The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1 (15 page)

II.

A
WAY! WE OFFER NO CHARITY
HERE!”

Three years after Johnny's death I kicked through a wrought-iron gate, pitched across a manicured walkway, and collapsed upon the front steps of a three-story manor of Gothic villa design—the residence, hoped I, of Dr. Cornelius Leather of the Medical School of Harvard College. My dumb skull served as knocker against a quatrefoil door panel. 'Twas the witching hour, black as ink, soupy as a dream, and the unhelpful reprimand tied a black bow on the nightmare. A foot heel shoved at my hips.

“Find another family to leech!”

The maligner who plagued me became encircled by a small assembly of whisperers, gaspers, and grunters. Their noises fluttered about like butterflies. I smiled and indulged these kissing little insects until a woman's strident voice cut through the rabble.

“Mr. Dixon, unhand that boy.”

“He's a no-good panhandler, Mrs. Leather. He'll wake up the whole block.”

“He's not making a peep. We can spare some bread.”

“They're like cats, ma'am. Feed them once and the yard will be crawling with kittens.”

“My word. He is in a bad state, isn't he?”

Her voice was gentle enough to inspire me to concentrate.
Nightgowns of various colors surrounded me: gray, blue, plaid, and white, the last being of such sophistication that I became embarrassed of my all-fours position. I planted a shoe for standing; it was weatherworn to the texture of rotten fruit.

Feet thundered down an interior staircase. A harsh voice crashed and echoed.

“Listen to me, everyone! I am not a plant! I do not fold into sleep at the setting of the sun! An inconvenient fact for you to consider on this long night, but nevertheless I insist that you try.”

From a distance, the barking of a dog, then two, then three, then too many to count. Of course an urban castle like this would have hounds, and soon they would come in slobbering attack.

In response, a baby began to cough from an upper floor.

One of the nightgowns, a gray one, flitted away.

“Forgive me, Dr. Leather, sir, there is a guttersnipe refusing to leave.” This was Mr. Dixon, baritoned bully. He took two handfuls of my clothing but the cotton came apart like cobweb. He muttered in disgust and tried the thicker material of my collar and belt.

“Stop, Dixon. Stop at once.”

Dixon stopped.

The doctor's pajama-bottomed knees bent to a kneel.

“Divine Providence,” whispered he. “If I believed in it, now would be the time to invoke it. Mr. Finch, is it really you?”

A simple but bedeviling question.
Was
it still me? Had it been me since I'd devolved into a scrounging phantom? Had it been me since my murder eight years antecedent? If anyone could sniff out the base falsehood of my being, it was this scholar, so I nodded with a plainness befitting a bedraggled itinerant: it was me, all right.

“My heart,” said he. “It is bestirred. Bestirred mightily.”

With great hullabaloo, Leather shooed his servants back to their chambers, crooked my arm about his neck, and launched me to my feet, all the while shouting for Dixon to quit gawking and take the opposite arm.

We plunged into a darkness unbitten by wind and devoid of precipitation and needled not by stars but by funny yellow lights. Indoor electricity? A house, by Gød! I was inside a modern, electrified house! The din of the howling dogs faded as I was hustled through a hallway lined with portraits of ancestors and beneath the tiled voussoir of an archway. My dragging toes registered the change from polished maplewood to silk Ottoman carpet. We passed beneath a pendant-laden chandelier and alongside a luminous grand piano, whereupon a magenta méridienne swam up to us and into its upholstered embrace I was placed.

The dim parlor glowed with opulence. Leather issued hushed orders to his gaunt manservant (who in my fazed state I estimated as fifteen feet tall), and Dixon bolted away with as much decorum as is possible for one sporting a tasseled nightcap. Leather exhaled, smoothed his hair, and took a knee before me.

He was older, of course, but still absent of the whiskers that, in those days, were
de rigeur.
This nakedness of face made his surprise all the more fascinating to observe. He attempted to master the moment, bright eyes scouring my every inch until I was rubbed quite raw.

Dixon ducked back into the parlor and set a silver serving tray upon a needlepointed foot rest. Poking their heads through the distant doorway were two women, one the white-gowned Mrs. Leather, or so I assumed, and the other the gray-gowned nursemaid who held against her shoulder the coughing newborn.

