A FEW HOURS BEFORE DAYLIGHT, ALMOST ANY NIGHT, THE Avenues of San Francisco are quiet. Sound is discrete. But fog manipulates sound deceptively.
That scratching is the junipers, flanking the front door.
That tapping is a computer keyboard. Unmistakable. In another part of the world, however, it might pass for the sound of quail pecking at seeds on the roof.
A steady sibilance, barely perceptible over the sound of the junipers abrading the facade of the house, might well have been a dry-cleaning plant, far down the block. But no; rather, it was the hiss of a forced-air respirator, breathing for someone who couldn’t breathe on his own.
The bass moan would be the “moaner,” a loud basso profundo foghorn, on the south tower of the Golden Gate Bridge.
The drool on the rug below a lower corner of the respirator’s mask accrues in silence, tinged with blood.
Stuffed birds flew along the wall to the right of the front door, above the stationary heads of several cats and one dog.
A robin. A mockingbird. A pair of house finches, the male more rubicund than the female. Five pigeons. A golden crown sparrow. A vireo. One raven. Two crows.
There’s something these birds are trying to tell me. What could it be? He adjusted the strap on the respirator mask and touched the tip of the needle to a vein in the top of the hand. Answer, as the needle sank, They’re all endemic to Golden Gate Park. A red contrail bloomed in the plastic barrel. Does that include the tomcat? He depressed the plunger. Yes, but that’s no tomcat, son. That’s calico. Only the female occurs as calico.
Torvald’s mind responded to itself, in an exaggerated falsetto, I didn’t know that. Say, Uncle Torvald, are you boning me? How many times have I told you? Don’t bone me. Wavering tone, there. Torvald sighed. He was too worn out to take it from the top. In the old days, he would have worked it until he got it perfect. But what difference could it make now? The castrato tittered. Why would I do that?
To … confuse me? Now the falsetto mocked itself. The Torvald tittered aloud and covered his mouth with his fingertips, a habit he’d developed after the flailing elbow of Vol. XIII knocked his front teeth out. Oh, we wouldn’t want that. We find it’s best when you know exactly what’s going on. It’s more … efficacious.
He unseated and reseated the bridge with the tip of his tongue. Efficacious…?
For me, of course, he answered silently. Not for you, necessarily.
He stood behind Philadelphia, who lay on the floor facing away from him, feet toward the front door and head not a yard from the big television. Whatever it was about efficacious, it would be his, Torvald’s, engineered efficacy. Not this kid’s. Not by a long shot.
Torvald set the syringe on the rosewood secretary, alongside the iBook, and pulled up the chair. How diverting it sometimes can be, he typed into his computer journal, when, in the attempt to forestall the inevitable, they bring all their intelligence to bear. It’s too bad curare doesn’t allow you to talk.
“…Is that a pit bull?” he said to the screen, as if trying out the line.
On the other hand, Torvald typed, there are the ones who accept their fate without a word, as if they deserve it. Query. He paused. Which is the more courageous?
Staffordshire terrier?
“Charmant,” Torvald typed and said, as though responding to somebody who had spoken aloud.
Endemic to the park, too, I suppose.
Torvald stopped typing and said, “All predatory.”
He looked to one side of the computer screen, “The pit bull preys on the cats,” and looked to the other. “Correct.” He looked up, “The cats prey on the songbirds,” and down, using the falsetto: “Ditto.”
“But the songbirds prey on…?”
“Insects.” He giggled. “Too tiny for taxidermy.”
“Oh.” After a pause, “And the crows? The ravens?”
“Garbage.”
“But … the insects feed on garbage, too, don’t they?”
“Garbage breeds them. Maggots, flies, even mosquitoes, happily enough.” He cleared his throat.
“What about … the rats? Where do the rats come in?”
“There are at least three species of hawk that live in the park and prey on the rats that prey on the garbage. They are magnificent to observe, but hard to catch.”
“Not impossible to catch?” queried the falsetto,
“Nothing,” Torvald declared with an imperious roar, “is impossible to catch.”
