Brood (17 page)

“Zoom, Doom. All kinds of shit. That stuff is fucking evil. I heard it was blood.”

“It is,” Dennis says. He refuses to react to her cursing. It makes him sick but does not surprise him. It's not as if he were expecting someone with morals or manners.

“You should put it away,” she says. “I don't even want to see that shit.”

A feeling of pleasure is going through him as he senses her fear of the little vial standing on the tip of his thumb, held in place by his first finger. “It is definitely blood.”

“That's ill shit. You on it?”

“What if I am?”

“Are you?” Her tone takes on a bit of uncertainty.

Dennis knows it's not exactly PC and feminist and everything, but sensing a woman's wariness and even her fear is kind of an aphrodisiac for him. “Well, my dear,” he says in his debonair voice, picked up from long afternoons watching black-and-white movies while warehoused at his tipsy grandmother's house in Rock Island, “I propose we make a party of it and each partake of the fabled Zoom.” He takes another vial out of his shirt pocket.

“If you touch one fucking drop of that shit, I'm leaving.” She glares at him, and when she notices no particular change in his expression, she adds, “And I'm keeping a hundred for my travel and time.”

“Ah, my fair damsel,” Dennis says. “You cut me to the quick!” He has no idea where this kind of talk is coming from, but he is amused by this new identity and cannot imagine that it is anything less than irresistible.

“You got to be nuts using that stuff,” she says.

“You've partaken of the mighty red, then, I presume?” Dennis says.

“No fucking way. Two of the other girls.” She shakes her head. “The warning's out on that shit. Some freaks up from Mexico are bringing it into the city. Anyhow, that's what I hear.”

“Really?” All her swears are like fingernails on a blackboard to Dennis. “That's what you believe in your infinite wisdom?” He grins at her—and if smiles were display cases, this one would be showing Phi Beta Kappa keys, degrees from Stanford, Harvard, and MIT, and a family tree of accomplished ancestors reaching back to the Magna Carta. “And what other valuable information do your confidants share with you, pray tell?”

“Oh, you're a funny guy. Well, there's nothing that funny about getting the shit fucked out of you and coming out with scratches all over. This old Canadian guy staying at the Hilton took a chunk out of Mirabella's earlobe. And swallowed the diamond stud her boyfriend gave her.” Bree shakes her head.

“Well, then, we'll have none of this,” Dennis says, dropping the vials back into his shirt pocket. His smile broadens. She said just what he predicted she would say. It's all going exactly according to plan…

Believing Dennis is cooperating with her, she relaxes a bit; her voice softens. “You oughta be careful with that stuff, sweetie,” she says. “You ain't a teenager.” She pokes his soft stomach. “That shit'll mess you up, swear to God.”

“Well, let's have a drink anyhow,” Dennis says. He indicates with a wave two glasses on the cluttered coffee table. Though each of them contains a vial of Zoom—the former Zoom vials themselves had been refilled with V8 juice—they look like well-made Bloody Marys, each with a wedge of lime notched on the rim, and a celery stalk standing in the center. “I didn't add the vodka yet, in case you don't drink.”

She looks at her watch. “Oh, I guess I can have a little vitamin V.”

“Vitamin V, I like that,” says Dennis. There is a bottle of off-brand vodka on the table—he can afford one of the fashionable brands, but he is sure they are for pretentious idiots. He unscrews the cap, pours a generous splash into each glass. He hands one to Bree and takes one for himself.

“To us,” he says, clinking her glass.

“Cheers,” she says.

She brings the glass up to her lips but then hesitates, seeing that Dennis has not lifted his glass. He seems balky and uncertain.

“What about you?” she says.

“Just taking in your beauty, my dear.”

“You're not drinking?”

“Sure I am. Undoubtedly.”

“How about we trade glasses,” she says.

“Really? I…this is sort of my favorite glass.”

“I say we trade. How about it? Be a good boy.”

“If it will make you feel better, of course,” says Dennis. He hands her his glass, takes hers in exchange. He gives her a look that says,
Now, are you happy?

“It's a little early for me,” she says.

“Oh, come on. It's later than it's ever ever ever been.” He gives her glass another clink, this one with an edge of admonishment in it.

They drink. Dennis steels himself against the taste, which he assumes will be greasy and gross. But it's not half bad—the V8, the horseradish, and the hot sauce have done their job disguising the taste of those children's blood.

