"And he gave me candy."
"I'm sorry," said Torrez absently, "I don't have any candy."
"Sugar Babies are better than Reese's Pieces." Torrez had always given her Reese's Pieces, but before now she had not been able to tell him what she preferred.
"How can you talk?"
"The people that nobody paid for, he would put all of us, all our jars and boxes and dolls on the TV and make us change what the TV people said. We made them say bad prayers."
The phone rang again, and Amelia's voice out of the answering machine speaker said, "Sheesh" and broke right in. "What, what?"
"I've got a message for Terry Torrez," said a woman's voice, "make sure he gets it, write this number down!" The woman recited a number, which Torrez automatically memorized. "My husband is in an alarm clock, but he's fading; I don't hardly dream about him even with the clock under the pillow anymore, and the mint patties, it's like a year he takes to even get halfway through one! He needs a booster shot, tell Terry Torrez that, and I'll pay a thousand dollars for it."
I'll want more than a thousand, Torrez thought, and she'll pay more, too. Booster shot! The only way to boost a fading ghost-and they all faded sooner or later-was to add to the container a second ghost, the ghost of a newly deceased infant, which would have vitality but no personality to interfere with the original ghost.
Torrez had done that a few times, and-though these were only ghosts, not souls, not actual people!-it had always felt like putting feeder mice into an aquarium with an old, blind snake.
"That'll buy a lot of Sugar Babies," remarked Amelia's ghost.
"What? Just make sure he gets the message!"
The phone clicked off, and Amelia said, "I remember the number."
"So do I."
Midwives sold newborn ghosts. The thought of looking one of them up nauseated him.
"Mom's dead," said Amelia.
Torrez opened his mouth, then just exhaled. He took a sip of Amelia's rum and said, "She is?"
"Sure. We all know, when someone is. I guess they figured you wouldn't bleed for her, if you wouldn't bleed for me. Sugar Babies are better than Reese's Pieces."
"Right, you said."
"Can I have her rings? They'd fit on my head like crowns."
"I don't know what became of her," he said. It's true, he realized, I don't. I don't even know what there was of her.
He looked at the doll and wondered why anyone kept such things.
His own Bible, on the mantel in the living room workshop, was relatively intact, though of course it was warped from having been soaked in holy water. He had burned out half a dozen verses from the Old Testament that had to do with witchcraft and wizards; and he had thought about excising "thou shalt not kill" from Exodus, but decided that if the commandment was gone, his career might be too.
After he had refused to ransom Amelia's ghost, he had cut out Ezekiel 44:25-"And they shall come at no dead person to defile themselves: but for father, or for mother, or for son, or for daughter, for brother, or for sister that hath had no husband, they may defile themselves."
He had refused to defile himself-defile himself any further, at least-for his own dead daughter. And so she had wound up helping to voice "bad prayers" out of a TV set somewhere.
The phone rang again, and this time he snatched up the receiver before the answering machine could come on. "Yes?"
"Mr. Torrez," said a man's voice. "I have a beaker of silence here, she's twelve years old and she's not in any jar or bottle."
"Her father has been here," Torrez said.
"I'd rather have the beaker that's you. For all her virtues, her soul's a bit thin still, and noises would get through."
Torrez remembered stories he'd heard about clairvoyants driven to insanity by the constant din of thoughts.
"My daddy doesn't play that anymore," said Amelia. "He has me back now." Torrez remembered Humberto's wave this morning. Torrez had waved back.
Torrez looked into the living room, at the current Bible in the burning rack, and at the books he still kept on a shelf over the cold fireplace-paperbacks, hardcovers with gold-stamped titles, books in battered dust-jackets. He had found-what?-a connection with other people's lives, in them, which since the age of eighteen he had not been able to have in any other way. But these days their pages might as well all be blank. When he occasionally pulled one down and opened it, squinting through his magnifying glass to be able to see the print clearly, he could understand individual words but the sentences didn't cohere anymore.
She's like me.
I wonder if I could have found my way back, if I'd tried. I could tell her father to ask her to try.
"Bring the girl to where we meet," Torrez said. He leaned against the kitchen counter. In spite of his resolve, he was dizzy. "I'll have her parents with me to drive her away."
I'm dead already, he thought. Her father came to me, but the book says he may do that for a daughter. And for me, the dead person, this is the only way left to have a vital connection with other people's lives, even if they are strangers.
"And you'll come away with me," said the man's voice.
"No," said Amelia, "he won't. He brings me rum and candy."
The living girl who had been Amelia would have been at least somewhat concerned about the kidnapped girl. We each owe God our mind, Torrez thought, and he that gives it up today is paid off for tomorrow.
