The Octopus on My Head (18 page)

Torvald withdrew a round brown bottle from the desk drawer and checked the level of its fluid against the light of the computer screen. “You'd think that by now the government would have stumbled across the idea of training dogs to sniff out evil.” He unscrewed the rubber-bulbed top. “I'm serious. After a certain amount of time in this business, my personal odor changed. For the worse. If we had time, I'd prove it to you. Perhaps your girlfriend will describe for you how I proved it to her, when you meet in hell.”

He leaned over and held the dropper about two feet above the upside eye, which bulged above the stitched hem of the respirator mask. A bead of clear fluid quivered at the tip of the pipette. Torvald paused. “The mind is not affected, either. It gets to wonder, is this battery acid?”

The drop enlarged. “Oh.” The drop retreated. “Did I mention that you also retain your sense of pain?”

Torvald slowly squeezed the dropper's bulb until a single drop of fluid plummeted the two feet, directly into the right eye. The body twitched as if from an electric shock. Two additional drops followed, with commensurate twitches. “I'd do the other one, but it's too much trouble to roll you over. Besides, your witness shall be borne as lucidly with one eye as well as with two.”

Torvald waited, as if expectently. “Well,” he said, after a while, “I guess it's not battery acid.”

He capped the vial and returned it to the drawer. “The police, having employed tubucurarine chloride to subdue their criminal, might read him his Miranda rights, and he would understand them. He would understand everything that was happening to him. His trial, even his execution. In your case,” Torvald smiled and modestly flattened the fingers of one hand over his sternum, “your mind is actively reassuring itself that the stuff might not have been battery acid after all. Desperately, of course. It might have been battery acid, for all you know. Why not?” Torvald smiled. “It's not that I'm incapable of it.”

On screen, “Lavinia” began to weep.

Ripening.

Let's see, Torvald thought. I think I can rig this up.

Torvald stepped back, chin in hand, and studied the situation. Let's call him Baldy. Philadelphia has too many syllables. Baldy lay on his side. After some consideration Torvald gripped Baldy's lapels and rotated his length some ninety degrees. Now Baldy could watch the monitor, which loomed mere feet away.

“Okay,” Torvald said. From a drawer in the video cabinet he retrieved ping-pong ball-like gadgets with wires attached, three of his many cameras. He placed one on the rug between the body and the front door. He place a second camera on the floor, aimed directly at the top of the skull and about five feet away from it. He placed a third camera ball on the floor at the foot of the monitor cabinet, not two feet from Baldy's glistening eye and the rostrum of the respirator mask.

On the audio monitor, Lavinia was hyperventilating. While Torvald regretted the lack of a second DVD recorder, he unwrapped three fresh video cassettes and fed them into three decks in the stack of gear that lived in the cabinet below the wide screen, powered them up, and set them all to recording. One for each camera.

There was a panel of push button switches that controlled the inputs and outputs of his video and audio signals. Torvald toggled back and forth between the various cameras, each signal coming up on the big monitor as he adjusted for angle, placement, focus, “Happily absorbed in the minutiae of his craft,” as he said aloud; and, delighting in the design of his next-to-last production, unpretentious parenthesis as it was, he almost laughed.

Interregnum
. He tried its title aloud, “Cranial Croquet.”

Torvald opened the front door. No doubt the breath of cool Pacific air bathed the bald dome on the living room floor, chilling the perspiration beaded on its stenciled tentacles, which quivered, no doubt, like a basket of augury entrails. With a proprietary glance up and down deserted Anza Street, Torvald set aside the left-hand 84” 1x6 board of the front door casing, just behind the sculpturally tapered juniper that chafed it, and removed an ax from the cavity. Within seconds the board was replaced and he was back inside with the dead bolt locked, his retrieval of the ax so smooth it might have been part of an ordinary urban routine, no more nor less normal than the retrieval of a morning
Chronicle
from the grasp of the shrubbery.

