Rick Moody - Demonology

— I want to show you our place. I want to show you our gallery, she said, reaching for a sequence of words that might put a stop to it. He showed no indication of understanding the we implicit in our, that locution with which couples reinforced their reign over single persons.

— Stop, she said.

She pushed against him. He resisted. She pushed harder. He pushed back. She pulled away. He held on. She pushed again. He pulled away, holding on. He pushed back. She fell away. He held on. She pushed. He resisted. He pushed. She covered herself. She pulled away. She changed directions. He held on. She pushed against him. He resisted. She pushed. He resisted. She pushed, he resisted. And suddenly, disgustedly, he put a shoulder against her, the whole of his upper body, and she was free, and her liberty was foul. She bolted for the door at the far end of the roof. But before she could get there, there was a commotion behind her. A neglected attic closet of memory opened, forth came the image of a blanket, left from a picnic up in the north during a summer visit to the Green Mountains, a blanket, at dusk, aired on a laundry line, at night, disturbed by heavy wind. She was out with a friend, and behind them they saw it, the blanket, and its animus was expressed by the gust, a malevolent spirit that sent them, as girls, howling into the pantry, inconsolable. It was behind her, this very entity, tackling her now, and she was on her back. How horrible the words in the moment that they appeared in her mind, You are on your back, while another part of her noticed the masonry on the edge of the building. It needed attention. And there were car horns, in the distance; her hand dipped in the meniscus of a puddle; her own hyperventilations, sixteenth notes, remarkably constant. This was simply an arrangement of bodies she had once experienced, during an audition, nothing more, and just when her sorrow was beginning to accompany her terror, just when she was beginning to wonder what threat would be used to ensure silence, he whispered, Iain’t gonna hurt you, and she found, instead, that he was rolling over her, hefting her up, she went over onto her right side, and then onto him, and she was on top, and the first thing she did was slap him hard across the face, You already hurt me, you fuck, she said, and he did nothing, didn’t smile, didn’t speak, and then he took her hands, coinciding, she noticed, with an infrastructure of spotlights scintillating in the heavens on the Manhattan side of town, near the Maxwell House factory, where there had formerly been a robust, good-to-the-last-drop fog, all days, all times; he took her hands; he fitted them around his own throat, tightened his grip on her hands on his throat; there was no swiveling of hips, there was no grinding at her, there was no recognition, no sexual anything; only hands on her hands, and the tightening at his throat. She struggled to pull away, What are you doing? He struggled to keep her hands around himself, and his breathing became labored, if only she could see better in the dim light of the roof, she was murdering him, he was slipping away, and yet he was tightening the grip, Let me go, she angled her legs off of him, began to pull away again, Are you out of your mind? Looking up at her, plaintive. Suffocation of the earth, putrefaction of the land, foulness of marshes, reeds and egrets and muskrats and snappers all replaced by the even fouler rattus norvegicus to make this town of Hoboken, so cars could be stolen, substandard buildings constructed, bribes paid, drunks displaced, so bond traders could purchase their condominiums. Then she was off, heading for the door, racing for the door, expecting him to finish her off in the stairwell, to impale her through the heart on the diamond stylus of his stolen turntable, to fire the exploding bullet of his class war into the base of her skull. But when she tried to ascertain his whereabouts, he was gone, except for his voice, It’s your town now, calling after her, Your town now.

The front door of the Mad Son Electric Gallery swung back almost exactly on time, seven P.M., that evening in October, for its opening gala, and the guests outside, who numbered exactly seven, were unaware that anything much in the way of a delay had taken place. M. J. Powell, temporarily sobbing hostess, could hear, on the other side of the door, Gideon Katz, the boyfriend of Lori Fine, her dancer friend from NYU; Gideon was a mathematician, extremely talkative, and his specialty was knots, and Gerry Abram-owitz loved him, loved everything about him and his knots, how beautiful they could be in the telling, no symbolism to them at all, just knots with numbers describing them, An invariant, you know, that’s any number you can assign to a knot which doesn’t change if you twist the knot or pull on it, like if you wrap a piece of rope around a banister and don’t tie it and just pull on one end, it comes off the banister, well except that they’re not knotted around anything. They just are. So that example doesn’t count. On the other hand, if you havetwo ends in front of you, you cross one over the other, one way would be the positive way and you can assign a number of one to that, the right strand going over the left, a positive crossing, see, and the other way would be negative. So any kind of knot has an algebraic length, get it? The minimum is if you pull on it to get rid of the loops, and so forth. Had to be Gerry that Gideon was talking to. Who else could it be? Who else would tolerate a disquisition on knots? No knotted knot has a crossing number less than three, see, but, unfortunately, its also true that there’s knots that have the same invariant but aren’t the same knot, so it gets complicated. Maybe Gerry had lost his key too. He had left his key in the library up at Columbia, the library for Asian languages, where they had once gone together to kiss, because he liked it so well, its dim, neglected stacks. Books and kissing were related somehow. When she appeared in the threshold of the doorway, to the seven excited guests here for the opening gala, she could see that Gerry was not among them. What a disappointment. And she was a complicated figure to the assembled, too, and instead of attending to them immediately, she watched as, going up the block in the distance, a shade, carrying some bulky object, hastened off. If you have a loop with two crossings in it, then you can pull it and flip it and twist it with just an unknotted loop.

— Are you okay? Lori said. M. J. saw herself as she must have appeared, torn skirt and stockings, face wet, hair matted, an open gash on her thigh.

— A long story, she said. — Come on in.

Here was the part that Gerry would have loved, because it was the part he designed himself. He often made sketches of things, on scrap paper, not terribly adept sketches, but sketches anyhow. One day she’d found the plans for the gallery, scribbled in this style, on the coffee table. Just sitting there. For her. Then she began the job of realizing this interior for the Mad Son Electric Gallery, according to his vision; no whitewash since Tom Sawyer’s was applied with such method. They had taken the whole of the weekend, and while they were laboring, they were laboring together. It involved putting the old sofa, with the stuffing unstuffing, out onto the street, where it disappeared at once. Other furnishings, such as they had, were hidden under white sheets, so that the effect, in toto, was of perfect eggshell, a blank slate, incomplete potential, like in the great galleries. All these years later, fifteen years later, she remembered the sad parts of the story, but the good parts too, as one thinks of youth after it is gone, a laugh, a goof, a riot, made some bad decisions, made some worse decisions, made awful decisions, smoked a Quaalude, slept with a boy on antipsychotic medication, wrecked a car, watched thirteen dawns in thirteen towns, loved people otherwise spoken for, wrote a life story, threw it out, spent recklessly, gave a dog to the ASPCA because it barked, quit speaking to a guy and his friends, gave up dancing, above all, gave up dancing. Tried out for Arnie Zane and Bill T. Jones, stayed up nights, didn’t get the job, and then the knee problems, and then social work school, after which she got married to somebody, some other guy. Oh, it wasn’t worth going into. What was attractive became repulsive, this particular habit, this particular inhibition in the beloved, you were married and your heart was in the freezer in the basement. But all that weekend they painted the interior of the gallery, she and Gerry, that was a good weekend. The disappointments from later on never interfered with the memory of washing paintbrushes and rollers with Gerry, holding his hands under the faucet. His hands: long and narrow, fingernails incredibly short, the hair on his hands strawberry blond. All this, his hands under the faucets, the big soft part at the base of his thumb. If she had these hands, fifteen years later, in her own hands, if she had back her youth, she knew she would prize these things in a way she hadn’t then.