“Oooh, salty,” Bree says. But she's drunk deeply; half the glass is empty. The ice cubes, coated pale red, are visible now.

“Sorry about that,” says Dennis. “I'm actually a trained chemist. But apparently not much of a mixologist.”

“I have to watch my sodium intake,” Bree says.

“Oh, come on. Anyhow, didn't you hear me? Weren't you even listening to what I said? I'm a trained chemist. PhD, the best schools, you name it.” He sees her eyes move; she is once again taking in the penny-pinched squalor of this shitbox apartment. “Trust me,” he says, hurrying now. “There's very little salt in your drink. And we're also—you should keep this to yourself—we're in the process of disproving all this low-sodium, salt-free-diet stuff. According to the work we're doing in the lab, there's nothing to it.”

“Whatever,” Bree says, putting the drink down on the table.

“Ah, dear damsel, you cut me to the quick,” Dennis says.

“You already said that,” Bree says. She is frowning. She has a strange look on her face, as if she hears someone very, very far away calling her name.

“Well, I just don't see why you won't finish your drink. Watch how Professor Daddy does it.” He drains his glass.
Professor Daddy! That's who I am, that's who I will be!

“I'm good,” she says.

Oh no, you're not,
thinks Dennis.
You're actually bad. You are a whore. How can you say you're good?

“Sure?” He is playing it cool.

He can.

He has outthought this woman three times over. He knew she might react badly to the sight of the vials and that's why he emptied them of Zoom and put the good stuff in the drinks. He knew she would see him hesitate to drink, and because she has a comic-book mind and is far more predictable than the weather, he knew that she would think there was something wrong with her drink. And that is why, of the three vials he portioned off for today's playtime, two and a half were poured into the drink she ended up with. And so even if she wants to be a pain in the behind and refuse to drain her glass like a good little whore, she has already consumed more than enough to make what comes next a most excellent adventure.

Bree now is licking her lips and swallowing her mouth's moisture in gulps, as if consuming dollops of cold mashed potatoes. She pats her breastbone, and her eyes go through a series of transformations: concern, followed by fear, followed by fascination, and ending up in a kind of animalistic blankness—the eyes go from being windows to the soul to being windows on pure appetite.

Dennis is feeling quite a bit of appetite himself—it's amazing how quickly that Zoom starts zooming. How long has it been? Ten seconds? It's difficult for him to stand still. He finds himself marching in place, but his demeanor is hardly soldierly. He is rotating his shoulders, flexing his fingers, sniffing and snuffling. All of his systems are in overdrive. His mind repeats the question: What do I do, what do I do? He wants to look out the window, lock the door. He wants to urinate, defecate, eat, drink, procreate. But having given himself a 50 percent dose, he is able to keep these surging desires in check.

The same cannot be said for Burgundy/Bree etc. etc. She was given the megadose, so what is a surfable wave to Dennis is a tsunami to her. She is helpless to resist. In fact, the word
she
might not even apply to her, since, grammatically speaking, it implies a certain specificity, and most of the traits, memories, and goals that form the core of who she is in the world and how she sees herself have been washed away as the Zoom courses through her like a marauding army of Visigoths charging through an undefended village, obliterating everything in its path.

“Hi, sweetie,” she fairly shouts. She has no idea why she said this. It could be she is curious if she is still capable of human speech. She steps toward Dennis, cups his business, gives it a shake, and then, her eyes widening, she takes a deep, deep breath, squats on the floor, leans her shoulder against the arm of the sofa, hikes up her skirt, yanks her undies to one side, and lets loose a powerful stream of urine.

I'm going to pee-pee too!
thinks Dennis. He is erect and it's something of a struggle to get his prick out of his pants but a moment or two later he is standing next to the woman and covering her urine with his own. The odor is amazing. It's like the best meal he's ever had combined with suddenly understanding exactly how everything in the world is connected.

He pushes himself into her mouth. She doesn't seem to mind, but she doesn't do what he would call a professional job. Her eyes momentarily roll back in her head and then reappear again, no more expressive than two blueberries in a slot machine.

She loses her balance and now she is on her back, oblivious to the fact that her carefully lacquered hair, not to mention her head, is in the dark circle of wet the two of them left on the carpet. Dennis pushes her skirt up higher, until it is around her ample waist, like a thick carpenter's belt minus the tools. He attempts next to pull her underpants off, but she is twisting, perhaps writhing, from side to side, and it's too difficult, so he does what any God-fearing gentleman would do in his position—he tears them to shreds. The elastic band requires special effort, but soon she is fully available to him.

