The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares (30 page)

Laughing, Nicolas lurched to his feet. “Good-bye, ma’am! Thanks for these! ’Bye!” Carelessly he seized her husband’s beautiful suit, overcoat, floral-print shirt as if they were ordinary articles of cast-off clothing, slung them across his arms, and left the house.

His companion, who had trotted around the corner of the house to get the van, drove now to the circle driveway where Nicolas climbed inside and both men drove away.

In a state of shock, Helene stood unmoving for several minutes. Then, she went to check the guest bathroom: the toilet had not been flushed. The towel on the rack had been used roughly, soiled and wet and twisted. Was something missing from the sink counter?—the marble soap dish? The expensive Dior soap was in the sink as if it had been flung there.

Not Nicolas but Gideon must have done this. Helene could not believe that her friend who’d admired her so, could have done this.

Flushing the toilet, turning away.

Then, she hurried downstairs to check the unfinished basement—all of the furniture, all of the clothes and other items were gone. Though this had been Helene’s directive, now she felt a further shock for how bare, how vast the basement was, how grubby the concrete floor! You could see the outlines of objects that had been stored here for years; silhouettes in the floor, only just slightly less dirty than the rest of the floor.

The door to the outside had been left carelessly ajar. Helene went to close and lock it.

Helene left the unfinished basement and would have returned upstairs except, impulsively, she opened the door to the finished basement, the “family room”—and saw in disbelief that this room, too, had been emptied.

The men had taken away the sofa, the chairs—the coffee table—even the carpet; they’d managed to detach and haul away the fifty-two-inch flat-screen TV. They’d taken away the exercise machines—treadmill, StairMaster—that had not been used for years. The door to the wine cellar was ajar; Helene had no need to look inside to know that Helping Hands had emptied the shelves of wine bottles.

In the vacated room Helene stood trembling. On the floor of this room as in the wake of a whirlwind were left-behind, broken things—pottery, a small lamp, vases containing dried grasses and wildflowers. She was too numb to know what to do. Thinking
But it has to be a mistake—doesn’t it? This could not be deliberate
. She saw again the derision in the man’s eyes—
That’s what I was sent there for. Why’d you ask!

6.

She began to see the van in the neighborhood.

From an upstairs window she saw the metallic-colored van with red lettering on its side—Helping Hands
—
passing her driveway to turn into a neighbor’s house.

And elsewhere in Birnam Wood, and in Quaker Heights—there was the bullet-shaped vehicle making its slow determined
way along tree-lined circuitous streets. Among the elegant Colonials, French Normandy, quasi-Edwardian, quasi-Georgian houses set back from curving lanes with names like Eucalyptus Way, Pheasant Hill, Deer Hill Drive, Pilgrim Lane, Old Mill and Birnam Wood Pass—the red letters Helping Hands. Daily in the rolling hills of Quaker Heights were vehicles bearing lawn crews, carpenters, roofers, painters, Guatemalan housemaids—a continuous stream of service vehicles—and among these the Helping Hands van was not so very different from the rest.

Helene saw, and felt a jolt of emotion—alarm, dread—but also something like envy. For
he
might be coming to another woman’s house, and not to her.

She had not called 911, to report theft. She could not have sworn—the Helping Hands men might testify to this—that she’d made it absolutely clear, she had not wanted them to enter the finished part of the basement.
A misunderstanding—maybe.

One night she saw an ambulance pull into the driveway of the neighbor’s house, which the Helping Hands van had visited that morning. The wailing siren had wakened her from a sedative sleep. At the corner of Birnam Wood Circle and Foxcroft Lane was a fieldstone manor with a remarkable slate roof, larger than Helene’s house. She recalled—a widow lived in that house. An older woman, in her sixties, whose husband had died before Helene’s husband, the previous spring. How remote it had seemed to Helene, the death of a man in his sixties! A widow in her sixties! Helene had not known the couple well but she’d walked over to the house, after a few days, to bring potted flowers to
the bereaved woman; the woman had been gracious to Helene but distracted, clearly she’d preferred to be alone.

