Mortal Fear (49 page)

 ERIN> You sound like you know a lot about it.

 MAXWELL> Death and life? Yes. I know them well. But you should not long for that annihilation. We all get there too soon. Tell me, why did you not marry this unique lover?

 As I describe Erin’s marriage of convenience to Patrick, and his promise never to ask about Holly’s father, I am forced to look into an abyss I have not allowed myself to think about for the past three months. The dark hole where Dr. Patrick Graham has become unhinged, obsessed by a shadow face that lurks in his dreams like a grinning demon that will never grant him peace.

 My face.

 MAXWELL> Has your husband ever struck you during these arguments?

 ERIN> No. Not that I haven’t deserved it. But I’m starting to understand him now. I once thought he could grow to love my child as part of me. But men aren’t built that way. In the animal world, males try to kill the offspring of other males. At some primitive level, I think the same thing is happening in my husband’s brain. The more he loves my son, the more he hates him.

 MAXWELL> Yes. And what is your solution to all this?

 ERIN> I haven’t got one.

 MAXWELL> Of course you do. You simply haven’t found the strength to admit it. You don’t love your husband, do you?

 ERIN> No. He’s a good father, though. I picked well in that department, even in desperation.

 MAXWELL> Do you love your sister’s husband?

 ERIN> I don’t think so. I don’t know.

 MAXWELL> If you knew you were going to die tonight, how would you feel about him?

 ERIN> I don’t know. I’d be angry that he was going to be left with my sister. Be free of me and my son. I guess I must resent his happiness.

 MAXWELL> And your sister’s.

 ERIN> No. I was never jealous of my sister. My parents always loved some Nancy Drew idea of me, but my sister really knew me. And she loved me anyway. She still does.

 MAXWELL> So why resent her husband’s happiness?

 ERIN> Maybe because he’s the only man who ever made both of us love him. He got to screw Mary Magdalene and deflower the Virgin Mary too, all without taking any consequences. I mean _I_ certainly had to take consequences.

 MAXWELL> You want your sister to know the truth.

 ERIN> I don’t know. But I’m not sure I can keep the secret regardless. My husband is forcing the issue. What if he leaves me? Should I end up alone with my son while his real father lives an idyllic life with my sister? Is that fair? It makes me crazy! I hate him when I think like that.

 MAXWELL> Has he asked you for sex since Chicago?

 ERIN> No. But he’s still haunted by me. I feel it whenever I’m around him. And now that he knows about our son, he’s really going out of his way to see us. God. Everything is going to hell and I have no control over it. My sister wants a baby of her own. My son is like an unexploded bomb lying between our two families. My husband’s going crazy, my sister’s husband’s going crazy, I’m going crazy.

 MAXWELL> Calm down. Tell me one thing only. What do you want?

 Out of five different impulses, the right answer comes to me like divine revelation.

 ERIN> I want out.

 MAXWELL> That’s simply another way of saying you haven’t the courage to try to get what you want, which is your sister’s husband.

 ERIN> No! I WANT OUT!

 MAXWELL> Out of what? Out of your situation? Out of life?

 ERIN> It’s hard for me to admit this, but I still dream of the magical, mystical man out there somewhere who is what I’ve always wanted. Like
Snow White
. Someday my prince will come. Go ahead, tell me I’m pathetic and unliberated and everything else. I could care less. That’s what I want. I want to be saved.

 MAXWELL> Describe your prince for me.

 I close my eyes.

 Out of the luminescent afterimage of the computer screen, something is moving toward me. It is formless yet threatening, faceless yet drawing into focus. It is not one thing. It’s a mass of shadows. An army of ghosts, walking with their eyes shut. Ghosts of all the blind men who used Erin throughout her life. And my ghost walks among them. But behind those pale shadows I see something else. A shining obsidian darkness. And within that darkness floats a single pair of open eyes. Terrible cobalt eyes framed by long lashes, eyes that stare into my soul with phallic intent.

 Brahma’s eyes.

 ERIN> I think my prince is a Dark Prince. He terrifies most women, but not me. He knows the ways of the world, but he’s not _of_ the world. Do you know what I mean?

