My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (53 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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What Eddie didn’t take into account was the fact that while time did, indeed, heal all wounds, it was also the source of them—a fact the sorcerer Body-without-Soul was only too well aware of. It was the sorcerer’s ambition to get rid of time altogether, and in so doing to make everything in the world duplicate his own grotesque condition. For what granted the body its relation to time but the soul, the ageless, deathless soul—without the soul the lump of flesh that was the body would just sit there forever like the lump it was, unable to understand or feel a thing.
Eddie turned out to be a portrait artist of uncommon skill, his ability to capture the essence of a subject so uncanny he earned commissions from some from the city’s most prominent citizens. He painted the newly appointed bishop with his gold mitre and ivory teeth; he painted the mayor’s bony wife with her chubby daughter. In each case he was able to convey an almost painfully accurate representation of the subject’s external appearance while at the same time laying bare what would otherwise remain occult, the bishop’s unrequited love for his own handsome face, the daughter’s delight at being the cause of her mother’s embarrassment.
It wasn’t long before Eddie could afford a studio of his own in a fashionable neighborhood. Initially society’s darling, as the years passed he also became the object of serious critical attention. There were shows at the major galleries, articles in the best journals, adulatory monographs, even a coffee-table-sized book. For a while he was married to one of his patronesses; he had his share of love affairs as well. Then one evening he got the call that changed everything. “I have a job for you,” said the sorcerer Body-without-Soul, disguising his voice to sound human. “I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”
The next day when Eddie entered his studio he found that a woman had let herself in and was standing on the dais with her back to him. She was wearing an organdy gown of a pinkness so pale as to be practically white, tied at the waist with a deep pink sash. On her head she wore a bonnet, its long pink streamers hanging loose to her shoulders, which were bare. She was the image of Pinkie, the girl on Mary’s trading card, though unlike the woman in his studio, Pinkie would never have been caught dead with a cigarette. The woman glanced to one side. “Eddie,” she said, exhaling smoke. “Darling.” He got the fleetest glimpse of a single eye, refracting light and silver like mirror backing.
But if this was Mary, why was the yellow cat hissing at her, its back arched in a parody of feline anger? The woman looked no older than Mary had the last time Eddie had seen her, whereas he, Eddie, was losing his hair and needed glasses to read the paper, and the yellow cat had long surpassed one hundred in human years. The studio was overheated, the water banging in the radiators, the smell of turpentine and cigarette smoke overpowering. There had been some scandal, Eddie remembered, following which Mary had moved to the city. As he watched, she began removing her clothes. Her skin was that shade of milky white that’s almost blue, like skim rather than whole milk, her hair a tumble of curls. Before she had a chance to turn to face him, he had bolted from the room, together with the shoe box and the cat.
Now he could no longer stand the sight of living flesh. For a while he drew the cadavers the hospital supplied for the use of the medical students; he had been told there was money to be made illustrating anatomy textbooks and this proved to be true. Later he preferred to find his subjects at the city morgue, where he was befriended by the coroner, a heavyset man with the drooping jowls of a hound and a long gray ponytail. When Eddie asked him the difference between a cadaver and a corpse, the man pointed to a recent arrival by way of reply. The bodies that came into the morgue were not always in such good shape, corpses—as opposed to cadavers—often having met a violent end. But Eddie could draw anything. “You’re so good you can draw blood,” the coroner liked to say, and then he would howl with laughter.
I suppose it’s not surprising that eventually someone Eddie knew would show up there. He was sitting alone eating a sandwich, his drawing pad open on his knees, and had just started sketching.
“Remember me?” asked the corpse.
It was Miss Vicks lying on the marble slab, flat and pale as a flounder. “Listen to me, Edward,” said Miss Vicks. “You’ve always been good at following directions. Do you still have that knife I gave you?” She asked him to cut her up in pieces the way he’d cut up the hare. When Miss Vicks spoke her mouth opened and closed like a small live entity all its own.
