Walking as sedately as a woman on her way to a Ladies' Book Circle meeting, she went up the stairs and down to the closed bathroom door.
'Stanley?' she called, trying the door again at the same time, suddenly more afraid than ever, not wanting to use the key because having to use the key was somehow too final. If God hadn't taken it back by the time she used the key, then He never would. The age of miracles, after all, was past.
But the door was still locked; the deliberate plink . . . pause of dripping water was her only answer.
Her hand was shaking, and the key chattered all the way around the plate before finding its way into the keyhole and socking itself home. She turned it and heard the lock snap back. She fumbled for the cut –glass knob. It tried to slide through her hand again — not because the door was locked this tune but because her palm was wet with sweat. She firmed her grip and made it turn. She pushed the door open.
'Stanley? Stanley? St — '
She looked at the tub with its blue shower curtain bunched at the far end of the stainless steel rod and forgot how to finish her husband's name. She simply stared at the tub, her face as solemn as the face of a child on her first day at school. In a moment she would begin to scream, and Anita MacKenzie next door would hear her, and it would be Anita MacKenzie
who would call the police, convinced that someone had broken into the Uris house and that people were being killed over there.
But for now, this one moment, Patty Uris simply stood silent with her hands « clasped in front of her against her dark cotton skirt, her face solemn, her eyes huge. And now the look of almost holy solemnity began ot transform itself into something else. The huge eyes began to bulge. Her mouth pulled back into a dreadful grin of horror. She wanted to scream and couldn't. The screams were too big to come out.
The bathroom was lit by fluorescent tubes. It was very bright. There were no shadows. You could see everything, whether you wanted to or not. The water in the tub was bright pink. Stanley lay with his back propped against the rear of the tub. His head had rolled so far back on his neck that strands of his short black hair brushed the skin between his shoulder –blades. If his staring eyes had still been capable of seeing, she would have looked upside down to him. His mouth hung open like a sprung door. His expression was one of abysmal, frozen horror. A package of Gillette Platinum Plus razor blades lay on the rim of the tub. He had slit his inner forearms open from wrist to the crook of the elbow, and then had crossed each of these cuts just below the Bracelets of Fortune, making a pair of bloody capital T's. The gashes glared red-purple in the harsh white light. She thought the exposed tendons and ligaments looked like cuts of cheap beef.
A drop of water gathered at the lip of the shiny chromium faucet. It grew fat. Grew pregnant, you might say. It sparkled. It dropped. Plink.
He had dipped his right forefinger in his own blood and had written a single word on the blue tiles above the tub, written it in two huge, staggering letters. A zig-zagging bloody fingermark fell away from the second letter of this word — his finger had made that mark, she saw, as his hand fell into the tub, where it now floated. She thought Stanley must have made that mark — his final impression on the world — as he lost consciousness. It seemed to cry out at her:
Anothe r drop fell into the tub. Plink.
That did it. Patty Uris at last found her voice. Staring into her husband's dead and sparkling eyes, she began to scream.
2
Richard Tozier Takes a Powder
Rich felt like he was doing pretty good until the vomiting started.
He had listened to everything Mike Hanlon told him, said all the right things, answered Mike's questions, even asked a few of his own. He was
vaguely aware that he was doing one of his Voices — not a strange and outrageous one, like those he sometimes did on the radio (Kinky Briefcase, Sexual Accountant was his own personal favorite, at least for the tune being, and positive listener response on Kinky was almost as high as for his listeners' all –time favorite, Colonel Buford Kissdrivel), but a warm, rich, confident Voice. An I'm-All-Right Voice. It sounded great, but it was a lie. Just like all the other Voices were lies.
'How much do you remember, Rich?' Mike asked him.
'Very little,' Rich said, and then paused. 'Enough, I suppose.'
'Will you come?'
'I'll come,' Rich said, and hung up.
He sat in his study for a moment, leaning back in the chair behind his desk, looking out at the Pacific Ocean. A couple of kids were down on the left, horsing around on their surfboards, not really riding them. There wasn't much surf to ride.
The clock on the desk — an expensive LED quartz that had been a gift from a record company rep — said that it was 5:09 P .M . on May 28th, 1985. It would, of course, be three hours later where Mike was calling from. Dark already. He felt a prickle of gooseflesh at that and he began to move, to do things. First, of course, he put on a record — not hunting, just grabbing blindly among the thousands racked on the shelves. Rock and roll was almost as much a part of his life as the Voices, and it was hard for him to do anything without music playing — and the louder the better. The record he grabbed turned out to be a Motown retrospective. Marvin Gaye, one of the newer members of what Rich sometimes called The All-Dead Band, came on singing 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine.'
'Oooh-hoo, I bet your wond'rin how I knew . . . '
'Not bad,' Rich said. He even smiled a little. This was bad, and it had admittedly knocked him for a loop, but he felt that he was going to be able to handle it. No sweat.
He began getting ready to go back home. And at some point during the next hour it occurred to him that it was as if he had died and had yet been allowed to make all of his own final business dispositions . . . not to mention his own funeral arrangements. And he felt as if he was doing pretty good. He tried the travel agent he used, thinking she would probably be on the freeway and headed home by now but taking a shot on the off-chance. For a wonder, he caught he r in. He told her what he needed and she asked him for fifteen minutes.
'I owe you one, Carol,' he said. They had progressed from Mr Tozier and Ms Feeny to Rich and Carol over the last three years — pretty chummy, considering they had never met face to face.
'All right, pay off,' she said. 'Can you do Kinky Briefcase for me?'
Without even pausing — if you had to pause to find your Voice, there was usually no Voice there to be found — Rich said: 'Kinky Briefcase, Sexual Accountant, here — I had a fellow come in the other day who wanted to know what the worst thing was about getting AIDS.' His voice had dropped slightly; at the same time its rhythm had speeded up and become jaunty — it was clearly an American voice and yet it somehow conjured up images of a wealthy British colonial chappie who was as charming, in his muddled way, as he was addled. Rich hadn't the slightest idea who Kinky Briefcase really was, but he was sure he always wore white suits, read Esquire, and drank things which came in tall glasses and smelled like coconut– scented shampoo. 'I told him right away — trying to explain to your mother how you picked it up from a Haitian girl. Until next time, this is Kinky Briefcase, Sexual Accountant, saying "You need my card if you can't get hard."'