THREE

^“THEY HAVE A POLICE RECORD OF THE FIRE,” PETE MAGNUS told her, “but there’s no bones. No bones and no teeth.”

He had been contacted by Bill’s attorney, who told him no one knew where Bill and Betty were. Apparently, however, Bill had empowered the lawyer to set up a fund. “It’s a trust fund,” reported Pete Magnus. “The thing is Esty, what your crazy father did was, he made me your guardian.”

“What does that mean?” she asked. Sitting across from the shrunken head, whose crumpled eye sockets held her mesmerized, she was motionless. She had taken two Valiums from the medicine cabinet to distract from her stomach pains. She knew the source of the pains; ibuprofen, aspirin, Tylenol were no defense against them.

“This trustee, he disburses funds to me and I funnel ’em down to you,” said Pete Magnus. “I don’t know why he did it. Maybe it’s how young you are.”

“So if I need money,” she said, “I have to get it from you?”

He was lounging on the couch, legs up on the coffee table, suit jacket thrown over the back of a chair. He had loosened his tie and unbuttoned his shirt, calling for a cold one as he came through the door. He took a swig and shot her a sidelong look. “In the legal sense I guess that’s the deal,” said Pete. “But you know me, I won’t be hard to handle. You wanted Esty, you could have me in the palm of your hand.”

She was queasy. She went to the bathroom and threw up in the toilet bowl.

“I should get a job,” she said when she returned. He was watching basketball.

“Problem is, with that is,” said Pete, “you don’t have a high school diploma. Plus you got no work experience, not even waiting tables. Plus you’re under the weather. Don’t worry babe. You’re set. It’s a generous allowance. You stick with me. Slam dunk!”

She was momentarily stunned, but the arrangement matched Bill’s profile. She knew what she had to do. She was alone in her knowledge of the future and therefore the sole responsible party. When the time came she had to have the facts at her fingertips. Pete Magnus’s doctor had diagnosed her with an ulcer, but he was wrong. She had no faith in medical professionals. They were machinists in a country of animals. The pangs they ascribed to an ulcer were in fact clear indications that the embryonic monster was attempting a jailbreak. It was trying to eat its way out, gnawing and scratching. Its dead godfather had proved unforthcoming. Frequently she asked him what she had done to deserve it, but his vocal cords had been severed long since and he refused to sing. He was unrepentant. Anyway, she blamed the middleman.

She learned about New Caledonia, about headhunters in South Massim, about the warriors of nineteenth-century Melanesia who believed that the meat of their enemies contained the vitality of the deceased—a vitality that, if ingested, was transferred through gastric juices and bloodstream to its new host, the conquering hero. Heroes who ate the vanquished, by dint of their consumption, safeguarded themselves against their victims’ posthumous vengeance. Thigh meat, breast meat, arms or flanks, white or dark it made no difference.

It was not only the Papua New Guineans. There were others: domestic subspecies. She conducted hagiographical research, but on a pantheon of criminals instead of saints. Their accomplishments were a matter of public record. Daniel Rakowitz had made Manhattan dancers into soup, Arthur Shawcross had eaten eleven women after their demise, and Jeffrey Dahmer pickled genitalia and painted skulls. Then there was Chikatilo, a gourmand of tongues and private parts who liked his food still breathing. They appeared in sufficient numbers to convince her that geography was not the key. Man-eating was pandemic.

When her homunculus was born, if she survived, she would have to raise it. On the sly, with money raised by pilfering from Pete’s petty cash, she enrolled in a week-long seminar she saw advertised in Family Circle, on a rack beside the cash register in a grocery store. Titled “Prenatal Lessons in Happy Child Rearing,” it was hosted by an antediluvian Junior League chapter in association with Mothers Against Drunk Driving and held in a conference room at a Sheraton.

The other attendees were bulging with expectancy, distended bellies sheathed in floral cottons. Between pro forma lectures they mingled over a buffet lunch, included in the price of admission, and shared confidences on the subject of morning sickness and discharge. A woman named Pammie said she and her husband, Ray, an urban planner, were going to have at least five children. “My sister’s into Zero Population Growth, but it’s mostly for welfare mothers on crack and that,” she revealed. “I figure Ray and I would be great parents, so we should go the whole hog. There’re no bad kids, just bad parents. Maybe there should be a test or something, like a minimum annual income for people who want to have kids, or like an IQ test, and you fail the test they should give you one of those Norplants or like a vasectomy,” and she scooped up a helping of ambrosia salad and trundled back to her chair.

