3

Call me paranoid. Call me what you will. But this place was freakish, and never more clearly than now as I pushed through a crowd gathered around a transparent tank in which an armless and horribly burn-scarred man wearing nothing but a Speedo sat among thousands of hairy spiders that crawled over his body like a shivering coat of fleece. The onlookers squealed as the object of their delight opened his mouth, inviting one of the hairy crawlers inside. When the spider accepted the invitation, their voices grew even shriller. When the man bit into it, they lost all semblance of belonging to a civilized species.

A snowboarding buddy once told me that in the Red Light back alleys of Amsterdam he had been dragged into a sex show featuring a woman with one leg ‘doing it’ with a woman with no legs. I asked him why he’d let himself be dragged in and he said, “The whole world’s a freak show, man. This was just a ready, prepackaged sample.” I naturally pointed out his excuse of an answer was a typical one for moral degenerates and reprobates such as himself, and that I didn’t know who were sicker, the ones running the show or the ones buying the tickets. But it does beg the question, doesn’t it? Just who are the freaks in the carnival? And are we immune to the contagion just because we claim we are? I mean, I honestly can’t say whether I paused long enough to imprint the actions of the man in the tank because of a need to make sure my eyes weren’t deceiving me or because of some baser urge. Whatever the case, I made it through the congested audience, with the rough help of those whose field of view I impeded, and found myself in a void between corruptions.

I’d a reasonable view of the well-lit square from where I stood so I held my position looking for that splash of yellow that would set her apart from the general array. After a couple moments I spotted the right color and immediately headed after it, only to find that the owner of the tee shirt was a boy. I did a deliberate, methodical three-sixty, scanning the crowd with a father’s blood driven x-ray vision, but to no avail. Full-fledged panic reared, despite the fact that the in-character part of me still campaigned to downplay the thing. Where the hell was she? I knew her and she wouldn’t just wander off when told to do otherwise. Especially when she’d been practically accosted already by some of the element.

And where, said a less steady inner voice, was the elephant man-thing? I hadn’t seen—

A costume bumped into me, roughly, as it staggered by. I whirled, on the verge of hurling an obscenity at the drunken clown, but stopped short of doing so. I took a breath. A long deep breath. Then another for good measure. Calm down, I instructed myself. As you’ve so often told your ex-wife, you’re strung tight as a—

Wire.

Out of nowhere, a flash from the dream I’d had on the night Kristin had phoned me after having her own nightmare. The images were somehow more alive, more fully realized during this random moment than when I’d awakened from the dream. The emerging unidentifiable faces now had sketchy features, all identical, all an awful lot like those of my offspring—more specifically, Kathy. A background noise that I hadn’t remembered at the time accompanied the memory, a faint tick-tocking that seemed to come from some external source, outside of the forest, maybe even outside of the dream. The sense of the memory was different too, the proportions of being lost, being watched having changed to a feeling of desperately needing to extricate myself from the snarls of barbed wire because of some evil graver than mere faces among the trees. For that random moment, as if the finger depressing the shoot button on the camera wouldn’t release the frame back to time, I found myself unable to breathe, throat constrained by the clutch of the metal vines, body deprived of its ability to perform its most basic and necessary functions by the knowledge of something still coming, something beyond awful, something malevolent, merciless, demented.

How long the moment would have gone on is impossible to say because it was interrupted by what I’m sure was a gentle slap on my back, though it felt like a hammer as it shocked my respiratory system back into working order. I feigned normalcy as I turned, but I could tell by Ferez’s puzzled face he’d noticed something was amiss. I was about to say something, anything, but he beat me to it.

“Ah, I see your lovely daughter’s been doing some shopping. What a delight she is, sir. What a delight.”

Sure enough, there she was, just coming out of a souvenir shop, a small bag in her hand.

Christ, I thought. Here I’d been freaking out about her whereabouts, when where the hell was I? Vicious dream flashes blossoming out of panic attacks? Was I losing it? Had Kristin’s news affected me more profoundly than I’d realized? As I considered this, the nerves did not relax, but flared hotly, like tiny open-mouthed serpents unwilling to concede that the danger had passed. I could feel the blood pulsing in my eyes, my fingers trembling, my testicles bristling. It was as though I’d just escaped a torrent of bullets and was expecting the next flurry at any moment.

