Jackdaw, page 9
When I took a break it was because my fingers ached. I cracked my neck, stretched, stood up.
Which is when I realised Lightfoot was gone.
13
At first, when you start to lose weight from some pathology, like, say, cancer, people tell you you’re looking great.
That’s what happened to me. I’d get into work and my colleagues would tell me whatever diet I was using was working, or ask me to share my workout tips. I was definitely leaner and my clothes were hanging looser on my frame. That was because I had a diet that consisted of cellulose sourced from paper. My tummy muscles felt lax and the curve of my spine was abnormal because the Destroyer made me slouch all the time.
At some point I deteriorated from fashionably lean to underweight and it showed. People transitioned into a kind of faux worry. They seemed concerned about my health, but in actuality they were concerned with their own. What’s wrong with this guy and is it contagious? Can’t he do the polite thing and take his sickness out of my face? Distancing strategies among primates. Other animals too. Bees will kick other bees out of the hive if infected with foulbrood, and the normally social lobster will avoid virus-infected ones.
My brain still worked, though. I may have looked ten years older, but all my neurons were firing as required.
Didn’t matter. People told other people who told other people.
‘You need to take sick leave,’ said my direct boss in a new meeting, fortified by Human Resources.
‘I’m not sick,’ I said.
‘I am a doctor. You are sick,’ said my boss. ‘Your muscle mass is less than it was six months ago, you’re cachectic, your face is sallow, your eyes are bloodshot and, to be honest, you look like you have cancer.’ AIDS went unspoken, but loud and clear.
‘I don’t have cancer.’
‘How do you know? Have you had a blood test? Did you check tumour markers?’
‘I’ve had a test.’ Not tumour markers though. I should have done that.
‘You are wasting. You have to find out why your muscle and adipose fat is melting away, Tade.’
Oh, that.
I knew where my flesh was disappearing to.
It was a sculpture.
Study for a portrait of the writer.
I have never been very tall, but I became muscular as soon as I got out of my gawky teenage years. Elise said I was made of circles. Bulging muscles, not large, but rounded and ever ready to punch. I trained first in karate, then taekwondo, then some mixed martial arts. I was good, not great.
Martial arts calmed me down. The time I stopped fighting when I was seventeen? That was why. Training exhausted me and sparring served as an efficient outlet for my rage at being unloved.
You do well in hand-to-hand combat if you don’t fear pain and you train. I didn’t fear a hit to the face. I worked out till my belly was hard and I could take hits there. And you’ll recall that my stepfather had trained me to absorb kicks to any part of my anatomy.
I was at my best in university, of course, but that discipline followed me.
My hair started flaking off when I was twenty-one. I expected this because my father was bald from a similar age; I made peace with it, and things like Rogaine or a toupee were for lesser men. My gut grew ten years after that. That was genetics combined with diet, I guess. I liked food. I still worked out, but what I got for my pains was a big belly over hard muscle. I could live with that. I’d seen fat kung fu masters and my sparring was still effective. I used to be fast and strong; now I was experienced and strong. More brain than brawn to keep up with the youngers.
When that hardness started to abate, I wondered what was happening. That’s where the sculpture came in.
About the time Lightfoot disappeared I started seeing a new object in my peripheral vision on the left side.
At first I didn’t attend to it, thinking I was experiencing some kind of visual phenomenon, like a floater or something. Then I realised I only saw it when I was in my study and never when I closed my eyes. Henrietta still had dominion over my eyelids. It seemed like a drop of viscous fluid hanging in the air at first, translucent like K-Y gel, about the size of a rugby ball and the shape of an amoeba. Over time it became more and more opaque, and the colour changed to bright red. It seemed to grow as I lost weight. I started to think my belly fat was going there and nothing could convince me otherwise. Other than growth, it didn’t move. It darkened to mauve.
‘Jessie Lightfoot, where the fuck are you?’ I asked the empty attic.