“I don’t believe that,” confided a freckled eight-monther to Estée. “There’s plenty of room. I saw on TV how they could melt the polar ice caps on Mars with nuclear bombs and then it would be warm enough to live on.”

In the afternoon, small-group discussions were held. Novice mothers sat around tables and deferred to a presiding moderator. They were required to write down child care dilemmas on scraps of paper, anonymously, and hand them up to her. She read out the questions one at a time. In Estée’s group, the first question was an obvious plant. “Your child and the president of the United States are trapped in a burning building. Which one do you save?”

“Wouldn’t the Secret Service get the president out?” asked Pammie.

“That’s right,” said the moderator fondly, “your child should always be your first concern.” There followed conversations about breast pumps, sudden infant death syndrome, and potty training. “My, we have a comedian with us today!” said the moderator, and read out Estée’s question. “Your baby is eating people. What do you do?” This was greeted with a round of titters. Estée excused herself. Evidently the professional mothers were unwilling to help.

In the library she found no reference to cannibal embryos, although some toddlers in far-off tribes were routinely trained to run with their spears. Advice on care and grooming was not forthcoming. She would have to approach Pete Magnus with the problem. After all, he was her guardian and might have to be solicited to release monies for the cause of upbringing. Over take-out Mexican, he grumbled about business problems. “Goddamn midwestern housewives waving bills in my face, threatening litigation, do I need this Esty? Senile fathers drooling on their pillowcases and their menopausal daughters come screaming at me, old guys probably don’t give a shit, practically corpses, hooked up to life support, persistent vegetative state, you can bet your ass they don’t even know their own names anymore, what do they care if their windows look out on panoramas of the Sonora Mountains? Could be some back alley in Jersey City for all they care, they don’t know the difference. Plane trip’s gonna kill ’em?”

“I’m going to have a baby,” said Estée.

He choked on a chip doused in chunky-style salsa.

“That’s impossible Esty, the doctor would’ve told me. Plus which we, I mean that one time—you been going out on your own?”

“I don’t know anyone but you.”

“Then you’re not pregnant,” said Pete Magnus, wiping his eyes with a Taco Bell napkin. “I know it for a fact. Just because you’re late, it doesn’t mean you got a bun in the oven. Jesus Esty, scared me half to death.”

“It’s not a normal baby,” she said. “It’s trying to eat its way out. That’s why I have the stomach pains. The shrunken head is the father. You’re like Joseph.”

Pete Magnus stared at her and then folded his napkin into a small square.

“Esty,” he said with unaccustomed gentleness, “the stomach pains are from your ulcer. We gotta get you some help. You ever been to a therapist?”

“If I have a baby, will you help me with it? That’s all I want to know. That’s the only reason I told you.”

“Listen Esty,” he said, leaning forward and circling her wrist with thick fingers, “I’m here for you. But drop the baby shit. It’s a fantasy. Maybe you didn’t have sex ed. For babies you need your balls, Esty. Testes. You need your spermatozoa. That shrunken head has no sperms Esty. That shrunken head couldn’t fuck its way out of a paper bag.”

“I read in a magazine at the doctor’s that the males of a species are the ones that pass down the most bad genes,” said Estée. “It also said: The male typically makes a swift postcoital exit, leaving the female to rear her offspring alone. And anyway the head used your sperms to do it. You have testes. I saw them.”

“Listen Esty, I’m not going to sit here teaching you the facts of life,” said Pete Magnus. “Let’s just drop the subject. You’re not having a baby, okay?”

“You have no idea,” said Estée stiffly, and stalked into her bedroom. She locked her door, found a discarded lighter in a desk drawer, and burned the notebook, long hidden in a drawer. Pete Magnus rapped on the door when the smoke alarm went off and poured Evian on the blaze.

Next morning, with the ersatz Joseph off to work, she held a vigil in front of the head. She imagined the end of his life. He had lain dying in the black soil, beneath foliage so thick he gazed upward to the sky, flat on his back, and saw only a glimmer from the pale nut of the sun. Sliced open from throat to crotch, heart still fluttering, viscera spilled over an anthill, he had abandoned his carcass. He had joined the numberless ranks of the forgotten. He was inconsolable. His bones were restless; he was at a loss in the land of opportunity. The purple mountain majesties were not for him, nor yet the amber waves of grain. He had been trained in the customs of his forebears. Nothing had equipped him for a realtor. She pitied him, no matter what he had done.