“Whassup, Daddy-O?” my daughter said. Like the German Was ist los? or the Spanish ¿Qué pasa?, the syntax in the question Whassup? is driven by inflection, and hers, as she studied me, hovered somewhere between confused greeting and concerned inquiry.

“Nothing, sweetheart,” I said, hoping she would see the lie through with me. “The mayor and I were just finishing up our interview.”

“On our way back for another beer, I hope,” said the good mayor.

“I don’t think so, Mr. Ferez. My daughter and I have had a long day and want to be fresh for tomorrow’s festivities.”

“A pity,” he said, partaking of my daughter almost openly. To her he said, “What did you buy? Something to remember our lovely Brazilian city by?”

“Just a gift for my sister.”

Before the mayor could utter something that would make my shell come apart completely—“Oh, you have a sister”—we were interrupted by the noisy passage of none other than the elephant butler. And God help us all, but he was singing. At the top of his lungs, in accented English, he sang that jingle from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life (the very movie in which the elephant costume appeared) that poked fun at Irish Catholic propagation.

“Every sperm is sacred,” he crooned, elongated arms rippling with the melody. “Every sperm is great.”

I looked back at Kristin, whose mouth had dropped open as she watched him.

“If a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate!”

***

I asked Kristin later in the hotel room what the elephant costume had said to her, and she told me he had asked her if she had seen the movie that had briefly featured him. Just to be rid of him, she told him no, but in fact I had let her watch it with me not six months before—without her mother’s knowledge. It’s an adult movie, to be certain, but Kristin was worldly enough not to let a hodgepodge of off-color and opinionated jabs upset her world view. Without sounding too apologetic, my feeling was that the movie’s aesthetic, which lay in the balance between its bathroom humor and its commentary on the human condition, made it a worthwhile experience. At any rate, the man in the elephant costume had gone on to do an improvised street rendition of the surreal ‘Welcome to the Middle of the Film’ segment, which basically involved him moving his protracted arms at odd angles while saying things like, “Where did the fish go? It went wherever I did go.” I must have spotted them together after this bit was finished. Had I witnessed the stranger’s gesticulations from my seat across the square, I don’t know what I would have thought I was seeing. Nothing healthy, that’s for certain.

By then I was completely over my episode and able to process the evening with some objectivity. The attack had been brought on, I decided, by a combination of travel weariness, shocking news, and even worse beer. No matter how on our game we think we are, we are all susceptible to breakdowns, both major and minor. Life deals out its injuries, one deuce after another, and eventually you begin to wear down. I had crossed thousand-foot-deep chasms, hand over fist, by rope, done numerous ‘extreme’ activities that require supreme mental concentration, but none of this made one immune or impervious. No amount of self-discipline conditioned a person completely against the more insidious workings of the mind. I’d cracked a bit, bottom line. The experience was under my belt now, such that next time, God forbid, I’d recognize the demon before it took possession of me.

Though I could tell my daughter was as concerned for me as I was for her, that she had definitely spotted the wrongness in my demeanor, we didn’t let the matter insinuate itself into our chat time before we locked up the room tight against the freakish night and went to bed. She no doubt had pegged my behavior a reaction to the news of the baby, and wanted to respect my space. But as she turned out the light by her bed, she did say one thing that would continue to stick like tar long after the night was done:

“Daddy-O, do you think normal families go through what we go through?”

Normal families? What to say to such a question?

“Honey, we’re not a special case. But isn’t your question a contradiction in terms? If normal families go through what we go through, aren’t we normal too?”

“That’s not what I meant, Dad,” she said. “I mean regular old families. Are we . . . I mean, you know . . . ?”

