Read The Captive Condition Online

Authors: Kevin P. Keating

The Captive Condition (9 page)

In the stillness of the night I sensed a presence and worried it might be a young couple concealed in the brush, making love. No, an afternoon picnic under the noonday sun, that was the proper hour for a romantic tryst. Of course, moonlight had an allure all its own. Blood-swollen mosquitoes and the curious stares of raccoons weren't always enough to deter the truly horny from quick consummation. Unattractive people more often than not, overweight and over the hill. Fleshy buttocks sinking slowly into the stiff grass. In desperation they tried to recapture the enchantments of youth. Disappointment awaited those who yearned to fulfill even the most humble of fantasies.

With caution I approached the pool and watched the rings widening across the surface. When I finally noticed the figure floating facedown, legs spread wide, a turquoise gown billowing below the surface, I paused and muttered an embarrassed “Pardon me,” a force of habit from my days at that despotic Jesuit school, and then, because I wasn't entirely convinced by what I was seeing, I dropped to my knees and looked more closely. I picked up a stick and gave the body a sharp jab. The woman rolled like a log and drifted counterclockwise, faceup, toward the center of the pool, her nose breaking the surface like a dorsal fin, arms floating above her head in a gesture of surrender.

That she was dead and freshly dead, too, I had no doubt, and I thought it senseless to check for a pulse, call
911,
massage her heart, perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, the kiss of life. I stared at her face for a moment, a corpse's face, already turning faintly blue like a wax effigy. Her lips, drawn back from her teeth in a grimace of terror, pain, metaphysical angst, seemed to move with ghoulish loquacity, and her eyes wept an oil slick of mascara down her pale cheeks. Water boatmen and backswimmers skimmed along the surface and nested in her tawny hair, an incompetent mermaid robbed by death of any beauty she may have once possessed, and it took me a moment to recognize her as the young woman who strolled through campus with Professor Kingsley. How old was she? Twenty-five? Thirty? Maybe she'd left her bed in the night, a somnambulist haunted by bad dreams. But then why was she wearing such an unusual dress?

I decided to wait until she floated a bit closer before trying again to snag her and fish her out. Then I remembered from having watched so many movies that a witness was never supposed to tamper with a crime scene, if indeed this was a crime. Maybe it was suicide, someone too depressed to walk to the bridge and take the leap. Some people in this town treated suicide as a serious offense. Harshly sentenced, too. Unflattering write-ups in the newspaper, denial of proper Christian burial, contemptuous whispers from friends and neighbors, a hundred indignations. To the religiously inclined she would no longer be a real person but a sloughed husk, no better than a slimy skin left behind by a water snake. “Suicide,” said my Jesuit teachers, “always gives Satan special pleasure.” I remembered, too, the old custom of burying suicides at crossroads, and how at night a traveler could sometimes hear eerie sounds under the trampled clay.

I slumped into one of the Adirondack chairs, thinking it a terrible pity that the owners didn't own a dog to warn away strangers. On a table beside the chair, I found a copy of
Madame Bovary,
its spine cracked, the glue barely holding the pages together. An unusual choice for a summer read. The story of Emma Bovary and her callous lovers always made my eyes flutter with boredom, but now I wondered if the professor had been right all along. Maybe Flaubert really did have something important to teach. Funny, I thought, that life should imitate art and not the other way around.

While making a mental note to refer to Kingsley's scandalous rendezvous in my thesis, I opened the cover, and into my lap fell several pieces of pink stationery. By the dim light of the quarter moon I managed to make out a few words, and it didn't take me long to realize that this was a message from beyond the grave, its small letters precise in their severity and single-minded purpose. In the quiet night I heard the woman's voice calling to me, a faint whisper soured by death, her cold breath washing over me and making my flesh tingle. I tried to decipher the full meaning of her bleak and bitter maxims, but my eyes grew heavy, and I placed the pages in my shirt pocket, fully intending to finish reading the letter after I rested.

If a light hadn't gone on next door, I would have nodded off and slept until dawn. In a panic I jumped from the chair, deeply disoriented, groggy with drink, unsure of where I was or how I had gotten there. At the neighbor's window I saw two young girls looking directly at me. Their cheerless eyes seemed to lack any childlike quality whatsoever, and I shuddered at the pale vampiric coloring of their faces. In general small children frightened me. They were ruthless and unprincipled. If given an opportunity they squealed on their elders. And what would the police say if they found me like this, an intoxicated stranger lounging on the patio of a reputable taxpayer's home as a body puttered back and forth across the pool as though death had equipped it with an outboard motor? They always thought the worst of people, these small-town cops with their truncheons and pepper spray and itchy trigger fingers. I decided to make a run for it before they could gun me down like a rabid dog.

