SEVENTEEN
THE DESK
Kendall shut off the garage lights, lowered the door and locked it. He walked up the sidewalk, up the Mayan steps to the portcullis. His castle, although it was more Mayan than Saxon. He let himself in through the heavy copper-paneled door and once again smelled that odd mixture of exotica with a faint putrid undertone. Perhaps all it needed was a thorough scrubbing. He’d ask Torrance about a reliable cleaning service, maybe offer the job to Tommy.
The house seemed to exhale as he entered, embracing him in a warm hush. He paused in the foyer and listened. The house was far from silent. It ticked with the heat of the day. He heard the faint thrush of the ventilation, the barely discernible white noise of traffic.
He locked the door and walked back to his studio. It was just past midnight. He couldn’t believe he’d listened to that crap. Anything to get laid, huh? And there was the irony. He’d thrown away a guilt-free fuck! Well, who knew? She could be crazier than an orbital rat, turn vindictive like Glen Close in Fatal Attraction.
He’d always been a boy scout, old school. Chivalrous. He got it from reading about King Arthur as a child and from the evangelical church he’d attended. The Resurrection Fellowship. They’d had meetings on whether to change the name to the Resurrection Personship. It was undecided. His parents had brought him up to respect women. He’d run through dozens of relationships before he met Shirley.
He had a slight buzz from the three drinks he’d consumed. He knew he shouldn’t drive, and he’d been lucky. He vowed not to do it again. Tomorrow he would get a dog. A dog would be there to greet him. A dog would announce visitors. A dog would be able to tell him if the voices he heard were real or not.
Kendall had a dog growing up. His name was Shemp, and he was a shaggy collie-type mixed breed. Kendall and his brother Ron would romp for hours with Shemp. The day they had to put Shemp down—he couldn’t see, couldn’t climb the steps—was the saddest day of Kendall’s childhood.
The house was built for a dog. He could leave the dog in the courtyard all day with no fear it would escape. Kendall sat down on the edge of his massive bed—something out of Cecil B. DeMille—and removed his clothes. He brushed his teeth and went to bed but was unable to sleep. Alcohol and anxiety. Anxiety about the voices. At one point, he fell into a shallow sleep and startled himself awake. He thought he’d heard a scream. It took him a minute to realize it was the wind whistling through his nose.
He flopped, he spun like an axle, did not sleep. He drifted in and out of a dream in which he was visiting an artists’ co-op in New York, looking at “art” made of detritus, old iron gears welded together in a meaningless and unappealing manner, children’s crayon scrawls, each accompanied by a fast-talking artist explaining his or her art.
“It’s conceptual, don’t you see,” said a snotty Brit. It was Desmond. “It’s sorta meta if you know what I mean.”
Picasso sat in a corner painting.
Kendall opened his eyes. Daylight filtered in through the skylight. He’d passed the night without screams. He got out of bed. He felt like shit. He took a shower.
Sunday morning coming down. Kendall made coffee, toasted a bagel, went into the studio where a blank page stared at him from the drawing board. He grabbed his patented Timberline page stencil and put down the panels.
Cheap Shot on the cover. Comic artists often drew the cover first to gin up interest in the product. He laid out the hulking Cheap Shot standing on a mountain of discarded plastic drinking bottles, a well-endowed girl wrapped around his leg, a nail gun in one hand and a can of wasp repellent in the other fighting off an army of zombies.
The girl. Did he draw the breasts too big? Since the dawn of the Pleistocene comic book aficionados had decried the crass and sexist depiction of women in comics. Why were their figures so exaggerated? Why didn’t they look like ordinary women? The conflict would never be resolved. Kendall understood something many people did not. Comics were fantasy. Men drew most of them to entertain other men. Men did not fantasize about skinny chicks with flat chests or the morbidly obese.
Most comic book artists had never taken life drawing and got their knowledge of anatomy from books on how to draw comics. The best of these imparted an excellent working knowledge of the idealized male or female body. The fans didn’t want realism. They wanted fantasy.
Kendall had done life drawing. He’d even sold a few portraits and nudes. His women were gorgeous but realistic. Drawing them excited him. He drew this one. He was excited. The doorbell chimed “Beauty’s Only Skin Deep.”
Kendall got up. Pulling himself off a drawing board made a great sucking noise like pulling up a moist bathmat. His fatigue rushed back in weighing him down. He looked at his watch. Fuck. Almost noon.
Tommy stood in the door grinning, thumbs tucked into the waist of his cargo shorts wearing hi-zoot sneakers. “Torrance said you might need help moving furniture.”
Kendall motioned him in. “Thanks. Yeah. I need your help with an old desk in the basement. We don’t have to move it far. It’s blocking the door to the garage. You want some coffee?”
“No thanks, man. I drink energy drinks.”
Kendall led the way downstairs. They emerged in the corridor.
“Wow,” Tommy said. “This is really creepy.”
Kendall showed him the roll top. Together, using all their might, they shifted it away from the garage door down the hall and left it against the wall. Kendall opened the garage door inward. He stepped into the garage and turned on the lights. Tommy followed.
Tommy nearly fell to his knees when he saw the Corvette. “Mahalo! Man, that is so fuckin’ bitchin’!”
“You surf?” Kendall said.
“Every chance I get. I only been like three times this year, though, ’cause I been so crazy busy.”
Kendall walked over to the tall cabinet holding the surfboard. “Take a look at this.”
Tommy’s eyes saucered and his jaw hung low. “Whoah dude! Look at that fibro!”
“That’s a Stan Mouse Silver Surfer.”
“The Surfer is totally rad. You interested in selling?”
Had the board been factory stock or with another painting perhaps. But a Stan Mouse Silver Surfer was likely worth a fortune. On the other hand, Kendall could use the money. On the other hand, Tommy wouldn’t have it.
“Let me think about that. I might let you take it to the beach.”
“I would be so careful, man! That thing is a babelini magnet.”
Kendall let Tommy sit in the Corvette. They turned off the lights and reentered the basement.
“Thanks, Tommy. I owe you one.”
“No problem, dude.”
Kendall walked with Tommy back to the front entrance and said goodbye. The desk was extremely heavy. What was in it?
Kendall went back into the basement. The roll top curled back into the lid with a guttural purr. It took Kendall’s eyes a second to adjust to the dim light. The thing broadcast loathing before he even understood at what he was looking. A trap door opened beneath his feet; an instant of vertigo, loss, hollowness. He stepped back, afraid to turn his eyes from the thing on the desk.
The spiked object was a tarantula carcass. A big one, from which protruded a series of pale white horns. The sight of it stampeded his skin. He froze. It was unmoving. It was dead. He recognized it as a form of fungus that attacks tarantulas, growing long horn-like tendrils out of the host’s corpse. He had failed to anticipate tarantulas in his multimillion-dollar house.
Kendall returned to the wardrobe room and seized a whisk broom. He used the broom to shove the grotesque corpse onto a dust pan which he upended into a paper bag and deposited in the secure fifty-gallon plastic garbage bin.
The desk contained numerous cubbyholes stuffed with papers, many of them letters. Kendall withdrew an envelope from a cubbyhole, removed the hand-written letter, and began to read.