"Yes," said Torrez. He lifted the coffee cup; his hand was shaky, but he carefully poured the rum over the cloth head of the doll; the rum soaked into its fabric and puddled on the counter.
"How much is the ransom?" he asked.
"Only a reasonable amount," the voice assured him blandly.
Torrez was relieved; he was sure a reasonable amount was all that was left, and the kidnapper was likely to take it all anyway. He flicked his lighter over the doll, and then the doll was in a teardrop-shaped blue glare on the counter. Torrez stepped back, ready to wipe a wet towel over the cabinets if they should start to smolder. The doll turned black and began to come apart.
Amelia's voice didn't speak from the answering machine, though he thought he might have heard a long sigh-of release, he hoped.
"I want something," Torrez said. "A condition."
"What?"
"Do you have a Bible? Not a repaired one, a whole one?"
"I can get one."
"Yes, get one. And bring it for me."
"Okay. So we have a deal?"
The rum had burned out and the doll was a black pile, still glowing red here and there. He filled the cup with water from the tap and poured it over the ashes, and then there was no more red glow.
Torrez sighed, seeming to empty his lungs. "Yes. Where do we meet?"
Father Dear.
Al Sarrantonio.
He never beat me, but told me stories about what would happen to me if I did certain things.
"The crusts of bread," he told me, cutting the crusts off his own bread instructively and throwing them into the waste bin, "gather inside you. If you eat bread with the crusts still on, you will digest the bread but your body will not digest the crusts. They will build up inside you until..." Here he made an exploding gesture with his hands, close by my face. He smiled. I smiled. I was four years old, and cut the crusts off of my bread.
"The yellow pulpy material left after an orange is peeled," he told me another day, a bright sunny one as I remember, with thick slats of sunshine falling on the white kitchen table between us; I recall the sound of a cockatoo which flitted by outside, and the vague visual hint of green and the smell of spring that came in through the bottom of the window, which he had opened a crack (I believe now that he opened it that crack for effect, to accentuate the brightness of spring outside with the stuffy dreariness of our indoor habitation-he told me other things about dust and about the indoors), "will make your teeth yellow if you ingest it. With the eating of oranges, which, by the way, you must eat, Alfred, for your condition, any specks of this pulp will be caught in a receptacle just to the back of your throat, just out of sight, and will creep up like an army of ants at night to stain your teeth. In time, your teeth will become the deep shade of a ripe banana; perhaps, someday, that of a bright lemon just picked." How I remember the hours I spent whisking those orange fruits clean of pulp, examining my fingernails afterward to make sure no bits had adhered to them; O, how many other hours did I lay awake at night in my bedroom, hating him and at the same time believing him (no, that's not right; the hate came later, much later; there was only love then, and if not that at least a respect for his knowledge, for the things he was so gently trying to save me from-no, it was Love after all) and waiting, with a dry ticking at the back of my tongue where the saliva had dried as I lay fearfully waiting for those tiny insect bits of pulp to march up my mouth, dousing my gums and teeth with yellow spray from their bucket-like tails; O! How many hours did I spend in front of a mirror, trying to see, my mouth as wide as my jaw would allow it, that "receptacle" where those lemon-ants waited!
I hate him now; came to hate him slowly, inexorably, and, in time, I have come to love that hate, to relish and enjoy it since it is the only thing I have in this world that I am not afraid of.
He taught me nothing of value. He taught me to hate books, to hate what was in them and the men who wrote them; taught me to, above all, hate the world, everyone in it; everything it stood for. "It is a corrupt place, Alfred," he lectured endlessly, "filled with useless people possessed of artificial sensibilities, people who respect and cherish nothing. They live like animals, all of them, huddled into cities chockablock one on top of the other; they are of different colors, and speak different languages until all their words mix in one jumbled whirr and none of them understand what any of the others are saying. I know, I come from that world, Alfred. They don't know what life is. They don't know what's safe. But you know what's safe, don't you?"
I remember grinning eagerly up at him at times like this, like a puppy; he always bent down over me, his hands behind his straight tall back, and I remember at times reaching up to him with my tiny hands, begging him, "Pick me up, pick me up, swing me, please!"
"Swinging you will make your stomach move in your body," he answered, smiling wanly, "and once moved, at your delicate age, it will stay in that new spot, perhaps where your lungs or pancreas should be, and will make you sick for the rest of your life. It may even turn you into a hunchback, or make you slur your words if it moves, on the high arc of your swing, into your vocal cavity. You do understand, don't you?"
My arms lowered slowly, tentatively, to my sides.
I was not allowed to play on the swings on the grounds, either, but would stare at them for hours through my bedroom window.