Her words summoned an image I’d kept more or less buried since it first made its bloody impression. Soon after Felicia and our newborn twins came home from the hospital, Felicia’s body had flushed itself of a rather significant amount of placenta that had somehow remained in her system. In a way the repugnant picture was symbolic of the tragedy that seemed to surround the Ocason family. I quickly put it back where it belonged, extracting a lesson out of its superstitious appearance

“We’re not cursed. We’re not even particularly unusual. It is unwise to think of your life in comparative terms. Our paths are our own, along with all the rewards and pitfalls. When you look back on your journey one day, you want to be able to say, I lived my life to the fullest. I lived it with honesty and grace and an awareness of my faults. When adversity presented itself, I overcame it and pushed on. When suffering threatened to make me forget the joy in life, I did not let it. As hard as it sometimes was, I kept my perspective. I loved myself, I remained true to myself through it all. And while if I had to do over again I might tweak the journey a bit, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

She didn’t say anything for a while. I let my eyes fall closed, thinking about my advice and who it was really meant for. After a few minutes I heard her stir in her bed. The pause seemed too long as I waited for the words, but when she finally spoke, she said simply, “Thank you, Dad.” And I knew from her voice that silent tears were flowing.

***

I woke suddenly, with an acrid odor in my nostrils and a dim tick-tocking in my ears. I couldn’t decide at first whether the smoke lingered from the dream or was coming from the waking side of the curtain. But the darkness around me, fragmented occasionally by the lights of the dying party, revealed nothing more threatening than these flashing reminders of where I was. In the dream someone had been trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t recall whether they’d succeeded or not. One word had come back with me. Its impression so dull, I wasn’t sure it had made the crossing in its original form. If it had, then the identity of the someone who’d shared it perhaps wasn’t so unknown at all, and what seemed a mild dream, as far as my receptors could be trusted, took on different proportions. Twins was the word, and somehow the idea of its utterance from my departed daughter’s lips threw the shadows of a nightmare.

As if to confirm that it was a night for such visitations, I heard Kristin murmur what sounded like Kathy’s name in her sleep as I got up and went to the bathroom. I stood over the toilet feeling cold despite the mugginess of the poorly air conditioned interiors of what was supposedly the ‘luxury’ hotel in town. The hotel was located two blocks from the town square, on a busy corner. Its inset entrance situated at the point of the angle of the two streets and facing a cement island that boasted a raised sculpture of some historical figure. Our room was on the back side of the hotel, with a brief patio that opened onto a garden crisscrossed by pebbled footpaths and shared by the hotels on each side of the Rio Campestre. The asphalt, concrete, and vegetation huddled in conspiracy against modern defenses, holding the heat in place like a trap. Earlier, in the square, it had not seemed so bad, but that was earlier. I could feel the clamminess of my skin as I had to will relief for my schizophrenic bladder.

I didn’t feel especially well, or rather I felt out of context, as though caught between two storylines, one of which hadn’t yet unfolded. The basic bodily function of relieving myself seemed a heavy yet desperately mundane action. At the same time, an amazing feat of nature. I knew the threads of sleep and its alternate reality still clung, but the motions of washing my hands, drying them, placing my hand on the doorknob, seemed things of themselves. I opened the door, stepping out of the bathroom, and stopped cold.

A shadow lay against the diaphanous drapes covering the sliding glass door leading to the garden, its instantly recognizable shape distorted even further than its elongated limbs achieved. The body was bizarrely out of proportion, the appendage protruding from its face wider than a fire hose. But there was no mistaking the costume.

I stood motionless for at least five seconds, trying to decide if the man was standing right there, maybe just beyond the patio, or was out in the garden. What was certain was that for those five seconds he, too, did not move, as if aware the phantasmagoric effect. As if he had found the precise location among the garden’s lamps that would hold him outlined against the door.

If this was that moment of recognition come so soon after the attack of earlier, the critical moment that decided whether the demon of panic would be let in or not, I was going to win this round through controlled, if still detached, decisiveness. When I moved, I moved swiftly, crossing the room in four strides, flipping the lock and jerking the door open in a single motion. As the curtain fell behind me, I half expected to find the hand of an absurdly long arm seizing my throat. But there was no one there. Not around the patio, not at a wider radius among the configurations of shrubs and flowers, not to the left or the right. I stepped off the porch listening for sounds of movement, but detected nothing except the scattered cries of the town’s sleepless. He could not have gone far. His shadow had not withdrawn before I was in the act of pulling open the door. Which left the disturbing thought that he had only backed out of sight and was still out there watching from the vegetation.

