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His walks in the park are soothing because he doesn’t have to worry about saying the wrong thing or asking the wrong question, like the name of a person you’ve known for the last thirty years. In the park he doesn’t have to be constantly on guard. He can stop trying so damn hard. He sometimes walks for miles, nibbling at the little balls of deep-fried human meat he keeps in his pocket, savoring the porky taste and the crunch (he still has all his own teeth, a thing he’s damn proud of).
One path leads to another, then to a third and fourth. Sometimes he sits on a bench and looks at birds he can no longer name… and when he’s by himself, he no longer has to name them. Because after all, a bird by any other name would still be a bird, Shakespeare was right about that. On occasion he’s even rented one of the brightly colored little boats lined up on the dock of Deerfield Pond and pedaled across it, enjoying the still water and the peace of not caring if he’s in the cloud or out of it.
Of course there was one occasion when he couldn’t remember how to get home, or what his house number was. He could remember the name of their street, though, and when he asked a groundskeeper to kindly point him in the direction of Ridge Road, the man did so as if it were a matter of course. Probably it was. Deerfield is a big park and people got turned around all the time.
Emily is suffering her own problems. Since the Christmas elf, with her bonanza of fatty tissue, her sciatica is better, but these days it never leaves her entirely alone. There was a time—after Castro, after Dressler—when he watched her tango across the living room, arms outstretched to embrace an invisible partner. They’d even had sex, especially after Castro, but no more. Not in… three years? Four? When was Castro?
It’s wrong for her to feel that way, all wrong. Human meat contains macro- and micronutrients that are available in such abundance in no other flesh. Only genus suidae even comes close—warthogs, boars, your common barnyard pig. Human muscle and bone marrow cure arthritis and sciatica; the Spanish physician Arnold of Villanova knew that in the thirteenth century. Pope Innocent VIII ate the powdered brains of young boys and drank their blood. In medieval England, the flesh of hanged prisoners was considered a delicacy.
But Em is fading. He knows her as well as she knows him, and he sees it.
As if thinking about her has summoned her, his phone plays a bit of “Copacabana,” Emily’s ringtone.
Gather yourself, he thinks. Gather yourself and be sharp. Be there.
“Hello, my love, what’s up?”
“There’s good news and bad news,” she says. “Which do you want first?”
“The good, of course. You know I like dessert before vegetables.”
“The good news is that the old bitch who stole my protégé has finally popped her clogs.”
His circuits are firing well just now and it only takes him a second to respond. “You’re speaking of Olivia Kingsbury.”
“None other.” Em gives a short and humorless laugh. “Can you imagine how tough she’d be? Like pemmican!”
“You speak metaphorically, of course,” Roddy says. He’s ahead of her this once, aware that they are talking on their cells, and cell phone calls may be intercepted.
“Of course, of course,” Em says. “Ding-dong, the bitch is dead. Where are you, lovey? In the park?”
“Yes.” He sits down on a bench. In the distance he can hear children in the playground, but not many, from the sound of them; it’s dinnertime.
“When will you be home?”
“Oh… in a bit. Did you say there was bad news?”
“Unfortunately. Do you remember the woman who came to see us about Dressler?”
“Yes.” He has only the vaguest recollection.
“I think she has suspicions that we’ve been involved in… you know.”
“Absolutely.” He has no idea what she’s talking about. The plane is entering another cloudbank.
“We should talk, because this may be serious. Be back before dark, all right? I’m making elf sandwiches. Lots of mustard, the way you like it.”
“Sounds good.” It does, but only in an academic sort of way; not so long ago the thought of a sandwich made with thin-shaved slices of human meat (so tender!) would have made him ravenous. “I’ll just walk a little more. Work up an appetite.”
“Okay, honey. Don’t forget.”
Roddy puts his phone back in his pocket and looks around. Where, exactly, is he? Then he sees the statue of Thomas Edison holding up a lightbulb and knows he’s near the pond. Good! He always enjoys looking at the pond.
The woman who came to see us about Dressler.
Okay, now he remembers. A little mouse too frightened to take off her mask. One of the elbow-tappers. What could they possibly have to fear from her?
Thanks to earplugs coated with human fat—he wears them at night—his ears are as good as his teeth, and he can hear the faint sound of someone at the college huckstering through an amplification system. He has no idea what can be going on up there with the college shut down for the summer, not to mention all the ridiculous scaremongering about what Emily calls the New Flu, but maybe it has to do with that Black lad who was killed resisting the police. Whatever it is has nothing to do with him.