I sprinted across the yard, but this time when I tried to scale the fence I lost my footing and smashed my balls against one of the exposed knuckles. Certain I'd been castrated, I toppled to the other side and immediately curled into a fetal position, clutching my torn pants and gasping for air. The police would apprehend me now, a stewed eunuch squealing a neutered nocturne. After mocking me (“Look on the bright side, kid, it's not like you was ever gonna use dem things again”), they would level the most serious charges against me—public intoxication, trespassing,
murder—
but if they had any compassion at all, they would first take me to the ER and let the doctors suture my shredded sack.

Five minutes passed, and though I was unable to summon the willpower to rise to my feet, I did manage to inch my way on hands and knees under a box hedge and through a pile of crab apples heaped beneath the limbs of a scrub tree. Behind me, somewhere in the vicinity of the swimming pool, a woman started to scream. Her animalistic skirls and screaks were so primal they had a curative effect on me, and I found I had the strength to run.

With the invincible laughter of a drunkard, I limped into a cool summer mist that curled over the dark rim of the valley, concealing me from view and making everything look like a blank page, no one around to fill it with words, a world not yet created, and I felt euphoric and very much alive.

5

Some people were tormented by the past; others, like Emily Ryan, were tormented by the future. On Saturday morning I was tormented by a debilitating hangover. At daybreak, when the awful specter of sobriety sidled into my room and slipped uninvited into my bed, I knew only one thing: that in order to survive the next twenty-four hours it was essential that I keep the apartment in total darkness, black and silent as a tomb. Failure to do so would lead to the awful prospect of waking early to empty cupboards and an empty stomach, not even a single slice of stale bread to help soak up whatever beer remained in my belly, but now, with the windows wide open and the blinds up, the room was flooded with punishing summer sunlight so hot and unbearably bright it seemed to melt the paint on the walls and make it drip from the ceiling like warm glue. I buried my face beneath a pile of pillows and wished to be dead, but for some reason the idea of death didn't sit well with me. I tried to think why this might be so, tried to piece together the events of last night, but it hurt too much. My throbbing brain conjured up an image of a floating dragon whispering its dark secrets and spreading its glittering snakefolds under the face of the sea.

On the windowsill a bird sounded an alarm, a single sharp note repeated over and over, and then went suddenly silent. I heard footsteps outside the apartment. Worried that a loud knock would come at any moment, I remained perfectly still and tried not to breathe. Awful things awaited me on the other side of the door, I was certain of it, and I had an uneasy feeling that it wasn't Death but Life that was about to come knocking, like a truculent salesman determined to pressure me into buying something I didn't want and couldn't afford—no returns, no exchanges, thank you for your business, enjoy the rest of your day. I waited for five minutes, ten, fifteen, and when no knock came, I decided to investigate. Terrified I might find gray matter seeping from the socket of my injured left eye and smeared against the white sheets, I struggled to lift the pillows from my skull, and then slunk toward the window.

“What the hell…,” I whispered.

For the next thirty minutes, with almost vertiginous incomprehension, I watched Morgan Fey carry her prized paintings from the back of a rental truck into the vacant row house next door. This wasn't playing nice, not at all, but I now realized that Morgan, like any cruel competitor, was fully prepared to bend the rules and resort to using dirty tricks in order to triumph over her opponent. After months of sofa surfing in the apartments of friends and family members, after countless hours of dreaming up dark and diabolical schemes, she now made her first strategic move.

I opened the window. The warm air vibrated with the hum of cicadas and the distant wails of a newborn baby. I gestured to the poster she was holding.

“Haven't seen that one,” I said. “Poor lady looks like she needs some snorkeling gear.”

Morgan halted on the front step, her lips forming the stiff scowl of an anxious curator of a doomed art gallery. “What happened to your eye?”

I gently touched the black patch and said casually, “Work-related injury.”

“Your face is swollen. Did you have a doctor check it out?”

“Oh, sure, just as soon as I qualify for medical insurance. So what's that painting called?”

