15. The Final Dispatch, contd.

Do you hear it too? That low, cool, reasonable voice going on and on in the underwater light of the curtained room that smells of mouth, of alcohol fumes and sleep, saying, “You might almost think you were imagining the low, cool, reasonable voice going on and on, it isn’t the sort of voice that a child would have, that any ordinary sort of child would have. Of course yours isn’t an ordinary child, or a child in ordinary circumstances: your child has lost her mother, lost, that’s a good one, as if she had just put her down somewhere and never picked her up again, as if a child could ever forget where she had left her mother, where her mother had left her, lost, that’s a good one, I wonder where I got that idea, her mother was taken from her, someone took her, it was somebody’s fault she’s gone, I wonder whose.”

[Pause.]

Barely a pause, and then the voice continues, “The voice continues, after barely a pause, continuous and meandering as thought, perhaps it is thought, not a voice, perhaps it is just someone’s idea of a voice, the idea of a voice that never stops talking, talking about what, talking about what you did, and also about the voice itself, which voice, the one that never stops saying that you are responsible, that you have a debt to pay, that you have to pay it, the debt you incurred, there’s only one way, and it has to be done, so there’s no point in talking, only in doing, doing it, the voice will stop if you do it, if you don’t do it the voice won’t stop, the voice will keep right on saying that you should do it, that you know you should do it, that you will do it, that you are doing it, only you aren’t, you know that, but you know that you should, so you will, won’t you, the voice says that you will, so you will, won’t you, because the voice is only putting your own thoughts into words, the voice may not really be a voice at all, only your own thoughts, imagined as a voice, the voice of a child, but no ordinary child, no child in ordinary circumstances would talk like that, on and on, low, cool, reasonable, bloodless, but yours isn’t an ordinary child, of course, or a child in ordinary circumstances, your child has lost her mother, lost, that’s a good one . . .”

A hitch, silvery sound of a flask unscrewing, slosh, glottus, outbreath . . . [hitch, silvery sound, etc.]. “It can’t be the child, you know it’s not the child, the child’s an idjit, can’t talk straight, child’s defective, tongue-tied, a circus freak, it’s not the child, not that child, not any child, no child would talk like that, low, cool, reasonable, bloodless, unrelenting, saying that there’s no payment for what you did, no payment but one, and even that one will not cover your debt in full, saying that the ghosts are keeping your accounts, adding it up, the pluses and the minuses, precious few pluses, a peck of minuses, all down in the book, what book, does the child have the book, what book, there’s no book, it’s a figure of speech, there’s no book, just an idea of a book, a book of accounts, your accounts, kept by ghosts, the ghosts who spoke to the child, who are speaking to you, in a child’s voice, but it isn’t a child’s voice, not that child’s voice, that child’s an idjit, not any child’s voice, any ordinary sort of child, any child in ordinary circumstances, but your child isn’t an ordinary child, she’s an idjit, circus freak, defective, haunted, spooky, nor are her circumstances ordinary, your child has lost her mother, lost, that’s a good one . . .” Pause, creak of floorboards. [Pause, creak of floorboards.]

The child is crouching beside the bed, feet numb from the cold floor, knees stiff, haunches aching, unable to stop now. Her voice is low, cool, reasonable. She never stutters, not once. It is not like speaking at all, what she is doing, opening her mouth, letting persuasion through it. Persuasion is not speaking, she understands, it is letting another person’s thoughts flow through you, your father does not recognize them, he senses that they aren’t yours, but he doesn’t yet recognize them as his own, but he will, you are helping him, he is almost there now. Stare at the plaster flowers on the ceiling, stare at the stain on the coverlet, his breath is steady now, drop your voice, let him sleep, for now, let him go to sleep hearing the voice (your voice, his voice) saying [echo], “Maybe it’s the mother, not the child, maybe that’s who it is, who it’s got to be, not the child, talking, on and on, like this, low, cool, reasonable, bloodless, unrelenting, adjudicating, offering arguments for and arguments against, mostly for, for what, for putting an end to it, to what, to the voice, how, you know how, why, you know why, it was your idea, not hers, not whose, not the mother’s, not the child’s, but yours, you’re the one who thought of it, you’re the one who’ll carry it out . . .”

