Chuck Palahniuk - Lullaby
Carl Streator is a solitary widower and a forty-ish newspaper reporter who is assigned to do a series of articles on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In the course of this investigation, he discovers an ominous thread: the presence on the scene of these deaths of the anthology Poems and Rhymes Around the World, all opened to the page where there appears an African chant or “culling song.” This song turns out to be lethal when spoken or even thought in anyone’s direction and once it lodges in Streator’s brain, he finds himself becoming an involuntary serial killer. So he teams up with a real estate broker, one Helen Hoover Boyle, who specializes in selling haunted (or “distressed") houses (wonderfully high turnover) and who lost a child to the culling song years before, for a cross-country odyssey. Their goal is to remove all copies of the book from libraries, lest this deadly verbal virus spread and wipe out human life. Accompanying them on this road trip are Helen’s assistant, Mona Sabbat, an exquisitely earnest Wiccan, and her sardonic eco-terrorist boyfriend, Oyster, who is running a scam involving fake liability claims and business blackmail. Welcome to the new nuclear family.
→ Prologue At first, the new owner pretends he never looked at the living room floor. Never really looked. Not the first time they toured the house. Not when the inspector showed them through it. They’d measured rooms and told the movers where to set the couch and piano, hauled in everything they owned, and never really stopped to look at the living room floor. They pretend.
Then on the first morning they come downstairs, there it is, scratched in the white-oak floor:
GET OUT
Some new owners pretend a friend has done it as a joke. Others are sure it’s because they didn’t tip the movers.
A couple of nights later, a baby starts to cry from inside the north wall of the master bedroom.
→ Chapter 1 The problem with every story is you tell it after the fact. Even play-by-play description on the radio, the home runs and strikeouts, even that’s delayed a few minutes. Even live television is postponed a couple seconds.
Even sound and light can only go so fast
Another problem is the teller. The who, what, where, when, and why of the reporter. The media bias. How the messenger shapes the facts. What Journalists call The Gatekeeper. How the presentation is everything.
The story behind the story.
→ Chapter 2 They ask you just one question. Just before you graduate from journalism school, they tell you to imagine you’re a reporter. Imagine you work at a daily big-city newspaper, and one Christmas Eve, your editor sends you out to investigate a death.
The police and paramedics are there. The neighbors, wearing bathrobes and slippers, crowd the hallway of the slummy tenement. Inside the apartment, a young couple is sobbing beside their Christmas tree. Their baby has choked to death on an ornament.
→ Chapter 3 The muffled thunder of dialogue comes through the walls, then a chorus of laughter. Then more thunder. Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.
The stomp and stomp and stomp of a drum comes down through the ceiling. The rhythm changes. Maybe the beat crowds together, faster or it spreads out, slower, but it doesn’t stop.
Up through the floor, someone’s barking the words to a song. These people who need their television or stereo or radio playing all the time. These people so scared of silence. These are my neighbors. These soundaholics. These quiet-ophobics.
→ Chapter 4 My second crib death assignment is in a concrete-block housing project on the edge of downtown, the deceased slumped in a high chair in the middle of the afternoon while the baby-sitter cried in the bedroom. The high chair was in the kitchen. Dirty dishes were piled in the sink.
Back in the City Room, Duncan, my editor, asks, “Single or double sink?”
Another detail about Duncan is, when he talks, he spits.
→ Chapter 5 The front door swings open, and inside is a woman holding a cell phone to her ear, smiling at me and talking to somebody else.
“Mona,” she says into the phone, “you’ll have to make this quick. Mr. Streator’s just arrived.”
She shows me the back of her free hand, the tiny sparkling watch on her wrist, and says, “He’s a few minutes early.” Her other hand, her long pink fingernails with the tips painted white, with her little black cell phone, these are almost lost in the shining pink cloud of her hair.
→ Chapter 6 Nash, the paramedic, shows me the purple and red bruises on every child, livor mortis, where the oxygenated hemoglobin settles to the lowest part of the body. The bloody froth leaking from the nose and mouth is what the medical examiner calls purge fluids, a natural part of decomposition. People desperate for an answer will look at livor mortis, at purge fluids, even at diaper rash, and assume child abuse.
The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.
→ Chapter 7 During my first cup of coffee, Henderson walks over from the National desk. Some people grab their coats and head for the elevator. Some grab a magazine and head for the bathroom. Other people duck behind their computer screens and pretend to be on the phone while Henderson stands in the center of teh newsroom with his tie loose around his open collar and shouts, “Where the hell is Duncan?”