I experimented. Using just my willpower, I created a bulge in the side of the mass. Then I made it flatten into a disc. I got elaborate, pulling out horns and tentacles, twisting them into pretzel shapes, a mild distraction. I didn’t think anything of it until it started pulsating.
If I concentrated in a quiet room, I could hear the beating of a heart. I put my hands on my own chest to see if it was the same. It wasn’t. I had a tumour outside my body, fed by my own flesh, which I could, to an extent, shape. To an extent. It kept growing in size, and no matter how much I ate, I kept shrinking. At least I knew where the food was going.
My skylight sprung a leak one night and I came up to work one morning to find my keyboard drenched and my mouse borked. This shouldn’t have been a problem since I mostly worked in longhand and transcribed. The problem was I still had to get all those ink scrawls into the computer and telepathic computing isn’t a thing yet. I wasn’t rich enough to have a personal assistant. I ordered a new keyboard, but the leak continued. I wrote to the sound of constant dripping water. It occurred to me, later, that it hadn’t even been raining. Where was the water coming from? Was it even water? By this time I had a measuring jug to collect the liquid. I’d stop writing and empty it every hour or so. Now I was curious. I tasted the collected liquid and I was surprised and not surprised to find it salty. Like tears. Or sweat.
Where would that be coming from? The sea is miles away. Even if there was rain, it wouldn’t be salty, although I remembered one instance of salty rain during a cyclone when I was in the South Pacific. I lived right next to the sea, as in I could take my lunch break in the Pacific and get back to work in minutes. I’m fairly sure what I tasted was sea spray, not rain, but salty rain sounds more sensational and it’s a better story for dining out.
I looked left at the sculpture. My eyes hurt because I always had to keep them still, but shift my focus left, which was weird and migraine-inducing. The surface glistened, moist, and whatever fluid was on it streamed slowly up, against gravity.
The tumour was sweating and, shit, nobody obeyed the laws of physics anymore in my world.
I popped some chocolate pretzels because why not? Feeding a tumour is hard work and you need as much junk food as you can find.
A part of me knew this all had to be imaginary, but as each drop of sweat landed in the jug it splashed and tiny droplets landed on my skin. It was cold, and the temperature change was immediate. I knew I was going to have to deal with this at some point, but I was consumed with my writing. I would finish the damn book first, then have a nervous breakdown. I had stopped taking the fluoxetine because I ran out and didn’t go back for a repeat prescription even though my saintly GP left several voicemails reminding me and telling me the dangers of abruptly stopping, which really wasn’t true. Fluoxetine, of all of the drugs in its class, can be stopped abruptly because it’s broken down into something called norfluoxetine, which stays in the blood for five days. Not that I was thinking of this at the time. I would have done the same if I had been on a different drug.
I did start to worry when the tumour seemed to move around from the corner of one eye to the other. It undulated, like a slug, and I worried about what its purpose might be. Or what it was growing into. I could still shape it, like a flesh sculpture, but that didn’t affect its purpose. Or maybe I was the one directing it from my subconscious. That didn’t help me because fuck knows what was going on in my mind at that time.
But I wrote. The words flowed like… tumour sweat, like the undulatory motion of a fleshy sculpture.
I didn’t tell my boss any of this in the meeting.
‘It must be stress,’ I said.
‘You’re going to go to Occupational Health. You’re going to be assessed for fitness to work,’ he said.
‘What? No,’ I said. ‘I’m fine. I’ve been working. There haven’t been any complaints from my patients—’
‘Actually…’
He produced a bunch of documents.
There had been complaints, but nebulous.
He looks scary. He looks like he’s dying. He talks to himself. I’ve heard that psychiatrists are mad themselves, but this is ridiculous. He rushes off to the toilet so often. Does he have irritable bowel syndrome? He breaks off mid-sentence and can’t find the train of thought anymore. He stinks. His hygiene has worsened considerably. Something is wrong. I think he is about to drop dead.
‘When did these come in? They don’t seem fair,’ I said.