 MAXWELL> Go on.

 ERIN> He inspires awe in men, yet abases himself before me, as I abase myself before him. He knows that all men who ever touched me were like slaves who tended me until his arrival. He knows that earthly defilement confers a certain kind of purity. He knows I possess immeasurable love, but that the edge of my love is terrible and cold, and he welcomes that. He can make me scream in the night, loose me from everything that holds me to the earth, cause an explosion in my head that dwarfs the orgasm of my body. He loves me so desperately that he wants to kill me, but that is the one act he hasn’t the power to commit. Because at the hot core of his strength, he fears me. THAT’S what I want!

 MAXWELL> Be at peace, child. I AM COME.

 A drop of stinging sweat falls into my eye. Somewhere on this planet a man sits in the glow of a computer screen, speaking these words to me and fantasizing a future I do not even want to crack the door on. I am miles farther down the road Dr. Lenz tried to walk, and the only way home is forward.

 ERIN> I don’t know what to say. Your words are powerful. I won’t deny that I’m drawn to you. But I know the reality. You’re nearly fifty years old, and you’re sitting somewhere dreaming about _bedding_ this beautiful young girl you’ve found on-line. I don’t think you’re my savior.

 MAXWELL> I am more than savior, Erin. I am a second sun burning above the teeming earth. But even suns need sustenance. They consume themselves, as I have done for so long. I am subject to one god above me, and that god is TIME.

 ERIN> You sound like you’ve gone a little far with this.

 MAXWELL> We are come to the fork in the road. To the time of choosing. You must decide whether to remain where you are, dwelling in darkness, or to journey to the place of understanding. Remember that knowledge is a burden. Knowledge has a price.

 My mind has finally gone blank.

 ERIN> I need a few minutes to think about this. It’s a lot to take in at once.

 MAXWELL> No.

 ERIN> Why not? To be perfectly honest, I need to pee. You’ve made me nervous.

 MAXWELL> Urinate where you sit. It will bring your mortality home to you.

 ERIN> I’m perfectly convinced of my mortality, thank you. I’m going to leave this terminal for five minutes. I do want to know about your life. I do believe you’re different. You might even be the one. But I have to pee, and I want to compose myself. If you’re here when I get back, I’ll be glad. If you’re not, I’ll be sorry.

 And with that—with my heart beating like a triphammer and my hair soaked with sweat—I log off.

 CHAPTER 33

 I spent most of the five-minute rest I gave myself from Brahma in the bathroom, wiping my neck and arms with a steaming washrag and staring at my stunned face in the mirror. Brahma’s life story—what I’ve heard of it—is stranger than anything I ever imagined, and I have a sense that it will only get more so. But is he telling the truth? Am I learning the genesis of a murderer? Or is he merely playing me for a fool, as he did so expertly with Dr. Lenz?

 I don’t think so. A small voice in my mind is telling me to call Daniel Baxter—or even Lenz himself—but I am not ready to do that. Having brought Brahma to the point that he wants to pour out his twisted past to “Erin,” I must push on to the end.

 Sitting back down at the computer, I pull on the headset and take a long pull from a fresh Tab. On the screen are the last sentences I spoke:
If you’re here when I get back, I’ll be glad. If you’re not, I’ll be sorry.
I decide to make him wait another minute, just to keep the authority on my side. After finishing the Tab, I speak again, and EROS faithfully transcribes.

 ERIN> Are you still here, Max?

 MAXWELL> Yes.

 ERIN> You haven’t scared me off yet. Let’s go.

 MAXWELL> Go?

 ERIN> I’m ready to hear the rest of your story.

 MAXWELL> But we were discussing you.

 ERIN> You told me a secret, I told you one. It’s your turn again.

 MAXWELL> Such children we are. Very well. Where was I?

 ERIN> Incest. Your father married a woman in America for her money and position, while his sister—your mother—ran off to Germany and gave birth to you during the war.

