Dark Rivers of the Heart

Then we’re standing at the table, and I’m not sure how we got there, the woman lying in front of me and my father pressing against my back, pinning me to the table. He has a vicious grip on my right wrist, pushes my hand onto her breasts, slides it along her naked body. She’s half conscious. Opens her eyes. I’m staring into her eyes, begging her to understand, as he forces my hand everywhere, all the time talking, talking, telling me that I can do anything to her I want, it’s right, it’s what I was born to do, she’s only here to be what I need her to be.

I come far enough out of a daze to struggle briefly, fiercely. Too brief, not fierce enough. His arm’s around my throat, choking me, jamming me against the table with his body, choking with his left arm, choking, the taste of blood in my mouth, until I’m weak again. He knows when to release the pressure, before I pass out, because he doesn’t want me to pass out. He has other plans. I sag against him, crying now, tears dropping onto the bare skin of the manacled woman.

He lets go of my right hand. I hardly have strength to lift it from the woman. Clink and rattle. Down at my side. I look. One of his disembodied hands. Sorting through the silvery instruments that are floating in the void. He plucks a scalpel from the weightless array of clamps and forceps and needles and blades. Seizes my hand, presses the scalpel into it, folds his hand over mine, grinding my knuckles, forcing me to grip the blade. Below us the woman sees our hands and the shining steel, and she begs us not to hurt her.

“I know what you are,” he says, “I know what you are, sweet boy, my baby boy. Just be what you are, just let go and be what you are. You think she’s beautiful now? You think she’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen? Oh, just wait until we’ve shown her how to be more beautiful. Let Daddy show you what you are, what you need, what you like. Let me show you what fun it is to be what you are. Listen, Mikey, listen now, the same dark river runs through your heart and mine. Listen, and you can hear it, that deep dark river, roaring along, swift and powerful, roaring along. With me now, with me, just let the river carry you along. Be with me now and lift the blade high. See how it shines? Let her see it, see how she sees it, how she has eyes for nothing else. Shining and high in your hand and mine. Feel the power we have over her, over all the weak and foolish ones who can never understand. Be with me, lift it high—”

He has one arm loosely around my throat, my right hand gripped by his, so my left arm is free. Instead of reaching back for him or trying to jam my elbow into him, which won’t work, I plant my hand against the stainless steel. Unendurable horror and desperation empower me. With that hand and my whole body, I shove away from the table. Then with my legs. Then my feet. Kicking against the table with both feet. Raging backward into the bastard, unbalancing him. He stumbles, still grinding the hand in which I’ve got the scalpel, trying to tighten the arm at my throat. But then he falls backward, me atop him. The scalpel clinks away in darkness. My falling weight drives the breath out of him. I’m free. Free. Scramble across the black floor. The door. My right hand aching. No hope of helping the woman. But I can bring help. Police. Someone. She can still be saved. Through the door, onto my feet, tottering, flailing to keep my balance, out into the catacombs, running, running past all the frozen white women, trying to shout. Throat bleeding inside. Raw and raspy. Voice a whisper. No one on the ranch to hear me anyway. Just me, him, the naked woman. But I’m running, running, screaming in a whisper when there’s no one to hear.

The expression on Ellie’s face cut through Spencer’s heart.

He said, “I shouldn’t have brought you here, shouldn’t have put you through this.”

She was gray in the light of the frost-white bulbs. “No, it’s what you had to do. If I had any doubts, I have none now. You can’t have gone on forever…with all of this.”

“But that’s what I’ll have to do. Go on forever with it. And I don’t know now why I thought I could find a life. I don’t have any right to make you carry this weight with me.”

“You can go on with it and have a life…as long as you remember it all. And I think now I know what it is you can’t remember, where those lost minutes come in.”

Spencer couldn’t bear to meet her eyes. He looked at Rocky, where the dog sat in deep despondency: head lowered, ears drooping, shivering.

