‘I bet Coca-Cola is training geese over northern Montana right now to spell their name,’ Jem contributed. Ah, my little luftmensch, Giggy thought proudly as she poked her nose beneath the Panamanian end table.
Jem was sure that the popularity of the chaise had something to do with the crime committed against Robert. Beautiful Robert, he revived, insouciant Robert, his brackenberry slip of a tongue, his pale smooth flesh like the cream of Holsteins, his eyelids as if brushed by the deepest of Libyan pollen. Soon a veritable diadem of tears began to drip silently onto Jem’s lap. Before Robert had become a victim, Giggy had nicknamed him ‘le petit communiste,’ after the photo by Pierre et Gilles of the milk-skinned Slav with false eyebrows. But this connection had become impossible to maintain ever since rectangles of the young man’s taut flesh had been so meticulously stripped off his body – sections of thighs, ass, chest, arms, neck, even face: primarily the cheeks, chin and forehead, but also a bit of one ear. The sado-masochistic enactment of a blazon. His healthiest pieces of new flesh, those that were not bandaged, ran in rough patches across his thighs and lower abdomen. They reminded Giggy of winter sunburn, smoked salmon, the luminescent apricot chiffon so popular at Midwestern weddings in the 1970s. Initially she had found herself hesitant to tend to these wounds. Jem, conversely, remained committed, inspired by the sensitivity of his partner’s torso. He wanted to take pictures of the damage with Robert’s camera, but he recognized that the passion carried the risk of being psychologically abusive. Mental relaxation was still as important as physical relaxation for the man – not that there was any worry about the latter, thought Jem, since he was almost fully immobilized.
Giggy had taken on the responsibility of turning her nephew’s lover from back to belly or belly to back three times a day, and this new intimacy had been enough to increase her attachment to him, although she dared not nickname her little pumpkin again. There was something in these actions, she realized, that supported a force greater than she could articulate. The regularity and repetition of the assistance created a habit of giving in Giggy’s life that she had not experienced before. It felt to her like a sort of primordial nurturing that lifted her beyond any daily woes. It was as if helping a person with his sorrows, not simply lightening his pain but sharing in it, experiencing the pain felt by another as if for a moment it were one’s own, worked to lessen the discomforts of one’s selfish life. It was, she conjectured, perhaps most akin to what soldiers felt when nursing their companions in battle – a love not only sanctioned but heightened through pain. Spartan.
When she helped Robert shift off his back onto his side, and then let him rest for a moment before turning him onto his belly, her seeing his discomfort was also her participating in it and thus making it something less extreme and lonely than it otherwise would have been. At these moments, Robert’s agony became a shared experience that allowed Giggy to step out of her own identity as the matriarch of the Winter Garden and into a softer role that gave her character roundness. Just as it is that fleeting emotions first attract saints to their calling, so, too, did this experience introduce Giggy into a community that pulsated beyond the patterns and conceits of her town or even those of society in general. It was no less than what the Victorian philosopher Violet Paget had described, as she tended her ailing brother, as the transhistorical empathy that allowed one to feel comfortable in being companioned by the past.
Many called the crime ‘murder’ even though Robert was not dead because, in one of those startling coincidences that so disconcert movie executives, a news story had recently made the rounds describing a murder case in which the methods used were similar to those practiced on Robert, down to the suspected scalpels, the absence of anaesthetic and even the size of the fleshly strips, which ranged in thickness from that of onion skin to a quarter of an inch on the juicier parts of the body. Based on this information and the fact that the victim in the article had died a quick death, the doctors who looked at Robert’s patchwork anatomy claimed that he too was bound to die, unless one could grow back skin, layers and layers and layers of skin. ‘And there isn’t enough time for that, is there?’ the community had chirped into their phones with the harmony of crickets, ‘There just isn’t enough time.’ Cora, who had become understandably defensive in recent weeks as she was more and more frequently murmured to be the prime suspect, had also grown infuriated by this habit among locals of turning every statement they made, every insinuation, every accusation, into a question. It was as if their incessant use of the interrogative somehow emptied their accusations of responsibility, the question mark becoming an upturned ladle out of which poured all the bilious pleasure they found in another’s discomfort, leaving nothing but the empty wooden spoon of a question mark. But this could still be painful enough if rapped against the widow’s peak or at that softer rise of flesh just behind the ear.
Having massaged their conclusions into unanimity, the doctors eventually accepted that the patient would at least die more sympathetically at the Winter Garden than if he were kept in the hospital, and so they asked him if he wished Giggy to take him home. One blink – yes; two blinks – no. The family made its procession from the hospital to the villa: first the ambulance with Robert and Jem in the back, then Giggy and Chappy in the Bricklin – the gangly whippet rather more twitchy than usual – and finally Cora pedalling furiously in their dusty wake. She was soon passed by a clutch of reporters who caught up with Giggy and the whippet just before they entered their home. Unwilling to carry on a lengthy conversation while Robert had yet to be comfortably set up, she agreed to make a statement. The whip-pet, true to his hunting ancestors, remained silent but frenetic. The breed may be admired for covering a maximum of distance with an economy of energy but, when not racing, Chappy used his excess in any way he could.
‘He’s alive,’ Giggy pronounced with regard to Robert, after some thought, ‘but, as Théophile Gautier might have said, he’s not living.’ They all understood what she meant of course, but this did not stop them from misconstruing the epigram in a way that encouraged false speculations: ‘“Not Living” Reports Close Friend.’
‘If Coca-Cola is in northern Montana,’ the woman interrupted her memorial self, ‘I bet they wish their name was Vova-Vola. So much easier to spell with geese.’ She found her hearing aid behind the corydalis lutea, screwed it back where it belonged, and then snatched a drag of her menthol to show how seriously she was thinking. The final distant hints of daylight glimmered off the long and extremely slender canoe that the professor and his assistants, almost invisible in the offing, were tugging into the pines. The sky had donned a blue so deep that Giggy knew that, should she turn away for even a moment, the night would rise up and steal in to replace it. The moment – despite being imbued with her love for Jem and the maternal altruism she had discovered through the pleasure of Robert’s pain – was as ephemeral as the colour of time. The deep blue survived only through her most recent memory, her will. With this realization of power, she felt herself destined to blink, and so she did … and five stars the colour of bluebells surfaced above the untroubled lake. A black velvet curtain had fallen on the day.
The constable would not be arriving today. Jem rose to prepare the barbecue for supper. He had promised himself that this week he would master the rotary grill. As her nephew teetered across the gazebo under the weight of a can of lighter fluid, Giggy made her way inside to rotate the victim. Without surfacing from her somnolence, Cora had formed a pillow out of the journal entries that Dr. Amicable had given the household to read. Robert Shakely, poor boy, had died here on Lake Wachannabee, and part of the professor’s project involved his search for the factory