Touchy and Feely Read online

  ‘Do you believe that?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Steve, it doesn’t make any difference what I believe. The girl has made the complaint and her parents are howling for blood.’

  Steve pressed his fingertips against his forehead. He was beginning to feel a headache coming on—one of those headaches that made his left eye blurry.

  ‘Are you still holding Alan now?’

  ‘We’ll be bringing him down to Litchfield in maybe twenty minutes. I thought you’d probably want to see him before we charge him.’

  ‘Who’s the girl? I wasn’t even aware that he knew any girls. Not that intimately, anyhow.’

  ‘Her name’s Kelly Kessner. Her parents are Richard and Davina Kessner.’

  ‘Kessner Realty?’

  ‘That’s them.’

  ‘God almighty.’

  Steve had only met Richard Kessner two or three times, at charity functions. But he remembered him as being a loud, bullying man with a permanent tan and dyed, bouffant hair. The sort of man who always tried to crush your fingers when he shook your hand. He couldn’t remember Davina Kessner, though, and as far as he knew he had never met their daughter Kelly.

  ‘Is Alan there? Can I talk to him?’

  ‘Hold on, Steve. Let me ask him.’

  ‘Don’t ask him, Roger, tell him. I want to talk to him, OK?’

  There was a lengthy pause. Through the window, Steve could see Doreen standing impatiently next to his car. He raised one finger to indicate that he wouldn’t be long.

  ‘Steve? It’s Roger. Alan says he doesn’t want to talk to you.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Roger. He has to.’

  ‘You want me to hold a gun to his head? He absolutely refused.’

  ‘I don’t believe this. What did he say?’

  ‘You want the exact words?’

  Steve hesitated for a moment, and then said, ‘No, thanks, Roger. Just tell him I’ll be back in about an hour. And tell him not to worry. It sounds like the whole thing was some kind of stupid misunderstanding.’

  ‘OK, Steve. Talk to you later.’

  Children of the Absent Gods

  For Feely, the afternoon passed like a dream, or a home movie of somebody else’s life.

  Serenity microwaved a frozen chili that her mother had left for her, and the three of them sat cross-legged on the hearthrug in front of the fire and ate it with serving spoons, straight out of the big blue Tupperware bowl. Robert hadn’t been able to chop any more firewood so Feely had wedged one huge log into the fireplace, which was burning with a furious roar.

  ‘Are you kids happy?’ Robert asked them.

  Serenity only licked her spoon and gave him a suggestive smile, but Feely said, ‘Absolutely—I’m happy.’

  ‘Then now’s the time to start worrying,’ said Robert. ‘And you know why? Because the happier you are, the worse it hurts when it all turns to shit. Which it inevitably will.’

  He spoke very slowly, and very emphatically. He had not only drunk three-quarters of a bottle of Mr Bellow’s Maker’s Mark, but he had taken eight Tylenol tablets to dull the pain in his fingers. With Feely’s reluctant help, he had stuck his fingertips back on as accurately as he could, using BandAids and Scotch tape, but he still kept complaining that they were throbbing, and that they felt ‘loose.’

  Feely felt full now, and weary, and he was finding it hard to stay alert. But he couldn’t take his eyes away from Serenity, sitting opposite him. Her hair was shining in the firelight, and her eyes sparkled, and the shadows fondled her breasts. He wished he could sit here for ever, just staring at her.

  ‘I don’t know . . .’ he said. ‘Fate’s been very benevolent, so far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Sure. Ever since I bought my ticket at the Port Authority, I really feel like somebody’s been taking care of me. Like in Hercules, The Incredible Journeys, you know, with the gods looking down from the clouds and making sure that I achieve my desideration.’

  Robert gave a dismissive pfff! ‘You really believe in gods? Let me tell you, kid, there are no gods left. Not one. Even before the birth of Christ the gods saw what men and women were turning into, and they bailed.’

  ‘Oh, I think you’re wrong,’ said Serenity. ‘I don’t think the gods have gone. I think they’re in hiding, that’s all, until we come to our senses. But they still keep an eye on us.’

