Murder of Angels (3 page)

From the center of his palm, dead-heart center of the kaleidoscope gyre, one shining thread and the small white spider spinning silk from light and hurt and the tinfoil shreds of the man’s discarded soul. They all see it, this final proof against the rehearsed sneers and skepticism of their fallen, unbelieving age. The boy sinks to his knees, and in another moment the only thing left in the whole, wide world is the man’s booming voice, the swirl of color in his hand, the white spider dangling above Theda’s upturned face. And in the long, cicada-whisper hours left before dawn, he weaves them charms against the hungry day.

3

And three thousand miles away, the girl named Niki opens her eyes on darkness, blinking back shreds of nightmare mist, gradually remembering that there’s no one in the bed but her, slowly remembering why. She lies very still and stares at the high bedroom ceiling, letting what’s left of the dream seep through her like rainwater percolating down and down and down through pure and cleansing sands, settling finally in forgetful, merciful aquifers; “Daria?” she whispers once, even though she knows that no one will answer.

She won’t be home for another two weeks, Niki. You know that. You know that perfectly well.

In the dream, she was still so young and there was so much time that had yet to be lost to her, and Niki lay in the big bed in Spyder Baxter’s room and stared at the pale thing dangling, head down, from the ceiling.

Way back there, way back
then,
Niki whispers in her lover’s ear,
I want you to get help. I want you to tell your doctor what you told me. I want you to tell her about the body you hid in the fucking basement.

Time to burn, to toss aside like candy-wrapper discards, time to slip between her fingers while she looked the other way. And Spyder Baxter, sad and crazy, fucked-up
Lila
Baxter with her bleached white hair and blue eyes and the cross carved into her forehead like damnation’s mark. Spyder to stand for all the past, every single failure, every single sacrifice, Spyder to take her sins away and drown in them.

“Spyder?” Niki whispers, and the dark room in the big house on Steiner Street whispers nothing much back. Nothing much at all. A passing car. Muted city sounds leaking in. The clock on the bedside table clicking to itself like an insect metronome.

The alarm clock is digital,
Niki thinks, and the ticking abruptly stops. She shuts her eyes again, trying to remember the things her psychologist has taught her, all the telltale differences between dreams and reality, but all she can hear is Spyder and the sound of drywall straining beneath the weight of the pale, dangling thing, the thing that Spyder
became
.

To save you,
she said.
To save you all.

The chrysalis, its shining skin like a clot of iridescent cream, a whiteness washed with shifting, indecisive colors. The shape beneath its skin, familiar and entirely alien, breathing in and out, in and out, and Spyder mumbles something in her ear that Niki doesn’t understand.

“What?” she asks. “What did you say?” but the chrysalis only swings and creaks and breathes.

Niki opens her eyes again and not enough time has passed that the room is any lighter, still hours until dawn, sunrise that really makes no difference because her demons have never been shy about the sun. The clock is ticking again, and this time she doesn’t argue with it. There’s another sound, too, like thunder far off, or waves against a rocky beach, and she sits up and listens.

“Schizophrenia
can
be managed,” her psychologist says, whispering from some secret nook or shadow. “You can live a normal life, Niki, if you’ll
let
me help you.”

“You don’t know,” Spyder says, way back then, and the ticking clock, the thunder and the waves; Niki tries to hear her memories of Dr. Dalby’s voice instead, but he’s the least substantial phantom in the room.

“I know
now,
” she whispers. “I do, Spyder. I know now.”

Niki pushes back the blanket, the sheets, exposing her bare legs, and ten years earlier, she does the same thing, in that other bed, that other room. The chrysalis swings almost imperceptibly from its fleshy vinculum, making the ceiling sag with its weight. She knows that Daria’s somewhere in the house looking for her, not this house now, but that house then, the tumbledown house at the dead end of Cullom Street. Not San Francisco, but Birmingham, and in another moment the bedroom door will open and Daria will try to save her again.

“You can’t help me,” Spyder mumbles in her ear. “Not here. Not now.”

“That these…these
events
you’ve described left such a deep and horrifying impression upon you is completely understandable, Niki. You were only a kid, weren’t you? All those things you
thought
you saw—”

“The whole world,” Spyder says, “the entire fucking
universe,
is held together with strings. I read that in a physics book. Strings in space and time, Niki, strings of energy and matter, light and darkness. And what I need to know, what I have to learn, is who the hell’s
pulling
those strings.”

In a moment, the chrysalis, ripe and swollen, will begin to split and spill its wriggling contents across the floor.

“Let me go,” Niki says, her voice sounding very loud in the empty bedroom in the big house that Daria Parker bought for her. “Let me forget and just be me again.”

“You will not believe the things that you will see,” Spyder murmurs. “The things I will show you.”