The grounds, naturally, were beautiful, wooded and sprawling. No one, I heard it whispered among the servants, had grounds like this anymore; no one, I once heard a Chinese servant say, deserved to have such grounds. The world, he whispered to mute Mandy, my sometimes guardian (when He was away), was still far too crowded for this type of thing to crop up again; there were too many other problems to be solved without one man shutting himself up in such a way. I am sure that Mandy went straight to my father after this bit of sacrilege had been imparted, and the man, if I remember correctly, was gone the following day. Another servant, of course, was in place instantly.
The grounds, as I say, were sprawling, but I was not allowed to make use of that sprawl. There were too many opportunities to be "hurt." The swinging motion I have already described could, of course, be accomplished to dire effect by the swing set just beyond the Italian-tiled patio; there was also at that spot a set of monkey bars which "would upset the balance of your hormones if you were to use it, since hanging upside down by a boy of your delicate constitution would only lead your body to hormone imbalance. The features of your face would begin to move about by the action of the blood rushing to your head, and you would end up looking something like this." He made an extremely grotesque-and terribly funny-face then, and I laughed along with him until I abruptly began to cry. If my memory serves me correctly, I ran and threw my arms around him, thanking him for saving me and asking him to promise never to leave or send me away; and, yes, I remember pointedly and now as clearly as if the moment were again occurring that my teary eyes were staring at his hands, still behind his back, and I was willing them to move around toward me, to show me anything parental and physical. I believe that may be the moment when I thought something was not right between us; for a fleeting second I entertained the thought that maybe he didn't love me after all but then quickly dismissed it, knowing that it must have been me, that I may already have been in danger of contracting some vile disease, something transmitted by a touch of the hands to the head, something transmitted by a loving hold, and that he was merely, as lovingly as he could, trying to avoid exposing me to it. He was saving me from himself. I threw myself from him, aching with apology for what I had almost accomplished. I don't remember if he thanked me or just went away.
"If you gaze at the sky too long," he said, after catching me leaning out of an upper-story window at the moon overhead, "your head is very liable to fall off or stay locked in that position at least. Never look up in the daytime."
"Not even to watch a bird fly overhead?"
"Never. How old are you now?"
"Seven."
"Never look up again, Alfred. Until now you have been lucky, but with the age of reason comes a severity of life that you will only too soon realize."
I never looked up.
"If you sit in a chair for more than five minutes, your feet will begin to lose their circulation and may never get it back. If you stand for more than five minutes, too much blood will rush to the bottom of your body and your feet will become heavy, as if filled with lead." I crouched when I walked.
"Meat will cause you to turn red."
I did not eat meat.
"Vegetables will cause you to turn their own color-yellow, green, orange." I only ate vegetables when desperate.
"Chocolate will cause you to turn black. Wheat you may take, and potatoes, and you may drink water in moderation after boiling, cooling and then boiling again. Do not drink milk: it will make you white as paper."
He showed me a book with these things in it, or rather read to me from one. The book, I later discovered, was Moby Dick. Such a thick book, such thick lies.
And yet I followed his instructions and thanked him for it. I grew. I grew fat. Wheat and potatoes were my diet, and teenagehood found me stout and ugly. I wore glasses thick with mottled glass, because he told me a lucid pair would cause my eyes to change color and shape. My teeth hurt, and he scolded, saying that I had eaten something, possibly so long ago I could not remember, something that had gone against his wishes and was now catching up with me.
I will kill him when I find him.
He left abruptly; abandoned that massive estate in the dead of night when I was fifteen years old. There was only one hint that this would happen. Late in December of the winter he left, during the coldest part of a cold month, Mandy, the ghostly mute, took to her bed believing she would die. She was attended to by other of the staff, and even my father occasionally visited her. I was told never to go into her bedroom. I had once had a peek into that room-enormous and cluttered, with a high sculpted ceiling (there were paintings on it, clouds and blue sky which made me fearful lest my eyes and neck lock on it) and deep brown carved wooden walls. A huge bed, with high spikes at the four corners. A green-and-yellow coverlet. This was all I remembered. In the very last days of December, when it was made known with the usual whispering (whispers were what filled that manse, whispers and lies) that she would die before the night was gone, I went in to see her.
