Rick Moody - Demonology

My brother and I fought the whole next ten years, my brother Jack and me, as I correctly predicted, threats shouted at holidays, even after I met my wife, even after my marriage ceremony (my best man was Joey Kaye, the guy whose dad paralyzed Bobby Erlich for life). My brother missed my wedding because he’d been at a club in the Village called Silver Screen, where he said whatever he had to say in order that he might persuade one Elise, an alcoholic, to go to a motel in Yonkers with him, where he was doing lines with her on a pocketbook mirror and watching motel pornography, the swooping arc of enhanced breasts, a nipple coming in and out of focus, simulated yelps of longing. He had never seen a girl with such large tattoos, and in such unusual spots. Was it her or was it the actress on the screen who was so vocal? Elise wanted to be an actress, and her uncle had incested her, but she made him phenomenally happy for two hours, and he her, at least until they ran out of their talc, and then when she woke in the morning my brother was back at the car dealership, moving the Beemers, as he said, wearing an Armani double-breasted suit, totally forgetting that he was supposed to be at my wedding. I know all these things.

One day some years later, who should come knocking at the back door but my brother Jack, wearing clothes that eerily resembled the garb of detectives from a popular television show of the period: a designer suit in pale blue and a polyester T-shirt of dusty rose. He was at the back door, see, while my wife and I were eating deviled eggs and sprigs of parsley; here he was wearing pastel colors, smiling in a way that signaled bad news ahead.

What’s he doing here? my wife said, loud enough that he would not mistake the words. She’d never forgiven him for missing the wedding and for sending us a set of plastic nesting bowls as a gift, and she rose up from the table on the porch, her green paper napkin still tucked in her neckline, and hastened indoors, where she turned on some opera, loud.

He rapped on the aluminum siding, though I was two feet away. We were in plain sight of one another.

Who do you think it is?

Oh, hey. A long-lost relative. A good-looking guy with a flimsy pretext.

Thought I’d drop by.

So you did.

What the hell’s going on? he attempted. Iwanted to say that I feel bad about things, you know? I feel bad about things and I want to straighten it out. I thought I’d come on over and we’d have a talk. We could set things right again and we could hoist a few beers together. Talk about it all.

He was still out on the step, and he was shading his eyes, though wearing sunglasses. He had a scrape on his cheek. There was an earnestness to his simulations.

That’d be great, I said, but Tanya and I have an engagement, if you want to know the truth, so I only have a couple of minutes.

What kind of engagement?

Precious Jewels and Stones show. At the Coliseum. Going to be a big rush on the first day.

It went on like that, each of us maneuvering for a purchase. One guy makes a slip, the other guy grabs for the handhold, crowds in. Soon my brother Jack began to warm to his ulterior motive. He was always a guy who couldn’t sit still for long.

Why don’t you come out front here, Jack said. Igot something I want to show you.

The screen door slapped at its frame. I figured I’d get it over with. We went around the alley, between Frattelli’s place and ours. Fratelli’s garden hose coiled by the edge of his lawn. Frattelli’s excessively healthy floribunda, a spigot on the side of our house still dripping, though I had put a washer in there only a week before. I wanted a life with a minimum of fuss. Woe to them that are wise in their eyes.

It was a gold Porsche.

Mergers in the automobile business will continue apace, and soon General Motors will be making Bentleys, and the same barely functioning engines that are under the hoods of American cars will soon be under the hoods of fancy foreign models, and it will be good for stock prices, and even good for the Gross National Product, but not good for cars themselves. That’s the limit of my interest on the subject. What’s a car, my fellow-Americans, but a system for conveyance, as I was recently telling Sasha Levin of Forest Hills, before she had time to complain about her under-performing account; I’ll buy any car, a Reliant K, a Breeze, a Cavalier, I don’t care too much, and Tanya doesn’t either, and we tend to leave bottles rattling around in the footwells in the back seat, to take up the space where the kids should have gone. A Porsche to me was just another car, and mainly I saw behind it some Organized Crime Figure or Junk Bond Trader who rode your bumper and talked on a cellular phone while flipping you the bird. I didn’t want to have anything to do with Porsches, or Jaguars, or Corvettes. I looked back at my house. I saw my wife, Tanya, in a window upstairs. A curtain fell across her face.

Isn’t she a beauty? My brother said hurriedly. He meant the car.

What the hell are you doing showing me this Porsche? Let’s get this over with, okay?

What’s the rush?

It was dented up. In a way that, for me, exactly recalled an earlier car crash and an earlier victim, which is to say that the passenger side was mashed, one headlight completely eliminated, and I’m pretty sure the axle was bent and the front fender mangled up in there, rubbing against the oil pan. There was flourescent gunk running in my driveway.

I just hosed this driveway.

Hey, I’m sorry, Jack said. Listen, I just want to know if I can park this in your garage for a couple of days.

I looked at my Timex with imitation Cordovan strap and wondered why eighteen minutes for this request. He had his own car dealership where he worked, and his own auto mechanics who would bang out a few dents, no questions asked, and he had always boasted that he could get an inspection sticker for me easy. It was not a good sign, his request, and I asked why I had to have this car in my garage, and he said that he’d busted it up right nearby, out on the river road, and he had things to do, and some points on his license, and just wanted to leave it for a couple of days, wouldn’t be any trouble, and he’d buy me a case of beer or something to make it worth my while.

And that was when I noticed the blood inside. The interior of the Porsche was leather, a ruddy leather interior, and there was blood on the dash, on the molded foam, where the air bag would later have gone, there was a dried splotch of blood from where some forehead had collided with the windshield, and I squinted at it discerningly, at the inevitability of another life coming to an end, the failure of it, of life leaking out on the leather.

Is this blood in this car?

What the hell are you talking about? My brother replied.

I asked if this was blood.

There’s no blood in the car. I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Why was a spillage of blood always an emblem of my troubled march in this world, why these pieces of bodies, these cascading morsels of corporeal material, why this length of tibia broken jaggedly off at the knee, with tufts of muscle still clinging to it, why, in my dreams, the stretcher bearers, why the dead boys, why the high-impact collisions, again and again, why the spectacle of young men running into stationary objects, why the lamppost with the D.U.I. wrapped around it, a hand separated from a wrist, by some fifty feet, vertebrae like popcorn scattered across the bucket seats?

I said, Get your goddamn car out of here now, what do you mean by bringing this thing around here? Did you kill someone, in this car? Am I accessory to all your blunders? Like I don’t have enough blunders of my own? What are you doing here? I’m not related to you, I don’t have even one characteristic that you have. I started loud, admittedly, but I got quieter, because I knew, in the middle of my tirade I knew, this fragmentary bunch of people, this collection of lost souls, my family, they were rushing further off now, like some distant hurtling margin of the negatively spherical universe, they were further off during this conversation, and when this conversation was over, they would be impossibly far away —cousins, aunts, uncles, of old bipolar Eire, my father, there would be only my mother’s death left to survive, my mother alone in her little house in New Rochelle one block over from a shuttered Main Street, and when my brother climbed into his Porsche — which had a left front flat, I now saw — the last of my uncertain futures would be certain.