  ‘Yeah—look at everything that’s happened to me,’ Feely agreed. ‘Meeting you, meeting Serenity. You can’t tell me the gods didn’t have something to do with it. Look at us here now, man, in front of the fire, don’t try to tell me that all three of us congregated here just by happenstance?’

  ‘You’re full of crap,’ said Robert. ‘The trouble with human beings is, we’re all still looking for signs. We need meaning in our lives! We need oracles, and predictions, to tell us what to do next! So we keep on looking for clues, or marks, and when we find them . . . poor pathetic souls that we are, we think that we’ve discovered the answer.’

  He looked at Feely with unfocused eyes, and then at Serenity. ‘But I’ve discovered the real answer, children, and the real answer isn’t in signs, or riddles. The real answer is . . . transparent rulers.’

  ‘What?’ said Serenity.

  ‘Transparent rulers,’ Robert insisted. ‘Just like the gods, they’re invisible, but they still have the measure of us.’

  ‘There’s no answer to that,’ said Serenity.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Robert, ‘because it’s a universal truth.’ Then he said to Feely, ‘Get me another drink, will you, kid? I think my legs are permanently locked. No wonder the Japs lost the war. Once they sat down to eat they couldn’t get up again.’

  Feely uncrossed his legs, took Robert’s glass, and went across to the drinks cabinet on the other side of the living room. As he passed the widescreen TV, he saw a small yellow house, with a TV reporter standing in the back yard. The caption along the bottom of the picture said NEWS 24: SNIPER KILLS CANAAN WOMAN.

  ‘Hey, Robert!’ he said. ‘Lookit—on the TV! Isn’t that the same house we passed by this morning, where that little girl was making a snowman?’

  Robert swiveled around and squinted at the screen with one eye. ‘Yes, Feely, you’re right. That’s the very house. What about it?’

  ‘Looks like a woman got herself killed there, by a sniper.’

  Robert looked up at him, with one eye still closed. ‘What are you trying to say to me, Feely? That I gave them the evil eye? Are you trying to suggest that it was my fault, that woman getting shot?’

  ‘Of course not. Why should I? I just think it seems kind of epiphenomenal, that you should say what a happy house that actual specific house was, and the very same day it’s visited by doom.’

  Robert shook his head. ‘Wouldn’t have happened, if she’d owned a transparent ruler. She would have seen it coming. The snowman, too, poor bastard.’ He tried to turn back toward the fire, but he fell sideways onto the rug, with his legs still locked together. ‘God, I must be drunk.’

  ‘Why don’t we get you to bed?’ Serenity suggested.

  ‘My legs are stuck. Help me sort my legs out.’

  Between them, Feely and Serenity disentangled his legs. ‘Come on,’ said Serenity. ‘You could use some sleep.’

  ‘I need another drink,’ said Robert. ‘If I have another drink, I’ll sober up.’

  Serenity ignored him. ‘Come on, Feely, help me to get him upstairs.’

  It took them almost five minutes to drag Robert up to the guest bedroom. He kept trying to turn around and go back downstairs again, and even when they got him to the top he decided to cling onto the banisters like a stubborn child.

  ‘I’m sober! I’ve sobered up! Listen to this: “Since inquiry is the beginning of philosophy, and wonder and uncertainty are the beginning of inquiry, it seems only natural that the greater part of what concerns the gods should be concealed in riddles.”’

  ‘You couldn’t say that unless you wer
e drunk,’ said Serenity, prying his fingers free from the banister-rail.

  ‘What? You girls—you think you know everything! You think you control our lives! Nothing could be further from the spoof! You can’t do squat unless we allow you to! You can’t even menstruate unless we say so! Men are the sole arbiters of everything that walks, flies, sinks, shits, or swims!’

  Eventually, Feely and Serenity managed to force Robert through the bedroom door, and push him onto the bed. Once he had collapsed back onto the pink-and-white quilt, he stopped struggling, and lay back with his eyes closed. ‘I think I need a little sheep,’ he slurred. ‘Feely, get me another drink, will you? Make it a large one. Not one of those goddamned . . . small ones.’

  Serenity knelt down beside the bed and laid her hand on his forehead. ‘Get some rest, OK, Touchy? You’ve had a pretty bad day, one way and another.’