I knew she was alone. There were statues on that floor, as on every floor, behind which I had often hidden and which I had no neuroses about since my father did not know or had never caught me at it. There was one particular statue, a golden, tiny wood goddess with bow, set prominently high on a pedestal just to the left of the wide winding staircase (I used to occasionally slide down that staircase railing also, until He found me at it one day and told me that my genitals would be forced back into my body by the pressure of the railing if I continued), which gave an excellent view of Mandy's sickroom entrance. Shortly after supper I secreted myself there, watching the comings and goings of the servants, the dour doctor who came from somewhere and departed again to it, and, finally and surprisingly, my father, who came quietly out of the door somewhere just before midnight. He had no reason to check on my whereabouts, since he had made sure I was tucked solidly into my bedchamber just after dinner and had no reason to believe I would be anywhere else (he told me as a baby of the "things that were abroad after dark"), but this was one of the few of his lies that I had managed to outgrow, even though at times on my nightly sojourns I thought I spied one of his "beasties of the night"-more likely optical illusions of the night. It occurs to me that he was neglectful in this, but why quibble; I seem to recall he was getting a little old by this time and had forgotten to reinforce some of the foul walls he had built, brick by blood-red brick, around me for my fifteen years. Anyway, here I was when he hobbled off (he was getting old, and I remember him making use of a cane just before he left the next month) to his own voluptuous quarters somewhere to the other side of the building and one flight up (I had seen those quarters once, too, and they made Mandy's into a tent) and, probably, to one of his live-in paramours, servant-man or-woman or possibly someone from outside who was occasionally flown in, usually around the holiday season (which was not, naturally, celebrated, in this household).
I waited a full ten minutes, crouched in my hiding spot and beginning to balance the two fears-fear of discovery by leaving the shadow of that statue too soon and fear of my legs being lost to me since I could feel numbness setting into them-before slowly moving out toward the door in a rabbit's crouch.
The lock ticked open easily. The room was not as big as I had remembered, but the bed seemed even bigger. Grey moonlight suffused the room, throwing a pale line of light across the bottom half of the bed; there was also a low wattage bulb set into the wall over the bedstead, illuminating the upper half.
All I could see was a pile of pillows and that same green-and-yellow comforter, which looked as flat as if no one were under it. At first I thought that this might be the case; perhaps they had moved her without my seeing; perhaps she had died and they had lowered her from the window into the waiting arms of the dour doctor to be carted off for burial or burning; perhaps this had all been a setup to lure me to this spot so that my hiding place behind that wood goddess could be uncovered and I could be mind-tortured further. I whirled quickly around but saw no one at the doorway behind me and no one, seemingly, in the corners of the room ready to jump out.
By this time I had moved close enough to see that, yes, she was in bed after all. Barely there, what was left of her. There was a head above the line of the quilt that looked like the head of a monkey, shriveled and nut brown; and below that the coverlet stretched as flat as I had imagined it did, scarcely revealing the outline of an evaporated body.
I leaned down over her, wanting very badly to peel up her eyelids as I had seen once on television (before He had decided that this pleasure, too, should be denied me for my own good), when her eyes opened of their own and she stared straight into my face.
She tried to scream, but nothing came out. Her features contorted, her lips pulling back over her teeth, making her look even more like a monkey. It was now that I saw why she was mute: her tongue ended in a surgically sharp line at the back of her throat, giving her nothing to articulate with. Or so I thought.
After a moment she ceased trying to scream, and a curious calm descended on her. She looked at me for a few moments, apparently recognizing me now. Why had she tried to scream? Possibly she had thought I was someone else. But now, recognizing me as she did, her eyes brightened and she tried desperately to say something.
"What?" I asked, leaning down close with my ear to her mouth, wanting to draw back because of the disease she might impart to me but overcome with a violent compulsion, for the first time in my life, to explore a mystery on my own. "I can't hear you."
She was muttering something, so far under her breath and with such obvious effort that I hushed my own breathing, concentrating doubly hard to pick up her faint, insect's voice.
"Mo..." she was saying. "Mot..."
"What?" I rasped at her, impatient and now with one eye on the door lest someone hear the faint struggle going on in here.
"Mot..."
"Mot? What do you mean, mot?"
"Mot...Mother," she said, so far in the back of her throat that it was like listening to an echo off somewhere in a cave.
My body became ice. I nearly grabbed her by the mouth to make her repeat that word; but her eyes had filmed over and her lips were slack. For a moment I thought she had died there before me, but as I watched her eyes cleared again and once more she looked straight into me, through me.
I said nothing, and then I whispered, "You are my mother?" Her mouth said nothing, but it formed the word, yes.
"Oh," I said, my throat gagging. I threw myself from the bed, instinctively going for the window and then pushing myself away from it when I looked up to see the full moon staring down at me from above. I fell to the floor. My throat would not work; I lay gasping for air like a reefed fish. My head was on fire, too; I thought for a moment that one of the terrible things my father had warned me about for so many years had come true, that the moon, or my disobedience in being out of my room, or my visit to this chamber, or the sight of this woman or what she had said had triggered one of those ugly reactions which had for so long hung above me like a sword. I had eaten too many crusts when a baby, I thought desperately; possibly it was lemons; or bananas, or my brains had blown up to balloon size from hanging upside down, or not hanging upside down, or from bumping into a doorjamb, or not.