Helene dreaded now to learn what might have happened to Mrs. Windriff.

7.

Why’d you ask me. Why’d you send for me.

In the twilight of her bedroom he came to her. His face was shadowed, the quick-flashing bared teeth and the glisten of his eyes were all she could see of his face. She knew his smell: unmistakable. Her body tensed against him. Her heart was beating close to bursting. Her shoulders, her back, her hips and buttocks, her straining head, were pinned against the bed by the weight of his body. His hands on her throat, fingers tightening.
You called me, you wanted me here. This is what you wanted
. Through the house there was a heavy pulsing silence. The grandfather clock in the downstairs hall had ceased its solemn chiming weeks before. For in the Haidt household it had been Helene’s husband who oversaw the Stickley clock, inherited from his family. Helene had begun to realize that she hadn’t been hearing the clock for—how long? The tolling of time had simply ceased.

For this is death—the tolling of time has ceased.

Yet the man did not strangle her. His fingers relaxed—then again tightened, and again relaxed—tightened, relaxed: this was mercy, that he would allow her to breathe. For the gift of breath was the man’s to give her, it was not for her to take.

Weakly she pushed at the man, whose coarse skin scraped against her skin, the scarred and pitted face, the stubbled jaws, a mouth like a sucking predator-fish. One of his legs was atrophied, the thigh-muscles badly wasted, yet still he was strong, pinning her against the bed, paying no heed to her cries, her pleas and her desperation, she had not wanted this, she had wanted the man as a friend, as a companion, as a lover who would love
her—
she had not wanted this. His hand slapped over her mouth, to silence her. His gritty hand that tasted of salt and dirt, to silence her. Her head struck against the headboard like the rapping of knuckles on a door until—at last—something gave, something broke, the door opened and she fell through.

8.

Now in the wintry morning in the circle drive outside the widow’s front door, the metallic-colored van with H
ELPING
H
ANDS
in red letters on the side.

Just inside the door she crouched, panting. Barefoot and her hair in her face. She could not see who was driving the van—sunshine reflected from the windshield, blinding.

She would not! Not ever.

A Hole in the Head

Strange!—though Dr. Brede wore latex gloves when treating patients and never came into direct contact with their skin, when he peeled off the thin rubber gloves to toss them into the sanitary waste disposal in his examination room his hands were faintly stained with rust-red streaks—
blood
?

He lifted his hands, spread his fingers to examine them. His hands were those of an average man of his height and weight though his fingers were slightly longer than average and the tips were discernibly tapered. His nails were clipped short and kept scrupulously clean and yet—how was this possible?—inside the latex gloves, they’d become ridged with the dried rust-red substance he had to suppose was blood. He thought,
There must be a flaw in the gloves. A tear
.

It wasn’t the first time this had happened—this curiosity. In recent months it seemed to be happening with disconcerting frequency. Lucas considered retrieving the used gloves from the trash to inspect them, to see if he could detect minuscule tears in the rubber—but the prospect was distasteful to him.

In the lavatory attached to his office Lucas Brede washed his hands vigorously. A swirl of rust-red water disappeared down the drain. This was a mystery! Few of his patients ever “bled” in his office. Dr. Brede was a cosmetic surgeon and the procedures he performed on the premises—collagen and Botox injection, micro dermabrasion, sclerotherapy, laser (wrinkle removal), chemical peeling, therma therapy—involved virtually no blood loss. More complicated surgical procedures—face-lift, rhinoplasty, vein removal, liposuction—were performed at a local hospital with an anesthesiologist and at least one assistant.

On the operating table Dr. Brede’s patients bled considerably —the face-lift in particular was bloody, as it involved deep lacerations in both the face and the scalp—but nothing out of the ordinary—nothing that Dr. Brede couldn’t staunch with routine medical intervention. But
this
!—this mysterious evidence of bloodstains, inside the latex gloves!—he couldn’t comprehend. There had to be a defect in the rubber gloves.