“In, in, in, in, in,” she chants, and her tongue lolls out of her mouth and she pants like a dog waiting to be fed.

When Dennis was in high school, there was a student production of
Raisin in the Sun
—an all-white production, as it happened. He had a small role, but he took it to heart, and the poem from which the play took its title—
What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
—has haunted him ever since. As someone whose life has been a series of frustrations, he has had to struggle not to lose heart. He has had many dreams deferred, but none of them, as far as he can tell, have dried up. And one of his deferred dreams—to have a woman begging for it, spreading her down-there lips and just completely fricking begging for it—is right now finally coming true. And it is no little desiccated raisin in the sun. It is a big juicy grape; it is, in fact, an entire vineyard at the peak of gushing ripeness…

That's the good news.

The bad news is everything that happens next.

B
elow her is a pit of despair; she can smell it, she can taste it, and Cynthia hangs above it from a thin, fraying rope. And all that rope is made of is two brief text messages, one from Alice that says
We're okay,
and the other from Adam, typically more expressive, though in this case only marginally so, that says
See you soon, Mom.
The rope is tied around her ankle and she is upside down, turning slowly, facing and smelling the foul pit of hopelessness and grief, and everything else in life—eating, sleeping, shopping, thinking—is either undoable or irrelevant.

I can't call the police,
she writes in her journal.
What if the kids are up to some mischief—or worse? Those poor babies. What if they are taken away from me? Can they do that? I don't even know what my rights are. I don't know anything. Just this, these two things: Adam. Alice. I love them. And they need me.

She sits in the middle of her bed. It is ten at night, and she is dressed, ready to leave at a moment's notice. The door to the bedroom is open wide. She scrambles up, pulls the door shut, and locks it.

She has been doing this for the past hour. Closing the door to the bedroom and locking it. Unlocking it and opening it. Closing, opening, locking, unlocking. It is a state worse than indecision. One moment she feels safer locked away, and three minutes later it hits her that nothing could be more dangerous than a closed, locked door—she
must
be able to hear what (if anything) is happening in the rest of the house. But then the sight of that wide-open door and the thought of some beast, some intruder, a swarm of rats, a flying phalanx of bats pouring in—it's as if the person who left the door open must have been out of her mind, and she slams it shut, bolts it, only to open it again in a few minutes.

Now that the door is closed, the house emits more inexplicable noises. A thud. A creak. A bang. A squeak. She pictures the house. Why, oh why, oh why did she ever want to live in a large house? She remembers the first time she stepped foot in this place, not long after Leslie and Alex were engaged. How dazzled she was, how thrilled, moved as if by the sudden sound of overwhelmingly beautiful music—she had never been a guest in such a magnificent dwelling, let alone lived in such a place. Everything about it filled her with awe. Here was the source! For years she had been selling early American antiques, and walking through these rooms for the first time, she felt as if she were visiting the birthplace of all the fine furniture—the end tables, the paintings, the chairs, the sofas, the andirons, the pokers and tongs, the carpets, the lamps and chandeliers, the pewter serving trays, the immemorial gravy boats—all gathered together in their natural habitat. She had felt like a lover of animals who finally gets to see her beloved lions and giraffes on the Serengeti Plain.

But now. The bricks, the rafters, the beams, the window sashes, the glass—everything was pure hell. The house confounded her, mocked and tormented her. If you stood in one room, it seemed as if an evil presence was dancing happily in another. If you went to that room, the entity would have already moved on to another room, and another, and another, and another. If only she knew twenty-five people in New York City, twenty-five people who would help her, defend her, indulge her. She would have them here right now, one in every room.

But what about the cellar? What about the attic? The yard!

She scrambles off the bed again. Her journal slides to the floor. The noise of it turns her around. She laughs without joy, a
ha
and a
ha
no more merry than the sound of nails being hammered into the lid of a coffin. She races from room to room, switching on lights. A shadow—her own—terrifies her. A reflection in the window. The sound of her own breathing.