Then he turned his eyes to the black door. Whatever he found beyond it would decide whether he had a future with or without Ellie. He might have neither.

“I didn’t try to run back to the house,” he said, returning in his mind to that distant night. “He would have caught me before I’d gotten there, before I could use a telephone. Instead, I went up to the vestibule, out of the cupboard, through the file room, and turned right toward the front of the building, into the gallery. By the time I was on the stairs to his studio, I could hear him coming through the darkness behind me. I knew he kept a gun in the lower left-hand drawer of his desk. I’d seen it once when he’d sent me there to get something. Entering the studio, I hit the light switch, ran past his easels, supply cabinets, to the far corner. The desk was L-shaped. I vaulted over it, crashed into the chair, clawed at the drawer, got it open. The gun was there. I didn’t know how to use it, whether it had a safety. My right hand was throbbing. I could hardly hold the damn thing, even in both hands. He was off the stairs, into the studio, coming for me, so I pointed and pulled the trigger. It was a revolver. No safety. The recoil about knocked me on my ass.”

“And you shot him.”

“Not yet. I must’ve pulled up hard on it when I squeezed the trigger, pulled off target, so the bullet took a chunk out of the ceiling. But I held on to the gun, and he stopped coming. At least he didn’t come as fast, not pell- mell anymore. But he was so calm, Ellie, so calm. As if nothing had happened, just my dad, good old dad, a little perturbed with me, you know, but telling me everything was going to be all right, romancing me with that sweet talk like in the black room. So sincere. So hypnotic. And so sure that he could make it work if I only gave him time.”

Ellie said, “But he didn’t know that you’d seen him beat your mother and carry her back to the barn six years before. He might have thought you would put together her death and his secret rooms when you came down from your panic — but until then he thought he had time to bring you around.”

Spencer stared at the black door.

“Yeah, maybe that’s what he thought. I don’t know. He told me that to be like him was to know what life was all about, the true fullness of life without limits or rules. He said I’d enjoy what he could show me how to do. He said I’d already started to enjoy it back in that black room, that I’d been afraid of enjoying it, but that I’d learn it was all right to have that kind of fun.”

“But you didn’t enjoy it. You were repulsed.”

“He said that I did, that he could see I did. His genes ran through me like a river, he said again, through my heart just like a river. Our shared river of destiny, the dark river of our hearts. When he got to the desk, so close I couldn’t miss again, I shot him. He flew backward from the impact. The spray of blood was horrible. It seemed for sure that I’d killed him, but then I hadn’t seen much blood until that night, and a little looked like a lot. He hit the floor, rolled facedown, and lay there, very still. I ran out of the studio, back down here….”

The black door waited.

She didn’t speak for a while. He couldn’t.

Then Ellie said, “And in that room with the woman…those are the minutes you can’t remember.”

The door. He should have had the old cellars collapsed with explosives. Filled in with dirt. Sealed forever. He shouldn’t have left that black door to be opened again.

“Coming back here,” he said with difficulty, “I had to carry the revolver in my left hand because of how he’d clenched my right so hard in his, grinding my knuckles together. It was throbbing, full of pain. But the thing is…it wasn’t just pain I felt in it.”

He looked at that hand now. He could see it smaller, younger, the hand of a fourteen-year-old boy.

“I could still feel…the smoothness of the woman’s skin, from when he’d forced my hand over her body. Feel the roundness of her breasts. The resiliency and fullness of them. The flatness of her belly. The crispness of pubic hair…the heat of her. All those feelings were in my hand, still in my hand, as real as the pain.”

“You were only a boy,” she said without any evidence of disgust. “It was the first time you’d ever seen a woman undressed, the first time you’d ever touched a woman. My God, Spencer, in supercharged circumstances like that, not just terrifying but so emotional in every way, so confusing, such a damned primal moment — touching her was bound to reach you on every level, all at the same time. Your father knew that. He was a clever sonofabitch. He tried to use your turmoil to manipulate you. But it