David Wallace - Broom of the System

The Antichrist didn’t say anything.

“What’s his name, anyway?” said Lenore.

“His name’s the Breather.”

“I mean his real name.”

“Who cares. Mike something.”

“Hmmm.”

The Antichrist was staring out into the thin twisting fountains in the fields, and the forests, all in the reddening shadowy light. “Do you still drink a lot of Tab?” he said, out of the blue.

Lenore looked at him. She decided he was high. “I don’t drink Tab much anymore,” she said. “I mostly drink seltzer water now. Tab tastes to me like some little kid made it with his chemistry set.”

The Antichrist laughed and hefted the leg. His hightop was with Lenore’s hightops, out in front of them in the grass. The little girl was peering around her mother’s leg at the Antichrist, who pretended to ignore her.

“Where’s your friend Mr. Vigorous? What’s he supposed to be doing?”

“I don’t really know. I think he’s wandering around. I think he sort of has some internal catching up to do. He hasn’t been back here, ever, since he graduated.”

“I see.”

The two older children had stopped rolling and now started to trudge heavily back up the steep hill. The father and mother hissed at each other over the camera’s light meter. Around the woman’s calf were green eyes and wisps of red hair. The Antichrist put part of the leg inside his shirt.

“Are you pretty sleepy?” Lenore asked. “From the Quaaludes, I mean?”

LaVache looked at the trees. “The Breather told you this was a Quaalude day? What a garrulous room-group, today. It was a very small Quaalude. And no, not really, Quaaludes don’t make me sleepy, anymore, really.”

“How do they make you feel?”

The Antichrist looked at his ankle. “Like I’m elsewhere.”

Lenore looked at the little girl.

“Elseone,” LaVache said to his ankle. “Besides,” he looked up, “the old cortex is a flurry of activity now, because I have to get all prepared to talk Hegelian sublation with Nervous Roy Keller, which will be a bitch, because Nervous Roy is far too nervous to assimilate any but the most clearly presented information. Clear presentation is not Hegel’s strength.”

Lenore tugged at a blade of grass. It came out of the ground with a faint squeak. “How come you do everybody else’s work for them, Stoney?”

“Where do you think Lenore is?” the Antichrist asked the leg.

“Why do you do other people’s work and not your own?” said Lenore. “You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met. John included.”

“Speaking of which…”

“How come you’re doing this? You’re flapped here all the time, aren’t you?”

The Antichrist brought a joint out of the drawer. “I have a leg to support.”

“How come?”

The Antichrist lit up with practiced ease in the wind and looked at his sister from behind his cloud. “It’s my thing,” he said. “Everybody here has a thing. You have to have a thing here. My thing is being the Antichrist, more or less being a waste-product and supporting my leg. A tragically wasted intellect. So to speak. You can’t be thingless, Lenore. Mr. Vigorous notwithstanding.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

LaVache looked over Lenore’s head, at the sun. “Let’s pause for just a moment to let me try to get all this straight.” He scratched at an eyebrow. “You came all the way out here, to the very most tangential of Beadsmans, to inform me that you don’t know where certain people are, and to ask me whether I know where certain people are. And you did so at Dad’s request.”

“What Dad wants me to find out is whether you’ve heard or have any idea where exactly Lenore or John are. Is. Especially Gramma, for Dad.”

“Of course.”

“And you say you have no idea.”

“Right.”

“Did you know about the stuff Gramma was doing with Dad?” Lenore asked. “The nursing home stuff?”

“More or less. More less than more.”

The little green-eyed girl was cautiously approaching Lenore and LaVache, moving inside her mother’s long late shadow. The Antichrist, still pretending to ignore her, nevertheless enticed her with the leg.

“How come?” Lenore said.

“How come what?”

“How come you knew?”

“I believe Lenore told me, in her own unique epigrammatic way.”

“Well, when?”

“A while ago. Actually I did some math for her and Mrs. Kling.”

“Yingst.”

“Yingst. Some multiple regression. Last Christmas. Really more John’s area than mine, but since dear John is, or was, busy starving himself, and the leg quite obviously isn‘t, it cheerfully gobbled up the hundred clams with nary a qualm.”

“Have any thoughts of how come Lenore told me exactly nothing about any of this, by any chance?”

“Nothing even remotely resembling a thought,” LaVache said. When Lenore looked up from her blade of grass, she saw that the little girl was now sitting next to the Antichrist, her small soft legs with shiny black shoes out in front of her. The Antichrist was letting her touch the leg. To Lenore he said, “I really must confess to wondering, in the dark part of the night, what you and Lenore actually talk about all the time. You were over there constantly, this past summer.”

“Well, I was reading to Concamadine, some of the time, too.”

“I’m glad someone can stand to see her.”

“Who says I can stand to see her?”

“She still likes Old Mother West Wind? Ollie the otter and Sergio the snake and all that?”

“I really haven’t seen her in a while. She liked it the last time I read it to her. At least she made what I interpreted as liking-sounds.”

“How lovely,” LaVache said. “You better go see her. She must get really lonely. You think?”

The little girl was looking at the side of the Antichrist’s dark shiny face, Lenore could see. The girl tugged on the sleeve of his sweatshirt.

“Are you the devil?” she asked in a loud voice. Her parents didn’t seem to hear her.

“Not right at the moment,” the Antichrist said to the little girl, turning the leg over to her completely, for a bit.

“I don’t want to go there anymore, at least until Lenore gets back,” Lenore said softly, shaping a hooked curve of hair under her chin. “I’m afraid I really and truly hate Concamadine. I don’t know if your theory is right, but I’m afraid I do. And that Mr. Bloemker who’s constantly around gives me even more big-time creeps than he did before, for reasons I don’t feel like going into right at the moment. And plus of course now Lenore’s just gone, for over a week, and after working awfully hard to make really sure I’d care about her, she now doesn’t even bother to say where she is. She should know I’m not Dad. Just like you, of all people, should know I’m not Dad.”

The Antichrist played with the floppy empty leg of his corduroy shorts.

“I’m beginning to think Lenore’s dead,” said Lenore. “It’s horrible to think that and still not be able to really grieve. I think she maybe even died in the nursing home, and Mrs. Yingst did something to her, when she wasn’t busy giving innocent animals LSD or pineal-food.”

“You know, in my opinion, if you want my off the-top-of-my-head opinion, I think Lenore’s maybe dead, too,” the Antichrist said, amusing the little girl by guiding her hands so as to make the leg dance on the ground, his joint held easily between two fingers. “She’s about a hundred, after all, isn’t she? I think she’s just gone off somewhere to die. Somewhere where no one could see her being for the briefest second defenseless. I think that would be her style. Either that or she’s down at Gerber’s right now, preparing to give Dad an incredible kick in the corporate groin. To which I say go for it.”