  Robert opened his eyes again, and stared at her. ‘You’re not Elizabeth, are you? No, I thought not. Pity. You know what Elizabeth said to me? She said, “Whatever you want, Robbie, you just tell me what it is, and I’ll do it.” Now, how many women do you know who would say something like that? And mean it?’ He nodded, and kept on nodding. ‘And mean it? You see where I’m coming from? And mean it?’

  His eyes closed, and he fell into a drugged and drunken sleep. He didn’t snore. In fact he didn’t even seem to be breathing, but Serenity laid her hand on his chest and said, ‘He’s OK . . . I can feel his heart beating.’

  Feely surprised himself by feeling jealous. He wouldn’t have minded if Robert were dead.

  The Return of Captain Lingo

  They left the bedroom and Serenity closed the door. ‘I think I’m going to my room now. I want to wash my hair and all. If you want to stay up and watch TV, fine.’

  ‘Hey, it’s not even nine o’clock yet. Don’t you maybe want another drink, and we can maybe converse some more?’

  ‘Actually, Feely, I’d like a little time on my own.’

  ‘Oh . . . OK.’

  Serenity smiled at him and chucked him under the chin with her finger. ‘Don’t be disappointed. You look like you could use some sleep, too.’

  Feely shrugged and looked around. ‘I just like this so much. Whatever Robert says, I feel happy here. I feel hygienic, and also warm, and not at all inclined to be mendacious.’

  ‘You’re something, you know that?’

  ‘Everybody is something.’

  ‘I know. But you’re really something.’

  ‘I don’t know. Robert says you have to do a cataclysmic deed if the world is going to pay you any attention.’

  ‘A cataclysmic deed? Like what?’

  ‘I don’t really know. But Robert says that when you do it, everybody has to go ho-o-oly shit!’

  Serenity laughed. Then she took hold of his hands and kissed him on the lips, just lightly. ‘You know, sometimes I stare at my parents’ eyes real close up and I try to see if there’s anything inside them. My dad says “What the hell are you staring at?” and I say “I’m trying to see into your soul.” He thinks I’m cracked, but there’s a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and this woman says, “I feel there is an angel inside me . . . who I am constantly shocking.” I love that poem. But when I stare at my parents I think that what you see is all they are. No angel inside. No devil either. They’re like hollow people, knock-knock, they’re empty. I wonder if they were always like that, or if their real selves decided to escape one day, like you escaped, and went north.’

  Feely nodded. He couldn’t find the words to answer her. He nearly said, ‘I love you,’ but he didn’t know how she would respond. If she laughed at him, he thought that he would probably shrivel up and die of humiliation, like a slug with salt on it.

  Serenity turned and opened the door to her room. ‘Maybe I’ll come down later, when I’ve washed my hair. Help yourself to anything you want. You know, beer, Cheezos.’

  ‘Sure. Thanks.’

  Feely went downstairs to the living room. The log that he had wedged into the hearth had left a smoky mark right up the middle of the white-painted fire-surround, and up the wall, too. He picked up the poker and levered the log sideways, so that it wouldn’t stick out so much.

  On the TV news, a detective with dark rings under his eyes was saying, ‘—one or two promising leads, and we’re expecting some developments within the next twenty-four hours. We’re keeping an open mind as to motive, but it seems increasingly likely that Mrs Mitchelson’s shooting was a random act of violence by a very disturbed individual.’

  Feely sat down at the dining table and opened his blue cardboard folder. Captain Lingo wouldn’t have had any trouble telling Serenity how he felt. But Feely was beginning to think that maybe words weren’t everything. You could know every single word in the English language. You could know ‘piaffer.’ But if you didn’t know how to say ‘I love you’ without the risk of humiliating yourself, what was the point? For the first time, Feely wondered if Father Arcimboldo might have not been telling him the whole truth.

  He pulled out a clean but slightly crumpled sheet of art paper, and took the top off his thick black felt-tipped pen. He sketched Orchard Street, and the Bellow house, and the snow. Captain Lingo was walking up toward the front door. He was turning around to Verba and saying, ‘I feel magnetized toward this house, Verba . . . there’s somebody here I have to talk to.’

  Verba said, ‘Very well, Captain Lingo . . . I’ll meet you later.’