“I was talking to this woman Leola, at the office,” said Pete Magnus from his car phone. “She goes, what Esty needs are female friends, like other women she can relate to. Sisterhood and shit. So I asked this woman Marsha, more your age. She goes yeah, she’s into it. Fuck you! Asshole tailgater, I should brake and collect his insurance, send his premiums sky-high. Lunch at a Thai place. Take the corporate AmEx. Just you two girls. I figure it’s cheaper than an analyst. You should go Esty. Gotta get out more. Don’t eat a spicy dish. With that ulcer and all.”

“She’s the one that does the primal scream?”

“That’s the one. But she’s really a nice chick. You’ll like ’er.”

Pete picked her up in the Mercedes, with Marsha in tow, and dropped them off at the restaurant. Marsha ordered satay with peanut sauce and coconut milk soup.

“It’s a learning growth process,” she said, dipping her chicken. “When I can actually express the primordial anguish, you know in this venting scream, then it’s like a purging. A catharsis. I graduate and I can train other students. The course takes two years. I have another three months before the scream.”

“You can’t just go ahead and scream?” asked Estée, staring as skewered chicken made vanguard assaults on the rectal O of glossy lips. She had no appetite for birds, reminded by their white meat of gizzards and spoor-encrusted claws.

“That would be premature,” said Marsha. “A premature scream can traumatize you. It would set me back a year. I mean if just anyone could walk off the street and scream they wouldn’t have to charge so much for courses. Like I said, it’s a formative growing experience. Right now I just chant. I also sing karaoke. That’s where I met my husband.” She extracted a tube of lipstick marked Koral Kreme from her purse and applied it. “I’m so compulsive about makeup, but I mean you have to look your best. Sex equals money equals power. Lew, that’s my husband, he totally hates how I wear it to bed.”

“Do you have children?” asked Estée.

“Are you kidding? I have a career. I went on the Pill when I was sixteen. Have some chicken, here. It’s delicious. Not exactly local, but what the hell.”

“No thank you,” said Estée. “I don’t eat much meat. My father was a butcher.”

“Are you kidding? Honey, how old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

“Jesus, eighteen? The guy’s a cradle robber. You don’t have, I mean, you’re living with Pete, right? Listen, seriously. Has he tried anything?”

“He tried to impregnate me,” she admitted. “I think it worked.”

Marsha dropped a satay stick in her lap.

“Damn, this stuff stains,” she said, red in the face as she dabbed at the brown mark with a napkin. “Listen, you should stay away from Pete, I mean he comes on to everyone. He came on to me until he started playing softball with Lew, that’s my husband, and he’s been having sex with a woman at the office, Leola, and he screws around on her. And she’s married.”

“Don’t worry, I know all about it,” said Estée, spooning up soup. “The biological imperative of Homo sapiens male is to inseminate as many females as possible. The male moves from one to another as quickly as he can, for maximum propagation. But the female of the species tries to find a secure nest, a good habitat for bringing up the young. It’s biology. Reproduction of the fittest.”

“What are you, a science major?” asked Marsha, flustered. “Listen,” she urged, “don’t tell Pete what I said, okay? I mean I work for the guy. He goes, this girl is staying at my place, friend of the family, she doesn’t have friends in L.A., and I mean I’m very outgoing, I like people so I go sure. I’m just worried about you, it’s a dog-eat-dog world. But don’t tell him what I said, okay?”

“I don’t tell him anything,” said Estée. “He has certain functions but little comprehension.”

“Yeah right,” said Marsha. “Tell me about it. Waiter? That Thai beer, do you have it in a lite version? Like Thai beer Lite?” and she lit up a cigarette. “I mean he doesn’t understand my therapy. He’s always bugging me about it. Lew’s the same way, it’s a thing with guys, they’re so narrow-minded. I go, Lew, I got an inner child that has to get out. This is a learning growth experience. He goes, learn and grow somewhere else. In my house I want someone who acts normal. Then he goes to a ball game and comes home blind drunk with no voice from yelling insults at the umps.”