He added with a flourish, using the voice of Omniscient Narration, “And before the kid could point out the squirrel, his larynx seized.”
Torvald laughed. He was enjoying himself. Sort of. In truth he felt awkward. This angered him. He beamed testily, though smug. The kid lives on, but quietly. Almost a minute passed, into the silence of which the greater silence of the Outer Richmond rushed like a tide. The junipers out front maintained their rhythmic sweeping of the little bungalow’s façade. The breathing of the woman on the video screen labored irregularly. Barely discernible, a sound separated its identity from the random noise. Gradually it took on a life of its own, as well as an identity. It was a siren. Far away. Torvald paused to listen. The wail increased in volume; its pitch waxed and waned. “That siren is coming this way,” Torvald whispered.
There are three types of siren in San Francisco. One is common to ambulances, one to fire trucks, and one to police cars. Torvald listened. By its siren, this is a police car.
It was far away, but onward the siren came. The wail held its pitch for a moment, as if hesitating. It seemed that the siren had to have turned north on 32nd Avenue, which bounded the west side of George Washington High School, a mere four blocks east of Torvald’s bungalow. And then, abruptly, the siren leapt a quantum in volume. Its vehicle had turned in front of the high school, which interrupted Anza for a block, and now it was on Anza Street. Heading west. It had to be. Towards me. Toward us. Towards the beach, too. But if it really wanted to get to the beach in a hurry it would stay on Fulton Street, with its synchronized lights and two lanes in each direction, three blocks south of Anza. But on it came, louder and louder, until all the other sounds were occluded by its ululation, until it virtually encompassed Torvald’s doorstep, and careened past the pink concrete aprons and westward, towards the beach, diminishing.
The siren’s pitch lowered, precisely according to the Doppler effect, as it sped away. The siren faded until, as if all too soon, reduced below a certain threshold, it was gone. He realized that, even though he was sitting down, most of his weight was on one foot.
Well, thought Torvald, redistributing his weight, that was a thrill. He cleared his throat. Oh, he typed, to control and predict access to the thrill of fear….
From among the shadows cast by the flickering video onto the east wall of the living room, the snouts and beaks of Torvald’s taxidermy overlooked the scene, like nocturnal forest creatures eavesdropping on a hiker transfixed by his campfire.
The insects and the garbage are your friends, Torvald typed. The only creatures that will survive the human endowment to the planet. In that context of utter depredation, they will thrive. But what about machines or robots? Or clones? he queried thoughtfully. How about bad, self-replicating software? And nanobiobots? He sniggered. After some consideration he dismissed these and wrote, Artifacts of the human presence. Inanimate trash. Bad software destroys itself.
“They’re different from garbage?” he asked himself aloud.
Mere anomalies of the futurescape. Undefined bulges in the jungle, overgrown and forgotten, like temples of the Maya. Torvald pinched a mint out of the tin next to the syringe and typed authoritatively, Garbage is alive!
Tell him about it. Garbage is alive and paying property taxes in the Avenues. But now something was developing on the video feed. He turned to face the screen. The woman tied to the wooden chair in the cinderblock room had begun to wake up. Her labored breathing had become labored whimpering. She struggled against her bonds, which were a broad black belt with brass grommets in two parallel rows around her middle, from which two straps rose over her shoulders and buckled to the back of the chair. Except that it was leather, it might have been a safety harness—safely harnessed, hah hah! Each ankle had a smaller belt and buckle fastening it to a leg of the chair. A similar arrangement applied to each thigh and forearm.
Struggle as she might, she wasn’t going anywhere. Having realized her predicament, the woman raised her head to look around.
Torvald’s breath quickened. His face became brittle. He sucked the mint hard. He remembered the name.
Lavinia.
Her voice found no articulation. How could it? A harness of black straps, fitted over the top and back of her head, trapped a bright crimson ball between her lips, half in and half out of her mouth. Cry out as she might, and now she tried, mere inarticulate whimpers would be audible, only. Mucus trickled over her upper lip; the exposed hemisphere glistened with it.