“I believe it already,” she replies, not taking her eyes off the chrysalis, Spyder wrapped up tight in that impossible, transforming second skin, and Daria’s calling Niki’s name now.

Spyder kisses her cheek, and then she smiles her lost and secret smile, that smile that Niki fell in love with once upon a time. “The things that pull the strings,” she says. “You’ll see.”

“I don’t want to see any more,” Niki replies. “I’ve seen enough already.”

“We’ve barely scratched the surface,” Dr. Dalby assures her from the chair behind his wide desk.

“I’ve seen all I ever
want
to see.”

And then the bedroom door opens, here, not there, so it isn’t Daria, her hands and face streaked with burns from the air clogged with acid threads. Just Marvin in his purple paisley bathrobe, Marvin Gale who watches over her because Daria can’t afford real angels.

“Are you okay, Niki?” he asks. “I thought I heard you talking—”

“Just a nightmare,” she answers quickly, and she knows the look on his face, the doubtful scowl, even though it’s too dark to see his eyes.

“You sure about that?”

“A bad dream,” she says. “That’s all. I’m fine.”

“Yeah, all right. You need anything before I go back to bed?” and she shakes her head no. “I’m fine,” she says again.

“You’re sure about that?”

“
Yes,
Marvin,” and he shrugs and rubs at his eyes with hands the color of roasted coffee beans. His black skin so dark that he’s little more than a silhouette against the light from the hall, and somehow his always being there for her only makes Niki miss Daria that much more.

“I’m going back to sleep,” Niki says and lies down.

“Sounds like a good idea,” Marvin mutters and stops rubbing his eyes. “You call me if you need me,” and then he’s gone. And she’s alone again. Alone
still
.

Listening to the thunder.

And the waves.

The ticking clock and the ceiling beginning to crack under the weight of the twitching, dangling thing.

Her heart and an airplane passing overhead.

It’s almost daybreak before she’s finally asleep again, and if there are dreams this time, she won’t remember them.

“W
ell, then what
were
you doing, Marvin?” Daria Parker asks and jabs him in the chest with an index finger. “I mean, Christ, what the fuck am I paying you for? You’re supposed to
watch
her.”

“I have to sleep sometime,” he says, and that makes her want to hit him, slap his face and never mind how hard it will be to get a replacement, someone else to keep an eye on Niki for what Daria can afford to pay. But his exhausted, bloodshot eyes and the stubble on his gaunt cheeks are enough to stop her.

“Can you get me a fucking drink? Can you at
least
do that much for me?” she growls, tamed and broken lion growl, burying the violence deep in words and not taking her eyes off Niki curled up small and naked on their bed, fetal Niki with her bandaged hand asleep beneath a framed print of John Everett Millais’
Ophelia
. Beautiful, lost Ophelia, floating along with her bouquet and her face turned towards unmerciful Heaven. Her skirts filled with air and buoying her up, but she’ll sink soon enough, the very next moment after the artist is done with her. And right now irony is the last thing Daria needs.

“It’s not even ten thirty,” Marvin says. “How about I get you some coffee, instead? Or there’s juice—”

“Marvin, are you my goddamn mother now? Did I fucking
ask
you for coffee or juice?
Please,
okay, just get me the damn drink?”

The little room is bright, morning sun off eggshell walls, a blue vase of Peruvian lilies on the table beside the bed. Daria turns away from Niki and Ophelia and stares out the second-story window of her big, apricot and cream–colored Victorian house at the busy morning traffic down on Steiner Street and the neatly mown green swatch of Alamo Square laid out beyond. This too-big house she bought for her and Niki right after
Skin Like Glass
went platinum and
Rolling Stone
was calling her the next Patti Smith. The next Angry Voice of Misunderstood Women Everywhere, and then the world spins three hundred sixty degrees, and she imagines someone else out there somewhere, staring across the square at this bedroom window, at
her,
so scared and angry and completely insignificant. Forget the rock-star shtick and she’s nobody at all, a frightened, hungover refugee from another world, the girl who fell to earth or San Francisco, and yesterday her lover tried to kill herself with a handful of pills.

“I’m sorry, Marvin,” she says, blinking at the sunlight, blinking because she’s trying not to cry. “I think my brain’s still back in Little Rock,” but Marvin’s gone to get her drink, or maybe he’s finally had enough of this shit and walked out on them, halfway back to anywhere sane by now.

“Fuck me,” she whispers and sits down on the edge of the bed. There’s still a pack of cigarettes in the inside pocket of her leather jacket, the pack she bought from a newsstand at the airport, and she takes one out and lights it, blowing the smoke away from Niki.

