DR. DEL RIO, PHD.
CAN SEE, IDENTIFY, &
REMOVE YOUR DEMONS.
And the door across the hall from it opened before them onto an obviously frightened woman standing in a cramped kitchen. The expression on the woman’s face was confusing to Jamie, because Jamie was feeling good.
“Oh, thanks, Ned,” the woman said as the four of them spilled into the place. She held a can of beer in her hand, and cuddled it to her chest. She wore a great big overcoat and a blue beret, but did not appear, actually, to be going out. Behind the stove she now backed up against, a black scorch mark fanned out across the wall, the record of a mishap involving flames.
“Jesus, Ned,” she said.
“This is so temporary I don’t want to waste my breath on the whole big explanation,” Ned said, brushing off his red suit as if it had accumulated some foreign matter out in the streets. Jamie, still holding the baby in her arms, realized now that he wore no overcoat — just motorvated on through the winter nights, warmed by the zeal of his mission. He moved now to embrace his sister, a gesture that seemed to startle her.
From the recesses of a darker room just off the kitchen came Anne Murray’s voice singing “(You Are My) Highly Prized Possession.” A man wearing thick tortoise shell spectacles now appeared at the entrance to this room and leaned against the doorframe and said nothing.
“We’re going to be here about three-quarters of an hour,” Ned said. “We’re just going to use the phone awhile. Okay?”
“The phone doesn’t work,” his sister said. “They cut the phone off. You know that.” She looked at the wordless man, from whose fingers dangled a bottle of beer by its neck. “He knew that two days ago,” she said to him.
“Of course I know that,” Ned said. “We’d just like you to look after the kids for forty-five minutes, while we make a few calls down at my place.”
“What do you mean?” His sister appeared more than agitated. She had a wild, phosphorescent tension about her that brightened the whole kitchen. “You don’t have a phone.”
“Of course I have a telephone,” Ned said, smiling at her. He smiled also at the other man, who raised his beer and took a pull without altering the cast of his features.
The sister seemed more alarmed by this news than by anything else Ned might have told her. “Shit,” she said. “Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.”
Ned addressed the other man. “Was she about to go somewhere?”
“I think she’s feeling a little chilly,” the man said.
“Can you all watch these kids for a little while?”
“Guess so,” the man said.
“You might even join us for a bit. You might be able to help us,” Ned said. “This is Jamie. And Miranda Sue, hiding behind her mom. And here we have little three-month-old Ellen. Ellen got a middle name, Jamie?” He was holding out to Jamie the flat palm of his hand, on which lay two red capsules.
There were taking place here one or two more things than Jamie could successfully process at a single time. “What?” she said. “What are those? And who are these people?” The whole situation began flashing with a dry potent unreality.
“I was just asking after Ellen’s middle name, because I was curious. And I was also offering you something to take the edge off. And this is my sister, Jean, and her husband, Randall. And these are two reds. Those white crosses, they always make me feel jumpy a little while after I eat a couple. What about you?”
“Yeah. I’m a little jumpy, I guess.” Jamie accepted the two reds. “Just for a second there, I was feeling like the whole room was getting kind of yellow and zig-zaggy.” Ned handed her a bottle of beer from the refrigerator, and she washed the pills down with a swallow. “Know what I mean?”
“Definitely. Yellow and zigzaggy. That means it’s time to take the edge off, smooth the whole deal out, sort of. How about you, beautiful?” He offered one red pill to Jean while looking at his brother-in-law for permission. The brother-in-law nodded, and the sister swallowed it rapidly and with an air of furious resignation. Jamie could feel a liquid warm front moving in on the raw borders of her own disquiet. The room began to get slow.
Ned’s apartment was on the next floor below, the hallway of which lacked but one or two functioning electric bulbs. He fiddled with his keys in the door, entertaining her with a string of chatter to which she found it unnecessary to pay any heed. “Hey,” she said suddenly, watching him manipulate his key in the lock, “how about that?” On several of his fingers, Ned sported the garish flaking rings, the secret decoder jewelry of nickel gumball machines.
He opened the door onto an interior that pulsed with black-light. Dayglo posters shimmered violently on every wall. His suit was now absolutely invisible, and his hands and head seemed to drift in the air. She followed him into this weirdness. “Your name’s Ned, huh?”
He shut the door behind them. In the ultra-violet his face appeared deeply tanned, the whites of his eyes now tinged with a faint blue life, like shark’s meat. “My name is Higher-and-Higher,” he said.
“Do you know about Linda Lovelace?” was the big question on Ned Higher-and-Higher’s mind. “Can you do like Linda Lovelace?” He wasn’t slapping her hard, it just seemed he was trying to keep her conscious. The brother-in-law Randall was helping. “This is so beautiful I can’t stand it,” Ned Higher-and-Higher said. The brother-in-law was quieter. He just kept doing things to her that were rough and hard, one after another, yanking her up by the handcuffs. She accepted that he was evil and that at the very least, he would break her arms. She let them do everything with a ceaseless nausea that could scarcely scratch its name on the barbiturate serenity she inhabited. “Oh man — oh yeah — oh man — oh yeah,” Ned Higher-and-Higher said. Jamie was drifting along the halls outside, worrying about her children. Now she was worrying about Jamie, who was inside one of these rooms, screaming into the palm of a man’s hand. She would have liked to bang on the door here, but she was a ghost without a fist. In the dim illumination of the hallway, the true color of the plywood was not revealed — it might have been grey, or white, or blue. Within, incoherent voices conspired beneath pounding rock and roll. She witnessed the flaming communication on the door across the halclass="underline"
Madame Kay
Gifted from GOD with ESP
READER AND ADVISOR.
We are in Hillbilly Heaven, she heard herself say out loud, and then she began to vomit as the brother-in-law started in on her from behind. Directly before her face, one of the Seven Dwarfs loomed up dayglo on the wall, brandishing a middle finger.
The brother-in-law wanted to do something with a knife. Ned Higher-and-Higher, wearing the dress cap of an officer in the United States Marine Corps, was trying to calm him down. He was talking and talking, faster than anyone had ever spoken in Jamie’s presence. I need a cup of coffee, Jamie thought. Keep that person away from me. I’m talking about my kids, my kids. Okay; you can even do things with the knife. I just want to live through this. I just want to take care of my kids. She clocked the brother-in-law’s knife with an eye as bland and dead as a camera’s. There it is, she thought. The whole answer is right there in his hand.
I want you to know, her heart said to the room, that I will do anything to see my children spared.
Something came around from behind Randall and slammed into the side of his head, and he sat down on the floor against the wall with his legs sticking out like a teddy bear’s. “What for?” he said. “What for?” Ned Higher-and-Higher was standing there in his Marine hat with a desk-lamp dangling from his hand. “You are the dumbest fuck,” he told his brother-in-law. Randall started to cry. “This is the last time,” Ned Higher-and-Higher told him. Okay, Jamie thought, we’ve crossed that one. We’ve gotten past the knife. Things have changed.