The bald head looked like a casaba melon, pale and damp in the gloom of a darkened supermarket, graced by the gentle mists which, perforce, bless all refrigerated produce. On the big screen, however, the head looked like the moon in a nightmare, ententacled, prolate, dead for aeons and, incongruously, runneled by brine.

Torvald decided to leave the monitor tuned to the camera shooting along the floor at the top of the head. The head lay on its left cheek, watched by the other two cameras, front and back, the head watching in turn its own image on the big screen. Torvald retrieved a large black plastic trash can liner from his pantry and carefully spread it on the floor beneath the head. All I'll have to do, he thought, stepping back to admire the setup, is turn it inside out around the mess, with no more bother than picking up ten pounds of dog shit.

“Okay,” Torvald said, when he had tired of watching the drugged eye struggling to search for itself on the screen. “Slate,” and he sharply rapped the axe-head against the oxygen tank, which rang like a pick hitting rock. “Rolling ye
Interregnum
: Cranial Croquet.” On the video screen a sensible wing-tip lowered itself onto the upper side of the lunar caustic. What's this going to look like? He breathed stertorously, excited by the prospect after all. An axe head lowered into the shot. He studied the screen, over his shoulder, and muttered, “No, no.” He leaned down. A hand closed over the eye of the camera like a spider squatting on an egg. The little golf-ball-sized camera had a microphone too, and when the hand closed over it, the speakers yielded noises as of wind blowing umbrellas and lawn furniture off a terrace. When the picture came back, the angle of the shot had changed. Now the axe would come in obliquely, from the side of the frame, and thence, about two-thirds into the shot, it would sunder skull and brain. How deep the penetration after impact was not just anybody's guess. Not to worry. No. It was an
educated
guess. The cameras would record all. Later he would intercut the moment of contact with the reaction shot from the camera that looked directly into the eye: waiting, cringing aforetime, detecting, bulging with awareness, suffused by pain, dimming with the ebb of its life force, and fading in the end, like a slow-motion blowing fuse, to black.

Slow motion would reveal the tiniest detail, like a high-speed mind reading the Bible.

Torvald toggled the monitor's three sources one last time. The face scrambled and resolved into the top of its own skull. There was some imperfection. The blows from the keyboard had done some damage. The face was caked with dried blood, the right cheek was deformed. The visible upside eye was discolored. It gleamed in the discolored face like a marble on a bed of caviar.

Torvald's wingtip lowered into the top of the frame, its shadow overhanging the face like a certain balcony overhangs a memory in Chekhov. “What would one think?” Torvald mused aloud. He toggled to the axial shot, the top of the head: “Would one rather see it coming? Or…?” He toggled the shot of the ruined face, huge in the monitor, its eyes as big as the camera balls: “Or would one prefer to see
oneself
, going? Hmm.” He toggled back to the skull. “Blink once for the scythe,” he toggled the eyes again, “twice for the flight of the soul.” He sighed. “Blinkless. It's up to me. The lonely onus of the
auteur
.” He made slight adjustments to the cameras. He toggled the three shots—the top of the head, the back of the head, the eye—hesitated, and toggled them again. And a third time. “Okay.” He made the decision. “Since I'm concentrating on a clean blow—for which,” he added as an aside, “you should be grateful—I won't see either image until later.
Ultimately omniscient
, in a manner of speaking, I shall view these images at my leisure. I'll assume you're vain enough to have lingered over the image of your face in the mirror as you shaved this dome over the years,” Torvald caressed the skull, “and
fingered your tentacles
…,” with the edge of the blade; it grazed the top of the skull as if it were scratching a dog's head. “I think you'll watch your own eye at the moment of impact.” He switched from the axial image to the shot of the eye. “First thought, best thought.”

“Good thing I'm left-handed,” Torvald muttered cheerfully, as he paused to roll up his sleeves. Then he wrapped his fingers around the hickory handle and waggled the axe head as if it were a niblick.

“Otherwise, we'd have to rearrange everything.”

Chapter Eighteen

P
REPARE FOR CALAMARI
,” T
ORVALD ADVISED, GAUGING THE
swing.