The woman’s frightened eyes enlarged, revealing much white and their unusual color, violet, as they swiveled around the room. Up, down, left, right, she craned to look over her shoulder but the harness prevented this. It didn’t make any difference. There was nothing back there but a sound baffle covered in a beige fabric that looked like corduroy.
“There’s probably software out there,” Torvald said quietly to the screen, “that would enable me to control your environment from this keyboard.” He touched the computer behind him. “A fiber optic cable, an interface in the control room…. Unfortunately, I lack the time to research, let alone master, this technology.”
He paused to gauge the crescendo of Lavinia’s panic.
Let her macerate.
After a long minute, Torvald turned to the computer.
Strange to declare, but the time is nigh. I can feel it. True, I have more on my plate than I can reasonably handle. Foreboding but undeniable, as with “Angelica,” I can evince none of the passion of yore, nor the resulting—and requisite—attention to detail. Am I so jaded? I don’t think so. The simple truth is, I have explored these avenues before, and they have yielded up all the secrets they have to offer me. I know them well, too well, and the supply of energy for such explorations is too limited to repeat them unnecessarily. What is at work is mere habit, which manifests itself through lack of discipline. My plate is not only full but, by the virtue of the peccancy of gluttony, it is overflowing. The Virtue of Sin, surely someone must have written that book? Here on the heels of eighteen, Volume XVIII, yes, I burden myself with two more potential studies. It is too much. I fly, I faint, I fall. Simply put, I weary.
For the first time since the translation of The Confession I have let slip the guise. Inconsequential as this may yet prove to be, I perceive it as erratic development, and I evaluate it not as lack of vigilance, but as stress fracture. The time has come to wrap up the field studies. Will I be afforded the energy, the time, the concentration necessary for a final cut? Time waits for no fiend. On the contrary, time copulates and breeds and feeds its own progeny to itself. The real-time of Lavinia ticks away, but her convulsive pules are less than heart-rending. What’s that? The chair recognizes the floor.
Baldy tried to scream, the falsetto snitched, but his voice is an empty paper bag blowing across a deserted parking lot.
Torvald spoke to the computer screen. “You have merged with the floor; you have become seamlessly integral with it; it’s as if the carpet sprouted from your head and died. Your mouth is filled with uncooked liver, formerly your tongue. Your interrogatives surf garbled saliva. Modulations from the thinnest string on the violin have become your inner voices. Content yourself with telepathic invective which, as you’ll find, works much in the same way that prayer works. That is as much as to say, telepathic invective is futile.”
Torvald rolled the syringe with a forefinger. “Tubucurarine chloride…. What? Do I roger your telepathic vilification?” He cocked his head as if listening for the siren. He aligned the syringe just so, equidistant between the iMac and the mint tin. “If you’re a bear or an otter or even a human, it’s a fine product. All your loco-motor functions—arms, legs, voice—even your eyelids—are kaput. You can’t even blink.” Torvald shrugged modestly. “And anybody can buy it on the Internet.”
He checked the gauge on the oxygen tank, on its own little handtruck by the window; he checked the transparent tubing for kinks; he snugged the straps on the mask. “A humanitarian would have some eyedrops to stave off desiccation.” Torvald clasped his hands behind his back, leaned over Philadelphia, and smiled. “And, ultimately, blindness. Nota bene.” He opened his mouth and exhaled. “Spearmint. Like it? Doesn’t it remind you of a leading brand of spermicide?” He stood again, beaming. “Yes, while you do not retain your sense of humor, kiddo, you do retain your sense of smell. I chew these mints out of courtesy and precaution because, some years ago, I began to emanate a curious odor. People noticed it. The stench of evil.” He laughed without mirth. “No doubt. When you think of it, however, Dorian Gray must have begun to smell strangely, most strangely, long before his decomposition became apparent to the outside world. Hmm? Rotted from within. Yes. Pheromones of decay. Those of fear, you know about. You generate them yourself. Mine are the reciprocal. Hah. Had I not sampled them with my own nose, I wouldn’t have believed it.”