“What’s the umps?”

“Stop it, I’m serious, I’m all trying to deal with childhood trauma, my father used to spank me and make inappropriate remarks, I only remembered it in therapy.”

“My father used to make me eat moths and conduct experiments on lower mammals,” said Estée. “Then he put me in a cage and killed an old woman in front of me. I haven’t mentioned it to anyone.”

Marsha gazed at her, spoon raised, with soup dripping off it. Then she put the spoon down with a clang against her bowl and looked at her watch.

“You know what, I just remembered I got an appointment with a new client that’s listing with me,” she said rapidly. “You got Pete’s credit card, right? He’s deducting it. I’m really late. I’m glad we had this talk. I really have to go,” and before Estée could say good-bye she was out the door, purse swinging at her hip, catching a heel on the threshold as she went out.

Estée watched her make her way down the sidewalk in jiggling strides on her high heels, the loose one causing her to wobble. Coming to a stop at a pedestrian crossing, waiting for the light to change, she looked at her watch, reapplied her lipstick, and vanished. Estée paid the bill, left the restaurant, and studied the site of Marsha’s disappearance on her way to the bus stop. All that remained was a heel.

In Pete Magnus’s mailbox she found a note without an envelope.

PRopHETEER, wARMonger & BLAsFemuR, BuRn in HELL wiTH ALL youR monEy. LETTing Old PEopLE diE wiLL dAMn you FoREvER.

She tried to show it to him, but he was on the telephone, with his arm in a sling. “This old sow comes up to me, corners me in the lobby, she’s all, are you an anti-Semite? She goes, because you’re shutting Holy Blossom down, would you shut it down if it was Our Immaculate Virgin Residence? She shoves a picture in my face, it’s like one of those mass graves full of Holocaust victims. She goes, you think just because we’re poor Hassids you can do this to us? You think we’re Hassidic so you can herd our fathers around like they’re cattle? This is what people like you have done to the world! She goes, I could go to the ACLU or the Anti Defamation League. She goes, we’ll sue your ass off for discrimination. Esty, did you use up the Valium? Jesus Esty, you snorting it or something?”

She left the note on the coffee table and went into the kitchen, where she found the sink overflowing, refuse clogging the drain as the tap ran. She turned it off.

“Her breath smelled like gefilte fish. I’m all, lady, I would terminate the lease on that place if it was home to Saint Goddamn Francis of Assisi preaching to the birds, if it was Ronald fucking Reagan on life support there I would terminate the lease! And she’s all, you Nazi! And what does she do? I swear to God, she pushed me through the revolving door, I fall down the stairs outside there and bust my arm. Didn’t even have time to get her name so I could sue her before she took off and the ambulance came. Anti-Semitic my big butt. I mean my mother’s maiden name was Schwarz, you know what I’m saying? My great-uncle was a rabbi. I had a bar mitzvah, all that shit, I gave it up because they made me wear the little hat. I mean the guys braid their sideburns, you know? I go, fuck the yarmulke Mom, I’m outta here. The woman still doesn’t talk to me. Yeah. Gimme the stats on Friday.” She picked up a dishrag and wiped a line of salt off the kitchen table, and the piece of curled paper beside it.

Spying from the kitchen door, she saw him put down the cordless, adjust himself to the left of his zipper with the unmaimed arm, pop the tab on his Diet Coke, and redial. He waited with his antenna pointing straight up, impassive, transparent in means but opaque in purpose. It was clear that he operated predictably, one sequence presaging the next, but why? She felt a cramp in her stomach: the baby chewing. In a wash of warm impatience she strode up behind him, grabbed the phone as he said, “Steve?” and lobbed it across the room. It hit a Fon statue with a resounding clang and fell.

“What the fuck Esty? I just got back from the emergency room, I’m in pain here, I was attacked, I got stitches and a broken bone here, I’m in crisis and you’re throwing a hissy fit? Do I get sympathy, concern? What is this?” He craned his neck and looked over his shoulder at her.

“Marsha has an inner child that’s trying to get out and I’ve got one too.”

“I told you already, you’re seeing the shrink. Now get the phone back, would you? I’m a gimp, I’m an invalid here. That was my stockbroker, he’s gonna leave the office soon. Would you get me the phone? You want me to go broke?”

“Like that.” She snapped her fingers. “Disappeared. I could too.”