 MAXWELL> Skip ahead six years. Richard had achieved his childhood dream. He was a prominent psychiatrist in one of America’s greatest cities. His wife had money but he earned plenty of his own. Yet he had one regret. The Gorgon had no intention of inhibiting her social life with the drudgery of rearing a child. So Richard lost himself in his work, and became more renowned and controversial with each passing year. His approach was simple. He encouraged people to accept their natures. He used Freud and Jung and the rest to legitimize so-called “aberrant” behavior. I find a humorous parallel with a maxim of the computer industry: “That’s not a bug, it’s a feature.”

 Richard relieved his rather exotic sexual needs away from home in a variety of ways, but he managed to stay clear of both the press and the police. When Catherine appeared on his doorstep (the old family brownstone, now fantastically refurbished) with a six-year-old boy at her side, he was stunned. I was a mirror image of him. Dark-haired, pale-skinned, classically beautiful. Mother explained the similarities with the fiction that I was Richard’s “nephew.” To explain my fatherless existence, Catherine told a harrowing tale of an impulsive marriage to a young German soldier who was quickly killed on the Russian front, then three terrible years in a displaced persons camp with Uncle Karl. The D.P. camp was real enough. The cold there lodged in my bones like tumors of ice. Catherine also revealed that I suffered from hemophilia, the same type Richard had. This made the Gorgon vaguely suspicious, but since hemophilia is passed down through females only, her suspicions were allayed.

 When Richard and Catherine were finally alone, Mother confessed the truth. There was never any German soldier. I was Richard’s son, though I did not know it. Half mad from exhaustion, Mother told Richard she’d managed to survive only by vowing to deliver me to him before she died. In her eyes Richard saw the glazed apartness that had lighted his father’s eyes shortly before he shot himself.

 Sweeping aside the Gorgon’s opposition, Richard took us into his home. Tension between the two women grew quickly, and one cold morning Richard found Catherine dead in her bed. She’d taken an overdose of morphine from his medical bag. She lay in state in the house for two days, resting in a bronze coffin, her delicate hands folded across her still breasts like those of a fallen martyr. I did not leave her side except to urinate, and I ate no food at all. Nor did I sleep. When Catherine’s body passed into the crematorium, I collapsed and had to be admitted to the hospital.

 When Richard announced that he would legally adopt his “nephew,” the Gorgon’s lack of opposition surprised him. He didn’t realize that I—without Catherine—was the answer to the Gorgon’s prayers as well as his own. I freed her forever from the pressure to bear a child. Yet things did not turn out quite as she hoped.

 In me, Richard had gained more than a son. For what was I but a genetic reconstitution of himself and his sister? The male and female halves united in one being. I was his father reborn. He educated me in the manner he had enjoyed before the Crash—private tutors focusing on the hard sciences—and I did not disappoint. As I surpassed each new expectation, Richard came to realize that his sister had been right. No other woman could have loved him as she did, or given him such a child. He came to believe that fate was acting through our bloodline to bring about a higher order of humanity. Without even being conscious of it, he began to eulogize Catherine as a saint.

 As the years passed, the Gorgon grew more resentful of me. From the beginning she’d had suspicions too deep to put a name to, and one night, after consuming a staggering amount of gin, she stumbled upstairs to Richard’s private bedroom and confronted him. She disparaged my mother in a long tirade. She’d done this before, but for some reason, on this night, Richard snapped. He told the Gorgon the truth. At first she misinterpreted, shouting that she’d always known I was a bastard, that Catherine’s “dead German soldier” was a lie to hide her whoredom. When she finally comprehended the true state of affairs and began wailing about “that demon child,” Richard lifted her off her feet, carried her to the second floor landing, and threw her over the rail to the marble floor below.

 I was fourteen then, and I saw it happen. The shouting had drawn me to the head of the stairs. Richard was terrified, not that I would report him to the police, but that he might have lost me forever by committing murder before my eyes. I remember my reaction to this day. I said, “It’s about time you did something about that shrew, Uncle.”

 Do you think me cold, Erin?

 In the silence of the hanging question, I force myself to take no position at all, to draw no moral line that might stop Brahma’s flood tide of confession.