As the chill whispered along my arms—neither decisiveness nor detachment deadens one—the Pink Floyd line from the song of the same title came with its eerie, vacuum-like emphasis on the last two words: Is there anybody . . . out there? With my actions and sensations still happening on some separate plane, the idea of voicing the question seemed both ridiculous and strangely pointless. I hovered there, an elephantine ghost myself, and then I heard, from deeper in the garden and fading with each adjective issued, the ditty from the Monty Python movie. Only this time there was laughter in it.

“Every sperm is sacred. Every sperm is great . . . ”

For the first time I made an association between the lyrics and Kristin’s condition. Logic said it was coincidence. Even thinking the question of how this stranger in a city thousands of miles from Alaska could possibly know of my daughter’s pregnancy was ludicrous. But some other sense, some instinct or intuition, wasn’t so willing to dismiss the correlation. Twice now the verse had been delivered in the proximity, or at least in hearing range, of my daughter and me. Almost conveniently, if you were willing to make that leap. Almost as if the verse was a message to us. I know what business is about, yes I do. Little girls have been playing adult games.

I checked myself. No way was I going down a road like that. And no way was I going to let myself become possessed, or obsessed, again. There was only one path to satisfaction here, and that was by confronting the elephant man-thing. I might look the fool, but that was small payment for peace of mind in a world gone suddenly implosive.

Stepping back inside the room, I locked the patio door, slipped on a shirt and a pair of treaded sandals, which, along with the athletic shorts I’d slept in, would suffice for the purposes at hand. But before I reached the front door, I heard my name, too urgently whispered from my daughter’s lips. I turned, thinking she was still asleep, that it was another fragment from whatever dreams tormented her. Just as I did, a fleeting light from somewhere provided enough illumination to see her face as she rose up to her elbow, looking at me. I won’t attempt to describe the expression that wracked it for fear of losing my way in inadequacies, but the feeling its mere memory evinces is akin to the experience of losing your foothold on a sheer cliff.

“Dad . . . I know the man with the elephant head. In the square he called me ‘little treasure.’ Just like . . . just like he did Kathy. Kathy-chen, he said. He was there, hiking on the trail when we were collecting leaves for the science project. The day Kathy disappeared.”

I had fallen back against the wall, and long before the last sentence had found its way out. My heart was thundering in my chest. My entire body felt as though it was encased in dry ice. I tried but failed to deliver the words that she must have needed desperately right then, after waking from this revelation. But there was only one outlet for the roiling, thunderous cloud that had descended, and that was the door. I told her to stay put and was out of the room that quickly.

As I ran down the corridor, turning left into another before bursting out of the hotel entrance, fragments of a puzzle I knew would somehow continue to make no sense as a whole began to click into place. Its central point of reference: Germany. I didn’t need to review my limited Deutsch to know the Germans attached chen to names, particularly their daughters’, as an endearment. Was it another coincidence this costume party attendee, on a separate continent, had used the same pet name? No. He had made a point of being around. Toss in lyrics, strange dreams, magazine ads, and you had a medley to match my tossing emotions as I raced around the far end of the hotel next door to ours. Heading for the rear of the garden, where the elephant man-thing’s voice had indicated he was moving. Whatever reasons someone might have for terrorizing us, when I got my hands around the creature’s throat I may not wait for an answer before I choked the goddamned life out of him.

The drive I’d entered ended at a chained gate. I climbed over the gate, and by the light of a paneled outdoor lamp found the nearest path, which I followed on soft but hurried feet until I was surrounded by darkness. Pausing to let my eyes adjust, I discerned the silhouettes of a bench and another lamp, this one burned out, at an intersection ahead. I listened for a moment before proceeding to the brief open area, where I ignored a sense of vulnerability as I stood stock still, tuning in to every whisper in the foliage around me. When after a minute or two none of those whispers hinted at human passage, I began to silently work my way back toward the hotel. As I did, each step seemed to have occurred before it was taken, a blending of the detachment that had followed me outside and the déjà vu that seemed to have taken up residence, surfacing at will. In spite of this quality between myself and my environment, I remained alert to any odd sound. The fact that I hadn’t already detected one was discouraging, as the garden was only so big. But there were also only so many possibilities I could have lost the man to. One, he’d made it out of the garden before I arrived at the gate. Two, he was staying at the hotel next to ours (he couldn’t have entered without a key). Three, he’d changed direction, either circling around toward the hotel on the other side of ours or—my beating heart fell out of stroke at the thought—reversing his tracks completely.