He paused. “Although, come to think on it, calamari is squid.
Tako
is octopus.” Torvald let the axe swing like a pendulum. “You wouldn't be HIV positive, by any chance? I'm nervous about the splash.” He lowered the axe to the carpet, picked up his foot, and looked deeply into Baldy's upside eye. “No.” He smiled and replaced the sole of his shoe on the side of the head. “Not a trace of the haunting. Not to mention,” he gauged the swing of the axe, “I'm beyond caring.”

A blast of fogwind buffeted the west side of the building. The drapes over the window stirred. Somewhere in the neighborhood, a bamboo wind chime clattered. The blade of the axe grazed the middle of the cranium. The edge slipped up an inch, down a half inch, and went away.

“You know,” Torvald said dreamily, “when I was young, I wanted to be a musician.”

The blade returned to leave an iron kiss. A polar touch. The trace of a frozen meridian. A molecular tingle.

“My mother sang in the choir at Old Saint Boniface in Fort Wayne.”

The axe blade hung midair, a windless kite on a short string.

“I was an altar boy. Even as you teeter on the edge of the abyss, I can smell the incense, I can taste the sweet communion wine, I can smell the starch in Monsignor's freshly laundered chasuble.”

On the monitor, the axe head retreated through the right side of the frame.

“You probably won't feel a thing,” Torvald said, as if speaking to the kid, but, strangely and obviously, addressing himself. “In the old days, old boy,” he reversed the axe and let the flat of it nuzzle the top of the shaved skull, “you would have felt many things. Everything. By the time I was finished?” He clucked his tongue. “They begged for the sharp end.” He sighed.

He recollected himself.

“The goldanged magic is gone.”

He stared at nothing. “Mother made me take piano lessons. The teacher was very good. But, well, to speak plainly, the teacher was a pederast, too. Hmmmm
….
”

Torvald's mind wasn't on his work, and he knew it. He stepped away from the skull, considered it without really seeing it, then bethought. He walked to the rosewood secretary, retrieved a bastard file from its drawer, and sat down in the chair with the axe across his lap. “Been a while since I brightened this edge.” Torvald dragged the file over the blade. “Hey, Baldy,” he continued conversationally, paying the while close attention to the task of honing, “ever heard that old saw—Hah! Get it?—about paper dulling a cutting edge faster than wood?” The file rang on the axe head. “Bone's worse. They say whale blubber's even tougher.” Abruptly the filing stopped. “Mint?” Transferring the file to the same hand that held the axe, he let two fingers scuttle through the tin. “No, forget it.” He transferred a mint. “You're beyond pensive suckling.” He resumed filing. “Close enough, anyway. Two hairs from a freckle.”

Torvald tested the burr with his thumb, eliciting a sound very like that of a distant doorbell; the old-fashioned kind, that rings as you twist its handle. “If I'd killed the Monsignor right off the bat or even right off the axe—hah—maybe I never would have graduated to mutilating surrogates.” He tapped the axe head with a corner of the file. “Mere symbols,” he muttered, abruptly humorless.

“That danged music teacher. I might have saved a lot of wide-eyed youth their precious traumas. And if I'd killed my mother right off the bat, with incredible violence of course, with a kitchen knife or broken mop handle and rage sufficient to slake my thirst for revenge, I might have been caught and sentenced immediately to an asylum for the criminally insane, which is where I belong: among my peers. There, like dear de Sade, I might have written to my heart's content, not to mention as my heart directed me to write, leaving the staff and ultimately society to find my musings invaluable if not key to their understanding of the deranged mind. And there too I might have studied music for real, with a teacher I could molest instead of the other way around, gleaning from her protestations—for a she it rightfully must be—inspiration for transcendent mad works, to be played in concert halls the world around for generations to come, or anyway for as long as mankind is willing to sit still for outbursts of genius.”