“Why should I do that?” Eddie asked, and he began to grow dizzy thinking of where the time went and how there wasn’t that much of it left. “Besides,” he said, “the last time I followed your directions I don’t remember things going particularly well.” Over the years he had grown so used to talking to the yellow cat he didn’t find it that strange to be talking to a corpse.
“What on earth do you mean, Edward?” Miss Vicks asked. “It was Mary who didn’t fold the paper the way I said, not you. Hurry up, please!” she added, flecks of spit appearing on her lips. “What’s taking you so long?”
At some point rain had started falling, long strings of it from a sky the color of tin, pieces of which kept breaking loose and landing on the morgue roof, piling up there like the pieces of time in the case of the grandfather clock in Eddie’s parents’ hallway.
Eddie felt so dizzy, he hardly knew what he was doing. He took the knife from where he kept it in the shoe box. He cut off Miss Vicks’s hands and feet and cut out her entrails and was just cutting off her head when he heard a tiny voice coming from his sandwich.
“Eddie,” the voice said. “Don’t listen to her. It’s a trap.”
Eddie looked down and saw an ant emerging from between the two slices of bread, the very same ant he’d saved so many years ago from starving. What Eddie had to do, the ant told him, was to hold onto the leg it had given him back then—did he remember? Eddie had put it in his shoe box. By holding onto its leg, the ant told Eddie, he would become an ant so small no one could see him, even with a magnifying glass. And indeed the second Eddie picked the leg up he found himself standing on the sandwich, the other ant at his side, as enormous as an elephant, its magnificent abdomen gleaming like patent leather.
“What do we do now?” Eddie asked.
“We wait and watch and listen,” the ant replied.
When the coroner arrived at the morgue to find parts of Miss Vicks strewn across the slab, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “Oh, Eddie,” the coroner sighed. “How could you do this to me?” Clearly it was a case for the police. In no time at all Body-without-Soul had sped to the scene in his silver-gray car. “Tell me you haven’t touched anything,” he said to the coroner. “We’ll dust for prints,” he added, snatching Eddie’s drawing without first bothering to put on his latex gloves. “You might as well go home,” he told the coroner. But the minute the man was gone Body-without-Soul tore the drawing to bits. “They’ll never get me,” he said. “Most human beings are too stupid and sentimental and the only one who isn’t I took care of years ago.” Of course Miss Vicks knew he meant Mary. Precious Mary, as Miss Vicks thought of her, sourly.
Human beings would never be able to kill him, the sorcerer went on to say, because to do that would require tracking down his soul, which was hidden somewhere on the Poole estate in a black egg. A black egg in a black craw in a black heart in a black stomach. Someone was going to need the right tools—a bunch of body parts, he added, a trifle sadistically thought Miss Vicks—without which they’d never be able to make all the transformations needed to slit open the belly of the cat that ate the dog that ate the crow and find the egg that his soul would fly out of when you cracked its shell open. “Blah blah blah,” said Body-without-Soul. “The usual song and dance. It’s not going to happen.”
Miss Vicks moved her mouth as if to answer. Nothing came out at first but a trickle of sound like tap water and then her hands balled into fists and the sound grew louder, churning and grinding and clicking like stones borne on the flood.
 
I think it’s harder to return to the place where you lived your life when you were a child than it is to change from a man to an ant and back again. Eddie couldn’t stop looking at his human arms and legs, wondering what had become of those six graceful appendages he’d come to prefer to his own, each one as translucent as amber and delicately feathered.
The street where he used to play baseball was jammed on both sides with parked cars, making the idea of playing anything there, even if he’d still been able to, impossible, and the sycamore trees, having first grown so immense that huge holes had been cut in their crowns to make room for telephone lines and electric wire, in the end had gotten chopped down completely. Mary’s parents’ house and the houses to either side of it had been changed into condominiums so you couldn’t tell where one stopped and the next began. Eddie’s parents’ house looked more or less the same, except that the sloping front lawn his father had worked so hard to maintain was turned to chaff, the grass dead or dying and overrun with dandelions, and instead of the lush ivy plant his mother had kept in the front bow window there was a hideous gold lamp shaped like a naked woman.
