Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘Hold up, hold up!’ cried Soapie, scribbling away frantically, hat tipped back and cigarette between his teeth. ‘Jesus! How do you spell “interterminant”?’

‘This death tonight was a violent but dynamically predetermined invasion of what we criminologists call a self-contained system of ritually proscribed behavior in which the parts are linked by implacable forces and the behavior of the whole is precisely defined by the laws of social etiology — and I assure you, we are not going to be pressured by any hack scandalmongers into abrogating our broader responsibilities and jumping to unwarranted and even irrelevant parochial conclusions! ’

‘Whoa-ho-ho!’ laughed Soapie, his pencil waggling frantically across the pad in his hand. ‘Violent total antilogical, uh, irreverent system … whew! I don’t know what any of this malarkey’s about, Nigel, by golly, but it should knock ’em out on the funny pages!’ He dotted a few i ’s, flicked his butt away, and, slapping his notebook shut, nodded at Leonard, who had been photographing the Inspector’s bristly tirade through a foreground of test tubes and beakers. ‘C’mon, Leonard, let’s go get a coupla skin shots of these impeccable faucets, and then have us something to eat. Ger’s old lady puts out a handsome spread.’

‘Stick around,’ Fred urged, coming back in with Bob, the two of them having just dumped Howard outside the door, ‘this one’s next!’

‘Nah,’ grinned Soapie, winking at me. ‘He’s old hat.’

‘ Those shameless egotistical frauds! ’ shrieked the Inspector when the two newsmen had left, and then, in a fit of decompressed rage, he began to beat his head against the far wall. ‘ Filthy bloated mythomaniacs who feed like dogs off the excrement of their own vile lies! ’ I thought this might be a good moment to slip away, but before I could make my move, the Inspector whirled around and cried: ‘ Seize him!’

‘No, wait—! ’ But they had already grabbed me, twisted my arm behind my back, and were highstepping me over to their work area, my feet barely touching the floor. ‘ Don’t—! ’

‘Easy, pal!’

‘We don’t want to have to get rough!’

The Inspector, who was striking his temples with his fists and groaning something about ‘dark fissures of the soul’ and ‘massive spiritual deformity,’ now threw a sheaf of photographs on the table in front of me and, jabbing a tremulous finger at the erected penis that Ros, dressed as a telephone operator, was holding in her ear, cried: ‘Whose is that?!’

‘I–I don’t know,’ I stammered, mine being the one she was speaking into.

‘And that!! ’ he demanded, pointing now at Ros’s pumping fist in a photo of the Pietà , then at one of Little Miss Muffet with what looked like a lamb under her skirt: ‘And this! ’

‘Actually, uh, that one’s from a show, I believe — a publicity still — The Mother Goo —’

‘ What are you trying to hide? ’ he screamed, banging his fists on the table, making the photos fly.

Bob tightened his grip on my arm, Fred whipped out his nightstick. ‘ Nothing! ’

‘Nothing? Nothing? Then how do you explain this?! ’ he cried, flinging a valentine onto the table.

‘Where did you find that?’ I gasped. It was one I had given my wife long ago — I recognized the ‘honeymoon hotel’ with its heart-shaped shutters, a private joke: there’d been a heart-shaped hole in the door of the outhouse we had to use …

‘Next to the body!’

‘Ah, that must be the one Naomi—’

‘We know what it is! Do you take us for fools? Do you deny you knew the victim?’

‘Of course not! She’s—’

‘She’s dead! I know that! But I need to know how! And when! Now for the last time: what have you seen? Eh? What have you heard? ’

Bob tightened his grip again; Fred, still wearing the dusty rubber gloves, grabbed my belt with one hand, brought the nightstick crashing down on the table with the other — ‘ Dickie! ’ I yelped. It was all I could think of. I could hardly breathe. I felt like I’d reflexed my testicles all the way into my ribcage. ‘Somebody said—!’

‘Dickie?’

They eyed me narrowly. I felt betrayed by my own desperation, ashamed of the outburst. I swallowed. ‘Actually—’

‘That the lily-dip in the white ducks?’ grunted Bob behind my back.

‘Yes,’ I squeaked, ‘but I only … Mrs Trainer said—’

Fred shook his head. ‘Nothing there, Chief. We checked him out. Double on-tonder.’

‘ What —?! More lies?! ’ I felt relief, even as Bob threw his free arm around my throat, half-strangling me. ‘I tell you, I can’t stand lies! They turn our consciousness to rot and putrefy the spirit! He waved a photo in front of my face of a round-helmeted cop being buggered by a masked superhero: ‘Now, who is that?’

Bob squeezed, arching my back, and all I could see was the ceiling. Fred, sucking in wind, drew his arm back. ‘I … I can explain—? ’

‘Explain? Explain? ’ the Inspector raged. The ceiling seemed to be pulsating and a chemical pungency filled the air. ‘ Open him up!

‘ No, just a minute! ’ I gasped. I groped for my buckle — ‘In the end, Gerry,’ my father used to say, ‘we reach for the inevitable’ — and Fred took his hand away. ‘I’ll … I’ll do it …’

They seemed to accept this. Fred lowered his stick. Bob loosened his grip slightly, though he kept his arm around me. ‘Awright,’ he growled, ‘ out with it!’

The three of them pressed round, boxing me in. We were all breathing heavily. On the wall in front of me they’d tacked up their charts for spectrochemical analysis: they looked like indictments, columnar and menacing, with something penciled in across the top. I studied it without seeing it, my hands at my buckle. I might as well get it over with, I thought. Who knows, I might not even be recognized. But I didn’t believe it. I felt betrayed somehow. A kind of inconsolable dismay swept over me, and a loneliness, as I reached, my eyes misting over (I’d had dreams like this: some final crowded-up demand, my will erased), for my zipper.

Bob and Fred backed off, laughing. The Inspector, too, relaxed, laid a restraining hand on mine. ‘That’s all right,’ he said quietly. ‘We know it’s not you. We showed your wife the photos and she said definitely not.’

‘We were just kidding,’ said Fred.

‘Ah …’ My heart was still in my throat. I wiped my eyes. The penciled-in notation on the chart read: ‘Never confuse the objective with the subjective sections of the protocol.’ It sounded like a line from a play.

‘Naturally, we would appreciate any help you could give us,’ said Pardew, filling his pipe from a small saclike pouch. I settled back. I’d been standing on my toes all this time, and somehow this had added to my sense of isolation and vague nameless guilt.

Bob had limped away to switch off the lamp on the microscope, shutting down the show there, and now gathered up some little boxes, plastic bags, and tools. ‘Shall I knock the teeth out before we bag her up,’ he asked, ‘or save it till later?’

‘Might as well do it now. What about the cast?’

‘The stuff’s ready,’ said Fred at the hot plate, stirring (I could hear music now, conversations, people shouting on the stairs: where had they been before?). ‘You want the whole chest or just—?’