“It’s okay, Joe. Let him go,” Michael said.
“We should stick together.”
“We are.”
When Ricky got back, he shambled into the living room, tossed away his jacket, and fell onto the couch beside Michael.
“Where’s Joe?”
“He went to tell Mum.”
Ricky nodded. “You know why they killed Kennedy?”
“No.”
“Because they had to. He made too many enemies. Sicced his brother on the Mob, attacked the Cubans, pissed off the Russians, stirred up trouble with the Negroes in Alabama. So they had to get rid of him. See, Lyndon Johnson, he’ll live to be a hundred. Because he’s a compromiser. You don’t need to kill a guy if you can cut a deal with him. You see what I mean?”
“No. Not really.”
“That’s why they killed Amy. It was the only way to shut the woman up.”
“What about the Strangler?”
Ricky gave him a cutting look. “I think we’ve got our own strangler. I’m going to find out who did this.”
“Did she ever tell you anything, a story she was worried about, a witness maybe?”
“No. She knew a lot of lowlifes; she wrote about them. But she wasn’t worried about it. None of them ever did anything. At least she never talked about it.”
“I was the one who gave her the DeSalvo story, you know. She came by.”
“I know. It’s alright, Mikey. If it wasn’t you, it would have been someone else. She didn’t take no for an answer. Besides, she probably had another source.”
Michael made a face: Bullshit. He said, “I wish I hadn’t seen her.”
Ricky went into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of Jim Beam. “Here. There’s nothing for depression like a depressant.” He handed his brother a glass.
“I’m supposed to be cheering you up.”
“I’m never gonna cheer up, Mikey.”
“Yeah, you will.”
“Nah.”
“You will. It takes time.”
“No. Because I don’t want to. I don’t want to ever get over it. So let’s just, you know, drink up.”
Ricky took a drink then turned and stared off into space, and that was that. He was through discussing it.
To Michael, his little brother’s face, in profile, looked weathered. At the corner of Ricky’s eye, the first delicate wrinkles were branching. Ricky Daley was actually getting old. How remarkable. Michael had never noticed the changes. In his mind’s eye, Ricky was always young, always smooth-faced, always the Ricky of his memory.
And the memory of Ricky was a potent one. When they had been kids, and Michael was first coming to realize that we are all trapped in the solitude of our own skins, he had nonetheless always felt linked to Ricky. Now it came home to Michael that both their skins had hardened, and he did not know Ricky at all anymore. More important, Ricky did not know him. Not the way he’d used to. So there it was, the human condition, and so what? What was the sense of worrying about it? People were consigned to interior space for a reason-for moments precisely like this one, when they were forced to give up people whom they would rather hang on to. We are built to withstand our losses. The Daleys would survive Amy’s death. What else could they do? They were still alive.
Impulsively, Michael dropped his hand onto the back of Ricky’s. Their stacked hands looked strange, like mating animals. Some old taboo, or a battalion of them, made Michael want to pull his hand away, but he left it there.
Ricky looked down at the two hands. A riffle of uncertainty crossed his face. But he left his hand there, too.
PART TWO
27
Michael opened his left eye-the good eye, free of the hydraulic pressure that swelled his right eyeball during a migraine. His eyelashes were crusted with mucus; he teased it away with his finger. The room was dark. He could make out the sloping surface of his pillow, the outline of the bedroom window. His head remained still. Behind him, his mother whispered rosaries. Her beads ticked softly as she worried them in her hand. Even then-with his brain pressing open the fissures of his skull, trying to blossom out of its thick bone case-he saw that it was funny. Margaret would treat his migraine with ancient cultic hocus-pocus. A half dozen norepinephrine tablets had not worked; maybe a dose of Jesus would do the trick. He had seen a cartoon in a magazine once: a witch doctor in a grass skirt dancing around a car with its hood raised. That was Margaret. The sound of her whispering infuriated him. Sibilant hisses, like mouse scratches. Why wouldn’t she be quiet?
Michael thought he might vomit. He risked jostling his head to feel for the stainless-steel mixing bowl on the floor by his bed. His fingers found the bowl and he pulled it up onto the bed.
His mother whispered, “Michael?”
He let his eye close, let himself drift.
The attacks usually began on the right side, a ghost behind the right eyeball, and as the pressure intensified and expanded, the pain became increasingly physical, sensual. It invaded the bony and spongy and meaty parts all packed tight in his head, and the loose weave of capillaries that netted the whole thing and kept it drenched. At times it seemed that the interior of his skull was illuminated. He could visualize the smooth bowl of his eye socket, and the mounting pressure in his arteries, and the poisonous fluid accumulating between his skull and scalp. At its worst-when he wondered if someone observing his scalp might actually see it stretch-at these moments he was conscious of the weight of his brain lolling on its stem, this pulpy wet mass that contained his consciousness. His mind beheld his brain. It was an electrochemical engine, impossibly complex, and when it broke the doctors were at a loss to fix it. They understood the mechanisms of migrainous pain well enough. Michael understood them, too; he had studied the literature and even with his layman’s knowledge he could follow the cascading failures-minute dilation of the arterioles feeding the brain, increased intracranial hydrostatic pressure, which in turn triggered the excruciating buildup of fluid in the subcutaneous tissue under the scalp, a drop in circulating serotonin, erratic electrical activity. The neurologists could explain how it all happened; what they could not explain was why. What triggered it? What was the First Cause? Somewhere in his brainstem was a flaw. The same sustained electrochemical reaction that produced Michael’s mind was flawed.
In her shushy whisper, Margaret continued to page Dr. Jesus, who seemed not to hear the message, or was not inclined to answer it. But then, He had not interceded on Amy’s behalf or on Joe Senior’s either. How, after all that, could Margaret maintain her childish faith in the old Catholic fairy tales and trinkets? What made the Jesus myth any more credible than a thousand others that people had been chanting around campfires all over the world in Jesus’s day? What distinguished Jesus from, say, the army of abandoned jesuses on Easter Island-except that Jesus had had the good fortune to be taken up by Europeans? Ah, it did no good to cross-examine her. Margaret’s faith was its own answer. He took her religiousness as a sign-yet another sign-of her simplicity. A lifetime in the hermetic world of a housewife had left her dull.
He pushed his head down into the pillow. Sometimes he could mash the heel of his hand into his right eyeball and feel relief, or press on his neck at the carotid artery, or squeeze his entire head with two hands. But the relief came at a price: When the compression was released, the gush of pent-up fluid was excruciating. So, by experimentation, he had found a compromise in which he lay on his right side and pressed his head down into the pillow with light, steady pressure that could be maintained for long periods. This was the position he returned to now, out of habit. He thought the attack was beginning to crumble. The peak had been reached and passed, almost undetectably. The sensation of pain took on a slightly different tone-stale, stanched, like turbid standing water. The current was reversing. He could begin to imagine himself in control of his body again. The very profusion of all these thoughts was itself a sign of recovery; pain annihilated thought, but Michael was thinking now. He was coming back
