Chuck Palahniuk - Lullaby

I stretch my jaws at the ceiling and say, we can't … we can't …

Alone with her now, I say, we can't trust Helen. She only wants the grimoire so she can control the world. I say, the cure for having too much power is not to get more power. We can't let Helen get her hands on the original Book of Shadows.

And so slow I can't see her move, Mona draws a fluted Ionic column out of a bloody pit below my big toe. Slow as the hour hand on a clock. If the column's from a museum or a church or a college, I can't remember. All these broken homes and trashed institutions.

She's more of an archaeologist than a surgeon.

And Mona says, «That's funny.»

She lines up the column with the other fragments on the towel. Frowning as she leans back into my sole with the tweezers, she says, «Helen told me the same thing about you. She says you only want to destroy the grimoire.»

It should be destroyed. No one can handle that kind of power.

On television is an old brick building, three stories, with flames pouring up from every window. Firemen point hoses and feathery white arcs of water. A young man holding a microphone steps into the shot, and behind him Helen and Oyster are watching the fire, their heads leaned together. Oyster's holding a shopping bag. Helen holds his other hand.

Holding up the bottle of rubbing alcohol, Mona looks at how much is left. She says, «What I'd really like to be is an empath, where all I have to do is touch people and they're healed.» Reading the label, she says, «Helen tells me we can make the world a paradise.»

I sit up on the bed, halfway, propping myself on my elbows, and I say, Helen is killing people for diamond tiaras. That's the kind of savior Helen is.

Mona wipes the tweezers and the needle on the towel, making more smears of red and yellow. She smells the bottle of alcohol and says, «Helen thinks you only want to exploit the book for a newspaper story. She says once all the spells are destroyed—including the culling spell—then you can blab to everybody that you're the hero.»

I say, nuclear weapons are bad enough. Chemical weapons. I say, certain people having magic is not going to make the world a better place.

I tell Mona, if it comes to it, I'll need her help.

I say, we may need to kill Helen.

And Mona shakes her head over the bloody ruins on the motel towel. She says, «So your answer for too much killing is more killing?»

Just Helen, I say. And maybe Nash, if my theory about the dead fashion models is right. After we kill them, we can go back to normal.

On television, the young man with the microphone, he's saying how a three-alarm fire has most of the downtown area paralyzed. He says, the structure is fully involved. He says, it's one of the city's favorite institutions.

«Oyster,» Mona says, «doesn't like your idea of normal.»

The burning institution, it's the Book Barn. And behind him, Helen and Oyster are gone.

Mona says, «In a detective story, do you wonder why we root for the detective to win?» She says, maybe it's not just for revenge or to stop the killing. Maybe we really want to see the killer redeemed. The detective is the killer's savior. Imagine if Jesus chased you around, trying to catch you and save your soul. Not just a patient passive God, but a hardworking, aggressive bloodhound. We want the criminal to confess during the trial. We want him to be exposed in the drawing room scene, surrounded by his peers. The detective is a shepherd, and we want the criminal back in the fold, returned to us. We love him. We miss him. We want to hug him.

Mona says, «Maybe that's why so many women marry killers in prison. To help heal them.»

I tell her, there's nobody who misses me.

Mona shakes her head and says, «You know, you and Helen are so much like my parents.»

Mona. Mulberry. My daughter.

And flopping back on the bed, I ask, how's that?

And pulling a door frame out of my foot, Mona says, «Just this morning, Helen told me she might need to kill you.»

My pager goes off. It's a number I don't know. The pager says it's very important.

And Mona digs a stained-glass window out of a bloody pit in my foot. She holds it up so the ceiling light comes through the colored bits, and looking at the tiny window, she says, «I'm more worried about Oyster. He doesn't always tell the truth.»

And the motel room door, right then it blows open. The sirens outside. The sirens on the television. The flash of red and blue lights strobing across the window curtains. Right then Helen and Oyster fall into the room, laughing and panting. Oyster slinging a bag of cosmetics. Helen holding her high heels in one hand. They both smell like Scotch whisky and smoke.

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.

Outside the car now is America.

Oh, beautiful starling-filled skies,

Over amber waves of tansy ragwort.

Oh, purple mountains of loosestrife,

Above the bubonic-plagued plain.

America.

A siege of ideas. The whole power grab of life.

After listening to Oyster, a glass of milk isn't just a nice drink with chocolate chip cookies. It's cows forced to stay pregnant and pumped with hormones. It's the inevitable calves that live a few miserable months, squeezed in veal boxes. A pork chop means a pig, stabbed and bleeding, with a snare around one foot, being hung up to die screaming as it's sectioned into chops and roasts and lard. Even a hard-boiled egg is a hen with her feet crippled from living in a battery cage only four inches wide, so narrow she can't raise her wings, so maddening her beak is cut off so she won't attack the hens trapped on each side of her. With her feathers rubbed off by the cage and her beak cut, she lays egg after egg until her bones are so depleted of calcium that they shatter at the slaughterhouse.

This is the chicken in chicken noodle soup, the laying hens, the hens so bruised and scarred that they have to be shredded and cooked because nobody would ever buy them in a butcher's case. This is the chicken in corn dogs. Chicken nuggets.

This is all Oyster talks about. This is his plague of information. This is when I turn on the radio, to country and western music. To basketball. Anything, so long as it's loud and constant and lets me pretend my breakfast sandwich is just a breakfast sandwich. That an animal is just that. An egg is just an egg. Cheese isn't a tiny suffering veal. That eating this is my right as a human being.

Here's Big Brother singing and dancing so I don't start thinking too much for my own good.

In the local newspaper today, there's another dead fashion model. There's an ad that says:

Attention Patrons of Falling Star Puppy Farm

It says: «If your new dog spreads infectious rabies to any child in your household, you may be eligible to take part in a class-action lawsuit.»

Driving through what used to be beautiful, natural country, while eating what used to be an egg sandwich, I ask why they couldn't just buy the three books they were shopping for at the Book Barn. Oyster and Helen. Or just steal the pages and leave the rest of the books. I say, the reason we're making this trip is so people won't be burning books.

«Relax,» Helen says, driving. «The store had three copies of the book. The problem was they didn't know where.»