Leather snapped his attention from me long enough to glare at Dixon. “You are expecting crumpets?”

Dixon bowed. “Very good, sir. I'll leave you to it.”

The doctor raised his voice over his shoulder.

“To bed with you, Mother! There's a good girl.”

The wife I had yet to lay good eyes upon nodded her assent. Instantly I felt shame. Look at me—I was on a
fainting couch
. This was out-and-out castration! The infant blared as it was transported from servant to mother. Mrs. Leather departed, patting the child's back, while Dixon took the nursemaid by the elbow.

“This house grows stranger by the day,” groused he.

“That it does, Mr. Dixon,” replied she.

Leather ignored the minor rebellion. From the tray he lifted teapot and cup. His excitation was betrayed by the ting-a-ling-ing of the china.

“Something to drink. You must be parched.”

I shook my head.

He replaced the china and lifted a plate of cake.

“A bite to eat, then. You are starving.”

I met the man's gaze and spoke.

“Neither activity holds interest for me.”

A shrewd grin wove across the doctor's face and I understood his offers to have been a test. He dropped both his act and the plate of cakes.

“Untrammeled ground. This is untrammeled ground upon which we lurch.”

He consulted a pocket watch. Dissatisfied by the data, he interrogated a grandfather clock only to receive the same bad news about the lateness of hour. The rudeness with which he glared at the orna
ments about us conveyed a distaste for the formalities of honorable society. He literally swallowed his excitement; I watched his throat bob.

“You must rest, of course. Rest for as long as you require. Tomorrow the both of us shall rise renewed and together determine how we might best assist each other. This is agreeable?”

Sleep was limp bait but I nodded to put his hammering heart at ease. He helped me to my feet and together we passed through the veranda, dining room, and drawing room, and into the great hall where we found Dixon vulturing beside a wide, upswinging staircase. The butler's overgrown eyebrows knotted at the sight of physical effort being expended by his lord.

“Ready the chamber sidewise to the laboratory, and be snappy,” ordered Leather. “I expect it prepared when my guest and I attain the third level. And no more servants on the third floor until further notice. None at all, is that understood?”

Dixon stammered compliance and bounded upward, his stone-heavy shoes reverberating about the vortex of two hundred stairs. I became delirious watching his ascent until a hand affixed itself to my back. My frame wilted like an underfoot dandelion. Never had I known the sensation of a touch so firm and supportive.

“First step.” Leather's voice was soft in my ear. “First step is the most difficult.”

III.

T
HE LABORATORY WAS CHOCKABLOCK WITH
breakables. Fragile pieces of glassware and dainty pipettes in racks, atembic and ampoule vessels fastidiously stoppered, innumerable jars of biologic matter stacked atop cabinets. From my gut rose a young hoodlum's anarchist yearning to render every fussy shelf into so much bright, gleeful shattered glass. It was a good feeling that reminded me of life. To destroy is to be human, no?

Leather sparked a trio of Bunsen burners and I tore my gaze from the delicates. Morning sun diamoned through a frost-gilded window and did wonders to the sterile white room. The doctor looked similarly refreshed, clean of coat and stiff of shirt, fingernails clipped and spotless, midnight hair stylishly swept. He titled back my chin to examine my jugulars.

“Zero hair growth upon face and neck. Interesting.” He took microscopic notes upon a pad, perfect parallel lines. Next he pinched my bottom lip. “Zero blood rush. Most interesting.” He pulled the lip downward so as to open my mouth, and peered inside with the help of a magnifying glass. “The tongue evidences anemia, though is not cyanosed, deviated, fissured, or afflicted of leucoplakia buccalis. It is sealed by lingual frenulum to the floor and epiglottis. Cause: lack of saliva. Most interesting indeed.”

Up popped a set of forceps with which the impertinent fellow
snagged my defenseless tongue. He torqued it to and fro as if wringing a damp rag.

“Wuh ah oo ooing?” protested I. “Et oh ah ee!”

I raised my hands in dual fists. Regardless of the man's heritage or pedigree, I'd knock his block off! Leather favored me with a dry look before releasing the forceps in favor of his pen and pad. I glared at him while limbering my poor, molested organ. Of course this treatment was preferable to the needles of Dr. Whistler. But what on Earth had happened to bedside manner?

