Rick Moody - Demonology

I worked my way into McCann’s limber and witty reception chatter and mimed a certain Chicken-style affability. Then, when one of those disagreeable conversational silences overtook the group, I ventured a question of your intended:

— So, Brice, how do you think your last fiancée, Eileen, would be reacting to your first-class nuptial ceremony today? Would she have liked it?

There was a confused hush, as the three or four of the secretarial beauties of his circle considered the best way to respond to this thorny question.

— Well, since she’s passed away, I think she would probably be smiling down on us from above. I’ve felt her presence throughout the decision to marry Sarah, and I think Eileen knows that I’ll never forget her. That I’ll always love her.

— Oh, is that right? I said, — because the funny thing is I happen to have her with me here, and…

Then I opened up the small box of you (you were in a Tiffany jewelry box that I had spirited out of Mom’s jewelry cache because I liked its pale teal shade: the color of rigor mortis as I imagined it), held it up toward Brice and then tossed some of it. I’m sure you know, Sis, that chips of bone tend to be heavier and therefore to fall more quickly to the ground, while the rest of the ashes make a sort of cloud when you throw them, when you cast them aloft. Under the circumstances, this cloud seemed to have a character, a personality. Thus, you darted and feinted around Brice’s head, Sis, so that he began coughing and wiping the corners of his eyes, dusty with your remains. His consorts were hacking as well, among them Sarah Wilton, his betrothed. How had I missed her before? She was radiant like a woman whose prayers have been answered, who sees the promise of things to come, who sees uncertainties and contingencies diminished, and yet she was rushing away from me, astonished, as were the others. I realized I had caused a commotion. Still, I gave chase, Sis, and I overcame your Brice McCann, where he blockaded himself on the far side of a table full of spring rolls. Though I have never been a fighting guy, I gave him an elbow in the nose, as if I were a Chicken and this elbow my wing. I’m sure I mashed some cartilage. He got a little nosebleed. I think I may have broken the Mansions unbroken streak of peaceful weddings.

At this point, of course, a pair of beefy Mansion employees (the McCarthy brothers, Tom and Eric) arrived on the scene and pulled me off of Brice McCann. They also tore the Chicken Mask from me. And they never returned this piece of my property afterwards. At the moment of unmasking, Brice reacted with mock astonishment. But how could he have failed to guess? That I would wait for my chance, however many years it took?

— Andy?

I said nothing, Sis. Your ghost had been in the cloud that wreathed him; your ghost had swooped out of the little box that I’d held, and now, at last, you were released from your disconsolate march on the surface of the earth, your march of unfinished business, your march of fixed ideas and obsessions unslaked by death. I would be happy if you were at peace now, Sis, and I would be happy if I were at peace; I would be happy if the thunderclouds and lightning of Brice and Sarah’s wedding would yield to some warm autumn day in which you had good weather for your flight up through the heavens.

Out in the foyer, where the guests from the Valentine Room were promenading in some of the finest threads I had ever seen, Tom McCarthy told me that Glenda Manzini wanted to see me in her office — before I was removed from the Mansion on the Hill permanently. We walked against the flow of the crowd beginning to empty from each of the suites. Our trudge was long. When I arrived at Glenda’s refrigerated chamber, she did an unprecedented thing, Sis, she closed the door. I had never before inhabited that space alone with her. She didn’t invite me to sit. Her voice was raised from the outset. Pinched between thumb and forefinger (the shade of her nail polish, a dark maroon, is known in beauty circles, I believe, as vamp), as though it were an ounce of gold or a pellet of plutonium, she held a single green M&M.

— Can you explain this? She asked. — Can you tell me what this is?

— I think that’s a green M&M, I said. — I think that’s the traditional green color, as opposed to one of the new brighter shades they added in a recent campaign for market share.

— Andy, don’t try to amuse me. What was this green M&M doing behind my filing cabinet?

— Well, I —

— I’m certain that I didn’t leave a green M&M back there. I would never leave an M&M behind a filing cabinet. In fact, I would never allow a green M&M into this office in the first place.

— That was months ago.

— I’ve been holding onto it for months, Glenda said.

— Do you think I’m stupid?

— On the contrary, I said.

— Do you think you can come in here and violate the privacy of my office?

— I think you’re brilliant, I said. — And I think you’re very sad. And I think you should surrender your job to someone who cares for the institution you’re celebrating here.

Now that I had let go of you, Sis, now that I had begun to compose this narrative in which I relinquished the hem of your spectral bedsheet, I saw through the language of business, the rhetoric of hypocrisy. Why had she sent me out for those birth-control pills? Why did she make me schedule her chiropractic appointments? Because she could. But what couldn’t be controlled, what could never be controlled, was the outcome of devotion. Glenda’s expression, for the first time on record, was stunned. She launched into impassioned colloquy about how the Mansion on the Hill was supposed to be a refuge, and how, with my antics, as she called them, I had sullied the reputation of the Mansion and endangered its business plan, and how it was clear that assaulting strangers while wearing a rubber mask is the kind of activity that proves you are an unstable person, and I just think, well, I don’t see the point in discussing it with you anymore and I think you have some serious choices to make, Andy, if you want to be part of regular human society, and so forth, which is just plain bunk, as far as I’m concerned. It’s not as if Brice McCann were a stranger to me.

I’m always the object of tirades by my supervisors, for overstepping my position, for lying, for wanting too much — this is one of the deep receivables on the balance sheet of my life — and yet at the last second Glenda Manzini didn’t fire me. According to shrewd managerial strategy she simply waved toward the door. With the Mansion crowded to capacity now, with volume creeping upward in the coming months, they would need someone with my skills. To look after the cars in the parking lot, for example. Mark my words, Sis, valet parking will soon be as big in the Northeast as it is in the West.

When the McCarthys flung me through the main doors, Linda Pietrzsyk was waiting. What unfathomable kindness. At the main entrance, on the way out, I passed through a gauntlet of rice-flingers. Bouquets drifted through the skies to the mademoiselles of the capital. Garters fell into the hands of local bachelors. Then I was beyond all good news and seated in the passenger seat of Linda’s battered Volkswagen. She was crying. We progressed slowly along back roads. I had been given chances and had squandered them. I had done my best to love, Sis. I had loved you, and you were gone. In Linda’s car, at dusk, we sped along the very road where you took your final drive. Could Linda have known? Your true resting place is forested by white birches, they dot the length of that winding lane, the fingers of the dead reaching up through burdens of snow to impart much-needed instruction to the living. In intermittent afternoon light, in seizure-inducing light, unperturbed by the advances of merchandising, I composed my proposal.