On the third floor of the once-magnificent mansion, now a brick box of dread, she stands in front of the twins' rooms, her chest heaving, her face contorted. The bedroom of a child is meant to be a cheerful, comforting place, brightly colored, sunny and safe, decorated with symbols of the innocent enthusiasms of youth—pictures of superheroes, beagles, kittens, pop stars, and dinosaurs. She has done her best to make the rooms right for the kids. Since their arrival, the twins themselves, however, have done nothing to make their bedrooms more theirs. Years in parental captivity, followed by the abrupt, powerless life of a child in the foster-care system, during which they were shuttled from family to family, house to house, room to room, have given them a permanent sense of impermanence. Wanting the children to make their rooms their own, Cynthia had deliberately left the walls empty, and they remain blank. The beds are tightly made, as if to pass inspection.

Cynthia enters Adam's room first. She turns on the overhead light, which shines brightly—too brightly for her nerves at this point. She switches it off, and the room settles down again, like a cobra retreating to its wicker basket. She crouches down and turns on the night-light, a winking, cheeky cartoon full moon plugged into the outlet and emitting a soft glow. The light—its kind intentions—breaks her heart. How we wish to make childhood a happy place and hope against all hope and against all evidence that if we love our children enough, we can keep them safe. Safe from the world. Safe from themselves.

Whoever it was who came to this room to take Adam's clothes left the dresser drawers hanging open, and now, going from the bottom to the top, she carefully slides them back into place. Next, Cynthia goes to his closet and picks up the hangers the intruder (or was it the twins themselves?) left on the floor. She returns them to the crossbar, steadies their swaying back and forth with her hand, and carefully closes the door. A part of her thinks that it might do some good to restore perfect order to the room.

She sits on the edge of his bed and strokes the soft down summer-weight comforter, encased in a pure silk French duvet cover, a ridiculous extravagance and one about as meaningful to a little boy as an honorary AARP membership, but, while furnishing the house in anticipation of the twins' becoming hers, Cynthia could not resist it. Now, however, she regrets it. She regrets…everything. She takes his pillow and holds it to her, as if it were a child. She buries her nose in it and there it is, mixed with the faintly lavender scent of the detergent, his soft, ever so slightly spicy smell, a combination of scalp and hair and skin and breath.

It is more than she can bear. The children were put into her care. She petitioned the court and said,
You must trust me.
She took them out of homes where they might not have been perfectly happy but where they were at least safe—not once in foster care did either of them go missing! But now it suddenly seems that keeping them in one place is more than she can accomplish.

She remembers how she used to feel selling antiques out of Gilty Pleasures, back in San Francisco about what now seems like fifty years ago. Sometimes, a wealthy customer would walk out of her shop with a delicate old painting or a fragile vase feeling that he or she had a right to the irreplaceable object because he or she had the money to pay for it. And Cynthia would watch the customer and the antique leave the store, mentally waving farewell to it and wondering if she were in fact sending the piece to its ruin and destruction. It was not enough to own a thing—you had to take care of it too. When you say,
This is mine,
you are signing a sacred contract that you will do it no harm.

And now, as far as she is concerned, she has committed acts of heedlessness and irresponsibility far, far beyond anything she imagined a few of her feckless customers capable of. She has failed to protect two beautiful, blameless, mysterious, and delicate little human beings.

She weeps into Adam's pillow and continues to do so as the darkness of the house closes in around her, slowly rising like a river, erasing everything in its path. Monster darkness, greedy, insatiable, implacable, pitiless darkness, the enemy of safety, the enemy of sanity.

Pay attention, pay attention,
a part of her silently warns. Someone could be coming up the staircase right this very moment.

Oh, leave me alone,
the rest of her answers.
I no longer care.

Alice, fully dressed, slides out of Rodolfo's bed. All he asked of her is to sleep next to him, and maybe let him put his arm around her. She was happy to agree—it sounded like fun, beautiful fun—but now she cannot sleep, and tonight's meal moves restlessly in her stomach, like a dog pacing around for last outs. Someone brought in a sack of cooked chickens and gallons of mac and cheese and all kinds of sodas and energy drinks, and everyone was in pretty high spirits and it smelled unbelievably good. So Alice ended up eating more than her customary six well-masticated bites.

And now, with the house quiet, and her privacy (she thinks) assured, she slips into the wreck of the bathroom to get rid of tonight's meal and whatever other undigested calories might be dangerously lurking in there as well.