“It's not a painting,” she corrected me, “it's a lithograph by Eugène Delacroix.
The Death of Ophelia.
What everyone fails to understand is that Normandy Falls isn't a town but a hamlet, and every hamlet needs its Ophelia, a green girl mad in grief. In
Hamlet
Shakespeare mentions Lethe, the mythological river of forgetfulness. You understand the meaning behind it, don't you, Edmund? It's not enough that your sins are forgiven. They must be washed from your memory, too. I suppose that's what it means to be born again. To suddenly come down with a serious case of amnesia. To willfully deny your past. To take no responsibility for the sins you've committed.” She sighed. “I guess for a lot of people it's the only way they can live with themselves. But how about the people who can't forget? What do they do?”

“They go back to bed,” I said, and slammed the window shut.

There were untold numbers of lonely little towns along the river that the world had forgotten or shunned or ridiculed from a comfortable distance, and I was mystified that Morgan had decided to remain in Normandy Falls. And for what purpose? To spite me? To continue working in that ghastly bistro and attending to the needs of her own barbarous tribe? No, she was up to something, had a plan in mind, and was just biding her time, waiting for the right moment to strike.

I collapsed onto the futon and only then did I see the pieces of pink stationery on the coffee table, left there like a bill of sale. At first, the letter was just a jumble of words, no different from an abandoned game of Scrabble, but after several slow and careful readings, I vaguely recalled the events of last night, and soon the meaning of the letter became increasingly clear. It left me with much to consider, but I knew that from now on the outside world would never cease to encroach upon my simple and humdrum existence.

Dear Marianne Kingsley,

By writing this letter I know I'm putting into jeopardy our good friendship. But I think it's important to face unhappy facts and I have to do what I think is best for everyone. This will come as painful news to you but I had no intention of letting matters get so out of hand. All summer long while you were at work your husband invited himself over to my house, used my pool, and visited my bed. At the beginning I was drawn to Martin because I thought his insights were wise, but I suppose professors say lots of things that sound intelligent to an uneducated woman like me. But then as the weeks went by he started saying things that frightened me. After he left my house I jotted down his words. Maybe you can make some sense of them:

—
College is an intellectual garbage dump.

—
Students are free spirits, a term that best describes the dispirited, the enslaved, the unenlightened.

—
Enlightenment is a religious euphemism for death.

—
Death is a consistent and universal truth, the afterlife only a speculation.

—
God is a mask used by weak individuals to disguise their own insignificant egos.

—
The ego is a hallucination with no clear foundation, no ultimate reality.

All of this was weird enough, but then he kept repeating that marriage was “a long, brutal winter.” Again and again he would tell me this—a long, brutal winter—even while we sat under the warm sun and watched the kids swim. Happy men don't say such things, do they Mrs. Kingsley? Now I'm worried he's infatuated with me.

I know you have every reason to despise me, but now I'm asking for your help before your husband does something rash. Martin is a man possessed by many demons, I believe this. I think he's capable of harming himself and others. I'm concerned not only for my own personal safety but for the safety of my children. He fantasizes about injuring my little girls. I can see it in his eyes. One minute he's kind, the next cruel, and lately he has taken great pleasure in humiliating me.

You probably wonder why I tolerate that kind of behavior from a man. It's a fair question, and I'm not sure I have a good answer other than to say I now fear him. If he knew we were in communication he would try to harm me. I just hope there is still time for us to solve this situation peacefully. Please contact me. But I beg of you, be discreet. All men are potential cheats and killers.

Sincerely,

Emily Ryan

What surprised me most about this letter was that, aside from the occasional loops and fancy flourishes, her penmanship was not unlike my own—a firm masculine hand, bold block letters, a compression of words upon the page. I folded the note neatly and placed it back on the coffee table. In my mind I began to devise a top-secret mission, but I dared not embark on my dangerous quest until the afternoon when I could replenish my stock of locally grown bud. “Normandy Waterfall,” Xavier D'Avignon called it. “Primo shit, my good man, nature's medicine.”

For now I desperately needed sleep and closed my eyes to the sounds of Morgan lugging that awful lithograph into the apartment next door, a black-and-white rendering of a distressed swimmer with long hair and flowing robes as she struggled to keep her head above the water of a swift-moving river.

—

In the alley between the bistro and the cabaret, anxiously marching in and out of the shadows, trying to invent plausible alibis to give to suspicious wives and girlfriends, nodding to each other in grim solidarity and nervously eyeing the patrol cars that rolled intermittently through the flat afternoon light, a dozen men waited for the chef to emerge from Belleforest, “the factory,” as they called it, where he cooked his product and then sold it at exorbitant rates. In recent months the stoop had become Xavier D'Avignon's personal pulpit, where he ministered to and collected cash from the low-caste deviants who congregated there in anticipation of their thirty minutes of bliss. Sometimes, while they waited for him to appear at the back door, the men grumbled about the rank smell of raw sewage wafting from the river, but after taking a few sips from a quart of his treasured
jazar
juice, they sincerely believed they were standing along the banks of an island stream in the steamy tropics, surrounded by fragrant fauna and flora. A few of the men realized they had a sickness, were painfully aware of their hacking coughs and high blood pressure, their knotted and quivering intestines, their violent, bloody excretions, and they worried that before the year was out they would find themselves spread-eagled on the coroner's metal table.