He filed a few strokes. “By the clock you have, let's see, about two and a half hours of decrementing paralysis. By then however your energy will have been so sapped that it will be perhaps three or four hours later before you'll have the motor coordination to actually sit up. By that time, I assure you, you'll be bait in my feral pussy traps behind the gardener's shed west of Stowe Lake in Golden Gate Park. Where, it may be of some comfort for you to understand, you will be of more utility to the preservation of the songbird population than you were to anything at all in your present incarnation.”

The honing started and stopped. Torvald raised his head until he was looking at the corner over the front door, where the wall met the ceiling.

“How the neighborhood has changed. When, as a new hire at 2DMedia, walking to the bus stop of a crisp spring morning, I was acculturated to noticing syringes discarded in the gutter. Toward the end of my tenure, seventeen years later, I was counting golf tees instead. Is this an improvement?

“Hmmm.” Torvald turned in his chair to ruminate on the bald head, without really seeing it. “Wait there.” He stood the axe against the window sill and turned to the computer. “I must make a note.”

Torvald laid the file carefully on the rosewood, parallel to the syringe, and clawed at his mints. After a moment of suckling introspection, he began to write.

…
Onerous,
Torvald typed.
Dismembering the corpse, feeding it piecemeal to the masticator, it takes all night, even saving out the choice bits for those nasty pussies, the liver and tongue they find so irresistible
….
But what difference does it make? I'm not as young as I once was and it's a lot of work, but where is my enthusiasm?
Torvald cast a winsome look over his shoulder at the stuffed head of the pit bull.
It's not the same since Ted Bundy died.
He tapped idly back and forth between two keys, moving the cursor back one space or ahead one space. Then he wrote,
What a great name for a pit bull. Angelica, who expired so unexpectedly—
He stopped. He saved what he had written. The hard drive on the iBook had an annoying little whine. He saved again. Again the whine. He saved again. Whine. He sat for a long minute, his minted tongue clenched between his teeth. Behind him, the respirator hissed.

Outside the door in the night a car rolled up Anza, heading east. It barely paused for the stop sign at 36th Avenue, not fifty yards from Torvald's front door, turned, and drove on.

Torvald scrolled up a screen to read what he had typed. He pinched two mints out of the tin as he read, and laid one of them on his tongue. Enough of these, he thought ruefully, and all my problems will be solved. He dropped the second mint back into the tin. Except tooth decay. He resumed typing.

In the end ah the untimely end, “Angelica” was only good for terrorizing “Lavinia.” “Cranial Croquet,” on the other hand, is proving good for less than nothing. I'm having trouble concentrating on him. I'm losing my touch. I foresaw a phase in which I gradually surrendered my integrity in exchange for closure, but I did not expect to simply drive off a cliff. I failed to anticipate the waning of my concentration, with which comes slipshod work, which, necessarily, will degrade into incompetence. It's the loneliness. It's the lack of recognition. In the beginning one expects to labor in the far reaches of isolation. It comes with the territory. It is the territory. One can't merely harvest greatness, let alone depend upon it, to find it awarded on a platter. One does, however, espy the threads of greatness woven into the sordid fabric of life
….
But after years without recognition, which must perforce come only in its most blinding form, instantaneously, and with it an abrupt halt, and behold the overnight sensation so far as the rest of the world is concerned. But such success belies years, decades, perhaps a lifetime of concentration, training, and hard work. And I? I accomplished it in less than twelve years. Twelve years!

Nevertheless, and because of it, I am tired. I am near, but I am tired. My ambition and the scope of my accomplishment have perhaps outrun my capacity to achieve them. It is a narrow thing. So many details to coordinate, so many eyes to avoid, so great a burden to shoulder in solitude. Yet in solitude is greatness achieved. One imagines the geniuses of history—de Sade, Morgan, Gilles de Rais, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy: ah the great, great Ted Bundy—men to match their deeds! Oh, that I might chat with giants over little white pleated paper cups heaped with colorful pharmaceuticals in a locked asylum! Not to discuss technique, certainly. Technique is merely a matter of daring; the rest is imagination.