Torvald withdrew a round brown bottle from the desk drawer and checked the level of its fluid against the light of the computer screen. “You’d think that by now the government would have stumbled across the idea of training dogs to sniff out evil.” He unscrewed the rubber-bulbed top. “I’m serious. After a certain amount of time in this business, my personal odor changed. For the worse. If we had time, I’d prove it to you. Perhaps your girlfriend will describe for you how I proved it to her, when you meet in hell.”
He leaned over and held the dropper about two feet above the upside eye, which bulged above the stitched hem of the respirator mask. A bead of clear fluid quivered at the tip of the pipette. Torvald paused. “The mind is not affected, either. It gets to wonder, is this battery acid?”
The drop enlarged. “Oh.” The drop retreated. “Did I mention that you also retain your sense of pain?”
Torvald slowly squeezed the dropper’s bulb until a single drop of fluid plummeted the two feet, directly into the right eye. The body twitched as if from an electric shock. Two additional drops followed, with commensurate twitches. “I’d do the other one, but it’s too much trouble to roll you over. Besides, your witness shall be borne as lucidly with one eye as well as with two.”
Torvald waited, as if expectently. “Well,” he said, after a while, “I guess it’s not battery acid.”
He capped the vial and returned it to the drawer. “The police, having employed tubucurarine chloride to subdue their criminal, might read him his Miranda rights, and he would understand them. He would understand everything that was happening to him. His trial, even his execution. In your case,” Torvald smiled and modestly flattened the fingers of one hand over his sternum, “your mind is actively reassuring itself that the stuff might not have been battery acid after all. Desperately, of course. It might have been battery acid, for all you know. Why not?” Torvald smiled. “It’s not that I’m incapable of it.”
On screen, “Lavinia” began to weep.
Ripening.
Let’s see, Torvald thought. I think I can rig this up.
Torvald stepped back, chin in hand, and studied the situation. Let’s call him Baldy. Philadelphia has too many syllables. Baldy lay on his side. After some consideration Torvald gripped Baldy’s lapels and rotated his length some ninety degrees. Now Baldy could watch the monitor, which loomed mere feet away.
“Okay,” Torvald said. From a drawer in the video cabinet he retrieved ping-pong ball-like gadgets with wires attached, three of his many cameras. He placed one on the rug between the body and the front door. He place a second camera on the floor, aimed directly at the top of the skull and about five feet away from it. He placed a third camera ball on the floor at the foot of the monitor cabinet, not two feet from Baldy’s glistening eye and the rostrum of the respirator mask.
On the audio monitor, Lavinia was hyperventilating. While Torvald regretted the lack of a second DVD recorder, he unwrapped three fresh video cassettes and fed them into three decks in the stack of gear that lived in the cabinet below the wide screen, powered them up, and set them all to recording. One for each camera.
There was a panel of push button switches that controlled the inputs and outputs of his video and audio signals. Torvald toggled back and forth between the various cameras, each signal coming up on the big monitor as he adjusted for angle, placement, focus, “Happily absorbed in the minutiae of his craft,” as he said aloud; and, delighting in the design of his next-to-last production, unpretentious parenthesis as it was, he almost laughed.
Interregnum. He tried its title aloud, “Cranial Croquet.”
Torvald opened the front door. No doubt the breath of cool Pacific air bathed the bald dome on the living room floor, chilling the perspiration beaded on its stenciled tentacles, which quivered, no doubt, like a basket of augury entrails. With a proprietary glance up and down deserted Anza Street, Torvald set aside the left-hand 84” 1x6 board of the front door casing, just behind the sculpturally tapered juniper that chafed it, and removed an ax from the cavity. Within seconds the board was replaced and he was back inside with the dead bolt locked, his retrieval of the ax so smooth it might have been part of an ordinary urban routine, no more nor less normal than the retrieval of a morning Chronicle from the grasp of the shrubbery.