‘I don’t give a shit,’ said my boss. That was uncharacteristic. He was a devout… something or the other. He didn’t usually swear.
‘Well, you should,’ I said. ‘Not a single one of these complaints is about the care they received.’
‘Your appearance and the emotions you stimulate in them is part of the care. Get the all-clear from Occupational Health, Tade. It’s the only way you’re getting back to work. You stay away until then.’
‘Fine, I will.’
I didn’t.
14
Around the time I ate the last pages from the books given to me for research, Elise called me to the living room for a talk.
A reasonable person, Elise never holds a grudge. She acts, she does not brood.
‘The advantage of taking action is you don’t have to waste time and energy on sulking or stewing. It’s healthier.’
She is the revenge type. You harm her or those she holds dear, she will do you damage, which is fine when you are not the object of her ire. I didn’t like how she was staring at me and I didn’t have Jessie Lightfoot for backup.
‘I’m not going to ask you any questions,’ she said. Her hands gripped the armrests of the chair tightly. She was stressed, but trying to look calm.
‘All right.’
‘I’m leaving. I’m taking Trap.’
Not ideal.
‘Why?’ I asked. Hint of a whine in my voice?
‘Are you kidding?’
‘I’m not. Why are you breaking up our marriage?’
‘I’m not breaking it up. You are.’
‘How? I don’t want you to go anywhere. You’re the one who’s leaving.’
‘Tade there’s blood and shit all over your clothes. You disappear and can’t be reached by phone. You don’t say where you’ve been.’
‘I’m working—’
‘No, you’re not.’
‘Yes, I am. Just wait here.’
Fastest I had moved in a long time. I darted up the stairs, got my Moleskine, where I wrote my first drafts, and, out of breath, shoved it in Elise’s face.
She opened it and read in silence. She flipped some pages. Her lips thinned.
‘Is this a joke?’ she asked.
‘I know it’s kind of raw, and uncomfortable, but that’s what I’ve been working on. It’s a first draft, so it’s bound to look rough and ready. I know what you’re thinking, and I think it’s shocking, yes, but it touches an honesty—’
‘What do you think you’ve written here?’
‘A novella for the…’
I snatched it from her and flipped through because this was not the expected response or tone. I had thought she would be dazzled by my brilliant prose and all my eccentricities would fall away because they were in the service of art. True love would prevail, conquer all, as they say. Cue violins and movie credits.
Oh.
I saw it immediately.
‘Um…’
‘Yeah,’ said Elise.
The book was full of prose, but it was the text of my last novel. They weren’t bad words, in fact, there were flashes of brilliance, but they weren’t new words and I had been regurgitating these for months, thinking I was writing pretentious studies for portraits.
‘I’m confused…’
Elise got up. ‘Yes, you are. You need to see someone, Tade, but I cannot let our son be exposed to this. I’ve not been up there but the stench from your study is overpowering. I honoured our agreement. Can you say you’ve been honourable?’ She gave me room to respond, but I didn’t take the bait. ‘We’re going to my mum’s. Sort your shit out, Thompson.’
Alone in the house, I lived almost entirely in my study. The dripping of sweat from the ceiling into a basin became soothing. I got used to Lightfoot’s absence. I didn’t have to skulk around to wank when Henrietta got frisky anymore. I only visited the kitchen and the bathroom for my basic needs and to feed the sculpture.
But the writing. Since Elise had confronted me with what I was doing I hadn’t been producing anything. The whole point of my research was to get a novel out of the experience. Bacon, in spite of his dissipations, always seemed to work. By all accounts he would spend the night carousing, get himself beaten up, go home, sleep it off or be fucked by some East End thug, wake up early and paint. That kind of discipline would be nice.
I wept. It was too much. My family, my medical practice, my literary ambitions, my health, all going or gone. I trembled with the emotion of it all. This transitioned to rigors and I may have had a fever.
Even the Destroyer rejected me.
‘Jesus, go and have a bath and wear clean clothes. I told you, hygiene is number one and you smell like a tip. This is disrespectful. Get out.’
