John Domini - Bedlam and Other Stories

Less than a year ago, now. The attack had come in the form of a gum-slow pain, as if he were giving birth to a creature that needed first to burrow from his breastbone through to his spine. Afterwards, as he’d floated through the white and steel of the hospital, with the color TV going all the time, seeming a million starstruck miles from his brown home in Lake Forest, then Grissom had drifted mentally too. He lay there reconstructing. A damaged chest and a rattled mind, both reconstructing. Yes both, because at his heart’s first vicious twist inward — in the very moment — uncountable tough lumps of memory had erupted farther up the spine.

Somebody will pay for doing this to me , he’d told himself at the time.

My whole life passed before my eyes , he’d told his visitors at the hospital.

Thus, there, plugged into the heart-support machinery, he saw the stories of what the intelligence agencies had done. His first day back on his feet Grissom called his lawyer. It wasn’t till this month just past that they at last received verification.

Now arrived the TV people. They came into Grissom’s home tonight and caught him by surprise. Though of course he had arranged the visit himself. Hours earlier, he’d telephoned the Chicago station. Plus before that he’d arranged every step of the procedure with Syl: the room they would use, the time of arrival. Yet then Grissom’s wife had unsettled his nerves. Simply by asking a few hard questions, Syl had got him striding back and forth across the living-room rug, so intently that when he’d touched a lightswitch — it was near sundown — the static electricity gave him a bad shock. Syl had sat on the sofa watching. She was waiting for something it seemed. Finally, her voice growing quiet with determination, the lines of her face deepening, she’d refused absolutely to take any part in Grissom’s bit on the TV news.

So he was caught by surprise. A man near sixty, in a bright silver suit he’d cleaned especially, he lumbered around gesturing to himself. He hadn’t even noticed Syl when she’d crossed the entryway to answer the door.

Only, one moment Grissom looked up, and in came the TV people.

A tall Oriental woman went first, angular at the jawline and hip, unmistakeably a beauty even though from Grissom’s distance her face was vague. In her angles alone he could tell she was gorgeous. Her hair was tied back flat against her skull, her long body cinched up tight in a three-piece suit of that flecked, metallic green which was popular just now. To see her stalk in, trailing wires — so bright, so pinched and sectioned, trailing wires — Grissom thought of a hornet prowling the air. Round her long neck there tottered a steel mirror on a hinged apparatus that allowed her to look at herself as she walked. The reflected sunset coming through the open door behind her colored her small face oddly.

Grissom stared, in wary shock. He went on standing in the center of his living room.

The Oriental reporter stopped to check something in her mirror, parting her lips roughly with two blood-colored fingernails and revealing her teeth. As she paused, there strode past her a creature that seemed to have three heads, each with a different size and a different degree of mobility. Grissom squinted and blinked several times. Finally he managed to distinguish between the plastic half-moon of the microphone, the iron angles of the camera, and the emaciated young cameraman’s half-visible, red-bearded face. Meantime closer to Grissom something else went rushing by low to the ground. He didn’t get a good look at it: some kind of large black box, an uncertain shape. It made the air stir around his ankles. The man hauling the box however was impossible to miss, a tough working stiff in his prime, twice Grissom’s size, his body under its golden T-shirt as blunt and efficient as a dead-bolt lock. Gold, it seemed, was this guy’s thing. Along one side of his face dangled an earring a good two inches across, bright gold. His belt buckle also was gold, and worn up on his right hip to catch the eye. Then next, coming in the door next, now — a wide aluminum bowl, freestanding, with consoles of switches and toothed snap-latches bolted on both at top and bottom. There were nasty-looking yellow bulbs at the bowl’s center. Crossing the slate entryway, its wheels shrieked. How did it move? But the girl who entered next certainly wasn’t pushing anything. A frowning blonde who looked like she wasn’t yet out of her teens, she came through the door tilted sideways, groaning, uneasy on cheap-looking high heels. Under this girl’s chin swung a legal pad clipped to a board; up on one shoulder she barely managed to balance a steel briefcase with sharp, studded corners; cradled against her other side was a bone-white gallon jug crookedly labeled HOT STUFF. All was positive, hard-surface, solid evidence thrusting forth dynamically into uncut sunlight. Even this overloaded teenage girl had an upper body that mushroomed out into a high-school jacket with bulging shoulders.

The jacket’s elastic hem was hiked up, revealing her midriff. It was the only ordinary, untucked flesh anywhere among these people. To Grissom it seemed the girl’s belly was rising towards him, rising…the hairless teenage skin blending with her unbelted jeans….

“Say three, three and a half right now,” the girl said, or rather grunted loudly. She’d come quite close. “And with these curtains — minute—” she bent, set down her burden. Her midriff disappeared. “With these curtains, better make it two.”

“Starbaby, I told you, I got the meter right here.” This was the grip in gold, answering over his shoulder and through his earring. Grissom couldn’t be sure, but the man appeared to have a hand between his legs. “They got rooms upstairs. Starbaby! Let’s go be alone and shut the door.”

“Knock it off and give me six hundred.” The Camera/Face, who closed in on Grissom and then backed away. “And make it a wide six hundred. I want to go override and we’ll color-down right here.”

He pressed in close again, his black lens twitching.

“Starbaby,” the grip went on shouting, “I told you, you want to travel with us you got to decide. What’s it going to be girl? Them or me, girl?”

Oh I understand, Grissom thought, sounding the words against his inner ear with forced sensibleness. I understand. He’s trying to put the make on the blonde girl.

“That’s an old song,” the girl shouted back without looking at him. She waved around something that looked like a compass. “I mean I heard my grandfather singing that song.”

“Oh you just don’t know, girl.” The man was working expertly, hopping up and down like a gymnast, making swift settings on the aluminum reflecting bowl. “Starbaby it ain’t that I’m old, it’s that you’re new . Girl you ain’t even been born yet.”

“Go, just — just stay on the other side of the world from me.” She sounded uncertain. “Just, get us the count.”

Grissom stood watching them all come into his house. The girl’s midriff like a piece of his own flesh orbiting now behind him to his right. The topheavy cameraman, the jade-green reporter like a blade of metal grass thrust upright between the harsh lines of the grip’s shouting. Grissom thought he’d never seen these rooms so crammed with humanity. Although — he thought again — that was an odd way to feel with Syl out of sight. But ow, those few hard questions she’d asked him earlier. They seemed still with him, here like seastones under the carpet. Why, Syl had asked him, did Grissom leave it to her during this past month to reconstruct the whole twenty-five-year-long chain of events on her own? Why didn’t he come tell her straight out: first there was that original executive-level trek, and, and next, Grissom …He tried to answer, saying there were things he could tell his lawyer and the people in the media that, ah, naturally Syl, ah, well like my fat her used to say, Syl, there are a lot of bastards out there….