“I know already. She went away and you got a Masai warrior trapped in your cervix. Okay fine. Now would you get me the phone?”

“You don’t like having a broken arm, right?”

“Damn fucking straight. Now gimme the phone!”

“But an arm, it’s external, it’s an appendage, it’s important but not necessary. Whereas a stomach or say a uterus, it’s internal, it’s what you are. You can’t do without it.”

“Get to the point Esty, Steve’s waiting here.”

“You have a broken arm, I have a cannibal. If you’re so upset about an arm, how would you feel about a cannibal?”

He closed his eyes and lay back, scratching at his cast with curled fingers.

“Look at it this way Esty. The cannibal’s just in your head, where the broken bone is an actual fact. Now would you get the receiver?”

“You have a broken arm,” she said. “Not a broken leg. And please stop leaving those piles of salt everywhere. I’m the one who has to clean them up.”

She turned her back on him and was heading for her bedroom when he pounced, approaching from behind as silent as a cat. Gritting his teeth, yowling from the pain afforded by his arm as it got crushed between them, he brought her to the floor. The demon warrior toppled off its end table. When she kicked Pete Magnus in the knee, he grabbed its broken spear.

“You want me to get rid of it?” he hissed. “I’ll do it right here, and then you can shut up about it.”

But he was not her primary concern. The baby had won its first victory: there was egress. She felt the rupture inside, the split sack of a balloon. The walls of the balloon were thin and punctured easily. Pete Magnus’s face turned black like burnt marshmallow and he went away, along with everything.

She recognized familiar terrain by the smell before she saw it: lemon-scent disinfectant, Lysol from the golden bottle. A different room, this time private. On her bedside table plumed a vast spray of roses, in virulent orange. A thin tube fed into her arm, right inside the skin. She sighed when she knew where she was, and sighed again at the dull matte gray of the television screen bent down toward her from the ceiling. She had sighed more times than was healthy when Pete Magnus made his appearance, before any other sign of life intruded. He wore an olive suit and dark-blue tie.

“Esty, honey,” he said, placing a warm fat hand on her limp wrist. “I need you to forgive me. You’re gonna be fine.”

“Did I have a coma?” she whispered.

“No honey, no coma. You almost had a miscarriage, you had what they call one of those hemorrhages. But the baby’s okay, it survived. You’re fine too Esty.”

She was vindicated. She had not followed in Bill’s footsteps.

“You tried to stick me with the spear.”

Pete Magnus took his hand off her wrist, clasped it in his lap, and bent his head. His cast was gone. “I’m in counseling Esty,” he said. “Believe me, I’m working through my hostility. My aggression was an act of self-hatred due to the fact I don’t love myself enough. You don’t know how rough it’s been on me.”

She averted her eyes from his puffy face, more darkly tanned than she remembered. On the wall behind him hung a banner of ligatured computer printouts whose large-dot matrix letters formed the exhortation Get Well Estee.

“You had an operation,” said Pete Magnus. “This new laser surgery. Don’t worry, major medical covered it. All you got is a little scar.”

“You tried to stick me with a spear,” she repeated. The roses had no scent; from one stem a tag stuck out—100% Silk.

“Listen Esty, when you get out we can go to counseling together. Blame is not the point Esty. Healing is what’s important. Plus you’re gonna be fine.”

She gazed up at the ceiling till someone prodded her in the abdomen. It hurt. A doctor had done it. A group of young men in white coats, and two women, stood at the foot of her bed. They stared at her. They were a wall of licensed professionals. The wall was white, the wall was tall. One leaned over her from beside the mattress with a gleaming instrument. He stripped the sheet back and opened her robe.

“Interns,” said Pete Magnus.

She would not permit it. no entry signs should be posted on her front and back, all over her so that everyone saw them. They were all invasive. They put their hands and faces everywhere. They were prospectors and she was public land. “Please go away,” she said to them. “Don’t touch me. It’s inside. There’s nothing you can do.”

“Esty, they’re doctors. Here to help. Stay calm.”

“I don’t care. Get them out!”

“Esty, don’t get hysterical on me.” He moved off, took the prodding man aside, and spoke to him softly. She closed her eyes and waited. Feet shuffled. Someone blew their nose.

“Are they gone?” she asked.

“They’re gone. Hey now, you can come home soon, Esty, awright?” cajoled Pete Magnus. “Don’t get yourself excited.”