And after? Feeble morality, mere criticism. Poetasters who demand the best seats based on articles they've written, talks they've given, round-table discussions dominated by belligerent narcissism, multiple appearances on television shows, the talking head surmounting a placard denoting ‘Expert,' the charade reproduced endlessly on screens worldwide—I should mount one on my wall—

Torvald stopped typing. “Did you hear something?”

He listened.

The fog wind blustered against the house, sweeping the avenues of cigarette ends and plastic bags and cypress needles, blowing sand from the beach all the way downtown, scouring the asphalt and currying windrows of detritus along the north-facing curbstones.

He strained his ears until it seemed he could distinguish, beyond the hiss of the respirator, a diesel bus pulling away from the stop at Fulton and 32nd, a solid seven blocks away. A good fog and a twenty-five-knot wind make for whimsical acoustics; but it seemed almost capricious to hope that he could be deceived about anything at this point.

“Kid,” Torvald said to the computer screen, “there's something I want you to know.”

There came no response, of course. It had been a long time since somebody had fashioned for Torvald a coherent answer. But he said his piece anyway. “This isn't personal,” he declared. “In all sincerity. I want you to believe that.”

I'll bet you say that to all the slaughterees!
he typed gleefully.

“Besides,” Torvald added aloud, trying to sound serious, but immediately he began to type his words as he spoke them, “
Since you work for a music store, is it fair to assume that you, too, are a failed musician?
”

Torvald began to type furiously, as if receiving dictation from himself, a self become a high octane confessional machine. “
I realized that I was so afraid of my music teacher I literally couldn't hear him. I couldn't hear what he was saying, I couldn't hear what he was playing. If I couldn't hear him, you see, then I couldn't learn. If I couldn't learn, I would never play. The fear of my music teacher interdicted every possibility of achievement. Such potential as I possessed was obliterated. Canceled. Wiped out. Every time I sat down to the piano I froze. If my mother bought me a record, I broke it. If she bought me sheet music, I lost it, and once I even wiped my ass with it. Can you imagine the panic I experienced, when it wouldn't flush? Again and again, I waited for the tank to refill. Finally I—Ahem.

“I could only think of what he had done to me, and that what he had done once he could and would repeat, and he would do it to me until I escaped. So I played wretchedly. My mother spanked me. I played worse. My father appeared only occasionally. Drunk? He was always drunk. He came home drunk and only to have sex with my mother. Afterwards he would beat her. Then he would litter the kitchen table with cash, always small bills, always a paltry amount, then he'd storm out. If I got in the way, my behind got kicked, too.”

Leaving off typing Torvald said, “She liked the sex part of this … arrangement
….
” His voice trailed off.

Silence.

“Did you hear something?”

Somewhere on the block the bamboo wind chime twisted and clacked.
She
, Torvald typed. He thoughtfully fingered another mint out of the tin, not looking at the tin but watching the cursor blink on the computer screen. He put out his tongue and placed the mint on it. The tongue retreated into the mouth.

“Mother liked the sex. The apartment was small, just three rooms. So when that man she called my father showed up to have sex with her, she would tell me that it was time for me to practice piano. This could be any hour of the day or night. She never knew when he would arrive. But he always came. And she always told me it was time to practice. Practice, practice, practice. Play loud. Play fast. They would laugh and open a bottle and take it into the bedroom, the bedroom she and I shared. Sometimes they would leave the door open, sometimes not. So I practiced. And practiced and practiced and practiced.

“I practiced scales, etudes, rondelles, folk songs, pastiche, atonality, the twelve-tone bash
….
I never mastered bebop. I never mastered anything. The pain was too great. I banged away loudly and incompetently. Sometimes I sang lyrics. Sometimes I made them up. Sometimes I just yelled. And the more I played, the worse my playing got.

“Finally my ‘father' came out of the bedroom with his galluses dangling, unshaven, in his undershirt, barefooted, reeking of whiskey and perspiration
and of something else I didn't want to think about. Knock it off, kid, he would say. Knock it off!”