Very early every morning of childhood, Mrs. Atwater’s way of waking her two boys up was to stand between their beds and clap her hands loudly together, not stopping until their feet actually touched the bedroom floor, which now floated in the depths of Virgil Atwater’s memory as a kind of sardonic ovation. Hopping Mad — This triple amputee isn’t taking health care costs lying down. The meth lab next door! Mrs. Gladys Hine, the voice behind over 1,500 automated phone menus. The Dish — This Washington D.C. caterer has seen it all. Computer solitaire: The last addiction? No Sweet Talkin’—Blue M&Ms have these consumers up in arms. Dallas commuter’s airbag nightmare. Menopause and herbs: Exciting new findings. Fat Chance — Lottery cheaters and the heavyweight squad that busts them. Seance secrets of online medium Duwayne Evans. Ice sculpture: How do they do that?
Atwater’s best regarded piece ever so far, 3 July ’00: A little girl in Upland CA had been born with an unpronounceable neurological condition whereby she could not form facial expressions, normal and healthy in every way with blond pigtails and a corgi named Skipper except her face was a flat staring granite mask, and the parents were starting a foundation for the incredibly over 5,000 other people worldwide who couldn’t form normal facial expressions, and Atwater had run down, pitched, and landed 2,500 words for a piece only half of which was back matter, plus another two columns’ worth of multiple photos of the girl reclined expressionless in her mother’s lap, stony and staring under raised arms on a roller coaster, and so forth. Atwater had finally gotten the go ahead from the bimanual associate editor on the Suffering Channel piece because he’d done the ’99 WITW fluffer on the All Ads All The Time Channel, which was also O Verily, and could truthfully posit a rapport with R. Vaughn Corliss, whose eccentric recluse persona formed a neat human hook — although the associate editor had said that where Atwater was ever going to find the UBA in the TSC story was anyone’s guess and would stretch Atwater’s skill set to the limit.
5.
The first of the dreams Laurel Manderley found so disturbing had occurred the same night that the digital photos of Brint Moltke’s work had appeared on the floor below the fax and she had felt the queer twin impulses both to bend and get them and to run as fast as she could from the cubicle complex. An ominous vatic feeling had persisted throughout the rest of the evening, which was doubly unsettling to Laurel Manderley, because she normally believed about as much in intuition and the uncanny as US Vice President Dick Cheney did.
She lay late at night in the loft, her bunkmate encased in Kiehl’s cream beneath her. The dream involved a small house that she somehow knew was the one with the fractional address that belonged to the lady and her husband in Skip Atwater’s miraculous poo story. They were all in there, in the like living room or den, sitting there and either not doing anything or not doing anything Laurel Manderley could identify. The creepiness of the dream was akin to the fear she’d sometimes felt in her maternal grandparents’ summer home in Lyford Cay, which had certain closet doors that opened by themselves whenever Laurel was in the room. It wasn’t clear what Mr. and Mrs. Moltke looked like, or wore, or what they were saying, and at one point there was a dog standing in the middle of the room but its breed and even color were unclear. There was nothing overtly surreal or menacing in the scene. It seemed more like something generic or vague or tentative, like an abstract or outline. The only specifically strange thing was that the house had two front doors, even though one of them wasn’t in the front but it was still a front door. But this fact could not begin to account for the overwhelming sense of dread Laurel Manderley felt, sitting there. There was a premonition of not just danger but evil. There was a creeping, ambient evil present, except even though present it was not in the room. Like the second front door, it was somehow both there and not. She couldn’t wait to get out, she had to get out. But when she stood up with the excuse of asking to use the bathroom, even in the midst of asking she couldn’t stand the feeling of evil and began running for the door in stocking feet in order to get out, but it was not the front door she ran for, it was the other door, even though she didn’t know where it was, except she must know because there it was, with a decorative and terribly detailed metal scarab over the knob, and whatever the overwhelming evil was was right behind it, the door, but for some reason even as she’s overcome with fear she’s also reaching for the doorknob, she’s going to open it, she can see herself starting to open it — and that’s when she wakes. And then almost the totally exact same thing happens the next night, and she’s afraid now that if she has it again then the next time she’ll actually open the front door that isn’t in front. . and her fear of this possibility is the only thing she can put her finger on in trying to describe the dream to Siobhan and Tara on the train ride home Tuesday night, but there’s no way to convey just why the two front door thing is so terrifying, since she herself can’t even rationally explain it.
The Moltkes were childless, but their home’s bathroom lay off a narrow hallway whose east wall was hung with framed photos of Brint and Amber’s friends’ and relatives’ children, as well as certain shots of the Moltkes themselves as youngsters. The presence in this hallway of Atwater, a freelance photographer who wore a Hawaiian shirt and smelled strongly of hair cream, and a Richmond IN internist whom Ellen Bactrian had personally found and engaged had already disarranged some of the photos, which now hung at haphazard angles and revealed partial cracks and an odd set of bulges in the wall’s surface. There was one quite extraordinary shot of Amber at what had to have been her wedding’s reception, radiant in white brocade and holding the cake’s tiered platform in one hand while with the other she brought the cutter to bear. And what at first glance had looked like someone else was a Little League photo of Moltke himself, in uniform and holding an aluminum bat, the artist perhaps nine or ten and his batting helmet far too large. And so on.
Atwater’s new rental car, a pointedly budget Kia that even he felt cramped in, sat in the Moltke’s driveway with the MD’s Lincoln Brougham just behind it. Moltke’s company van was parked in the duplex’s other driveway, which bespoke some kind of possible arrangement with the other side’s occupant that Atwater, who felt more than a little battered and conflicted and ill at ease in Mrs. Moltke’s presence, had not yet thought to inquire about. The artist’s wife had objected strenuously to a procedure that she said both she and her husband found distasteful and degrading, and was now in her sewing room off the kitchen, whence the occasional impact of her foot on an old machine’s treadle shook the hallway and caused the freelance photographer to have to readjust his light stands several different times.
The internist appeared to stand frozen in the gesture of a man looking at his watch. The photographer, for whom Atwater had had to wait over three hours in the Delaware County Airport, sat Indian style in a litter of equipment, picking at the carpet’s nap like a doleful child. A large and very precise French curl of hair was plastered to the man’s forehead with Brylcreem, whose scent was another of Skip Atwater’s childhood associations, and he knew it was the heat of the arc lights that made the hair cream smell so strong. The journalist’s left knee now ached no matter which way he distributed his weight. Every so often he pumped his fist at his side, but it was in a tentative and uninspired way.