“Spears,” she muttered, pensive. “Stethoscopes.”

“Jesus, Esty, you gotta let it go. Blame is not productive. Don’t forget, but forgive. Healing Esty. Healing.”

“How about Marsha?”

“Marsha?” Pete Magnus’s pager was beeping. He turned it off. “Fuckin Marsha never came back to the office, you musta put a bee in her bonnet Esty. Husband’s clueless, guy came in looking for her, accusing me of all kinds of shit, I’m like, dude, hands off. I figure she dumped him and took off. I could see why. That guy has a lot of aggression. It’s rooted in insecurity. So she split. Load off my mind, with that chanting and shit. I was getting sick of it. She’s probably living in a commune where they chant oogala boogala. Good riddance.”

If he refused to listen she would not waste her breath. It was true he was stupid. He was eyeless and armless, butting his stubby head against walls. She would take a firm hand with him from now on. She would bide her time, then dart out from under the rock.

“The baby deal Esty,” he said, seating himself on the edge of the bed. “I mean are you sure, you know, I’m the father? No offense. But it’s so weird.”

“You’re responsible,” she told him. “You bought the head. You put him in the box. Plus you supplied the sperms.”

“That’s all I’m asking,” said Pete Magnus. “I been thinking, we should go away. I got some plans, an enterprise. Talk about it when you’re better. Here, you know, I got these idiots trying to sue me for terminating a lease, making my life a living hell. They got no legal basis, that doesn’t mean they go away. I filed for a restraining order, but that shit takes time. You ever been to Florida?”

When visiting hours were over a doctor entered her room. He was old: his pink face was mottled and his earlobes hung long and flabby on each side of his head like handles on a Grecian urn.

“For your chart here, I need some information. Family medical records. Is there a history of cancer? Heart disease?”

“You name it,” she said, disinterested. “Obesity, mental illness, chronic paraplegia.”

“Paraplegia is not a disease,” he chided, head waggling. “I’m mainly interested in heart disease and retardation. Was there a history of that?”

“Unca Dicky had a low sperm count,” she mused. On the silken roses beside her head there crawled a silken caterpillar, spotted and hoary. “My mother went bald and had to defecate in her bed. My father was fat and he was also crazy. Other than that I don’t know. Why do you ask?”

“Hereditary conditions, we need to be informed. As your comprehensive health care providers. The fetus lived through your accident, but we have some questions about it. For instance, it has an anomalous heartbeat. Frankly, we’re concerned.”

“Anomalous?”

“The heartbeat of the fetus is stable, but fast. Much too fast. We don’t understand. The fetus’s brain is about one-third the volume that it should be. Like the brain of a chimpanzee fetus. We’re going to run some more tests.”

“Oh that,” she said, relieved.

“I’m afraid, Miss”—he consulted his clipboard—“Kraft, that though the baby may have defects, it’s too late to terminate your pregnancy. I’m sorry, but you need to know the situation. Realistically. We feel the infant may be challenged. Both physically and mentally.”

“I already know,” she said.

“I don’t think you appreciate the ramifications. You’re a very young single mother and in the event the baby does live beyond its first hours, you may have to bring up a difficult child. Your guardian has informed us you have access to a sizable trust fund. In that you’re very fortunate.”

“You’re a scientist, right? You’re aware that freaks of nature do occur?”

“We don’t like to call them freaks,” said the doctor sternly. Weedy gray tendrils, thin as thread, grew out of his nostrils. They were reaching out like plants toward the sun, trying to take root in her. Constant vigil was required. If she was not careful she would become a petri dish of sprouting microorganisms. She was already on her way.

“Please get away from me,” she said.

“Calm down. You’re going through a difficult time. You need some time to adjust, honey,” he said, and pinched her cheek as he left.

The next day he told her their tests were inconclusive. They would conduct more research, but it would have to wait. They would document the later stages of the embryo’s development. Pete Magnus wheeled her out of the hospital and drove to the back of his apartment building to avoid the picketing crowds in front. People carried signs that read Let Our Parents Die in Peace. Respect Your Elders. Big Business Is Bad Business. She was displeased when Pete showed her what he had done to her room.

“It’s temporary,” he said, “since we’re relocating. I figured we could start early. Stock up and take all the stuff with us.”