Morgan Fey had little sympathy for them. Resigned to a slow death at the hands of her own addiction, she stood on the concrete stoop and took a contemplative drag on her cigarette. Lately, she avoided venturing out here to take her break for fear of being mistaken for Xavier's business partner, but curiosity had gotten the better of her, and she wanted to see if she could spot any familiar faces among this pathetic crew loitering in the alley—professors, students, her ex-boyfriend. Mine was the unfortunate and slightly grotesque face of a man who yearned for either a kick in the teeth or the services of a talented cosmetic surgeon, and right away Morgan saw me among that chemically dependent horde, a sepulchral figure, sunken eyed, hollow cheeked, and she knew perfectly well why I was there. Under the right circumstances, if I were the only customer waiting in line, she would grab me by the back of my neck, push me toward the river's edge, and then give me a forceful shove into the boiling rapids. A weakling like me wouldn't last five minutes, and from my puny lungs would burst a wholly unnatural sound, like the sustained wails of a sickly infant abandoned on a piece of driftwood by its murderous mother.

Things were beginning to fall apart here, Morgan understood this, and the day was fast approaching when the local authorities, silent, secretive, supremely patient, uncommonly corrupt, would raid the bistro and plunder the safe upstairs. In ten minutes flat the cops would drill into the door and manipulate the dial to disengage the bolt. From having written several term papers about famous art heists around the globe, Morgan was familiar with the techniques of safecracking and knew what tools were needed to get the job done. Her hands began to tremble, and she crushed out her cigarette, last one in the pack.

Before going back inside the bistro, she looked over this awful infestation of shifty-eyed miscreants, lifted her middle finger, and waved it high in the air.

—

Having lived with her for so many months, I knew Morgan's habits, her routines, her litany of complaints, and I could guess what was on her mind. She expected an average day of glutting the dogs with flesh and fat, but by the time she arrived for her shift at Belleforest, she could see quite plainly that the Saturday-afternoon freak show was already in full swing. Typically, it was full dark before the crazies crawled out of their claustrophobic hovels and fetid firetraps—the cluttered studio apartments, the wind-battered trailers, the dens, dungeons, dirty cabins in the woods—but now Morgan saw a deeper pattern and was beginning to suspect that it didn't matter what time of day or night it happened to be, the crazies were everywhere, a never-ending parade of demoted demons coughed up from a sad, smoldering suburb of hell and sent on a mission to redeem themselves by methodically tormenting her.

Saturdays were somehow the worst. On Saturdays she was guaranteed to witness things so startling and difficult to forget that, in order to retain what little sanity she had left, she had to close her eyes and for five minutes focus her mind on the transitory nature of existence. Meditation, while an imperfect science, helped her to understand that life wasn't an artifact but a process, and sooner or later all processes ground to a halt. Armed with this knowledge, she could endure whatever terrible reality awaited her inside the double doors.

To a continuous clatter of dishes and a chorus of angry voices calling for service, Morgan raced from table to table, the only waitress to show up on time. The bistro had become a haven for otherwise unemployable misfits, the drifters and derelicts and parolees who worked as part-time busboys and dishwashers and short-order cooks. Many of them, after collecting their pay in the morning, went to the nearest check-cashing shop and then, without bothering to tell the boss they were calling it quits, fled town.

Consequently, Morgan was forced to do double duty, and now, like a psychoanalyst preparing to write a detailed report on a problem case, she reached for her notepad and approached a booth of grumbling, slack-thewed, knock-kneed geezers who asked about the
confit de canard.
With an ingratiating smile, she told them that the chef had truly outdone himself today. “May I also recommend the
foie gras.
We use only locally raised ducks and geese, as I'm sure you're aware.” Scribbling orders in a crabbed hand, her frantic fingertips sliding through the black sludge that gushed from her pen, she left loops, whorls, arches, and unsightly smears of black ink on the paper and across the front of her white apron. She apologized, returned to the kitchen, scrubbed her hands with scalding water and industrial cleaner, searched for a sharpened pencil, a fresh notepad, a functioning clock to check the time.

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