  In the next frame, the front door was opened and Serenity was standing there—an idealized Serenity: slimmer, more bosomy, with much more hair, and feline eyes. ‘I don’t know why,’ she was saying, ‘but I’ve been expecting you.’

  Captain Lingo and Serenity go into the living room. Captain Lingo says, ‘You and me have origins of such disparity that it beggars belief that we have even found ourselves in the same room together, let alone the same continental mass.’

  Serenity says, ‘Mmm . . .’

  Captain Lingo takes Serenity in his arms. ‘If each word of love was a flower, I would be presenting you now with the most abundant bouquet that the world of horticulture has ever had to offer.’

  Serenity says, ‘Ohhhh . . .’

  In the last frame, Captain Lingo kisses Serenity and says, ‘You are the dictionary definition of “perfection.”’

  Feely spent over an hour filling in the background details. When he had finished, he sat back and looked at his work with satisfaction, because he thought he had drawn it very well—especially his idealized Serenity. But he also looked at it with self-doubt, because he wasn’t at all sure that Serenity would like it. She might even be insulted, because he had drawn her waist so tiny and her breasts so big.

  Even so, he was determined that he would show it to her. If he couldn’t find a way to tell her that he had fallen in love with her, then Captain Lingo could do it for him. All he needed was courage, and maybe a drink. He went across to the cocktail trolley, unscrewed the cap from the Maker’s Mark, sniffed it, and then took a swig straight from the bottle. Then he stood there for almost half a minute, his eyes crowded with tears, his lungs on fire, coughing and coughing and coughing.

  Holy Mary Mother of God, why would anybody want to drink that stuff on purpose?

  When he had wiped his eyes and blown his nose on a piece of kitchen towel, he went upstairs. It was very quiet on the landing. He leaned his head against the door of Serenity’s bedroom, but he couldn’t hear anything. No television, no hair dryer, nothing.

  Now he didn’t know what to do. If Serenity was asleep, he supposed that he could creep into her bedroom and lay his drawings on her bed. That would be pretty romantic, wouldn’t it? He could gently shake her awake and the first thing she would see when she opened her eyes would be Captain Lingo, telling her that she was the dictionary definition of perfect.

  But what if she wasn’t asleep? What if he walked into her bedroom and she thought he was trying to come on to her? He stood outside her door for over a minute,
and then he hesitantly knocked. He waited, and waited, but there was no answer. Maybe he hadn’t knocked loud enough. He tried knocking a second time. He waited, but there was still no answer.

  It was then that he lost his nerve. He should have gone in and laid his drawings on her bed, but he didn’t have the cojones even to take hold of her doorknob. I’ll show her the drawings tomorrow at breakfast, he consoled himself, even though he knew that his chance was already passing him by. Tomorrow at breakfast would be too late, and Robert would be there, with a ten-megaton hangover and his hand still hurting.

  Feely didn’t know how long he stood outside her door, trying to make up his mind what to do, but it seemed like about an hour. He was so tired that his neck began to creak. In the end, he tiptoed his way along the landing to the guest bedroom, so that he could check on Robert.

  He opened the door, and at first he couldn’t work out what he was looking at. The bedside lamp was on, and the pink quilt had slid off the bed and was heaped on the floor. On the bed itself, naked except for a pair of khaki knee-high socks and a green glass necklace, was Serenity. Behind her, also naked, was Robert. He was holding his bandaged hand out sideways as if he were a motorist, signaling to turn left. His white buttocks were clenched together with effort. The air in the bedroom was almost unbreathable with the pungency of marijuana.

  Feely stood in the open doorway feeling as if he had walked into the wrong universe. Robert turned around and saw him, and for a split second he looked mildly surprised. But then he gave him an exaggerated grin, all teeth, and said, ‘Hi there, Feely!’ He didn’t even look embarrassed.

  ‘I’m—’ said Feely, and reached for the door handle. He just wanted to blot it all out.

  But—‘Feely!’ Robert called him. ‘Wait up! Where the hell are you going, Feely?’ and now Serenity opened her eyes and saw him, too. Her cheeks were apple red and her forehead was shiny with perspiration, and she smiled at him, like everything was perfectly normal.