Jonathan Nasaw - Fear itself

“Tony Guglielmino. No wonder I struck out with four-one-one.”

“Whoever did this is a real wizard. So what we need now is a wizard of our own. The best one I know of is Ben Wing, with the Nerd Squad in San Jose. I left a message for him to call me when he gets in. That’ll probably be around noon, our time-if you’d like, we can make it a three-way.”

“Yes, please, a thr-I mean, a conference call would be great.”

“Oh, you’re no fun,” said Davies.

“You’d be surprised,” said Linda.

“Here’s to the hair of the dog.” Pender raised his recently refilled glass.

“Ed, the fucking dog is bald by now.” Two o’clock in the afternoon, and by Sid’s count it was Pender’s fourth drink of the day-one Jim Beam on the rocks at the airport bar in Monterey, a Bloody Mary on the connecting flight to San Francisco, and now, after receiving the call from Linda about the disappearing PWSPD Association, another Jim Beam at the airport bar in SFO.

“Don’t nag me, man-I’m feeling very vulnerable.”

“I know.”

“I was being facetious.”

“The hell you were.” Sid reached across the too-high, too-small round pedestal table, the kind you find only in airport bars, to give Pender’s beret a sharp sideways tug. “There, much better.”

“What was that all about?”

“If you insist on wearing a brown beret with a plaid sport jacket, the least you can do is adjust it properly.”

“I was going for jaunty.” Pender glanced at his drink and seemed surprised to find it half empty. “You know what doesn’t make sense?”

“I can think of a few things. What did you have in mind?”

“Your whole life, they tell you clean up after your mistakes. You break it, you fix it. Then you reach a certain age, you screw up, and now it’s ‘Get the hell outta here, pops. Go home, grab a nap, we’ll take it from here.’”

“I believe that’s covered in the book of Ecclesiastes,” said Sid. “To everything there is a season. One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh. It’s the way of the world, Sparky-you might as well get used to it.”

Pender made a well-I’ll-be-damned face. “Since when did you start reading the Bible?”

“Since right after Esther died.”

“Did it help?”

“Turns out there’s a lot of good stuff in there-you ought to try it sometime.”

“You know, I just might,” mused Pender, looking down at his glass, which had somehow emptied itself again. “I just goddamn might.”

“Excuse me, sir?” It was the female flight attendant-all legs and smile.

Sid took off his reading glasses and looked up from the in flight magazine; there were still five minutes remaining before takeoff and he’d already read everything in it that wasn’t about shopping. “Yes, dear?”

“Your friend asked me to give you this.” A brown paper bag from the gift shop.

“My friend?” As far as Sid knew, Pender had excused himself to use the terminal rest room before boarding-the airplane toilet was yet another modern invention that hadn’t been designed for men his size. “Are you sure you have the right guy?”

The stewardess looked around the first-class compartment to see if there were any other little old men wearing blue blazers and gray toupees. Seeing none, she nodded. “He said he marked a passage for you. He also asked could you please pick up his clubs in baggage claim when we get to Dulles?”

Sid reached into the paper bag and pulled out a leather-covered, pocket-sized Holy Bible. It was black, with gilt-edged pages and a gold silk ribbon sewn into the binding. He opened it to the page marked by the ribbon and saw that Pender had circled a passage in Ecclesiastes; the print, however, was too small for Sid to make out, even with his glasses on.

“Would you mind reading that for me?” he asked, handing the Good Book back to the stewardess.

“Of course.” This was first class, after all. “It’s Ecclesiastes…chapter, lemme see, looks like chapter nine, verse ten:

“Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.”

You lie in the dark long enough, you start to make your peace with loss, with loneliness, with pain and regret and the shame of having wet yourself and the fear of knowing you’re about to die. You make your peace with all that and it’s like a headache after a couple of aspirin: you know it’s in there, it just doesn’t hurt anymore.

What Dorie missed most of all was her house. She wasn’t proud of that, and she definitely didn’t want to examine the meaning of it too closely, but that’s what it boiled down to for her. Not her friends, not her painting, and not even her on-again-off-again lover Rafael (a fine-looking Big Sur carpenter who would have made a great poster boy for Peter Pan syndrome), but rather a fifty-five-year-old frame house nestled under a live oak at least twice its age. In her mind, she went through it room by room, stood like a ghost in every doorway, looked out from every window in every season. It was hard to imagine a stranger living in it after she was gone. I should have made a will, she thought. Left it to some starving painter.

It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust when the lights finally came on. The room was obviously a basement; a tall man dressed all in black was padding across the cement floor. Dorie, still on her side, still hog-tied, avoided looking up at his face, instead keeping her eyes trained on his black-slippered feet as he approached. When her glance did begin traveling upward involuntarily, there was something disturbingly familiar in his easy, Clint Eastwood, backward-leaning slouching walk and the way his long-fingered hands dangled loosely at his sides.

Who are you? was Dorie’s last thought before a glimpse of the Kabuki mask covering his face propelled her into an alternate universe where there were no thoughts, only wordless terror welling up from somewhere deep inside, in the dark region of the brain stem where the lizard-self still ruled, and the human mind never ventured.

When it worked, when it all came together, there was a rare quality to the fear displayed by a phobic confronted with the object of his or her phobia, a purity and intensity to which your average Joe or Josie could never aspire. At such moments, the emotional closeness between Simon and his victim/partner made him feel the way other people seemed to feel when making love, even when his victim/partner was a male; when it was a naked female, any naked female, his sense of involvement was so acute as to be almost unbearable.

With Dorie, however, the relationship was both enhanced and skewed by the unfamiliar presence of a third party-the lurid Kabuki mask. Wearing it took Simon outside himself, somehow. It was as if he were seeing himself approach through her eyes and hearing the whispery rasp of his slippers on the rough cement, the buzz of the overhead fluorescents, and her own shallow panting through her ears. He felt the shock down to his bones when she saw the mask; when her terror peaked, when her thoughts shut down, he knew, and understood.

He was even glad for her when her vasovagal reflex kicked in, causing her to lose consciousness. He was glad for himself as well-the connection was too intense to be endured for extended periods, and it wasn’t until it had been broken that Simon realized he was in a state of extreme arousal.

And with that realization came the release. As always, the premature climax was unsatisfying and anticlimactic-a shameful, irrelevant spasm, a dribble and a blush instead of a gush and a roar.