“If the band doesn’t string me up for this one, baby, the promoters will, or Jarod or the fucking label. I already told Alex he might as well get in line with the rest,” she says and touches Niki’s forehead with the calloused fingertips of her right hand, brushes tangled black hair from Niki’s face, and she makes a tiny, uneasy sound in her sleep. Her almond skin feels cool as stone, as smooth and incomprehensible as marble. And at this moment, in this clean Pacific light, she might almost be the same girl that Daria Parker saw for the first time nearly ten years ago, ten years plus a lifetime or two; the same rumpled, carelessly beautiful Vietnamese girl on the run from herself and New Orleans and a head full of ghosts, stranded and alone in downtown Birmingham.

Daria glances back up at Ophelia hanging on the wall, and Jesus, she never liked that painting to begin with. Despair like something sacred, something virtuous.

“You’re scaring the holy shit out of me, Niki. Do you know that? I can’t keep doing this,” and then Marvin’s back with her drink, Bombay and tonic and fresh lime in a tall, plastic tumbler, ice cubes that are round, and she thanks him for it. Daria raises the glass to her lips, and it’s half empty when she sets it down on the table next to the blue vase, the cold gin warm and familiar in her belly, burning its way quickly towards her dizzy head, and she tries not to notice that Marvin’s staring at her.

“You still haven’t told me what happened,” she says to him, and Marvin shakes his head, sits down on the hardwood floor beneath the window, makes a steeple with his fingers and thumbs and rests his chin on it.

“What makes you think I know? I woke up yesterday morning and she was gone.”

“And she didn’t say anything or do anything Friday night?” Daria asks, then takes another long drag from her cigarette and reaches for the rest of her drink.

“I ordered take-out. We watched a movie, and then she listened to some old CDs until she took her meds and got sleepy and went upstairs to bed.”

Daria exhales, and the smoke hangs thick and gray in the space between them. “And that’s all?” she asks. “You’re not leaving anything out?” and Marvin glares at her and frowns.

“It was Thai take-out,” he says.

“Fuck you, Marvin,” and Daria closes her eyes and rubs hard at her left temple.

“You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what? What is
it
that I’m doing again?”

He watches her silently for a moment, the stern and gentle press of his gaze against her tender, jet-lagged skin and the feather-iron weight of his silence. She knows he’s choosing his words more carefully now, and Daria lets herself wish she’d stayed in Little Rock. She can feel guilty about it later, when the headache’s gone and Marvin’s gone.

“You know what I mean,” he says. “Thinking maybe if you just try hard enough you can be Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud and Florence Nightingale all rolled into one.”

“Is that what you think I’m doing?” she whispers and opens her eyes, is dimly disappointed that nothing’s changed, still the same bright San Francisco morning filling up the bedroom and wounded, sleeping Niki still right there in front of her. The room smells like cigarette smoke and clean linen, no trace whatsoever of the lilies on the table and she wonders if they even have a scent.

“Yeah. Something like that.”

“I’m losing her, Marvin. She’s slipping away from me a little bit at a time, and sooner or later she’s gonna get it right. Maybe next time, or maybe the time after that—”

“Unless she doesn’t really want to die,” Marvin says and produces a pale green ceramic ashtray, seemingly out of thin air, and hands it to Daria. “It’s not that hard to die. And we both know Niki’s not a stupid lady.”

Daria taps her cigarette once against the rim of the ashtray and doesn’t look at Marvin. Doesn’t look at anything but the tiny heap of powder-gray ash marring the clean ashtray, the glazed finish, and she knows that Marvin washed it by hand. He washes and dries everything by hand because he says that dishwashers are too rough on dishes.

“You might as well know I never bought into that whole ‘cry for help’ thing,” she says. “If somebody needs my help, if
Niki
needs my help, she knows how to ask for it without putting me through this shit.”

Marvin nods his head once, noncommittal nod, and then he goes to the bedroom window, stands there with his back to her and Niki, staring down at the traffic on Alamo Square. Daria crushes the butt of her cigarette out in the ashtray and sets it on the table.

“You think I don’t know how much Niki needs me here?” she asks, but he doesn’t answer, and Daria sighs loudly and reaches for her pack of cigarettes, her old Zippo lighter.

“You’re smoking too much again,” he says very quietly.

“Yeah? Well, it’s a goddamn miracle I’m not doing a hell of a lot worse than that,” and Daria has to flick her thumb across the striker wheel four times before the Zippo gives up an unsteady inch of blue-orange flame.

“She was playing your music,” Marvin says. “Friday night, before she went up to bed. She plays your music all the time these days. I finally had to ask her to use the headphones because she’d put one song on repeat and it was driving me crazy.”

The Zippo’s flame sputters and dies before Daria can light the cigarette hanging limply from her lips. She curses and flips the cover shut again, turns to face Marvin and the Sunday morning sunshine streaming in around him.