He would ask his nurse-receptionist Chloe to complain to the supplier—to demand that the entire box of defective gloves be replaced. It wouldn’t be the first time that medical suppliers had tried to foist defective merchandise on Lucas Brede in recent years, with the worsening of the U.S. economy there’d been a discernible decrease in quality and in business ethics. Lucas hadn’t wanted to credit rumors he’d been hearing recently about malpractice settlements that certain of his cosmetic surgeon-colleagues had been forced to make, suggesting that medical ethics, too, in some quarters, had become compromised.

In desperate times, desperate measures
. Whoever had said that, it had not been Hippocrates.

In the mirror above the sink the familiar face confronted him—a hesitant smile dimpling the left cheek, a narrowing of the eyes, as if seeing Lucas Brede at such close quarters he couldn’t somehow believe what he was seeing.

Is this me? Or who I’ve become?

He was Lucas Brede, M.D. He was forty-six years old. He was a “plastic” surgeon—his specialty was rhinoplasty. He took pride in his work—in some aspects of his work—and, rare in his profession, he hadn’t yet been sued for malpractice. For the past eight years he’d rented an office suite on the first-floor, rear level of Weirlands, a sprawling glass, granite and stucco medical center set back from a private road on an elegantly landscaped hillside on the outskirts of Hazelton-on-Hudson, Dutchess County, New York. In this late-winter season of dark pelting rains—the worsening economic crisis, foreclosures of properties across the nation, “domestic ruin”—and thousands of miles away beyond the U.S. border a spurious and interminable “war to protect freedom” was in its sixth year—Lucas Brede and the other physicians-residents at Weirlands were but marginally affected. Most of their patients were affluent, and if the ship of state was sinking, they were of the class destined to float free.

In addition, Dr. Brede’s patients were almost exclusively female, and vitally, one might say passionately, devoted to their own well-being: faces, bodies, “lifestyles.” They were the wives,
ex-wives or widows of rich men; some were the daughters of rich men; a significant fraction were professional women in high-paying jobs—determined to retain their youthfulness and air of confidence in a ruthlessly competitive marketplace. Occasionally Lucas happened to see photographs of his patients in the local Hazelton paper, or in
The New York Times
society pages—glamorous clothes, dazzling smiles, invariably looking much younger than their ages—and felt a stir of pride.
That face is one of mine.

He liked them, on the whole. And they liked him—they were devoted to him. For all were attractive women, or had been: their well-being depended upon such attractiveness, maintained
in perpetuity.

Already in their early forties, the blond, fair-skinned women were past the bloom of their beauty, and wore dark glasses indoors, expensive moisturizers and thick creams at night. No cosmetic procedure could quite assuage their anxiety, that they were
looking their age
. Lucas couldn’t imagine any husband—any man—embracing one of these women, in the night; they must insist upon sleeping alone, as they’d slept alone as girls. (Lucas’s wife now slept apart from him. But not because she wanted to preserve her beauty.) His patients were nervous women who laughed eagerly. Or they were edgy women who rarely laughed, fearing laugh lines in their faces. Their eyes watered—they’d had Lasik eye surgery, their tear ducts had been destroyed. Botox injections and face-lifts had left their faces tautly smooth, in some cases flawless as masks. But their necks!—their necks were far more difficult to “lift.” And the corn maiden and other nightmares
their hands, and the flaccid flesh of their upper arms. In their wish to appear younger than their ages, as beautiful as they’d once been, or more beautiful—
what they were not
—they were childlike, desperate. The more Dr. Brede injected gelatinous liquids into their skin—collagen, Botox, Restylane, Formula X—the more eager they were for more drastic treatments: chemical peels, dermabrasion, cosmetic surgery. They feared hair-fine wrinkles as one might fear melanomas. They feared soft crepey flesh beneath their eyes, they feared the slackening of jowls, jawlines, as in another part of the world one might fear leprosy.