He yells, “The street edition is going to press, and we need the rest of the damn front page.”
Some people just shrug. I just pick up my phone.
→ Chapter 8 The first paramedic arrived on the scene, the first action he took was to call his sto broker. This paramedic, my friend John Nash, sized up the situation in suite 1 7F of the essman Hotel and put in a sel order for all his shares of Stuart Technologies.
Kash
“They can fire me, okay,” says, “but in the three minutes
~1ade that call, those two in the bed weren’t getting any deader.”
→ Chapter 9 It’s the same William and Mary bureau cabinet. According to the note card taped to the front, it’s black lacquered pine with Persian scenes in silver gilt, round bun feet, and the pediment done up in a pile of carved curls and shells. It has to be the same cabinet. We’d turned right here, walking down a tight corridor of armoires, then turned right again at a Regency press cupboard, then left at a Federal sofa, but here we are again.
Helen Hoover Boyle puts her finger against the silver gilt, the tarnished men and women of Persian court life, and says, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She killed Baker and Penny Stuart. She called them on their cell phones sometime the day before they died. She read them each the culling song.
→ Chapter 10 Henderson catches me hanging my jacket and says, “You call Regent-Pacific Airlines about their crab lice?”
And I say, nobody’s saying anything until a suit is filed.
And Henderson says, “Just so you know you report to me now.” He says, “Duncan’s not just irresponsib1e turns out he’s dead.”
Dead in bed without a mark. No suicide note, no cause of death. His landlord found him and called the paramedics.
→ Chapter 11 There’s the stomp and stomp and stomp of a drum coming down through the ceiling. Through the walls, you hear the Laughter and applause of dead people.
Even in the bathroom, even taking a shower, you can hear talk radio over the hiss of the showerhead, the splash of water in the tub and blasting against the plastic curtain. It’s not that you want everybody dead, but it would be nice to unleash the culling spell on the world. Just to enjoy the fear. After people outlawed loud sounds, any sounds that could harbor a spell, any music or noise that might mask a deadly poem, after that the world would be silent. Dangerous and frightened, but silent.
→ Chapter 12 Nash is at the bar on Third, eating onion dip with his fingers. He sticks two shiny fingers into his mouth, sucking so hard his cheeks cave in. He pulls the fingers out and pinches some more onion dip out of a plastic tub.
I ask if that’s breakfast.
“You got a question,” he says, “you need to show me the money first.” And he puts the fingers in his mouth.
On the other side of Nash, down the bar is some young guy with sideburns, wearing a good pin-striped suit. Next to him is a gal, standing on the bar rail so she can kiss him. He tosses the cherry from his cocktail into his mouth. They kiss. Then she’s chewing. The radio behind the bar is still announcing the school lunch menus.
→ Chapter 13 Back in the newsroom, Wilson from the International desk wants to know if I’ve seen Henderson today. Baker from the books desk says Henderson didn’t call in sick, and he doesn’t answer his phone at home. Oliphant from the Special Features desk: “Streator, you seen this?”
He hands me a tear sheet, an ad that says:
Attention Patrons of the French Salon
It says: “Have you experienced severe bleeding and scarring as result of recent facials?”
The phone number is one I haven’t seen before, and when I a woman answers: “Doogan, Diller and Dunne, Attorneys at Law,” she says.
And I hang up.
→ Chapter 14 According to Architectural Digest, big mansions surrounded by vast estate gardens arid thoroughbred horse farms are really good places to live. According to Town & Country, strands of fat pearls are lustrous. According to Travel & Leisure, a private yacht anchored in the sunny Mediterranean is relaxing.
In the waiting room of the Helen Boyle Real Estate Agency, this is what passes as a big news flash. A real scoop.
On the coffee table, there’s copies of all these high-end magazines. There’s a humpbacked Chesterfield couch upholstered in striped pink silk. The sofa table behind it has long lion legs, their claws gripping glass balls. You have to wonder how much of this furniture came here stripped of its hardware, its drawer pulls and metal details. Sold as junk, it came here and Helen Hoover Boyle put it back together.
→ Chapter 15 Helen Hoover Boyle takes her cell phone out of the green and white purse hanging from the crook of her elbow. She takes out a business card and looks from the card to the phone as she punches in a number, the little green buttons bright in the dim light. Bright green against the pink of her fingernail. The business card has a gold edge.
