Chuck Palahniuk - Lullaby

Our footsteps echo against the concrete floor. The steel roof hums with rain.

And she says, «Don't you feel, somehow, buried in history?»

With her pink fingernails, from out of her yellow and white bag, she takes a ring of keys. She makes a fist around the keys so only the longest and sharpest juts out between her fingers.

«Do you realize that anything you can do in your lifetime will be meaningless a hundred years from now?» she says. «Do you think, a century from now, that anyone will even remember the Stuarts?»

She looks from one polished surface to the next, tabletops, dressers, doors, all with her reflection floating across them.

«People die,» she says. «People tear down houses. But furniture, fine, beautiful furniture, it just goes on and on, surviving everything.»

She says, «Armoires are the cockroaches of our culture.»

And without breaking her stride, she drags the steel point of the key across the polished walnut face of a cabinet. The sound is as quiet as anything sharp slashing something soft. The scar is deep and shows the raw cheap pine under the veneer.

She stops in front of a wardrobe with beveled-glass doors.

«Think of all the generations of women who looked in that mirror,» she says. «They took it home. They aged in that mirror. They died, all those beautiful young women, but here's the wardrobe, worth more now than ever. A parasite surviving the host. A big fat predator looking for its next meal.»

In this maze of antiques, she says, are the ghosts of everyone who has ever owned this furniture. Everyone rich and successful enough to prove it. All of their talent and intelligence and beauty, outlived by decorative junk. All the success and accomplishment this furniture was supposed to represent, it's all vanished.

She says, «In the vast scheme of things, does it really matter how the Stuarts died?»

I ask, how did she find out about the culling spell? Was it because her son, Patrick, died?

And she just keeps walking, trailing her fingers along the carved edges, the polished surfaces, marring the knobs and smearing the mirrors.

It didn't take much digging to find out how her husband died. A year after Patrick, he was found in bed, dead without a mark, without a suicide note, without a cause.

And Helen Boyle says, «How was your editor found?»

Out of her yellow and white purse, she takes a gleaming silver little pair of pliers and a screwdriver, so clean and exact they could be used in surgery. She opens the door on a vast carved and polished armoire and says, «Hold this steady for me, please.»

I hold the door and she's busy on the inside for a moment until the door's latch and handle fall free and hit the floor at my feet.

A minute later, and she has the door handles, and the gilded bronze ormolu, she's taken everything metal except the hinges and put them in her purse. Stripped, the armoire looks crippled, blind, castrated, mutilated.

And I ask, why is she doing this?

«Because I love this piece,» she says. «But I'm not going to be another one of its victims.»

She closes the doors and puts her tools away in her purse.

«I'll come back for it after they cut the price down to what it cost when it was new,» she says. «I love it, but I'll only have it on my own terms.»

We walk a few steps more, and the corridor breaks into a forest of hall trees and hat racks, umbrella stands and coat racks. In the distance beyond that is another wall of breakfronts and armoires.

«Elizabethan,» she says, touching each piece. «Tudor … Eastlake … Stickley …»

When someone takes two old pieces, say a mirror and a dresser, and fastens them together, she explains that experts call the product a «married» piece. As an antique, it's considered worthless.

When someone takes two pieces apart, say a buffet and a hutch, and sells them separately, experts call the pieces «divorced.»

«And again,» she says, «they're worthless.»

I say how I've been trying to find every copy of the poems book. I say how important it is that no one ever discovers the spell. After what happened to Duncan, I swear I'm going to burn all my notes and forget I ever knew the culling spell.

«And what if you can't forget it?» she says. «What if it stays in your head, repeating itself like one of those silly advertising songs? What if it's always there, like a loaded gun waiting for someone to annoy you?»

I won't use it.

«Hypothetically speaking, of course,» she says, «what if I used to swear the same thing? Me. A woman you're saying accidentally killed her own child and husband, someone who's been tortured by the power of this curse. If someone like me eventually began using the song, what makes you think that you won't?»

I just won't.

«Of course you won't,» she says, and then laughs without making a sound. She turns right, past a Biedermeier credenza, fast, then turns again past an Art Nouveau console, and for a minute she's out of sight.

I hurry to catch up, still lost, saying, if we're going to find our way out of this, I think we need to stay together.

Just ahead of us is a William and Mary bureau cabinet. 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. And leading me deeper into the thicket of cabinets and closets and breakfronts and highboys, the rocking chairs and hall trees and bookcases, Helen Hoover Boyle says she needs to tell me a little story.

Back at the newsroom, everybody's quiet. People are whisper ing around the coffeemaker. People are listening with their mouths hanging open. Nobody's crying.

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 irresponsible. It 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.

And I ask, any sign he was sodomized?

And Henderson jerks his head back just a trace and says, «Say what?»

Did somebody fuck him?

«God, no,» Henderson says. «Why would you ask such a thing?»

And I say, no reason.

At least Duncan wasn't somebody's dead-body sex doll.

I say, if anybody needs me, I'll be in the clipping library. There's some facts I need to check. Just a few years of newspaper stories I need to read. A few spools of microfilm to run through.

And Henderson calls after me, «Don't go far. Just because Duncan's dead, that don't mean you're off the dead baby beat.»

Sticks and stones may break your bones, but watch out for those damn words.

According to the microfilm, in 1983, in Vienna, Austria, a twenty-three-year-old nurse's aide gave an overdose of morphine to an old woman who was begging to die.

The seventy-seven-year-old woman died, and the aide, Waltraud Wagner, found she loved having the power of life and death.

It's all here in spool after spool of microfilm. Just the facts.

At first it was just to help dying patients. She worked in an enormous hospital for the elderly and chronically ill. People lingered there, wanting to die. Besides morphine, the young woman invented what she called her water cure. To relieve suffering, you just pinch the patient's nose shut. You depress the tongue, and you pour water down the throat. Death is slow torture, but old people are always found dead with water collected in their lungs.

The young woman called herself an angel.

It looked very natural.

It was a noble, heroic deed that Wagner was doing.

She was the ultimate end to suffering and misery. She was gentle and caring and sensitive, and she only took those who begged to die. She was the angel of death.