“You want any shit on that shingle?” she finally asked.
“I’m fasting,” he said without looking up.
“Fasting?”
“For tomorrow night.”
“You’re fasting for a lecture?”
“Not just for the lecture. I’m planning a ritual too.”
He threw her a smile. Lately his rituals were the only thing he got excited about, but for the last two weeks it had been even worse. Michael was in ecstacies, obsessed; he couldn’t talk about anything else. He kept reading and rereading the same book, making notes in it, trying out pronunciations that sounded like gibberish. Derek Crowe was coming to Cinderton. The mandala man. Michael couldn’t contain himself.
“You’ll be so weak you’ll pass out in the middle of the talk,” she said.
“No, by the second day I’m usually flying—I’ll feel great. Today’s just water and bread, but tomorrow I get bread, milk, and wine. It’s my own version of a black fast.”
“Whatever that is,” she said.
“It’s how you get ready for the really important ceremonies.”
“It’s not a ceremony, Michael, it’s just a talk!”
“But I’m doing rituals. One tonight, one tomorrow night, maybe one the next day. Three major rites from his book. It’s hard to memorize them.” This comment sounded like a rebuke. In other words: Shut up.
“Especially when you haven’t eaten all day.”
“No—that sharpens the senses, makes my mind clearer.”
“You look pale,” she said, but he didn’t answer. He had gone back to his book, making it clear that he didn’t have energy to waste on talking to his wife.
She cut a big square of dripping toast and shoved it in her mouth. It was like eating a sponge dipped in glue; she could hardly swallow.
She got up from the table, went down the hall into the living room, shivering even in her sweater since the front of the house was drafty thanks to the badly hung front door and the cardboard stuck in one of the broken windows. Tucker Doakes, their upstairs landlord, was a lousy carpenter, and he did all his own work.
Her textbooks were stacked on the coffee table. She picked up a few of them and tromped back into the kitchen, throwing them down with a thud next to her plate. Michael glanced up.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“Math.”
He pursed his lips, nodded. “It’s so great you’re back in school.”
It wasn’t the reaction she’d been hoping for. She threw her plate in the sink and sat down to a calculus text. The exercises looked far simpler than those in the books Michael read, his John Dee and Aleister Crowley and Anton Szandor LaVey. But his books were nonsense, endlessly confusing and arbitrary. Mathematics, on the other hand, was like a glittering crystal-clear landscape for the mind; an infinite path where she could lose herself forever. She had always been good at math, even while failing everything else in school. No matter how bad things got, she could find pleasure in puzzles and logic games. At least they fed the brain, developed her intelligence, unlike Michael’s medieval bullshit, which rotted the mind as far as she could tell.
But tonight the books were opaque to her. The figures lay like insects flattened between the pages, making her feel weary and stupid after five minutes of desultory study. This was not going to work. And tonight Michael was poorer company than usual.
She slammed the book shut. “I’m going out.”
He didn’t look up. “I’ll be in the temple for a while, so don’t, you know, worry about me.”
Don’t bother me, you mean, she thought. He didn’t ask anything else.
Lenore found her heaviest coat in the living room. She couldn’t stand to be in the house another minute. It was horrible to be so cold indoors, where the chill oozed out of every surface and even the floor sucked the heat from your body. At least she expected to be cold outside.
The porch was littered with beer bottles, Cheer Wine cans, and motorcycle parts. A soggy broken-down couch, covered with a greasy sheet, was occupied by Tucker’s automotive tools and a busted color TV set. Tucker had taken fifteen bucks a month off the original rent after Michael complained about the mess. Sometimes in warm weather Tucker came down, pushed the mess aside, and sat on the couch smoking grass and drinking beer, so they had to watch him pacing past their front window and hear him coughing and hacking and spitting over the rails. He was that kind of guy. His rust-eaten pickup truck was pulled up on the dead brown lawn, although he could have pulled it up behind the house or left it in the driveway, which he specifically hadn’t rented to them. An older T-Bird in worse condition sat decomposing at the edge of the yard, half overgrown by brambles. Michael’s crazed VW was parked on the lawn just off the driveway, and Lenore’s dying hulk, a Cutlass Supreme, was on the road out front, beyond the bare hedges. She had the keys in her pocket, but the thought of driving didn’t thrill her. The Cutlass had died too many times, leaving her stranded; she’d never yet been stuck on the roads outside of town, but she wasn’t willing to take the risk tonight. A storm was headed toward the mountains; with her luck it would hit if she went out. Not that there was anywhere she felt like going. Even the nearest video store was a three-mile drive. She wanted to be happy where she was, but that would take some doing.
Music thumped down from upstairs. Even in the cold, Tucker’s windows were open. Shoving her hands in her pockets, she went around the side of the house, down the driveway. As she passed the door to her own kitchen, she saw that Michael was already gone. She tiptoed up the flight of creaking, rotten steps to Tucker’s flat.
The door was unlocked, so she went in. He’d never hear her knocking, but Michael might. Michael didn’t approve of her upstairs visits, since there was only one reason she ever hung out with Tucker.
Tucker’s kitchen was a shabbier version of their own: dishes piled in the sink, pie pans full of crusted cat food on the floor, an algae-colored stream running across the linoleum from beneath the fridge. Scabby, a calico with skin problems, jumped off the sink when she came in and followed her down the hall to the front of the house, until the music grew so loud that the cat refused to go any farther. Since the Renzlers’ stereo was defunct, Tucker’s music was about all they ever heard. Obligingly, he played it loud enough for both homes.
She saw Tucker’s motorcycle boots propped on the foot-locker that served him as a coffee table, among a clutter of ashtrays, lighters, pipes and screens, and a massive, three-chambered red-white-and-blue acrylic bong. After taking a hit from the Patriot, you were required to stand and salute as you exhaled. A nearly full bottle of red wine sat on the floor next to the trunk; her mouth went dry and prickly at the sight of it.
Tucker lay back on the couch, eyes closed. The window above the couch was open; there were no curtains to move in the breeze, but she could feel it. Tucker thrived on the chill. He was almost too tall for the couch. Balding, with long curly hair and a scraggly beard, his beer gut peeping out from under a Harley-Davidson T-shirt, he looked oddly vulnerable. “Tuck!” she said.
He sat up as if a gun had gone off, his eyes bulging and crazed; but instantly, seeing her, relaxed and slumped down again, as if descending straight back into a trance. “Hey, girl,” he said.
“Thought I heard Scarlet up here. Where is she?”
“Scarlet? Naw, she’s not coming tonight.”
“Shit, that’s too bad. I was going to hang out with you guys for a while.”
He opened one eye. “Well, sit yourself down anyway. I’m not doing anything. Where’s your old man?” He reached for the remote control and turned down the volume on the CD player.