The bald head looked like a casaba melon, pale and damp in the gloom of a darkened supermarket, graced by the gentle mists which, perforce, bless all refrigerated produce. On the big screen, however, the head looked like the moon in a nightmare, ententacled, prolate, dead for aeons and, incongruously, runneled by brine.
Torvald decided to leave the monitor tuned to the camera shooting along the floor at the top of the head. The head lay on its left cheek, watched by the other two cameras, front and back, the head watching in turn its own image on the big screen. Torvald retrieved a large black plastic trash can liner from his pantry and carefully spread it on the floor beneath the head. All I’ll have to do, he thought, stepping back to admire the setup, is turn it inside out around the mess, with no more bother than picking up ten pounds of dog shit.
“Okay,” Torvald said, when he had tired of watching the drugged eye struggling to search for itself on the screen. “Slate,” and he sharply rapped the axe-head against the oxygen tank, which rang like a pick hitting rock. “Rolling ye Interregnum: Cranial Croquet.” On the video screen a sensible wing-tip lowered itself onto the upper side of the lunar caustic. What’s this going to look like? He breathed stertorously, excited by the prospect after all. An axe head lowered into the shot. He studied the screen, over his shoulder, and muttered, “No, no.” He leaned down. A hand closed over the eye of the camera like a spider squatting on an egg. The little golf-ball-sized camera had a microphone too, and when the hand closed over it, the speakers yielded noises as of wind blowing umbrellas and lawn furniture off a terrace. When the picture came back, the angle of the shot had changed. Now the axe would come in obliquely, from the side of the frame, and thence, about two-thirds into the shot, it would sunder skull and brain. How deep the penetration after impact was not just anybody’s guess. Not to worry. No. It was an educated guess. The cameras would record all. Later he would intercut the moment of contact with the reaction shot from the camera that looked directly into the eye: waiting, cringing aforetime, detecting, bulging with awareness, suffused by pain, dimming with the ebb of its life force, and fading in the end, like a slow-motion blowing fuse, to black.
Slow motion would reveal the tiniest detail, like a high-speed mind reading the Bible.
Torvald toggled the monitor’s three sources one last time. The face scrambled and resolved into the top of its own skull. There was some imperfection. The blows from the keyboard had done some damage. The face was caked with dried blood, the right cheek was deformed. The visible upside eye was discolored. It gleamed in the discolored face like a marble on a bed of caviar.
Torvald’s wingtip lowered into the top of the frame, its shadow overhanging the face like a certain balcony overhangs a memory in Chekhov. “What would one think?” Torvald mused aloud. He toggled to the axial shot, the top of the head: “Would one rather see it coming? Or…?” He toggled the shot of the ruined face, huge in the monitor, its eyes as big as the camera balls: “Or would one prefer to see oneself, going? Hmm.” He toggled back to the skull. “Blink once for the scythe,” he toggled the eyes again, “twice for the flight of the soul.” He sighed. “Blinkless. It’s up to me. The lonely onus of the auteur.” He made slight adjustments to the cameras. He toggled the three shots—the top of the head, the back of the head, the eye—hesitated, and toggled them again. And a third time. “Okay.” He made the decision. “Since I’m concentrating on a clean blow—for which,” he added as an aside, “you should be grateful—I won’t see either image until later. Ultimately omniscient, in a manner of speaking, I shall view these images at my leisure. I’ll assume you’re vain enough to have lingered over the image of your face in the mirror as you shaved this dome over the years,” Torvald caressed the skull, “and fingered your tentacles…,” with the edge of the blade; it grazed the top of the skull as if it were scratching a dog’s head. “I think you’ll watch your own eye at the moment of impact.” He switched from the axial image to the shot of the eye. “First thought, best thought.”
“Good thing I’m left-handed,” Torvald muttered cheerfully, as he paused to roll up his sleeves. Then he wrapped his fingers around the hickory handle and waggled the axe head as if it were a niblick.
“Otherwise, we’d have to rearrange everything.”