To assuage their skittishness, for they were hypersensitive to pain, Dr. Brede provided them with small hard rubber balls to grip when he injected their faces with his long transparent needles; he gave them mildly narcotizing creams to rub into their skin, before arriving at his office; he gave them tranquilizers, or, occasionally, placebos; it amused him, and sometimes annoyed him, that his patients reacted to pain so disproportionately—sometimes, before he’d actually pushed the needle into their faces. The most delicate procedure was the injection of Botox, Restylane or Formula X into the patient’s forehead where, if Dr. Brede was not exceedingly careful, the needle struck bone, and gave every evidence of being genuinely painful. (Dr. Brede had never injected himself with any of these solutions and so had no idea what they felt like, nor did he have any inclination to experiment.) His patients were devoted to him, but they were uneasy and emotional, like children—who could be angry with children?

He wanted to assure them
My touch is magic! I bring you mercy.

He liked—loved—his work—his practice at Weirlands—but there were times when the prospect of doing what he was doing forever filled him with sick terror.

Leave then. Quit. Do another kind of medicine. Can’t you?

His wife hadn’t understood. There’d been a willful opacity in her pose of righteousness. He’d tried to explain to her—to a degree—but she hadn’t understood. He needed to take on more patients—he needed to convince his patients to upscale their treatment—in the aftermath of this fiscal year that had been so devastating for all. Lucas wanted only to keep his finances—his investments—as they were, without losing more money; he’d had to deceive his wife about certain of these investments, of which she knew virtually nothing. Audrey’s signature was easy to come by—trustingly she signed legal and financial documents without reading them closely, or at all; so trustingly, Lucas sometimes skirted the nuisance of involving her, and signed her signature—her large schoolgirl hand—himself. Certain of his financial problems he’d confided in no one, for there was no one in whom he could confide. Nor could he share his more exciting, hopeful news—that he’d been experimenting with an original gelatinous substance that resembled Botox chemically but was much cheaper. There was a marginal risk of allergic reactions and chemical “burning”—he knew, and was hypercautious. This magical substance, to which he’d given the name Formula X, Dr. Brede could prepare in his own lab in his the corn maiden and other nightmares
office suite and be spared the prohibitively high prices the Botox manufacturers demanded.

One day, maybe, Lucas Brede would perfect and patent Formula X, and enter into a lucrative deal with a pharmaceutical company—though making money in itself wasn’t his intention.

“I’m going
in.
”

So matter-of-factly the neurosurgeon spoke, you would not have thought him boastful.

Lucas Brede had entered medical school intending to be a neurosurgeon. Except the training was too arduous, expensive. Except his fellow students—90 percent of them Jews from the Metropolitan New York region—were too ambitious, too ruthless and too smart. Except his instructors showed shockingly little interest in Lucas Brede—as if he were but one of many hundreds of med students, indistinguishable from the rest. As in the Darwinian nightmare-struggle for existence, Lucas Brede hadn’t quite survived, he’d been devoured by his fierce competitors, he’d been the runt of the litter.

How fascinated he’d been as a medical student, and then an intern, and finally a resident at the Hudson Neurosurgical Institute in Riverdale, New York—how envious—observing with what confidence the most revered neurosurgeons dared to open up the human skull and touch the brain—the
living brain
. He was eager to emulate them—eager to be accepted by this elite tribe of elders—even as in his more realistic moments he knew he
couldn’t bear it, the very thought of it left him faint, dazed—an incision into the skull, a drilling-open of a hole into the skull to expose the
living brain.

Vividly he remembered certain episodes in his two-year residency at the Institute. Memories he’d never shared with anyone, still less with the woman he married whose high opinion of Lucas Brede he could not risk sullying.

Ten-, twelve-hour days. Days indistinguishable from nights. He’d assisted at operations—from one to three operations a day, six days a week. He’d interviewed patients, he’d prepped patients. He’d examined CAT scans. Once confronted with a CAT scan he’d stared and stared at the dense-knotted tangle of wormy arteries and veins amid the spongelike substance that was the
brain
and all that he’d learned of the brain seemed to dissolve like vapor. Here was a malevolent life-form—a
thing
of unfathomable strangeness. He’d tasted panic like black bile in his mouth. For more than twenty-four hours he’d gone without sleeping, and in his state of exhaustion laced with caffeine and amphetamines he’d been both overexcited and lethargic—his thoughts careened like pinballs, or drifted and floated beyond his comprehension. Somehow he was confusing the brain-picture illuminated before him with a picture of his own brain. . . . What he was failing to see was a brain stem glioma, a sinister malignancy like a serpent twined about the patient’s brain stem and all but invisible to inexpert eyes. “Ordinarily these tumors are inoperable,” the neurosurgeon said, “—but I’m going
in
.” Lucas shivered. Never would he the corn maiden and other nightmares
have the courage to utter such words. Never would he have such faith in himself.
Going in.

