CHAPTER 33
I spent most of the five-minute rest I gave myself from Brahma in the bathroom, wiping my neck and arms with a steaming washrag and staring at my stunned face in the mirror. Brahma’s life story-what I’ve heard of it-is stranger than anything I ever imagined, and I have a sense that it will only get more so. But is he telling the truth? Am I learning the genesis of a murderer? Or is he merely playing me for a fool, as he did so expertly with Dr. Lenz?
I don’t think so. A small voice in my mind is telling me to call Daniel Baxter-or even Lenz himself-but I am not ready to do that. Having brought Brahma to the point that he wants to pour out his twisted past to “Erin,” I must push on to the end.
Sitting back down at the computer, I pull on the headset and take a long pull from a fresh Tab. On the screen are the last sentences I spoke:
ERIN› Are you still here, Max?
MAXWELL› Yes.
ERIN› You haven’t scared me off yet. Let’s go.
MAXWELL› Go?
ERIN› I’m ready to hear the rest of your story.
MAXWELL› But we were discussing you.
ERIN› You told me a secret, I told you one. It’s your turn again.
MAXWELL› Such children we are. Very well. Where was I?
ERIN› Incest. Your father married a woman in America for her money and position, while his sister-your mother-ran off to Germany and gave birth to you during the war.
MAXWELL› Skip ahead six years. Richard had achieved his childhood dream. He was a prominent psychiatrist in one of America’s greatest cities. His wife had money but he earned plenty of his own. Yet he had one regret. The Gorgon had no intention of inhibiting her social life with the drudgery of rearing a child. So Richard lost himself in his work, and became more renowned and controversial with each passing year. His approach was simple. He encouraged people to accept their natures. He used Freud and Jung and the rest to legitimize so-called “aberrant” behavior. I find a humorous parallel with a maxim of the computer industry: “That’s not a bug, it’s a feature.”
Richard relieved his rather exotic sexual needs away from home in a variety of ways, but he managed to stay clear of both the press and the police. When Catherine appeared on his doorstep (the old family brownstone, now fantastically refurbished) with a six-year-old boy at her side, he was stunned. I was a mirror image of him. Dark-haired, pale-skinned, classically beautiful. Mother explained the similarities with the fiction that I was Richard’s “nephew.” To explain my fatherless existence, Catherine told a harrowing tale of an impulsive marriage to a young German soldier who was quickly killed on the Russian front, then three terrible years in a displaced persons camp with Uncle Karl. The D.P. camp was real enough. The cold there lodged in my bones like tumors of ice. Catherine also revealed that I suffered from hemophilia, the same type Richard had. This made the Gorgon vaguely suspicious, but since hemophilia is passed down through females only, her suspicions were allayed.
When Richard and Catherine were finally alone, Mother confessed the truth. There was never any German soldier. I was Richard’s son, though I did not know it. Half mad from exhaustion, Mother told Richard she’d managed to survive only by vowing to deliver me to him before she died. In her eyes Richard saw the glazed apartness that had lighted his father’s eyes shortly before he shot himself.
Sweeping aside the Gorgon’s opposition, Richard took us into his home. Tension between the two women grew quickly, and one cold morning Richard found Catherine dead in her bed. She’d taken an overdose of morphine from his medical bag. She lay in state in the house for two days, resting in a bronze coffin, her delicate hands folded across her still breasts like those of a fallen martyr. I did not leave her side except to urinate, and I ate no food at all. Nor did I sleep. When Catherine’s body passed into the crematorium, I collapsed and had to be admitted to the hospital.
When Richard announced that he would legally adopt his “nephew,” the Gorgon’s lack of opposition surprised him. He didn’t realize that I-without Catherine-was the answer to the Gorgon’s prayers as well as his own. I freed her forever from the pressure to bear a child. Yet things did not turn out quite as she hoped.
In me, Richard had gained more than a son. For what was I but a genetic reconstitution of himself and his sister? The male and female halves united in one being. I was his father reborn. He educated me in the manner he had enjoyed before the Crash-private tutors focusing on the hard sciences-and I did not disappoint. As I surpassed each new expectation, Richard came to realize that his sister had been right. No other woman could have loved him as she did, or given him such a child. He came to believe that fate was acting through our bloodline to bring about a higher order of humanity. Without even being conscious of it, he began to eulogize Catherine as a saint.
As the years passed, the Gorgon grew more resentful of me. From the beginning she’d had suspicions too deep to put a name to, and one night, after consuming a staggering amount of gin, she stumbled upstairs to Richard’s private bedroom and confronted him. She disparaged my mother in a long tirade. She’d done this before, but for some reason, on this night, Richard snapped. He told the Gorgon the truth. At first she misinterpreted, shouting that she’d always known I was a bastard, that Catherine’s “dead German soldier” was a lie to hide her whoredom. When she finally comprehended the true state of affairs and began wailing about “that demon child,” Richard lifted her off her feet, carried her to the second floor landing, and threw her over the rail to the marble floor below.
I was fourteen then, and I saw it happen. The shouting had drawn me to the head of the stairs. Richard was terrified, not that I would report him to the police, but that he might have lost me forever by committing murder before my eyes. I remember my reaction to this day. I said, “It’s about time you did something about that shrew, Uncle.”
Do you think me cold, Erin?
In the silence of the hanging question, I force myself to take no position at all, to draw no moral line that might stop Brahma’s flood tide of confession.
ERIN› It’s almost like a film. I see it all happening in my mind’s eye. Is it real? Really real?
MAXWELL› Absolutely. That night, Richard took me into his study to try to explain what had happened. For once, he found himself at a loss for words. He realized he had reached the point where he must risk all-either gain a son or lose me forever. He told me the truth. He was not my uncle but my father. Uncle AND father. He told me of the forbidden union between himself and his sister, how through that sacral/ sexual union an immeasurable strength and talent had been created-me.
We had always felt an intense kinship, partly because we were so similar, but also because of our shared disease. During that hour in the study our bond was consecrated. We vowed to stand together on the matter of the Gorgon’s “accidental” death, and from that moment forward shared a conviction that we were beyond moral constraint. I was reborn that night, Erin. Incest and murder were my nativity.
ERIN› You were fourteen when this happened?
MAXWELL› Yes. I had wished this thing to be real for so long, and suddenly it was. It had never seemed possible that I’d been sired by some anonymous German soldier too stupid or unlucky to survive a war. Of _course_ my father was a renowned psychiatrist. If I was a little too ready to see myself as the
Despite my determination to remain calm, I clench my right fist in triumph. Drewe’s theory looks more likely with each passing minute.
ERIN› So you _are_ a doctor. I had a feeling you were.