“Glands: neither small nor large, hard nor soft, discrete or conglomerate. Head: no tender spots, no fontanelles. Face: neither hemiatrophic nor acromegalic nor adenoid. Eyes: no evidence of conjunctivitis, ophthalmoplegia, or edema of the lids.”

And that was just my head! The catalogue of my flesh kept pace with the physical intrusions. Cotton probes burgled the debris of my ear canals. Hot droplets lubricated the troposphere between eyeball and eyelid. A small electric light illuminated the grappling-hook chasm of my neck, from which he attempted, and failed, to gather sputum. Next came tests of reflex (the irritating snapping of fingers all about my head like moths) and perceptivity (a triangle rung behind each ear in aggravating alternation).

Bodily examination was next on the docket, which meant a side jaunt to the laboratory's washroom. I'd never encountered a tub with running water and ran my hand along the porcelain surface. Why, it was as zaftig as a well-endowed female and almost as pleasant to pet! Leather cleared his throat for my attention and explained the workings, more complicated than I would have preferred, but, alas, frustration so often presages pleasure.

Clothing peeled from me like stale rind. Twenty minutes later I
was sliding my backside down the tub's sensuous curve, indifferent to the questionable wisdom of submerging a corpse in water. I might have stayed there for a good decade if not for the odor. I parted my eyelids to find that I bobbed within a brown tarn of mud, leaves, and pebbles, while translucent sloughs of dead skin floated about me like ghosts of the lives I'd left behind.

Leather had not seen fit to provide me with towel or gown so I entered the lab dripping wet. Each step came with the audible squirting of bathwater through my freshest wounds. I leaned side to side to rid myself of trapped water.

Leather snapped his fingers.

“Stop playing around. Come here.”

I stood with arms outstretched as my personal physician took up sharp bits of ironmongery and prodded the stiff musculature of my body from the top down. He was most interested, of course, in Pullman Larry's pistol shots through my shoulder and abdomen, not to mention the 1896 kill shot straight through my heart.

When the novelty of poking fingers into wounds wore out, the doctor grabbed my pecker.

“Does this function?”

Seventeen years of life, nine years of death, and still the world was full of surprises.

“Excuse me, sir!”

“In either excretory or ejaculatory capacity. Does it work?”

“Release me! Or so help me!”

“Stop behaving like a child. The question is routine.”

“It is not routine to me, I assure you!”

“You do know what the penis is for?”

“Do I . . . ? Why, you . . .”

“Indicate that you understand, Finch. Indicate!”

Dearest Reader—oh, Dearest, Gentlest, Most Compassionate Reader. My incredulity masked a truth so dreary I have thus far avoided sharing it with even you. I had, of course, explored my carnal capabilities during those years alone in my monkey cage. No sooner had my hands been trained on liver pads and tapeworm pills than I began to, well, handle myself to throbbing memories of Wilma Sue. Understand that sexual desire stirred within me then; it stirs within me even now. But fie! Without the froth of pumping blood, my favorite appendage was but a dangling tumor, benign except for how it taunted me with memories of merriment.

Leather, crude besmircher of my cocksmanship, gestured at the table. It wormed my self-worth. This was no Pageant of Health! I was obligated to obey neither beck nor call! Naked though I was, I struck the cross-armed pose of a bullheaded Black Hander before, after a minute, burying my indignation and yielding to his request. He traversed thin ice, this doctor, but hearing his findings was the reason I'd come. The results might be worth an ounce or two of servility.

I reclined. He hovered over me with a handful of menacing tools. With eyes a-spark and lips a-twitch, he set about removing the two bullets still lodged in my corpse. What fun he had, pinching and digging and extracting! “
Amazing
,” whispered he with each cold screw of the blade. “
Wonderful
,” sighed he with each plunk of bullet into pan.

He pressed his fingers into my stomach and lingered.

“Something here. Not a bullet. Bigger. What? Tell me.”

“A marble,” said I.

“A marble?”

“A golden aggie.”

“What do I care of its coloring? You wish me to remove it or not?”

I closed my eyes against the rising glare of his scalpel.

“Please don't,” said I.

He did not forget to test the old bean, either. Hours later, he pestered me with riddles.

