Fear itself: a novel (3 page)

“Gee, thanks,” said Linda.

“Don’t mention it. Give me a holler when you’re done—I’ll be down here someplace.”

Johann Sebastian Bach’s
Six Suites for Cello Solo
has long been considered a benchmark for cellists. Pablo Casals, who at age thirteen stumbled upon the suites in a secondhand sheet-music store near the harbor in Barcelona, practiced them every day for twelve years before he worked up the courage to play one in public, and it would be another thirty-five years before he felt ready to record the entire series.

Since then, every world-class cellist has had his or her go at the suites, but only the most gifted, the Jacquelines and the Yo-Yos, have even wrestled them to a draw, so it was probably an act of hubris for a twelfth-chair cellist like Wayne Summers to attempt them.

But Wayne, born poor and black in San Francisco’s Fillmore District, had come late to his instrument, and as his teacher Mr. Brotsky always said, without at least a little
chutzpah,
a man never knows how good he can be or how far he can go.

Which was why every day for the past six years, whether he was working a day job, rehearsing with the symphony, or playing chamber music—or all three, as sometimes happened—Wayne made time to practice at least one of the dances from one of the suites. His favorite was the sarabande from the first suite—there was something so damn sweet and hopeful about it.

That, then, was the piece Wayne, lying in the darkness with his hands cuffed behind his back, chose to practice first, in order to keep himself from going mad. To begin with, he ran through the sarabande in his mind, his left hand twitching the fingering behind him, the muscles of his bowing arm tensing and relaxing rhythmically. Midway through, he began diddle-dumming along, which started the caged birds chirring and singing again. Not the owl though—the owl remained silent.

When he finished, Wayne heard polite applause—the sound of one man clapping, somewhere across the room. But the Bach had worked its magic on Wayne: his mind felt clearer than it had since he’d first awakened, however many hours ago.

“Who are you?” he asked into the darkness. “Why are you doing this?”

No answer—even the birds were silent. But the man was drawing nearer; Wayne could smell him now. He smelled like bubble bath. Cheap, strawberry-scented bubble bath.

“Are you going to kill me?” Wayne asked. It felt strange to be so calm at such a time.

“No.” The voice was only inches away.

Thank you, Jesus. “What, then?”

“I’m going to let our feathered friends here do it for me—eventually.”

On the surface, Wayne remained calm, perhaps because beneath the surface something had already died—hope, most likely—leaving him nothing to do but ask the question again: “Why are you doing this?”

Instead of an answer, a rank smell, then the unpleasant sensation of something cold and clammy being rubbed against his eyelids. It was all so bizarre and incongruous that it took Wayne a few seconds to recognize the odor, and a few more seconds for him to put it all together. Liver—the crazy fuck had just rubbed raw liver into his eyes.

And even then the significance of what had happened failed to dawn on Wayne until he heard a sound that drove every other thought, every other sensation but pure blind panic from his mind and consciousness: the rattle of the chain that tethered the barn owl to its perch.

A moment later came the buffeting of silent wings, and the strike. The first blow drove Wayne’s head back violently against the mattress. The pain was indescribable—Wayne rolled over onto his stomach and began thrashing his head from side to side to protect his eyes. The owl, starved and frustrated, half hopped, half flew from one side to the other, stabbing with its beak, trying to get at the liver smell, the blood smell.

Then it found the ear it had struck accidentally earlier, and contented itself with tearing at that until the man who had brought it to this place hauled it away from its prey and dropped a burlap sack over its head.

“Who
are
you?” screamed Wayne again, through the pain.

“I’ll give you a hint,” came the answer. “You know how people are always saying you have nothing to fear but fear itself? Well, that’s me, buddy—I’m fear itself.”

Dorie is sitting on a couch somewhere, knees primly together. Across the room a television is playing, but she can’t quite make out what’s on the screen. Behind the television, a window. What floor is this? she asks herself. It makes a difference—if she’s a few stories up, there’s no danger, but if she’s only on the first or second story, she mustn’t look up, mustn’t glance at the window.

In front of her, on a familiar-looking coffee table, there’s a big, glossy coffee-table book. She leans forward and opens it at random, but she can’t make out the words, can’t quite bring them into focus.

