Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘It was like a trial,’ she said. ‘You were being tested.’

‘That’s true … those were dark days, m’um …’

‘But you won through in the end …’

‘Well, I did. But not as I might have foreseen. As a young criminalistician, I was committed to the classical empirical tradition, to pure scientific analysis and the deductive enterprise. But, in the end, the solution came to me, I must tell you … in a dream …’ He heaved a tremulous sigh that shook his chest. ‘A … a young woman …’

‘I see …’

‘She was so … so …’ He clutched his face in his hands, his shoulders quaking.

‘There, there,’ my mother-in-law said, patting his pate.

There was a pause. His trembling subsided. When he took up his story again, he had regained his composure, but there was a quaver yet in his voice, the cords tensed. ‘She … she came to me across a vast expanse of what in the dream seemed more like time than space. A barren wasteland — like truth itself, I thought when I awoke.’

‘Yes …’

‘There was something before this about a city, or more than one perhaps — I’d been traveling, I think, through ancient iniquitous realms, dream representations no doubt of those deplorable consequences of man’s incorrigible nature which it had become my lot to study, to live among — but now we were alone together in this infinite desolation. She wore a pure white tunic, a girdle at her waist, her head and shoulders bare, her feet too perhaps, I don’t remember. A common stereotype, you will say, a storybook cliché — and it is true, as I watched her glide toward me across the flats with a grace that was itself archetypal, I felt reduced to a certain helpless innocence, simplified, stripped of all my pretensions, my professional habits, my learning — literally stripped perhaps, for I felt a certain unwonted vulnerability, not unlike nakedness, though of a spiritual sort, I’m sure you’ll appreciate …’

‘I know …’

‘But she was not as she seemed. Oh no! It was as though she had dressed herself up as a commonplace, the more to set off her very uniqueness, her extraordinary, her special — what can I say? — her profound selfness. Instinctively, I understood: she was the truth. The rest of my life seemed like those ruined cities I had just visited, teeming with congested activity and feverish aspirations, but inwardly empty and aimless. And utterly condemned. So you can imagine how I felt, standing transfixed there in that boundless space — or time — feeling naked and unworthy, yet flushed with a kind of bewildered awe that I should have been singled out, chosen among all men, to receive her. Nothing like this had ever happened to me, in or out of dreams. I was struck dumb with wonder. As she drew near, the very barrenness around me seemed to glow, to pulsate with an inner frenzy. And then she stopped. Not near enough to touch, but I wouldn’t have touched her had I been able, m’um, I couldn’t even move. She smiled — or rather, the serene smile she bore by nature deepened — and she spoke. What she said was: “The victim is the killer.” ’ He paused as though redigesting this news. The hand clutching the scarf at his throat trembled slightly. ‘Even now I can hear her voice …’

‘A riddle …’

‘So I thought, though later I was to learn otherwise. Now, in fear and trembling, I asked her to repeat herself, but she would not, she only smiled. I begged for another word, some understanding, had I heard her right? But she only continued to smile. Or rather, the smile seemed locked onto her face, for she no longer seemed quite real, an image rather, a kind of statue, but slowly fading — my heart leaped to my throat! I was about to lose her, lose everything! I reached out at last toward that silvery presence — but into nothing, she was turning into thin air! In fact, she was thin air — I was sitting up in my bed, groping in the dawn light, and staring at a pale frozen figure across the room: myself in the floor-length mirror on the far wall.’ So he stared now, his face drawn, his moustaches hanging heavy as anchors, seeming to drag the flesh down after them.

My mother-in-law drew his head into her lap once more, caressed his temples. ‘It was not a riddle?’

‘No.’ His voice was muffled now, shaken, but, when he resumed, resigned. ‘I wrestled with it as though it were, alone of course, reluctant to mention it to my dour and earnest colleagues — they would have thought me mad, as I thought myself at times. But then another suspect died — a former lover of the historian, a teacher of Hellenic romances who fell, or was pushed, down a pothole in the Pindus Mountains where-to she’d evidently fled — and suddenly the whole sinister pattern of this bizarre case became clear to me. Without explaining myself but hinting at my suspicions, I asked that the historian’s private diaries be unlocked. My colleagues scoffed — “Audacity don’t win no medals around here, son,” the Inspector on the case said, being as he was from the old school, you see — but I warned them that if we didn’t act quickly other victims would almost certainly be caught up in this deadly chain. Reluctantly, they let me have my way — and sure enough, hidden away in the more recent entries, encoded to appear nothing more than notations on an ancient Mayan calendric stela, lay the historian’s ingenious plan to set into motion, with his own suicide, an infinite and ineluctable series of murders. Some he had merely foreseen, others he had himself committed — the poisoning of his daughter, for example: with his profound knowledge of historical — and prehistorical — theatrics, he had foreseen our gathering there in his library that night, known of his daughter’s singular weakness for cascarilla, and so on, obtaining in advance the unsuspecting butler’s fingerprints on the decanter. The lover in the pothole had been found clutching what looked like an old-fashioned treasure map drawn with vegetable inks, and these too were found in the historian’s safe. The elder colleague at the historical society had sat on a poisoned tack in the very room in which the police interviewed him, a room kept locked except for occasions, as the prehistorian was well aware, when extreme privacy was required. On the other hand, it was fairly likely the former student had shot the creole maid, a necessary link in the chain, but hardly less inevitable than the others.’

‘It’s quite extraordinary!’

‘Yes, m’um, the fatal series might have run on forever had we not, upon deciphering the encoded plot, stopped the historian’s brother-in-law from taking the late daughter’s fiancé out hunting. And in the nick of time. It was a celebrated case, the turning point of my career. With it I won advancement, fame, the respect of my colleagues.’ He sighed. ‘But …’

‘It’s not why you’ve told me the story.’

‘No …’ The Inspector withdrew one of Ginger’s kerchiefs and blew his nose in it. ‘Are you sure you want to hear all this?’

‘Of course …’

‘I … I’m not married, you see …’

‘The young woman in the dream …’

‘Yes. I thought you’d … you’d understand. I’ve needed to tell someone about it for a very long time. I’ve kept it … kept it bottled up all these years. It was a very strange period in my life …’ He lay his head back again. ‘An intermingling of life and dream that was very much like madness …’

‘Was that the only time—?’

‘No, over the next few years, she reappeared every now and then in my dreams, often to assist me in a case, sometimes to bring me consolation or courage, once to provide, if you’ll pardon my opening my heart to you in this way, m’um, a kind of pleasure — the only pleasure of, well, that sort I’ve ever known or wish to know, unless it should come from her lips, her hands … and so forth.’