Robert Tanenbaum - Enemy within

There was a brief, shocked silence. Sister Royal put on a forbearing look, uttered a brief welcome, and started to repeat a version of what she had just told Karp. She had hardly begun, however, when Marlene interrupted. "Look, Sister, let's get down to business. 'Cause let's face it, this is a business you're running here, am I right? A business. You're in business, I'm in business, so let's talk business. I went to school here myself, right? I was a scholarship girl, in the little uniform, you had nuns here then, not like now, 'Yes, Sister,' 'No, Sister,' all that stuff, and chapel. So what I want to say is we want the kid here in school. I mean what else is she going to do all day? Hang out with the bums? I mean I hung out with bums, too, but they were a different kind of bums, because she's not what you could call socially developed, and that's important-social development. Of course, she doesn't shoot people, not that I learned that here, don't get me wrong. She comes from a good home. A good home. I'm her mother, um, so I know. I mean, you're not a mother, let's face it. What we really want… let's talk a figure. I got plenty. I mean, what do they say, money talks, bullshit walks." And here Marlene let out a hideous cackle and swayed in her chair.

The headmistress shot a glance at Karp and said, "Mrs. Karp, perhaps it would be better if we met at a later time…"

"Please, Sister," said Marlene, "it's Mizzzz Ciampi. Not Mrs. Karp. Mrs. Karp is deceased. Mrs. Karp was a wonderful woman, far, far more wonderful than me. Or I. Is that right? She produced my husband, who is a perfect person, as you can see, but my daughter is unfortunately not as perfect, which is why we are doing whatever we are doing. So what are we talking here? You need a new gym? Whatever…" Marlene popped open her bag, spilling stuff all over the desk-keys, cards, crumbled wads of high-denomination currency, and a flat pint of Hennessy. It clunked loudly and spun on the polished wood, the focus of all eyes. Marlene grabbed her checkbook and waved it, the pages flapping in Sister Catharine's face like a slaughtered chicken.

At that point, Lucy sprang to her feet, uttered a phrase in a language no one in the room understood but whose tone was unmistakable, and dashed from the room. Karp shot up, stuck Marlene's purse under one arm, hauled his wife from her chair and stuck her solidly against his opposite hip, and said, "I'm sorry. I'll be in touch," to the headmistress and frog-marched Marlene out of the office and out of the building, she protesting loudly and drunkenly all the way.

On the street, he had a little break because Marlene had to lean against a tree on Ninety-first and be sick, noisily and at some length. Karp dashed out to the avenue and tried to spot his daughter, but she was gone. The dead low points of his life came floating by his inner eye, as they will at such times: the moment he had realized that he was too crippled to play big-time ball; the night his first wife had ditched him; the time his second and present wife had been kidnapped; the time that same wife had been kidnapped again, with his daughter; and now. This one was right up there, a competitor in a tough league.

A metroliner was leaving for New England twenty-two minutes after Lucy arrived at Penn Station, and she took it, paying cash on board for her ticket. The train was crowded, filled with suits tapping laptops and exurban matrons with shopping bags reading paperback novels about shopping. Lucy found a window seat and rested her head against the cool, dusty glass as the train pulled out of the station. Another train was waiting stationary across the platform, and she experienced the common illusion: for an instant she could not tell which train was moving, and this made her think of the science class she had just flunked, and of where she was fleeing-to her best friend, Mary Ma, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Mary was as prodigious in math and physics as Lucy was in languages and had left for MIT in what would have been her junior year in high school. Mary had once used the analogy of the moving trains to explain the theory of relativity to her idiot friend, and thinking of this, Lucy felt tears start in her eyes. Which she suppressed. The train moved into the tunnel, gathering speed. Now she only saw her reflection, ghostly, transparent, and closed her eyes.

In her head, racing thoughts. Lucy knew enough about spiritual practice to understand that she should exercise some control over these because they were agents that helped to convert mere sadness into paralyzing depression and neurosis, but she found herself too tired to make the effort. It was the sort of emptying exhaustion and dryness that allows intelligent people the world over to sit passively in front of televisions watching moronic pap. So Lucy watched the movie in her mind. She would go to Cambridge and start a new life and live in a house with Mary Ma and never have to go to school again. She would make her own money, which would not be difficult for her. She knew people at Harvard, for whom she could be a lab rat; alternatively, she could walk into any international firm or agency and get a job as a simultaneous translator. No problems there. Mary would be delighted to see her. It was just what any hardworking math superstar needed, a neurotic idiotsavant, religious-nut roommate. Mary would, of course, have made her own friends, geeks who spoke in equations, not Cantonese, and how would Lucy fit in there, she who often stumbled on what was seven times eight? Of course, Mary loved her, but just because you loved someone, you didn't necessarily want to have them in your lap. David, same thing, he didn't want her in his lap either, not that he loved her, far from it. Tolerated maybe. She had such a good heart, though, Mary, and Lucy had really done so much for her in the past, wetback that she was. It really wasn't too much to ask, just a place to hang out while she got her life together. But what if she was cold, frightened, rejecting? Mary had that Chinese thing about family.

Lucy opened her eyes. Still darkness, and her ghostly face. The tunnel went on for a long time. She looked around the train, at her fellow passengers. Next to her sat a suburban matron with nicely done blond hair and careful makeup. She was wearing a tan raincoat and a tweed skirt and reading Cosmo. The rack above her was stuffed with shopping bags. She played with her pearls as she read about (Lucy peeked) famous people's descriptions of their best orgasms. Lucy wondered briefly if this woman had any children and what their lives were like, and wondered also if a monster was living inside her, as there was in Lucy's own mother. As there was in most people, she imagined.

She shifted in her seat. The car seemed warmer, more odorous: electricity, oil, damp wool, the perfume of the suburban matron, a heavy tropical scent, like frangipani or mimosa. The light, too, seemed dimmer, more orangy now. Lucy looked at her watch, her cheap watch. It seemed to have stopped. Or maybe time had. Her head throbbed. Her chest felt constricted. Hell must be like this, she thought, a train in an endless tunnel, its cars full of the damned working on laptops and reading magazines about orgasms of other people. She would never get off this train not in her head, not in Boston either. Mary would look at her as at a stranger, a feeble smile, embarrassed introductions to people who did not screw up, who had normal parents, who were normal geniuses, who were not stupid freaks. Stupid freaks. Stupid freak.

Stupidfreakstupidfreakstupidstupidfreakfreakfreakyfreak, the train said. I don't care, an interior voice said over the sound of the rails, I don't care, fuck them, I'll show them, they'll be sorry they treated me like that, I don't need them, I can do it by myself, fuck them all… and the rest of the usual horseshit of adolescent neuroticism, too tedious almost to mention. Here Lucy was fortunate, in that she had been exposed to at least the beginnings of spiritual training, and as the demonic voices built up to a consuming racket, she began, almost instinctively, to pray, and as instinctively chose the simplest prayer in the book, nothing fancy, asking for nothing but mercy, a one-liner. And not silently either, so that the woman next to her said, "Excuse me?"