I couldn’t smell myself, of course. I get my acute sense of smell from my mother. I think. She used to be able to tell when my stepfather had cheated by smelling other women on him. When I read Perfume by Patrick Süskind I related to the main character instantly. Grenouille, the protagonist, clearly had a superpower and took olfaction to extremes, but for me the world was full of smells that spoke to me. In Perfume the ability was explored to its furthest possible ramifications. I can smell people. It’s like people have olfactory signatures that I can identify. Nobody I knew had ever understood or, having attempted an understanding, believed me when I spoke of this. I thought everybody was like this when I was young. Body odours cause me pain and halitosis makes me run a mile.
To think I might be causing the same kind of discomfort to others made me ill and ashamed of myself. I went home, showered first, then ran a bath. I looked around for Elise’s bath salt things. I didn’t know bath salts so I just dumped a few in. They smelled like responsibility and leisure.
The quietness of the house got to me. This was just before Trap’s bedtime and he would have been switching from one toy to the next, trying to get the maximum play time out of his waning wakefulness. Why kids’ toys make such a racket I will never know. In his room the picture book he and I were drawing lay abandoned. I did think of finishing it in his absence, but then where would the father-son bonding be?
When I tired of the water I rose, sniffed my armpits and dried off. I avoided the mirror. I tried to straighten up my posture. After all, Destroyer couldn’t see me. Muscles and ligaments had adjusted already, and they groaned with the effort, resisting. I would need exercise or physiotherapy, or both. I resumed slouching.
At the foot of the ladder, in the hallway, I stopped and took a deep breath.
Yeah, not a good experience. As I entered the attic, I saw the change immediately.
The flesh sculpture was in the middle of my psychic nest.
I knew this was real. Before, it was just in my visual field, but disappeared if I looked directly at it. This was the word made flesh, pulsating and heaving in the midst of chewed research material. I punched myself in the temple twice, blinked, squeezed my eyes shut. Hello, Henrietta! Opened them again, and the sculpture was still there.
The air was moist with its sweaty, yeasty odour; its pheromones and malignancy. I had to be sure; I had to touch it.
I inched forward, but my heart kept beating faster and faster the closer I got. I retreated and flew downstairs.
That thing had hair.
I didn’t imagine that. The detail was too granular, and how did it get there? For one irrational moment I thought it was a prank. Elise wasn’t above such things, but then again, she wasn’t in the mood right now and I believed her when she said she hadn’t been up.
I stared up at the attic door as if that would change anything. I half-expected the sculpture to rush down after me and I was aware of my nakedness. If this was America I’d have a .45 cocked and locked with thirteen rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber. I’d be ready to blast it, to kill anything. More likely I’d kill myself.
I’d played with a Glock before, but only once. Just after medical school I got this gig where I attended weapons testing in an army barracks in Nigeria. I did it for a month. The regular guy was off with plague or something (not hyperbole. The doctor had yersinia pestis and nobody could figure where he got it from since there was no local outbreak. Rumour had it the base was testing unauthorised biological weapons and while I like listening to conspiracy theories as folk storytelling, I could not fault this thinking). I was drafted in because the regulations required at least one physician on site when ordnance quality control activities were carried out. The army and their language, right?
The things I saw made me irritated at Hollywood films, particularly in the area of hand grenades. You know that casual way the hero pulls the pin and throws, taking his sweet time to get to cover? Trading quips? Saying something cool? Walking away in slo-mo, backing the explosion? None of that happened.
What did happen was a live grenade being handed to a fearful, trembling recruit with sweat on his brow and, if he was lucky, a flak jacket. He had to pull the pin, chuck the grenade down a hole and duck behind a concrete shield. By my estimation he had like two seconds to get to cover before the most god-awful blast flowered from the hole, scattering dust and stones everywhere, and leaving a ring in the ears despite the muffs provided. Explosives are a terrible thing. How did humanity evolve to this level of potential for carnage?