There was a bassinet with frilly blankets, there were hanging plastic mobiles, toy drums, boxes of Huggies, a Jolly Jumper, stuffed animals including a hippopotamus the color of moss and a yellow dog, teething rings, rattles, potties, pacifiers, fuzzy sleepers with vinyl feet attached, nipple bottles.

“I hope you’re not looking forward to a normal baby,” she warned.

“Hey, the doctor told me that it’s probably a retard,” admitted Pete Magnus. “I figure, treat it like a normal kid, maybe it’ll snap out of it. Right?” He pointed out his favorite mobile, which featured floating hamburgers, French fries, and milk shakes in primary colors.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked him. “What’s your plan?”

“Plan? Jesus Esty,” he said, leading her back out to the living room. “I’m the father. Plus which, we’re good together. You take care of the kid, I’ll take care of business so you can be comfortable. Lemme tell you what we’re gonna do.”

She sat down on the couch and he brought her the pain pills and a glass of water from the kitchen. The shrunken head winked from its refrigerated case.

“I put in a bid on this property in Florida. Gulf Coast. Used to be a treatment plant in the sixties, cleaned it up, it’s prime waterfront, gorgeous landscape. Not huge, but big enough. Plan is, convert it into a resort. Small but select, elite clientele, golf, put in a spa, that New Age crap the rich women from Taos are into, your herbs, your crystals, full-body massages, advertise in Connoisseur, Architectural Digest, and some retired folks’ magazines, got a faggot chef from Greece lined up to do the food. You could be my partner, like my right-hand man, hostess-type shit when you have time. PR. You’re good looking, you got class, supply the image. Your earthly paradise we got there. Go swimming in the morning. Sound sweet or what?”

“I don’t know the first thing about being a hostess. And don’t partners have to put in money?”

“You’re a natural hostess. Plus for the money, that’s no problem. You sign a few papers, we can liquidate the capital in your trust, sign a deal where you get an income off the place when it’s up and running. A percentage. Part owner, stockholder. As your guardian I can facilitate.”

“Capital? What capital?”

“See Esty, what the trust is, it’s the income off a pool of money tied up in stocks. You only have access to the income, being under twenty-one, but me, as your guardian, I got the right to convert the capital with your permission, way the fund’s set up. Now it’s just sitting there in these boring blue-chip stocks, like having a savings account. Hardly any return on your investment. Low dividends. Waste of time Esty. Trust me.”

“How much capital?”

“Gotta look it up Esty, don’t have the figures at my fingertips, but if I had to guesstimate I’d say in the general neighborhood of seven, eight mil.”

“Seven or eight million dollars?”

“I know it doesn’t seem like much to start the place with, but shit, pull in another investor or two, got it lined up, we’re set to go. Small place, but luxury. That’s the plan.”

It was not always easy to breathe. Her throat was a thin stalk clogged with thick air. Every item in the apartment had a price tag affixed: she had not noticed it before. The tags were as big as the items. Even the shrunken head had been assigned a dollar value. The price tags cluttered up the rooms. She was hemmed in by potential transactions. Reaching for her water glass, she had to brush the sofa’s tag off her knee. The glass itself was marked Tiffany, $68. When she lifted the glass from the coffee table it left a ring, and in the center of the ring, $499. She put the capsules onto her tongue. They were acrid.

“Your interest in me is purely financial,” she said when she had swallowed. “Your stake is my money.”

“It hurts me that you say that,” said Pete Magnus, shaking his head. As he did so several price tags were dislodged and fell like paper snow onto his shoulders. “I’m the father of your child. Take care of you, put a roof over your head. I’ve done it all for you, Esty. I’m here for you.”

The shrunken head smirked at this and sent his vestigial body to perform a mocking dance on the mohair rug.

“Why did he make you my guardian? He hardly even knew you. Why’d he give you control of that money?”

“What can I say?” shrugged Pete Magnus. “I’m like the Prudential rock. And on this rock He builds His church, and shit. But seriously, he probably didn’t think you’d need it before you were twenty-one. The guy thought we were getting married. Jesus, he was in a world of his own. You can’t figure out a lunatic. Probably thought you’d come running home to him if you had problems. How could he know his house was gonna burn to the ground the week after?”

“You said you thought they’d sold it to developers,” she murmured. “You said it was part of their plan. A week after? How do you know when he set up the trust?”