Not that he dreaded the possibility of irrevocably maiming or killing a patient so much as he dreaded the public nature of such failure, the terrible judgment of others.

He hadn’t failed his residency, explicitly. In some ways he’d performed very well. But he’d known, and everyone around him had known, that he would never be a neurosurgeon. A shameful thing had happened when he assisted in his first trepanation, or craniectomy—he’d been the one to drill open the skull—this was the skull of a living person, a middle-aged man being prepped for surgery—handed a heavy power drill and bluntly told, “Go to it.” By this time in his residency he’d observed numerous craniectomies—he’d observed numerous brain surgeries. He knew that the human skull is one of the most durable of all natural substances, a bone hard as mineral; to penetrate it you need serious drills, saws, brute force. In the dissection lab in medical school he’d experimented with such drilling, but in this case the head was a living head, the brain encased in the skull was a
living brain
and this fact filled him with horror as well as the fact that he knew the patient, he’d interviewed the patient and had gotten along very well with the anxious man. Now, as in a ghoulish comic-book torture this man had been placed in a sitting position, clamped into position; mercifully, for the resident obliged to drill a hole in his head, he’d been rolled beneath the instrument table and was virtually invisible beneath a sterile covering and towels. All that Lucas was confronted with was the
back of the man’s head, upon which, in an orange marking pen, the neurosurgeon had drawn the pattern of the opening Lucas was to drill. “Go to it”—the older man repeated. The patient’s scalp had been cut, blood had flowed freely and was wiped away, now a flap of the scalp was retracted and the skull—the bone—exposed. Calmly—he was sure he exuded calm—Lucas pressed the power drill against the bone—but couldn’t seem to squeeze the trigger until urged impatiently, “Go
on
.” Blindly then he squeezed—jerked at—the trigger; there was a high-pitched whining noise; slowly the point of the drill turned, horribly cutting into the skull. Lucas’s eyes so flooded with tears, he couldn’t see clearly. Blindly he held the drill in place, the instrument was heavy and clumsy in his icy hands, and seemed to be pulsing with its own, interior life. How hard the human skull was, and adamant—but the stainless-steel drill was more powerful—a mixture of bone-shavings and blood flew from the skull—a flurry of bloodied shavings—the drill ceased abruptly when the point penetrated the skull, to prevent it from piercing the dura mater just beyond, a dark-pink rubbery membrane threaded with blood vessels and nerves. Lucas smelled burnt bone and flesh—he’d been breathing bone dust—he began to gag, light-headed with nausea. But there was no time to pause for recovery—he had to drill three more holes into the skull, in a trapezoid pattern, first with the large drill and then with a smaller more precise drill. The smell of burnt bone and flesh was overwhelming, hideous—he held his breath not wanting to breathe it in—now with a plierlike instrument pulling and the corn maiden and other nightmares
prying at the skull—panting, desperate—turning the holes into a single opening. He thought
This isn’t real. None of this is real
yet how ingenious, the “skull” oozed blood, now the single hideous hole in the skull was stuffed with surgical sponges immediately soaked with blood. Then he was speaking to someone—he was speaking calmly and matter-of-factly—the procedure was completed and the next stage of the surgery was now to begin—he was certain that this was so, he’d done all that was required of him and he’d done it without making a single error yet somehow the tile floor tilted upward, rose to meet him—as all stared the young resident’s knees buckled—the nerve-skeleton that bore him aloft and prevented him from dissolving into a puddle of helpless flesh on the floor collapsed, shriveled and was gone.