Eddie was an old man now. The hair he still had left was white and his teeth false, the youthful promise of his career all but forgotten, the portraits he had painted so many years ago possible to track down with some effort in private collections, but considered stylistically quaint. The big yellow cat was dead, also the coroner, the cat’s ashes in a plastic bag in Eddie’s shoe box, the coroner’s in a cemetery Eddie sometimes visited before he moved away from the city. The Poole estate had been sold to a developer who built a retirement community there, Poole Village, which included the nursing home where Eddie’s father lived the last years of his life. But Eddie’s father was dead, too.
As he walked along the neat brick pathways of Poole Village, Eddie could barely remember what it was he was supposed to have come back to do. The day was mild, the air sweet but with a smell of autumn in it, of burning leaves, and in the blue sky he could see a small wavering V of geese making their way south, hear the plaintive far-off sound of their honking. Mary had always made fun of him, of the way the end of summer made him sad—her eyes would mock him, lovingly. He remembered how she would sit on the porch stoop with one of the other girls, the two of them apparently in deep negotiation for some card, a dog or a horse or what the girls all referred to as a “scene,” meaning a painting from the Romantic period showing a world where beautiful places like the Poole estate had once existed. Mary’s head would be bent over the cigar box, her shoulders hunched, but he could tell she was more focused on him than she was on nothing else. No one or nothing else in his life had given him that same degree of attention.
Now a young woman orderly approached on the path, pushing an old woman toward him in a wheelchair. The young woman reminded him a little of his old elementary school teacher, Miss Vicks—she had the same red lips and fingernails, the same birdlike way of tilting her head when she talked, and her name, amazingly enough, was Vicky. The old woman was just an old woman; she wore the kind of sunglasses with side shields a person needed after cataract surgery, and her silver hair had been put up in a bun. “Are you going to lunch?” the old woman asked Eddie. “Today is Friday,” she added, clapping together the swollen joints of her hands. “Swordfish!”
Eddie was about to say no, that while Poole Village certainly seemed nice enough, he wasn’t yet a resident. But then he was once again filled with a sense of having forgotten something important, something he was supposed to have come back there to accomplish. He seemed to remember something about a sorcerer, but that was in a fairy tale he’d heard in his childhood. Something about someone wearing a diadem of star stickers, about a girl wearing a diadem of star stickers on her forehead.
The three of them—Eddie and Vicky and the old woman—were making their slow way along an avenue of shade trees, the leaves casting moving shadows across their faces. Eddie felt cold; what the stickers signified, it suddenly came to him, was more than the fact that one girl had been set apart from the other girls. Something had happened to her, something bad.
He followed Vicky and the old woman into the building. “Whatever you do,” the old woman told Vicky, laughing, “don’t push me down there.” She was pointing toward the blue hallway that led to the level-three nursing home; when you went down that hallway you never came out again except as a cadaver.
Eventually they arrived at the dining room. The room was full of old people sitting in groups of four or six around tables covered with white tablecloths. It was a pleasant room, almost like a restaurant, with artificial floral centerpieces and aproned waitstaff, except all the waitstaff could perform CPR. Eddie put the shoe box on the table beside him. There was a plate in front of him with a piece of fish on it and a pile of peas and a pile of rice but he had no appetite.
“What have you got there?” asked the attractive young man who came to wait on their table.
“You have to speak up,” Vicky said. “Otherwise he can’t hear you.”
The old woman reached across the table and put her hand on his and held it and he could feel a tremor run through his whole body that either came from him or from her, he couldn’t tell the difference.
He also couldn’t tell where he was but he thought he could see a sky like gray padding with a handful of black specks swirling just beneath it, birds busy looking for things to use to build their nests. There was the smell of knotweed, a little like the smell of cat urine, and sure enough there was his yellow cat, big and sleek the way he used to be when Eddie first saw him, scratching in the dirt. Eddie’s hands were shaking so hard he almost couldn’t open the shoe box.

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