He stood, went to the far wall, and ransacked his antique writing desk, never used by current owner, mint condition, $3,599, for a crumpled pack of Marlboro reds. Extracting one bent cigarette, he dropped the pack and went back to scrounging. “Just trying to make you feel better,” he said. His face belied the casual assertion. It was a swollen beet against the yellow spit of flame from his lighter. It burgeoned with nervous blood, angry capillaries pulsing under the skin.

But she was tranquil now. Her new knowledge baptised the desert of the penthouse, streamed over the items and tags, blurring the dollar signs, voiding the digits. It cleansed her of confusion. It was drowning Pete Magnus.

“When did you know about it? I mean the trust?”

“When I told you Esty, Christ.” he said, spitting a fleck of tobacco off the tip of his tongue. “The lawyer contacted me.”

“Then how do you know when he did it? Why did you say he didn’t know the house would burn? Before you said he burned it down himself. That’s what you said.”

“Figure of speech Esty,” rushed Pete Magnus, taking a deep drag. A cough hurtled out.

She waited, staring at him, then cleared her throat and spoke slowly. “I can see the forest for the trees.”

“The hell does that mean?”

“I was trained to observe animal behavior,” she said softly. “I know how to watch. You knew about the trust, and being the executor. You didn’t know if he would let you keep the money. Marsha said money is power. Then the house burned.”

“Jesus, Esty, is this gratitude?”

Silence would be her acid test. She sat without movement, the infant flailing and scratching but confined, safely enclosed, in her motionless hide with insulated walls. Squinting Magnus was watery-eyed from the smoke. He bent over, brooding, in his jungle of paper, as the curlicue of nicotine, formaldehyde, and tar dispersed above them.

“You saying you don’t trust me?” he sputtered at long last. Her suspicions were grounded in unprovable fact, built on a foundation of subterranean steel, invisible yet unassailable.

She kept her counsel.

“I mean what are you asking me here?” he persevered, seating himself on the edge of the couch, tapping his ash into her empty water glass.

“I thought he was the pyromaniac,” she whispered. “But it was you.”

Pete Magnus inhaled too swiftly and choked, wracked by spasms, as smoke billowed from his nose and trickled out his coughing mouth.

“That’s insane Esty,” he gasped when he could, grinding his cigarette out distractedly. “Tomorrow we’re going to counseling.” He picked up her water glass, tipped it up to his mouth, spat out the ashes, and ran to the kitchen.

“No,” she sighed into his wake. He was a fire starter. It confirmed her worst fears. Out there, alive or dead, Bill and Betty were doing what they’d always done. They had not recanted. They had made no sacrifice and no reversal. They were what they had always been. If they were living, they were living with no regret, on parallel courses, continuing as they had planned to continue. If they were dead, they were not suicides. They were dead criminals, not saints self-martyred on their knees. They had been struck down where they stood, spears raised, eyes forward, suspecting nothing. There had never been spectacular conversion.

Pete Magnus, tail between his legs, was gargling over the kitchen sink a broken man. She saw it in his slump of apathy. When she came in he didn’t raise his eyes, just turned to spit into the sink, over spaghetti-sauced stoneware and matching utensils caked with meat, bracing himself against the counter’s edge. She owned something. She had leverage. Anyway, the crime was unproven, and Betty had been waiting a long time for the pax romana.

“I have nowhere else to go,” she said. “I can make you a loan, interest free. It comes due when I turn twenty-one.”

He turned to face her, wiping his mouth with a paper towel.

“The full amount?”

“But it’s a loan.”

“Jesus Esty,” he said. “Shit yeah!”

She headed for her bedroom, where she picked up the icons of the baby cult and threw them out her door into a heap in the hallway. Pete made piles of salt on the living room table and sniffed them up, and then he went out. She stayed awake, seated beside the head in the living room, gazing out the window at the pattern of lights in the dark. She saw herself in Florida, cross-legged on a checkered picnic tablecloth, a quaint wooden basket beside her, wasps and gnats circling and diving beyond her reach. The rolling green lawns of her future spread out beneath her, bright as astroturf as she sipped ice tea in the shade of a date palm, casting no shadow. A few yards away, in diapers, the cannibal baby chortled and clapped its hands, crawling and tripping until it stood upright and took its first experimental steps across the grass.