from Rigoletto, romantic and alien at once: their sound track. If he went home? It would be the end of him and Izzie, he didn’t fool himself about that. And other changes: change would follow like falling dominoes. Maybe his mom would never find another job; things like that happened every day. Then he’d be working full time. Living at home. Night school. And then? What could he shoot for, what would he end up as, best-case scenario? A small-time lawyer like Mr. Beaman? A nauseating prospect. He suddenly knew one thing for sure: he wanted the big time. Perhaps the desire had been in him from the very beginning, but distrusted, denied, disowned, buried. He wanted it, more than Mrs. Smith, Miss Brown, the whole town put together. He remembered then a quotation from Nietzsche, one he’d highlighted a few days before, meaning to raise it with Professor Uzig: The great epochs of our life are the occasions when we gain the courage to rebaptize our evil qualities as our best qualities. Ambition wasn’t necessarily an evil quality; still, he had no need for the professor’s explanation now.
“I’ll think about it,” he said.
“Think about it?” said Izzie, disappointed, even shocked, as though he’d just revealed some unsuspected and damning flaw. Again: if only that had been Grace’s line.
“What do you want me to say?”
Izzie said: “Say yes.”
He said yes.
They drank. The brief exposure to air had turned the Romanee-Conti 1917 into something thin, tasteless, not wine at all.
Peter Abrahams
Crying Wolf
22
“God is refuted but the devil is not”-inevitable conclusion of Nietzschean philosophy?
What the fuck? Freedy almost said it out loud. Bad idea, of course, with him at the spyhole and big sister, little sister, and the college kid on the other side, like in a dollhouse. Freedy knew about dollhouses because there’d been one in his room, his room with the wall paintings and the “Little Boy” poem, when he was very young. Some theory of his mother’s about boys’ toys and girls’ toys, making boys into girls, world peace, more of her crazy shit. He’d smashed it to bits, of course, but only when he’d gotten a little older. Before that, he’d kind of played with it, reaching in, moving the tiny people around, maybe undressing that straw-haired one in the red-and-white checked skirt, and the boy one in the blue overalls, and then… His memory got hazy. But the point was he knew about dollhouses, knew about looking down on the world like a giant, hey! — like God. It was pretty cool.
Like God. Amazing.
Pretty cool, to stare through the spyhole, watch a whole kind of movie happening. Hey! — God the movie nut. Amazing. But there was a downside, he knew that already: not an easy job, what with all the information, coming so fast, so confusing, even for someone with his kind of brainpower. He felt a moment’s passing respect for God: who’d want to do this forever?
Confusing things, like some situation involving the college kid, impossible to understand. Home equity loans, tuition, rooms, boards, seven grand, a lost checkbook. Didn’t add up.
Unless that seven grand was lying around somewhere. Now that would be nice. Freedy was thinking how nice it would be-seven grand, three hundred per laptop, how many laptops was that? — when the college kid looked up, looked him right in the fucking eye. Or almost; his gaze slid up the wall a foot or two, fixed on something Freedy couldn’t see.
But a close call.
And then right away, another: he had to sneeze. What was going on? Did he have allergies all of a sudden, like those women whose pools he’d cleaned in California? He put his finger under his nose the way you were supposed to. That worked, or almost worked: the sneeze that came was tiny, made no sound at all.
Except little sister got a funny look on her face. Smash. Ka-boom. He could be through that wall in a second.
But the moment passed. Freedy’s muscles relaxed, just hung on his bones, heavy and still. Felt good.
Felt good, but that didn’t help him deal with the confusing things. Confusing things, like big sister and little sister were swatting flies or something, and then: Leo. Leo Uzig. This name kept popping up. Professor. On his laptop. Taught a course his mother thought Ronnie was taking. Ronnie? How could that be? Had a wife. Helen Uzig. A wife with money. Wife made him… made him what? What was that? Shave… shave off that-some word he didn’t catch and then two words he did- walrus mustache.
Something walrus mustache. The something word sounded a bit like ridiculous, but wasn’t. He tried to recall it exactly, gave up.
But walrus mustache: he’d caught that.
Walrus.
Plus it turned out Leo Uzig was famous. And his wife had money.
Confusing: but Freedy was an amazing person. Why? Because, despite all the confusion, with all this information whipping by, the moment he heard that Leo Uzig’s wife had money, what was the first thing he thought of? Yes. Money. Specifically, the envelope he’d steamed open, so wisely, it turned out, with the two C’s inside.
It was all coming together. Everything had a meaning. He’d heard that. He’d also heard that nothing meant anything. So what? None of that mattered. What mattered was his future. Pool company. Florida. Stick, stick, stick. And as for getting his hands on big sister and little sister, showing them what a man was, a real man, a buff, diesel, andro-popping, meth-tweaking fuckin’ animal like him? That would be nice.
Meanwhile, he was missing stuff. Action central, Freedy, action central. Action central, like the room with all the monitors, where you could watch everything coming together.
Someone else’s name came up, a name even stranger than Uzig; sounded Chinese maybe, Ni Chi. One of them, Uzig or Ni Chi, was a fake, but before Freedy could sort that out, the dolls in the dollhouse were drinking and talking about money again.
Fine with him, except that the music started up, with that horrible singing.
Turned out that big sister and little sister had money, possibly from hitting the Powerball number. Seven grand meant nothing to them, chicken feed. Why would it, you hit the Powerball number? Maybe this was a celebration. That would explain the wild look on big sister’s face-she was something, drop-dead, fuck-you and wild. Was she a little drunk too? Or a lot. She dropped the bottle; it shattered on that thick purple rug with the blue flowers, but none of them seemed to notice.
And then. Whoa. Kidnapping? A million dollars? They were afraid of kidnappers, because of the Powerball score? No, no no. They… they weren’t afraid of kidnappers-they were planning a kidnapping of their own! To get their hands on the Powerball money? And kidnapping who, exactly? That had to be important.
What was this? They were planning to kidnap one of themselves? Which one? Little sister? Big sister? Before he could get a handle on that, they shifted to the home equity thing again. Out came another bottle. More breaking glass. Were they all stoked on drugs or something? What drugs? Freedy wanted to know.
Something was going down. Big sister and little sister were hot. They were physical. Couldn’t keep still. Freedy could see that. The college kid, he was the still one. Dragging his feet about something or other. A wimp, of course, and so breakable in two. First Freedy would let him have a good one, right in the gut. Then A million dollars wasn’t much money?
No victim? No crime?
Big sister? They were going to kidnap big sister? Maybe yes, maybe no. A strange kind of kidnapping. Big sister was… going to hide out right here, down in the dollhouse? Did he get that right?
And then what? Little sister picks up the money?
Ka-boom? Big sister said ka-boom, the exact same word that had been on his mind at the exact same