She presses the phone deep into the side of her pink hair. Into the phone, she says, “Yes, I’m somewhere in your lovely store, and I’m afraid I’ll need some help finding my way out.”
She leans into the note card taped to an armoire twice her height. Into the phone, she says, “I’m facing...,” and she reads, an Adam-style neoclassical armoire with fire-gilded bronze arabesque cartouches.”
→ Chapter 16 Nash isn’t standing at the bar. He’s sitting alone at a little table in the back, in the dark except for a little candle on the table, and I tell him, hey, I got his ten thousand calls on my pager. I ask, what’s so important?
On the table is a newspaper, folded, with the headline saying:
Seven Dead in Mystery Plague
→ Chapter 17 Helen walks up with a wineglass in her hand, just a glimpse of red in the bottom, the glass almost empty.
And Mona says, “Where’d you get that?”
“My drink?” Helen says. She’s wearing a thick coat made of some fur in different shades of brown with white on each tip. It’s open in the front with a powder-blue suit underneath. She sips the last of the wine and says, “I got it off the bar. Over there, next the bowl of oranges and that little brass statue.”
And Mona digs both hands into her own red and black dreadlocks and squeezes the top of her head. She says, “That’s the tar.” She points to the empty glass and says, “You just drank my sacrifice to The Goddess.”
→ Chapter 18 Were and now, me writing this, I’m near Biggs Junction, Oregon. Parked alongside Interstate 84, the Sarge and me have an old fur coat heaped on the shoulder of the road next to our car. The fur coat, spattered with ketchup, circled by flies, it’s our bait.
This week, there’s another miracle in the tabloids.
→ Chapter 19 Everywhere outside the car it was yellow. Yellow to the horizon. Not a lemon yellow, more a tennis-ball yellow. It was the way the ball looks on a bright green tennis court. The world on both sides of the highway, all this one color.
Yellow.
Billowing, foaming big waves of yellow move in the hot wind from the cars going past, spreading from the highway’s gravel shoulder to the yellow hills. Yellow. Throwing yellow light into our car. Helen, Mona, Oyster, me, all of us. Our skin and eyes. The details of the whole world. Yellow.
“Brassica tournefortii,” Oyster says, “Moroccan mustard in full bloom.”
→ Chapter 20 The woman opens her front door, and here are Helen and Ion her front porch, me carrying Helen’s cosmetic case, standing a half-step behind her as Helen points the long pink nail of her index finger and says, “If you can give me fifteen minutes, I can give you a whole new you.”
Helen’s suit is red, but not a strawberry red. It’s more the red of a strawberry mousse, topped with whipped cr?me fraiche and served in a stemmed crystal compote. Inside her pink cloud of hair, her earrings sparkle pink and red in the sunlight.
→ Chapter 21 This wasn’t just one night. It just feels that way. This was every night, through Texas and Arizona, on into Nevada, cutting through California and up through Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana. Every night, driving in a car is the same. Wherever.
Every place is the same place in the dark.
→ Chapter 22 After we’re driving through the Midwest with the radio on some AM station, and a man’s voice says how Dr. Sara Lowenstein was a beacon of hope and morality in the wasteland of modern life. Dr. Sara was a noble, hard-line moralist who refused to accept anything but steadfast righteous conduct. She was a bastion of upright standards, a lamp that shone its light to reveal the evil of this world. Dr. Sara, the man says, will always be in our hearts and souls because her own soul was so strong and so un-
The voice stops.
→ Chapter 23 Centuries ago, sailors on long voyages used to leave a pair of pigs on every deserted island. Or they’d leave a pair of goats.
Either way, on any future visit, the island would be a source of at. These islands, they were pristine. These were home to breeds of birds with no natural predators. Breeds of birds that lived nowhere else on earth. The plants there, without enemies they evolved without thorns or poisons. Without predators and enemies, these islands, they were paradise.
The sailors, the next time they visited these islands, the only things still there would be herds of goats or pigs. Oyster is telling this story.
The sailors called this “seeding meat.”
→ Chapter 24 It the next library, I ask to wait in the car while Helen and Mona go inside and find the book. With them gone, I flip through the pages of Helen’s daily planner. Almost every day is a name, some of them names I know. The dictator of some banana republic or a figure from organized crime. Each name crossed out with a single red slash. The last dozen names I write on a scrap of paper. Between the names are Helen’s notes for meetings, her handwriting scrolled and perfect as jewelry.