By now I’d entered the glow radius of what I judged to be one of the lamps standing along the rim of the garden behind the Campestre. A good time for it, as the light enabled my body to keep pace with my racing mind, which was no longer concerned with the noise I made. I navigated the remainder of the garden as quickly as the maze would allow, the path depositing me almost directly upon the patio of the room next to mine and Kristin’s. I took two steps in the only direction that mattered, and froze. For the second time in a ten-minute segment of my life, I found myself the audience of a blood-chilling phantasmagoria, this time assisted in its effect by a moving, rotating light that must have belonged to a patrol or utility vehicle sweeping up the after-party streets.

The elephantine shadows stretched like bands of elastic across patio and yard as their source loomed over my daughter. Both door and curtains had been cast wide, offering the intermittent image of Kristin’s clamped, horror-stricken face. The elephant head canted not toward the long hunting knife held at her throat, not toward the shining memory that lived in the knife’s blade, but in the direction of the witness to the attack. In the presence of such a tableau, all considerations, however pertinent, become instantaneously extraneous, shedding away like shock ripples from the central burning force of fatherhood. Even so, it takes a moment for paralyzed muscles to act on signals from the brain, long enough for an elephant head to lean close to a girl’s ear and for that girl to recoil in terror, thrashing among the covers.

I found my legs as he found his, meeting him full-charge as he leaped out of the room by the same way he had entered. He got no further than the stoop as I slammed his body into the doubled panels of the open door, showering my screaming daughter in glass. I am a reasonably strong man, but it was almost with ease that I secured a position astride him, jamming my forearm into his throat and pinning his arms to the floor with my knees; almost with cooperation that I twisted the knife out of his incapacitated hand; almost with hunger that his flesh accepted the blade, which I continued driving under his ribs—though it had reached its hilt, though his spasms had waned—until Kristin’s screaming stopped.

She was limp as I pulled her up into my arms.

“Kristin, baby. Kristin,” I urged, shaking her. As I held her face in my hand, looking into glassed-over eyes, a thought made its insidious way to the surface, a prospect as unjustified as it was unbidden, considering the duration of her screams. And still I found myself tilting her head back, swallowing back the rising gorge at the memory of another delicate throat that had known the cold edge of a knife. I would not look at first, could not bring myself to validate by further action the notion that he had given Kristin, like Kathy, more than the gift of words when he leaned to her. Then, working against the muscles of my tightly closed eyes, I lifted my left, then my right eyelid.

I turned away, hyperventilating—

Then sucked it all back in as I saw the attacker slowly rise to his hands and knees, wavering a moment before steadying himself and pushing to his feet. He stood in profile, relative to my position on the bed, knife hilt protruding at a downward angle from beneath his ribs, butler tuxedo shirt saturated red. Again he rocked as I clutched my daughter to my chest with one arm, held the other poised to launch me from the bed. Again he steadied himself, then reached up and took the top of his hood in his fist. He pulled it slowly, pausing when his balance faltered, resuming when he’d found his inner ear again. It was an agonizing experience for the beholder, who wanted so to see this man’s face even as he wanted to see him crumple in a heap, forever. But at last the grim task saw fruition, the head tumbling to the floor with a padded thump, leaving behind the separate collar-like piece that had helped support the now demolished Styrofoam arms.

He appeared to be Latin, certainly not German, his face middle-aged, darkly handsome. It wore a peaceful expression, though he heaved slightly as he tried to speak from it. The word came on bubbles of blood, and in its native form, but it was enunciated clearly enough that I was able to decipher the sum of its syllables.

Evolución was how it came out, though my mind didn’t discount that a first letter r might have been lost in the effort.

With that utterance, he turned and stumbled out the door. He made it to the end of the patio before dropping, for good.