“If Dick has fifty cents and Christopher takes thirty cents, what does that leave for Dick?”

Seventeen years old, impatient, and rankled was I.

“It leaves Dick to track down Christopher and take that thirty cents out of his thieving ass.”

Even my flippant responses had a home within his reams of notes. By dusk he had loosened his tie and rolled back his sleeves and his waxed hair flopped across his forehead in hard sickles. So absorbed was he in study that he'd bade Dixon begone at three separate mealtime occasions. He sacrificed every human comfort, and he did it for me. Even a pissiness as practiced as mine wore away in the face of such dotage.

“Let me save you paper,” said I. “I am a freak. That is the sole note you need take.”

Leather looked up from his notes and squinted as if a fungal sample had begun to yodel. He set aside pad and pencil and stood, shorter than the average fellow but as forceful as a footballer, and he took my shoulders, firmly and with both hands, and raised me so that we stood more or less eye to eye.

Men had held me before, but only in headlocks or so that I might be socked in the stomach by their accomplices—certainly never in kindness. Dearest Reader, may I divulge to you something most unusual? It felt so good that I began to tremble. Brusque though his surgical prodding might be, thought I, might it not be its own type of tenderness?

“I am not in the habit of repeating myself so take the following
statement to heart,” said he. “The label upon that two-bit carousel of yours was not ‘Freak Show.' It was ‘Gallery of Suffering.' I will venture a step further. You do not ‘suffer' from your affliction at all. You radiate in it. You drift upon the effervescent water of life. Anyone—everyone—would turn over his last possession for but a single drop of this water.”

The doctor's confidence vibrated through the tightened fists upon my shoulders.

“Your time believing yourself a freak or somesuch drivel? It ends. My plans for you do not befit a freak. It is most fortunate that I am the surgeon with whom you have become affiliated. Those who share my operating theater at Harvard flee the study of death like rats from a flood. Why? Because death cannot be provoked by solution or scalpel; it is purity itself. And they, with tobacco in their lungs and rotgut in their stomachs, with their manhoods stuck inside one another's wives and reductive notions stuck inside one another's minds, they are
not
pure. No, not nearly!”

I found myself grappling to understand. Zebulon Finch, the hoodlum, the killer—pure? Surely the doctor had misspoken. But his conviction was evident in his locked jaws, and from those flexing muscles I took strength. I had expected many things from this man. But belief? Validation? Respect? These had not been among them.

“Do as I say and I shall shine light into your dark,” said he. “So illuminated, you will become what you least expect: an angel. But an angel of science! For what need have we of Gød? We men who have plucked lighting from the sky, quarried energy from the Earth, placed false breath into breathless lungs?”

Spiting good old Gød? Was that what this defender of mine was up to?

Why, yes, doctor, I do have some interest in that pursuit.

He yanked straight my lapels, pounded flat my collar, and ripped the thorns from my frowzy breast. I puffed my chest, proud to be subject to this vigorous smacking. Yet another shock awaited: the man offered me his open hand like a gentleman. I blinked at it.

“Your solemn promise is all I ask. Your promise to remain with me until my dowsing of your mysteries divine their secrets. Promise me that you are mine until then, Zebulon Finch. Let me be the architect of your angel wings.”

Ages had passed since Johnny had clung to my cage and begged that I serve as his guardian angel, a concept so preposterous that I'd turned away. Here, now, presented to me by a clean, manicured hand, was an opportunity to become the thing the noble lad had believed I could be.

“Imagine it,” spoke Leather. “I, a new kind of father. You, a new kind of son. Together building a new kind of family, not upon the tilting foundations of womb and placenta but upon a much firmer, broader, deeper bedrock.”

“Father,” “family”—the words cut to the bone. Bartholomew Finch had been the last man to shake my hand; they were the only physical touches he ever distributed. A father? He hadn't deserved the title. And the Barker? A sadistic stepfather at best! Dr. Leather, however, was benevolence itself. Yes, I could expect his fathering to be strict, but perhaps strictness was what a feckless youth like myself needed.

Ah, the molasses of emotion. How it sugars the most dangerous of decisions.

The cold, slack meat of my palm was encircled by a warm grip.

Actually, now that I think of it, the grip was feverish.