When she learned (this was in Cold Spring, New York, in her first foster home) that she might at least maneuver puberty into a stalemate by starving herself, it was amazingly difficult for her to get rid of her food. She used to stick the eraser end of a pencil as far down her throat as possible, until a muscle was touched, and she gagged, and suddenly the whole machinery of the body began urgently to run in reverse. Then she learned to use her finger. The entire process was painful, laborious, convulsive, and once she got herself to hurl, she would be sweaty and shaking from the effort. Now, it's easy-breezy. She can do it by swallowing a little bit of air, clenching the muscles of her stomach, and then forcing them out. It takes about two seconds, and bloop: she's empty and clean. It's really no more than an intestinal sneeze. It's not a big deal. She often wonders why everyone in the world doesn't do this, rather than letting themselves get gross. But she keeps it private. It's her secret, and like many secrets, it turns her life into a tiptoe journey over broken glass. Oh, well. She flushes the toilet as she empties herself, and no one is any the wiser.

Except that when she opens the bathroom door, Polly is standing there, fully dressed, holding a biology textbook, her dark brows raised and a crooked, superior smile on her face, like a schoolteacher who believes part of her job is to make sure your self-esteem is no higher than an ant's ass.

“Hi,” Alice says. She covers her mouth, pretends to cough.

“Feel better?” Polly says. She is whispering.

“I'm okay,” Alice whispers back.

“I know what you were doing in there,” Polly says. She bends over, extends her tongue.

Alice feels her color rising, beginning with her cheeks and going all the way to her scalp. Saying nothing seems the best thing to do, the only thing.

“Right,” Polly says.

“I wasn't,” Alice manages to say.

“We don't do that,” Polly announces in a way that implies there is a whole list of dos and don'ts that Alice knows nothing of. If Polly is trying to make Alice feel like an outsider, an unwelcome guest who might be booted out at any moment, she is succeeding.

Alice shrugs, as if the whole conversation is stupid. And with that, she starts to walk past her.

“Where are you going?” Polly asks, taking hold of Alice's arm.

“I'm tired,” says Alice.

“Oh, look at her,” says Polly. “She just can't wait to get back in bed with her boyfriend.”

“He's not my boyfriend,” Alice says.

“You better use protection. Safe sex, girl, you hear?”

“It's not like that.”

“Kids like us, we give birth to things this world has never seen.”

“I know. You don't need to tell me.”

“Um…” Polly points at Alice. “You've got a little throw-up on your chin.”

Nervously, Alice tries to wipe it away—but her chin is dry, and she realizes she has been tricked.

“Psych!” Polly says, grinning. Then, suddenly serious, her whisper marbled with apparent concern, she says, “You shouldn't do that. You could die from it. And it doesn't even work.”

Alice shrugs. She cannot argue, but she refuses to confirm the fact that she has been tossing her food.

“Other kids tried it, you know,” Polly says. She hasn't let go of Alice's arm; in fact, her grip tightens.

“Tried what?” Alice says, trying to shake loose.

“Stopping their bodies from changing. It only works for a while. We all know how annoying the body is. It does what it does, right? It wants what it wants. You think the body is some kind of car that the mind owns and drives around wherever it wants. But the mind is a passenger. It can't touch the gas, the brake, or the steering wheel.”

“I know how to drive,” Alice says. “For really. A Mazda. I had a foster brother in Cold Spring, he taught me. ”

“Yeah, for a blow job.”

“Gross.”

“Deal with it, Miss Perfect.” Polly looks away for a moment. She is not stopping to think about what she says, and so far she has been pretty surprised at what's come out. In every back-and-forth in this house and with their friends out in the various parks, Polly has been the nice one, the reasonable one. Now she's acting like (what she would call) a total bitch—and it feels just fine.

Dylan suddenly appears. His hair is slicked back and he is holding a sandwich—peanut butter, from the smell of it.

“So?” he says to Polly. “We's leaving?”

“Yeah. You ready?”

“Me's born ready, all my life, sister.”

“I'm bringing Dylan back to his pack,” Polly says to Alice. “They're up near One Hundred and Tenth, West Side. Come with?”

“It's okay,” Alice says.

“No, seriously. You have to. I can't walk back home all by myself.”

“I'm so tired,” Alice says.

“Come on,” Polly says. At last, she relinquishes her hold on Alice, but only to throw her arm over Alice's shoulders. “You fucking owe me.”