→ Chapter 25 Mona rolls the sock off my foot. The stretchy sock insides, the fibers, they peel my scabs off. My crusted blood flakes off onto the floor. The foot is swollen until it’s smooth with all its wrinkles stretched out. My foot, a balloon spotted red and yellow. With a folded towel under it, Mona pours the rubbing alcohol.
The pain’s so instant you can’t tell if the alcohol is boiling hot or ice cold. Sitting on the motel bed, my pant leg rolled up, with Mona kneeling on the carpet at my feet, I grab two handfuls of bedspread and grit my teeth. My back arched, my every muscle bunches tight for a few long seconds. The bedspread’s cold and soaked with my sweat.
→ Chapter 26 Imagine a plague you catch through your ears.
Oyster and his tree-hugging, eco-bullshit, his bio-invasive, apocryphal bullshit. The virus of his information. What used to be a beautiful deep green jungle to me, it’s now a tragedy of English ivy choking everything else to death. The lovely shining black flocks of starlings, with their creepy whistling songs, they rob the nests of a hundred different native birds.
Imagine an idea that occupies your mind the way an army occupies a city.
→ Chapter 27 Imagine if the Chicago fire of 1871 had gone on for six months before anyone noticed. Imagine if the Johnstown flood in 1889 or the 1906 San Francisco earthquake had lasted six months, a year, two years, before anyone paid attention to it.
Building with wood, building on fault lines, building on flood-plains, each era creates its own “natural” disasters.
Imagine a flood of dark green in the downtown of any major city, the of/Ice and condo towers submerged inch by inc/i.
Now, here and now, I’m writing from Seattle. A day, a week, a month late. Who knows how far after the fact. The Sarge and me, we’re still witch-hunting.
Hedera helixseattle, botanists are calling this new variety of English ivy. One week, maybe the planters around the Olympic Professional Plaza, they looked a little overgrown. The ivy was crowding the pansies. Some vines had rooted into the side of the brick facade and were inching up. No one noticed. It had been raining a lot.
→ Chapter 28 If the man opens his front door, and here are Helen and I on his front porch, me carrying Helen’s cosmetic case, standing a half-step behind her as Helen points the long pink nail of her index finger and says, “Oh God.”
She has her daily planner tucked under one arm and says, “My husband,” and she steps back. “My husband would like to witness to you about the promise of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Helen’s suit is yellow, but not a buttercup yellow It’s more the yellow of a buttercup made of gold and pave citrons by Carl Faberge.
The man’s holding a bottle of beer. He’s wearing gray sweat socks with no shoes. His bathrobe hangs open in the front, and inside, he’s wearing a white T-shirt and boxer shorts patterned with little race cars. With one hand, he sticks the beer in his mouth.
→ Chapter 29 The police report doesn’t say how warm my wife, Gina, felt when I woke up that morning. How soft and warm she felt under the covers. How when I turned next to her, she rolled onto er back, her hair fanned out on her pillow. Her head was tipped a little toward one shoulder. Her morning skin smelled warm, the way sunlight looks bouncing up off a white tablecloth in a nice restaurant near the beach on your honeymoon.
Sun came through the blue curtains, making her skin blue. Her lips blue. Her eyelashes were lying across each cheek. Her mouth was a loose smile.
Still half asleep, I cupped my hand behind her neck and tilted her face back and kissed her.
→ Chapter 30 Mona stands at my elbow. She holds a glossy brochure open, pushing it in my face, saying, “Can we go here? Please? Just for a couple hours? Please?”
Photographs in the brochure show people screaming with their hands in the air, riding a roller coaster. Photos show people driving go-carts around a track outlined in old tires. More people are eating cotton candy and riding plastic horses on a merry-go-round. Other people are locked into seats on a Ferris wheel. Along the top of the brochure in big scrolling letters it says: LaughLand, The Family Place.
Except in place of the a’s are four laughing clown faces. A mother, a father, a son, a daughter.
We have another eighty-four books to disarm. That’s dozens more libraries in cities all over the country. Then there’s the grimoire to find. There’s people to bring back from the dead. Or just castrate. Or there’s all of humanity to kill, depending on who you ask.
→ Chapter 31 A mile outside of town, Helen pulls over to the side of the highway. She puts on the car’s emergency flashers. Looking at nothing but her hands, her skintight calfskin driving gloves on the steering wheel, she says, “Get out.”