A hard hand grabs her wrist and yanks her up. She sprawls half on the bed, convulsing away from his body, feet exploding into sensation, bee stings, stars; “Talking!” is all he says, choked voice, smell of alcohol and of mouth, “Talking! You’re a little talker!”

“What? No!” She recovers her composure, adds, cunningly, “I thought I heard something.”

“Heard what?”

“I don’t know.” The hand tightens. “A voice!” Another hand takes hold of the bow at her collar and begins idly twirling it. Scrape, scrape on the underside of her chin. “I heard someone talking. I thought—I thought it was, was, was, was—”

“Was who?”

“Y-y-y-you!”

The hand releases her. She sprawls back onto the bedcovers and now she arranges herself there, now luxuriates, now she stretches like a cat, an odalisque. “I thought I heard you talking, on and on, and I came in to find out what you wanted.”

“Nothing. I didn’t want anything.” Adds, “I didn’t say anything.”

She taps his flask, which chimes. “More hooch?”

“Hooch. That’s no way for a child to talk. No ordinary child. No child in ordinary circumstances . . . Go! Get out of here! Get!”

Then, later, as the man slumps on the couch, staring at the joint of the wall and the ceiling, hand plucking idly at his crotch: the child sitting gently down beside him, the voice saying, “If your wife were here, you would be covering her now, but your wife isn’t here, wonder why that is, you know why,” and pausing, picking at a horsehair poking through the velvet, drawing it through, “Nothing’s left of you of any value, if there was ever anything to you of any value, you’re done, through, better leave this mess to others to clean up, you’ll just make it worse,” then humming a little, a tune the wife used to sing, when she forgot herself, not often, but too often, it was all her fault, but then the voice as if hearing his thoughts, no, as if overheard from his thoughts, from a deeper layer of his thoughts, saying, “No, it was your fault, all along, your failure, your sin, your damnation . . .”

A man of no great conscience may have that conscience so fretted and pricked and teased and inflamed by constant consultation that it swells like a cirrhotic liver. A man of no great will can be goaded into decisive action—it had happened once, it could happen again. In the hours when he came home from drinking at night, when he woke up drunk and drank more in the morning, in the afternoon when drunk he waited for the dark to come to cover his walk to the bar, the voice emanating from the narrow space beside his bed trained his thoughts, led him like a Lipizzaner through his paces until he could take his cue in a word, an inflection, and canter through his lines to the end.

Then, unfortunately, he would uncap his flask. Take another drink. The voice would have to start over, from the beginning. The voice was patient, though. He would do it eventually, the star turn, the “airs above the ground.” The voice was sure, and so the child was sure.

The child had come to feel that someone spoke through her. Her mother’s ghost? But her mother, she was fairly sure, would not have counseled hatred. That was her mother’s great weakness, for which the child despised and even, in a way, hated her. Her mother had let herself be killed because she would not see that her husband did not deserve her love or patience. The child was made of sterner stuff. She had her father’s gift for hate. And she had the voice, whoever’s it was.

It would start again, low, confiding. “Look what a mess you’ve made of things. Look what a mess you’ve made of yourself. Look how you’ve disappointed yourself. How you’ve disappointed God, if there is a God. Your wife. Your child. Your mother. Everyone who knows you. And if anyone else knew you, they’d be disappointed in you too. Better not to meet people. Better not to know people. Better not to show your face. Better not to uglify the scenery that way. How can you fix what you’ve broken? How can you replace what you stole? How can you pay what you owe? You can’t. You’ve got nothing of value to give. If you live longer, you’ll just owe more. All you can do now is cut your losses, ease the burden on better folk, improve the world by ridding it of yourself.”

The first time in my life that I spoke with perfect clarity, fluently, nimbly, volubly, and it was to kill a man.

I had miscalculated, however. Had not imagined that my father, cowed as he was, obedient as he was in the end to the voice that seemed to address him from his own alcohol-clouded mind, would try to take me with him. Maybe he sensed just enough of the truth to blame me, if not enough to know what to blame me for. Or he regarded me as a part of himself, ineligible for independent life. Or it was simple malice.

