The Throat

funeral announcements and the obituary notice, booked time at the crematorium, bought an urn and a slot in a mausoleum, secured the 'Chapel of Rest' and the services of a nondenominational minister for the memorial service, hired a car for the procession to the mausoleum, ordered flowers, commissioned makeup and a hairdo for the departed, bought an organist and an organ and ninety minutes' worth of recorded classical music, and wrote a check for something like ten thousand dollars. 'Well, I sure do like a man who knows what he wants,' said Just Call Me Joyce. 'Some of these folks, they come in here and dicker like they thought they could take it with them when they go. Let me tell you, I been there, and they can't.'

'You've been there?' I asked.

'Everything that happens to you after you're dead, I been there for it,' she said. 'And anything you want to know about, I can tell you about it.'

'I guess we can go home now,' Ransom said.

Early in the evening, Ransom was seated in the darkening room, staring at its one bright spot, the screen, which once again gave a view of the chanting crowd at Armory Place. I thought about Just Call Me Joyce and her baby. Someday the child would take over the funeral home. I saw this child as a man in his mid-forties, grinning broadly and pressing the flesh, slamming widowers on the back, breaking the ice with an anecdote about trout fishing, Lordy that was the biggest ole fish anybody ever pulled out of that river, oof, there goes my sciatica again, just give me a minute here, folks.

A door in my mind clicked open and let in a flood of light, and without saying anything to Ransom, I went back upstairs to my room and filled about fifteen sheets of the legal pad I had remembered at the last minute to slip into my carry-on bag. All by itself, my book had taken another stride forward.

3

What had opened the door into the imaginative space was the collision of Walter Dragonette with the certainty that Just Call Me Joyce's child would be just like his mother. When I had arrived at Shady Mount that morning, I'd had an idea which April Ransom's death had erased—but everything since then had secretly increased the little room of my idea, so that by the time it came back to me through imagination's door, it had grown into an entire wing, with its own hallways, staircases, and windows.

     I saw that I could use some of Walter Dragonette's life while writing about Charlie Carpenter's childhood. Charlie had killed other people before he met Lily Sheehan: a small boy, a young mother, and two or three other people in the towns where he had lived before he had come back home. Millhaven would be Charlie's hometown, but it would have another name in the book. Charlie's deeds were like Walter Dragonette's, but the circumstances of his childhood were mine, heightened to a terrible pitch. There would be a figure like Dragonette's Mr. Lancer. My entire being felt a jolt as I saw the huge head of Heinz Stenmitz lower itself toward mine—pale blue eyes and the odor of bloody meat.

During Charlie's early childhood, his father had killed several people for no better motive than revenge, and the five-year-old Charlie had taken his father's secret into himself. If I described everything through Charlie's eyes, I could begin to work out what could make someone turn out like Walter Dragonette. The Ledger had tried to do that, clumsily, by questioning sociologists, priests, and policemen; and it was what I had been doing when I put the photograph of Ted Bundy's mother up on my refrigerator.

For the second time that day, my book bloomed into life within me.

I saw five-year-old Charlie Carpenter in my old bedroom on South Sixth Street, looking at the pattern of dark blue roses climbing the paler blue wallpaper in a swirl of misery and despair as his father beat up his mother. Charlie was trying to go into the wallpaper, to escape into the safe, lifeless perfection of the folded petals and the tangle of stalks.

I saw the child walking along Livermore Avenue to the Beldame Oriental, where in a back row the Minotaur waited to yank him bodily into a movie about treachery and arousal. Reality flattened out under the Minotaur's instruction—the real feelings aroused by the things he did would tear you into bloody rags, so you forgot it all. You cut up the memory, you buried it in a million different holes. The Minotaur was happy with you, he held you close and his hands crushed against you and the world died.

Because columns of numbers were completely emotionless, Charlie was a bookkeeper. He would live in hotel rooms because they were impersonal. He would have recurring dreams and regular habits. He would never sleep with a woman unless he had already killed her, very carefully and thoroughly, in his head. Once every couple of months, he would have quick, impersonal sex with men, and maybe once a year, when he had allowed himself to drink too much, he would annoy some man he picked up in a gay bar by babbling hysterical baby talk while rubbing the stranger's erection over his face.

Charlie had been in the service in Vietnam.

He would kill Lily Sheehan as soon as he got into her lake house. That was why he stole the boat and let it drift into the reeds, and why he showed up at Lily's house so early in the morning.

I had to go back through the first third of the novel and insert the changes necessary to imply the background that I had just invented for Charlie. What the reader saw of him—his bloodless affection for his boring job, his avoidance of intimacy—would have sinister implications. The reader would sense that Lily Sheehan was putting herself in danger when she began her attempts to lure Charlie into the plot that had reminded me of Kent Smith and Gloria Grahame. You, dear heart, dear Reader, you without whom no book exists at all, who had begun reading what appeared to be a novel about an innocent lured into a trap would gradually sense that the woman who was trying to manipulate the innocent was going to get a nasty surprise.

The first third of the book would end with Lily Sheehan's murder. The second third of the book would be the account of Charlie's childhood—and it came to me that the child-Charlie would have a different name, so that at first you, dear Reader, would wonder why you were suddenly following the life of a pathetic child who had no connection to the events of the book's first two hundred pages! This confusion would end when the child, aged eighteen, enlisted in the army under the name Charles Carpenter. Charlie's capture would take up the final third.

The title of this novel would be The Kingdom of Heaven, and its epigraph would be the verses from the Thomas gospel I had read in Central Park.

The inner music of The Kingdom of Heaven would be the search for the Minotaur. Charlie would have returned to Millhaven (whatever it was called in the book) because, though he had only the most partial glimpse of this, he wanted to find the man who had abused him in the Beldame Oriental. Memories of the Minotaur would haunt his life and the last third of the book, and once—without quite knowing why—he would visit the shell of the theater and have an experience similar to mine of yesterday morning.

The Minotaur would be like a fearsome God hidden at the bottom of a deep cave, his traces and effects scattered everywhere through the visible world.

Then I had a final insight before going back downstairs. The movie five-year-old Charlie Carpenter was watching when a smiling monster slid into the seat next to his was From Dangerous Depths. It did not matter that I had never seen it—though I could see it, if I stayed in Millhaven long enough—because all I needed was the title.

Now I needed a reason for a child so young to be sent to the movies on several days in succession, and that too arrived as soon as I became aware of its necessity. Young Charlie's mother lay dying in the Carpenter house. Again the necessary image surged forward out of the immediate past. I saw April Ransom's pale, bruised, unconscious body stretched out on white sheets. A fresh understanding arrived with the image, and I knew that Charlie's father had beaten his wife into unconsciousness and was letting her die. For a week or more, the little boy who grew up to be Charlie Carpenter had lived with his dying mother and the father who killed her, and during those terrible days he had met the Minotaur and been devoured.

I put down my pen. Now I had a book, The Kingdom of Heaven. I wanted to wrap it around me like a blanket. I wanted to vanish into the story as little Charlie (not yet named Charlie) yearned to melt