There are pictures, though. The first one she turns to looks like a bird initially; the picture is the only colored object in Dorie’s black-and-white world, and so vivid it’s almost 3D. Then she leans closer and discovers to her horror that it’s not a picture of a real bird, but of a bird mask—one of those elongated, feathered masks that a medicine man or a witch doctor might wear.

She quickly closes the book, then hears a tapping at the window. Don’t look up, she tells herself—whatever you do, don’t look up.

But she does look up. She always does. And sees what she always sees: the face at the window. Or rather, the mask at the window—the eyeholes are empty, there’s no face behind it.

As always, Dorie Bell awoke from her recurring nightmare with the echo of her own scream ringing in her ears. And as always, there was no way to know whether she’d screamed out loud, or only in the dream. Fortunately, it didn’t matter: she lived alone.

Of the approximately thirty million Americans who suffer from phobia disorders serious enough to require professional consultation at some point in their lives, forty-two percent are afraid of illness and/or injury, eighteen percent are afraid of thunderstorms, fourteen percent fear animals, eight percent are primary agoraphobics (people who are afraid of public spaces, largely because they fear they will experience a panic attack, sometimes involving a syncope, in public; there is, of course, an element of agoraphobia associated with almost all specific phobias—the fear of having a panic attack is always more debilitating than the fear of whatever inspired the phobia in the first place), a surprisingly small seven percent are terrified of death, five percent fear crowds, and another five percent are afraid of heights; comprising the remaining one percent are the more exotic phobias, such as amathophobia, the fear of dust, siderodromophobia, the fear of railroad trains, and prosoponophobia, the fear of masks.

Dorie Bell, age fifty-two, of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, had been a prosoponophobe since age three. She had tried everything—prayer, analysis, desensitization therapy, behavior modification, more prayer—but had never been able to uncover either the source for her fear or a cure. The actual sight of a mask still triggered severe panic attacks, fear of accidentally encountering a mask still ruled her daily comings and goings, and mask dreams still haunted her nights.

And sometimes her afternoon naps as well—she had fallen asleep on the couch in her studio while waiting for Wayne Summers, who was supposed to be driving down from San Francisco that afternoon. They had met the previous spring, in Las Vegas, of all places, where nearly a hundred phobics (or, as they preferred to be called, Persons with Specific Phobia Disorder) had gathered for the PWSPD convention, and the two had become fast friends despite some rather striking differences between them, including age, race, religion, and sexual orientation.

Still struggling to shake off the psychic tatters of the dream, Dorie left the studio and went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea and check the time—there was no clock in the studio, intentionally. She was surprised to discover that it was nearly four in the afternoon, which left her in a minor dilemma, as she was anxiously awaiting a response to her letter to Agent Pender and hadn’t yet dropped by the post office today. (There was no home mail delivery in Carmel, largely because there were no street numbers on the houses; Carmel-by-the-Sea was a town that worked at being quaint.)

On the other hand, Wayne might be arriving any minute—he was already several hours overdue—and he would absolutely pitch a syncope if he had to wait outside with the jays, crows, thrushes, juncos, and warblers that inhabited the live oak in Dorie’s front yard.

Black guy passed out on the front lawn: wouldn’t that give the neighbors something to talk about, thought Dorie, hurriedly scrawling a note that read,
“Wayne, come on in, back soon, Dorie,”
and tacking it to the front door, which she left unlocked for him—you could still do that sort of thing in Carmel. Then she set off at a brisk walk for the post office, an eight-block round trip from there for most people, but twelve for Dorie, who had to take the long way around in order to avoid passing the African masks in the window of the Ethnic and Folk Arts Gallery.

There were, as of October of 1999, ninety-six art galleries and forty-one gift shops in Carmel; of necessity, Dorie had memorized the location of all the ones that displayed, or might display, masks visible from the street, so that she could detour around them. A relatively minor inconvenience, she knew, especially compared to the lengths an ornithophobe like Wayne had to go to avoid his bêtes—as specific phobia disorders go, prosoponophobia wasn’t the worst one to have. Except around Halloween, which, as Dorie was about to learn, had come two weeks early to Carmel that year.