He dragged me to the shed, as so often before. The hutches were all empty, tufts of fur tugged at my sentiments, I ignored them. Pellets rolling underfoot. Scatter of husked millet on the ground—mice had been at the rabbit feed. Sunlight edged through chinks in the walls, showed up feathers dancing in midair, chaff, dust. My crouch was practiced. I swayed away from a halfhearted kick. The key grinding in the padlock did not worry me excessively. I had been locked in before.

Then the flames came flowering up the boards.

When I flew like a phoenix out of the fire, my feathers black and brazen, I saw a greater glow reflected on the clouds. The factory was on fire, pianos shrieking, their wires snapping and singing.

Or, if it was a typewriter factory (I am at least reasonably sure it was one of the two, a choice between kinds of music), thousands of keys chattering in symphony to the touch of typists of blown flame, hunched and rearing, rising to pace the room, hunching again to snap out a contentious phrase.

Typewriter ribbon burns black and violet, with crawling veins of yellow.

And in the middle of the flames the twisted thing that had been my father.

I did not see it but I saw it, because I had seen it and made him see it with my words.

I stood on the lawn, barefoot, swaying, my hands held stiffly out beside me, trembling and staring, not at the jumping flames of the burning shed, but at those smoldering clouds. Clouds? Smoke, it must have been. My bare feet were stiff and cold, which seemed unbelievable to me, with the heat of the fire still beating on my burned face, and my hair smoking and curling, and my scorched hands singing with pain. Someone found me there, and though I was not liked and was indeed barely tolerated by the neighbors, who found me unsettling, my strangeness was temporarily forgotten in the brilliance and warmth of the interesting tragedy I had survived, and someone wrapped a blanket around my shoulders and sat me down with a mug of hot toddy and told me what I already knew.

At first some were inclined to look at me askance, for this was the second time I had lost a parent and that was at best uncanny and at worst suspicious, but a little later someone came in and the word went around that the fire, the little fire, that is, had been put out, the shed leveled, but that the padlock still held door to frame, that it seemed I had been locked in, apparently by my own father, and that stopped the whispers and the looks, for it struck all and sundry as so terrible that nobody knew what to say and one after another found an excuse to slip away until none was left but the neighbor whose blanket still draped my shoulders, who said blankly but not really unkindly that I had much better spend the night at her house than go home alone after what had happened, and they would figure out in the morning what to do with me.

In the morning my stutter was a hedge, a thicket, a wall of thorns. The chief of police came and spoke gently to me, but I struggled and spat and finally began plucking fretfully at my lips and smacking my own cheek and seizing my jaw in both bandaged hands to move it by main force, until at a glance from the chief my neighbor took my hands and bore them down and held them until I was calm again; but answers I could not give. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s simple,” said the chief of police, just as if I were not there, “as well as dumb. Maybe Harwood thought he was doing her a kindness. To go through life with that defect, and alone! I don’t envy her. No, I don’t envy her one bit.”

“What am I to do, officer?” said the neighbor in a confidential tone. “I want to do my Christian duty by the child, but I can’t keep her forever and quite honestly the creature gives me the heebie-jeebies. I don’t suppose that you—”

“A girl child,” said the police chief, quickly. “A bachelor’s home.”

“Oh! Yes? Oh yes, no, I see that that wouldn’t do. But then who—”

“No doubt there’s family,” said the chief, comfortably.

“Yes, of course.”

But there wasn’t. When the chief turned back to me, I waved him impatiently away, miming writing; when instruments were brought, I quickly and decisively wrote, “No living relatives—all dead.” And then, after a considering pause, “I am my father’s sole heir.” And so I turned out to be.

There was a closed-casket funeral, a perfunctory and ill-attended one, and then the coffin was sped into the ground. I, dressed in black, watched the dirt fall on its lid, my face still. The others watched me. It was not known, I gathered, whether I was aware that my father had tried to kill me. It was now generally said, though no one could explain how such a private matter came to be known, that he had developed a horror of me, because of my handicap, and thought that ghosts spoke through me, and that he meant to burn me to shut them up, but that even after the flames rose up around me, he heard me talking, in a low, cool, reasonable, bloodless, unrelenting, adjudicating voice, so that, understanding he would never be rid of me, he had done for himself as well, the poor bastard. It was also said that he had killed his wife and that I had known it and taken my revenge on him. How a child could do such a thing nobody knew, but everyone agreed that if any child could, it would be that one—myself—who scarcely seemed like a child at all.