'Of course you do,' she said, getting it.
Phil squeezed my shoulder, getting into executive mode. He was a products manager at 3M. 'I don't care what these clowns say, it's a physical problem. Once we find the right doctor, we're going to lick that thing.'
'These clowns' were my pediatrician, the Grants' GP, and the half dozen specialists who had failed to diagnose my condition. The specialists had concluded that my problem was 'not of organic origin,' another way of saying that it was all in my head.
'Do you think I got it from her?' I asked Laura.
'I don't think you got it from anybody,' Laura said. 'But if you're asking me does she feel terrible about it, sure she does.'
'Star?' Phil said. 'Star would have to be nuts to blame herself.'
Laura was watching to see how much I understood. 'Mothers want to take on anything that could hurt their kids, even the things they can't do anything about. What happens to you makes me feel terrible, and I can't even imagine what it does to Star. At least I get to see you every day. If I were your real mother, and my only chance to end world hunger for the next thousand years meant I had to go out of town on your birthday, I'd still feel awful about letting you down. I'd feel awful anyway, real mother or not.'
'Like you weren't doing the right thing,' I said.
'Your mother loves you so much that sometimes she can't stand not being Betty Crocker.'
The idea of Star Dunstan being anything like Betty Crocker made me laugh out loud.
Laura said, 'Doing the right thing doesn't always make you feel good, no matter what anybody says. Doing the right thing can hurt like the dickens! If you want my opinion, you have a great mom.'
I would have laughed again, this time at her Girl Scout's notion of cursing, but my eyes stung and a thick obstruction filled my throat. A little while ago, I said that two days after my fifteenth birthday I came to understand my mother's feelings in a way I could
2 • Mr. X
• O Great Old Ones, read these words inscribed within this stout journal by the hand of Your Devoted Servant and rejoice!
I always liked walking late at night. In a comfortable city like Edgerton, the enormous blanket of darkness cushions even the sound of your footsteps on the pavement. I walk down the avenues, past the empty department stores and movie theaters. I drift down Hatchtown's narrow lanes and look up at shuttered windows I could pass through in a second, but do not: part of my happiness is in the weighing and measuring of the lives about me. And like anyone else, I enjoy getting out of the house, escaping the captivity of that sty to which I um self-condemned. During my rambles I avoid street lamps, though regardless of the season I am dressed in a black coat and hat—a moving shadow, invisible in the darkness.
Or: nearly invisible. Invisible to all but a deeply unfortunate few, many of whom I admit to killing less from the need to protect myself than out of ... pique, maybe, or whimsy. There was one exception.
I subtracted from the world the gangly hooker in stacked, high-heel sandals and a skirt the size of a washcloth who launched herself toward me from a Chester Street doorway, so high on whatever girls were doing for fun that year that she grabbed my elbow to keep from swaying. I looked at the pinpoint dots of her pupils and let her pull metoward the doorway, opened her up like a can of sardines, and broke her neck before she remembered to scream.
I gave more or less the same treatment to the kid wearing a black
sweatshirt and fatigue pants who saw me because he thought he was looking for someone like me, surprise, surprise, and the young woman with a black eye and swollen lips who wavered out of a parked car at the sound of my footsteps and tried to get back into the car once she Haw me, but it was too late, poor baby. And let us not forget the actual baby I found abandoned atop a Dumpster and assisted in its departure from an inhospitable world by detaching its darling little hands and excising its little outraged eyes.
The baby had not seen me, true. I believe that requires an especially heightened degree of sorrow or misery, loss so irreparable as to make the rest of life an eternal wound, and the baby was merely cold and hungry. But long ago, an untimely arrest and imprisonment kept me from doing the same to another newborn, and anger got the better of me.I never claimed to beperfect.
The noisome, Night Train recking dwarf I killed to protect myself had pulled himself upright between the garbage cans in the alley alongside Merchants Hotel and gaped at my approach. All but a few of his ilk fail to see me even when they are looking directly at me, and those few have the sense to back away. This fellow was still too foggy for sense. A ragged shaft of star-shine caught his eye. 'Root-toot-toot, fuckin' Dracula,' he said. He giggled and leaned shakily over the garbage cans to inspect the grubby cement. 'Hey, where'd Piney go to? You seen Piney, Drac?' He referred to a more functional version of himself, a shabby outcast of whose existence I had long been vaguely aware.
'Rooty-tooty,' said the wretch, who would have gone on destroying himself without my assistance had he not followed his mantra by suddenly peering at me with a hideous mixture of delight and confusion and saying, 'Hey, man, talk about long time no see. I thought I heard ... I thought you was . . . aah ...'
He was one Erwin 'Pipey' Leake, some thirty years previous a hard-drinking young English instructor at Albertus University and a hanger-on of my bohemian period.
'Is Star . . . Star Dunstan, isn't she . . .'
I gripped his throat and slammed his head against the bricks. He tugged at my wrist, and I clamped my free hand over his face and twice more drove his head against the wall. The eyes of the former acolyte floated upward, and a stench of dead fish came from his mouth. When I let go, he crumpled between the garbage cans. I smashed my boot onto his head, heard his skull crack, and kept stamping until the side of his head turned soft.
These idiots should know enough to keep their mouths shut.
• Great Beings, You who in aeons to come shall linger over these words penned by Your Devoted Servant, You alone comprehend my certainty that a great change is in the air. The culmination of that Sacred Mission entrusted to me and so teasingly adumbrated by the Providence Master has begun to declare its appearance upon the earthly stage. As I walk unseen through the city, the flow of information sharpens and intensifies, bringing with it the promise of that destiny for which I have waited since I was a boy taking lessons from the foxes and owls in Johnson's Woods.
Here,in it room slacked with microwave ovens and laptop computers, a professional thief and occasional arsonist named Anton 'Frenchy' La Chapelle lies unconscious in sleeping embrace with one Cassandra 'Cassie' Little, a hard-bitten little scrubber. Hello, Frenchy, you delightfully nasty piece of work! You don't know it, but I imagine that your pointless life is going to serve some purpose after all.
Here, on the second floor of a rooming house, Otto Bremen, a grade-school crossing guard, slumbers before his television screen with a not quite empty bottle of bourbon nestled in his crotch. The last half inch of
For in my city's secret corners I already see runners of the blue lire. It hovers over Frenchy and his partner, it travels down the crossing guard's arm, and it gathers itself for an electrifying moment along the rain gutters on Cherry Street, where the surviving Dunstans eke out their blasted lives. Enormous forces have begun to come into play. Around our tiny illuminated platform suspended in the cosmic darkness, the ancient Gods, my true ancestors, congregate with rustlings of leathery wings and rattlings of filthy claws to witness what their great- grandson shall accomplish.
A most marvelous event has taken place. Star Dunstan has come home to die.
Can you hear me, slug-spittle?
Listen to me, you exhausted bag of skin—