On the windshield, there are little contact lenses of water. It’s starting to rain.
“Fine,” Oyster says, and jerks his car door open. He says, “Isn’t this what people do with dogs they can’t house-train?”
His face and hands are smeared red with blood. The devil’s face. His shattered blond hair sticks up from his forehead, stiff and red as devil’s horns. His red goatee. In all this red, his eyes are white. It’s not the white of white flags, surrender. It’s the White of hard-boiled eggs, crippled chickens in battery cages, factory farm misery and suffering and death.
→ Chapter 32 The town’s name is Stone River on the map. Stone River, Nebraska. But when the Sarge and I get there, the sign at the city limits is painted over with the name “Shivapuranr.”
Nebraska.
Population 17,000.
In the middle of the street, straddling the center line dashes is a brown and white cow we have to swerve around it. Chewing its cud, the cow doesn’t flinch.
The downtown is two blocks of red-brick buildings. A yellow signal light blinks above the main intersection. A black cow is scratching its side against the metal pole of a stop sign. A white cow eats zinnias out of a window box in front of the post office. Another cow lies, blocking the sidewalk in front of the police station.
→ Chapter 33 The crowds of people shoulder around us, the women in halter tops and men in cowboy hats. People are eating caramel apples on sticks and shaved ice in paper cones. Dust is everywhere. Somebody steps on Helen’s foot and she pulls it back, saying, “I find that no matter how many people I kill, it’s never enough.”
I say, let’s not talk shop.
The ground is crisscrossed with thick black cables. In the darkness beyond the lights, engines burn diesel to make electricity. You can smell diesel and deep-fried food and vomit and powdered sugar.
These days, this is what passes for fun.
→ Chapter 34 Home witches write their spells in runes, secret coded symbols. According to Mona, some witches write backward so the spell can only be read in a mirror. They write spells in spirals, starting in the center of the page and curving outward. Some write like the ancient Greek curse tablets with one line running from left to right, then the next running right to left and the next, left to right. This, they call the boustrophedon form because it mimics the back-and-forth pacing of an ox tied to a tether. To mimic a snake, Mona says, some write each line so it branches in a different direction.
The only rule was, a spell has to be twisted. The more hidden, the more twisted, the more powerful the spell. To witches, the twists themselves are magical. They draw or sculpt the magician od Hephaestus with his legs twisted.
→ Chapter 35 With me driving, Mona sits in the backseat with her arms folded. Helen sits in the front seat next to me, the grimoire open in her lap, lifting each page against her window so she can see sunlight through it. On the front seat between us, her cell phone rings.
At home, Helen says, she still has all the reference books from Basil Frankie’s estate. These include translation dictionaries for Greek, Latin, Sanskrit. There are books on ancient cuneiform writing. All the dead languages. Something in one of these books will let her translate the grimoire. Using the culling spell as a sort of code key, a Rosetta stone, she might be able to translate them all.
And Helen’s cell phone rings.
→ Chapter 36 Instead of the stain on my apartment ceiling, there’s a big patch of white. Pushpinned to my front door, there’s a note from the landlord. Instead of noise, there’s total quiet. The carpet is crunchy with little bits of plastic, broken-down doors and flying buttresses. You can hear the filament buzzing in each lightbulb. You can hear my watch tick.
In my refrigerator, the milk’s gone sour. All that pain and suffering wasted. The cheese is huge and blue with mold. A package of hamburger has gone gray inside its plastic wrap. The eggs look okay, but they’re not, they can’t be, not after this long. All the effort and misery that went into this food, and it’s all going in the garbage. The contributions of all those miserable cows and veals, it gets thrown out.
The note from my landlord says the white patch on the ceiling
is a primer coat. It says when the stain stops bleeding through, they’ll paint the whole ceiling. The heat’s on high to dry the primer faster. Half the water in the toilet’s evaporated. The plants are dry as paper. The trap under the kitchen sink’s half empty and sewer gas is leaking back up. My old way of life, everything I call home, smells of shit.
→ Chapter 37 The Gartoller Estate in the moonlight, an eight-bedroom Georgian-style house with seven bathrooms, four fireplaces, all of it’s empty and white. All of it’s echoing with each step across the polished floors. The house is dark without lights. It’s cold without furniture or rugs.
“Here,” Helen says. “We can do it here, where no one will see us.” She flicks a light switch inside a doorway.