“Look, I don’t need you laying some kind of fucking guilt trip on me, okay? Jesus,” and she takes the cigarette from her mouth and puts it back in the pack.

“You said you wanted to know everything.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me before now? If you thought it was important that she was listening to my music Friday night, why didn’t you tell me that to begin with?”

“Take her with you, Dar,” Marvin says, and he glances at Niki; she’s rolled over onto her left side now, and her face is buried deep in the white cotton folds of sheets and pillowcases. “That’s what she needs. Just to be near you for a little while. Just a few days—”

“No,” and something in the way she says it, spitting that one word out at him, so emphatic, so final, something cold and ugly in her voice—but nothing she can take back, no matter how it makes her feel. “You weren’t with us when she freaked out on me in Boston. I can’t work and watch after her at the same time.”

Marvin rubs nervously at his stubbly chin, his dark cheeks specked with darker whiskers when he’s never anything but clean shaven.

“Then take me with you, too,” he says. “
I’ll
watch her when you can’t.”

“I said
no,
Marvin, so don’t ask again. Does she even look like she’s in any shape to be on the road?” and Daria pauses, knows he isn’t going to answer her, but leaves space for an answer anyway. “Now, if you don’t think you can do your job, I can look for someone else.”

“I’m
trying
to do my job,” he says, the angry smudge at the edges of his voice. “I’m trying to keep her alive.”

“Well, you sure could’ve fooled me.”

And then neither of them says anything else, only one or two heated words away from something that can’t be taken back, apologized for, excused. Daria sits in the chair by the bed, running strong fingers through her spiky blond hair, staring at Niki’s bare shoulders as though there might be answers printed on her skin like tattoos or scars. The answers she needs to hold the world together around her, around them both, some secret talisman or incantation against all her fears and failures.

She was playing your music. She plays your music all the time these days.

“Will you leave us alone for a while?” Daria says. “I need to get my head together, that’s all. I have to figure out what the hell I’m going to do next.”

“Yeah, Dar, sure,” he replies, the reluctance plain to hear, but at least he doesn’t sound pissed off anymore. “If you need me, I’ll be in the kitchen.”

“And take this damned thing with you,” and she reaches into her jacket, removes her cell phone from a pocket and hands it to Marvin. “If anyone calls,
especially
that prick—”

“You’re busy.”

“Whatever. You can tell them I’m off screwing a herd of sheep for all I care.”

Marvin turns the phone over in his hand a couple of times, as if preparing to pass judgment on its molded plastic faceplate, plastic the indecent color of ripe cranberries. “It does have an off switch, you know?” he says and points to a tiny black button on one side.

“Then turn it off and take it with you.”

Marvin nods his head and walks past her to the bedroom door, has already started pulling it shut behind him when he stops and looks back at Daria.

“Hey. Who was Spider?” he asks her, and she stares at him like someone struck dumb, struck stupid, someone too far gone to ever be surprised by anything ever again but this one thing.

“What?”

“
Spider.
Last night, at the hospital, when Niki started coming back around, she asked for someone named Spider a couple of times. I’d almost forgotten—”

“I don’t know,” Daria lies, answering the question much too quickly, and she can see from his expression, the mix of confusion and concern, that Marvin knows perfectly well that she’s lying.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I thought it might be important,” and he closes the door, leaving Daria Parker alone with Niki and Ophelia and the sun-bright walls.

“She wrote this song when we lived in Boulder,” Niki said, and Marvin frowned at her, at Niki Ky sitting in the center of about a hundred jewel cases, the scatter of CDs like tiny space-age Frisbees. Niki in a gray-green cardigan at least two sizes too large and a black T-shirt underneath, faded black cotton and a big white letter Z with a question mark behind it—Z? inside a white silk-screened square—and then the song started again.

“When we still lived with Mort and Theo on Arapahoe,” she said.

“Yeah,” Marvin replied and he turned a page in the book he was trying to read. “You told me.”

“She used to play it on Pearl Street, for spare change, you know, and I’d sit on top of the big bronze beaver and listen. Sometimes Mort would tap along on his snare drum, if he didn’t have to work that day.”

“You told me that, too, dear,” and Marvin stared at her over the top of his paperback Somerset Maugham novel. “But haven’t you played it enough for one night?”

“You had to have a license, but there were lots of street performers on Pearl. No cars allowed. We knew a girl who juggled wineglasses, and a guy named Silence who played the hammer dulcimer.”

Marvin made a face like a cat trapped in a small child’s lap, sighed and glanced back down at his book.

“I’m sorry,” Niki said, not entirely certain what she was apologizing for and feeling more annoyed at Marvin than sorry for playing “Dark in Day” twelve times in a row.