No one watching Dorie Bell stride confidently down the hill toward the post office would have suspected her of being a phobic. She was a tall woman, broad-shouldered and full-figured, and she walked the walk in her Birkenstocks, paint-spattered overalls, and brown serape—head up, long strides, arms swinging, colorful straw Guatemalan bag swinging, waist-length brown braid swinging, too.

But as she turned west onto Fifth Avenue, having detoured down San Carlos to avoid the Ethnic and Folk Arts Gallery, she was ambushed. Overnight a faceless white mannequin wearing the medieval costume known as a domino (hooded robe and eye-mask, all the more dreadful to Dorie for its simplicity: black and white, the mask stripped to its essence) had appeared in the window of Verbena, the upscale women’s clothing shop on the corner of Fifth and Dolores.

Frozen in front of the window, unable to avert her eyes, just as in the dream, Dorie could feel her scalp tingling; bright pin-pricks of color dotted her vision as the blood began to drain from her head. She knew what was happening—her sinoaortic barore-flex arc, the mechanism responsible for the vasovagal syncope, was overcompensating for the sudden increase in blood pressure by dropping the pressure just as suddenly. But she also knew, after all these years, how to take charge, how to reverse the process.

Breathe, she ordered herself, closing her eyes to the m—to the object that had triggered the attack. Deeeep and sloooow, deeeep and sloooow. Then up on your toes, back down, up and down, breathe deep; long, slow shoulder-rolls, get the blood circulating, never mind about making a public spectacle, you’d make more of a spectacle passing out on the sidewalk, and breaking your nose again for good measure.

Attagirl, can’t be fearless until you’ve been afraid. Now turn away from the object, nice and slow, don’t hyperventilate; now you can open your eyes…now you can take a step…now you can take another….

And the danger was behind her, both physically and temporally. Nor did she abandon her errand, instead detouring another three blocks out of her way, only to return home empty-handed—no letters in her box, from Pender or anybody else—to an empty driveway and empty house: no Wayne, either.

By six o’clock, Dorie was concerned; by eight, she was worried; by ten she had already left three messages on Wayne’s machine and another two on his mother’s.

A few minutes after eleven the phone rang; Dorie snatched the receiver off the cradle, barked “Where the hell are you?” and was told, in no uncertain terms, to watch her language. Vera Summers, who double-shifted as a private nurse, was Dorie’s age, a praise-shoutin’, hymn-singin’, tee-totalin’, no-cussin’ Baptist, and not to be trifled with. Dorie apologized. “Sorry, Vera, I thought it was Wayne.”

“Apologize to Jesus, not me. But listen, sugar, I ain’t seen Wayne since church yesterday morning. Didn’t come home last night, didn’t call, nothing. You do see him first, you warn him he better duck next time he see his mama. He show up there, you have him call me. Meantime I’m ’onna see if I can get hold of my brother Al, on the police, grease some wheels.”

“Okay, stay in touch.”

“I will. I wouldn’t worry too much, though—it wouldn’t be the first time that boy stayed out all night, tomcattin’ around.”

But Dorie did worry, because she knew something Vera did not know. God
damn
it, she thought, picking up the phone again—how many more of us have to die before somebody listens?

“Hello?” The man on the other end of the line sounded peeved.

“Hi, it’s Dorie. Did I wake you?”

The voice softened. “Oh, hi. No, no problem—I’m a night owl. What’s up?”

“Remember Wayne Summers?”

“Refresh me.”

“He was the only black guy at the convention.”

“Right, right, the ornithophobe. What about him?”

“He’s missing,” said Dorie. “He was supposed to be coming down today, but he never showed up.”

“Maybe it slipped his mind. From what I recall of the boy, he did strike me as being just a tad flaky.”

“No, I talked to his mother. She doesn’t know where he is either—she said he didn’t come home last night.”

“Has she filed a missing persons?”

“Not yet—but her brother, Wayne’s uncle, he’s a cop, he’s gonna look into it.”

Attenuated silence, then the snick of a lighter and a hissing inhalation (the unmistakable sound of somebody toking up), followed by a spluttering cough (the unmistakable sound of somebody blowing a toke).