The ceiling goes up so high it could be the sky. Light from a looming chandelier the size of a crystal weather balloon, the light turns the tall windows into mirrors. The light throws our shadows out behind us on the wood floor. This is the fifteen-hundred-square-foot ballroom.
→ Chapter 38 At the offices of Helen Boyle Realty, the doors are locked, and when I knock, Mona shouts through the glass, “We’re not open.”
And I shout, I’m not a customer.
Inside, she’s sitting at her computer, keyboarding something. Every couple keystrokes, Mona looks back and forth between the keys and the screen. On the screen, at the top in big letters, it says, “Resume.”
The police scanner says a code nine-twelve.
→ Chapter 39 Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn’t see their thoughts as belonging to them. When they
had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving them an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave.
Athena was telling them to fall in love.
Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy.
Between television and radio and Helen Hoover Boyle’s magic spells, I don’t know what I really want anymore. If I even believe myself, I don’t know.
→ Chapter 40 Cash is eating a bowl of chili. He’s at a back table in the bar on Third Avenue. The bartender is slumped forward on the bar, his arms still swinging above the barstools. Two men and two women are facedown at a booth table. Their cigarettes still burn in an ashtray, only half burned down. Another man is laid out in the doorway to the bathrooms. Another man is dead, stretched out on the pool table, the cue still clutched in his hands. Behind the bar, there’s a radio blaring static in the kitchen. Somebody in a greasy apron is facedown on the grill among the hamburgers, the grill popping and smoking and the sweet, greasy smoke from the guy’s face rolling out along the ceiling.
The candle on Nash’s table is the only light in the place.
→ Chapter 41 This is after the police read me my rights. After they cuff my hands behind my back and drive me to the precinct. This is after the first patrolman arrived at the scene, looked at the dead bodies, and said, “Sweet, suffering Christ.” After the paramedics rolled the dead cook off the grill, took one look at his fried face, and puked in their own cupped hands. This is after the police gave me my one phone call, and I called Helen and said I was sorry, but this was it. I was arrested. And Helen said, “Don’t worry. I’ll save you.” After they fingerprinted me and took a mug shot. After they confiscated my wallet and keys and watch. They put my clothes, my brown sport coat and blue tie, in a plastic bag tagged with my new criminal number. After the police walked me down a cold, cinder-block hallway, naked into a cold concrete room. After they leave me alone with a beefy, buzz-cut old officer with hands the
size of a catcher’s mitt. Alone in a room with nothing but a desk, my bag of clothes, and a jar of petroleum jelly.
→ Chapter 42 Everywhere, words are mixing. Words and lyrics and dialogue are mixing in a soup that could trigger a chain reaction.
Maybe acts of God are just the right combination of media junk thrown out into the air. The wrong words collide and call up an earthquake. The way rain dances called storms, the right combination of words might call down tornadoes. Too many advertising jingles commingling could be behind global warming. Too many television reruns bouncing around might cause hurricanes. Cancer. AIDS.
In the taxi, on my way to the Helen Boyle real estate offices, I see newspaper headlines mixing with hand-lettered signs. Leaflets stapled to telephone poles mix with third-class mail. The songs of street buskers mix with Muzak mix with street hawkers mix with talk radio.
→ Chapter 43 In room 151 at the New Continuum Medical Center, the floor sparkles. The linoleum tile snaps and pops as I walk across it, across the shards and slivers of red and green, yellow and blue. The drops of red. The diamonds and rubies, emeralds and sapphires. Both Helen’s shoes, the pink and the yellow, the heels are hammered down to mush. The ruined shoes left in the middle of the room.
Helen stands on the far side of the room, in a little lamplight, just the edge of some light from a table lamp. She’s leaning on a cabinet made of stainless steel. Her hands are spread against the steel. She presses her cheek there.
My shoes snap and crush the colors on the floor, and Helen turns.
→ Chapter 44 When I was twenty years o1d, I married a woman named Gina, and that was supposed to be the rest of my life.. A year later, we had a daughter named Katrin, and she was supposed to be the rest of my life. Then Gina and Katrin died and I ran and became Carl Streator. And I became a journalist And for twenty more years, that was my life.
After that, well, you already know what happened.
How long I held on to Helen Hoover Boyle I don’t know. After long enough, it was just her body. It was so long she’d stopped bleeding. By then, the broken parts of Patrick Boyle, still cradled in her arms, they’d thawed enough to start bleeding.
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