THE GOOD BOY
novel by
Jan Leyre
Rushing down fuel-stinking Gate-49, with the last two weeks slamming my brains like lead waves, I could still hear the executor, who looked like a stuffed pig, say: I’m afraid Lauenfeldt Chemicals is bankrupt; bankrupt, bankrupt, bankrupt. Finally at the Jetway I took an exhausted breath.
“Just made it, watch your step sir,” a flight attendant said scanning my body, voice competing with revving engines, as I stumbled into freezing first class. “You’re alright?”
I collapsed into 4-A, feeling betrayed. It was an irrational feeling I rationalized. While Dad was ill, my mother and my sister Bettina had successfully managed to mismanage the business and hadn’t brought me in to help, reasoning that being an actor I knew nothing about chemistry or running a factory (Bettina was a chemical engineer). Besides, I was living in New York.
I’d been taking a break on the beach, dreading to return to the red-bricked manor house whose beauty I no longer saw, dreading what was on the second floor. September wouldn’t die; even the leaves on the ashes clung tenaciously, too guilty to fall.
Reluctantly I headed across the lawn back up the house, noticing that the large rosebush was nothing but dried out twigs and thorns. Dad used to threaten he would die when the bush with the fragrant pink roses failed to bloom. That summer it did.
When I walked into Dad’s darkened bedroom, facing the Sound, he was thrashing and shouting obscenities on the 400-year-old Dutch rosewood marquetry four-poster looking a mix between a mummy and a bog body, freeing himself from the life-support tubes and wires, which the two nurses and doctor tried to reattach. My mother and sister looked on—frozen. I didn’t fare much better.
A hand on my shoulder woke me. “Lunch?” barked the musk-reeking bald purser, ‘skull and bones’ tattooed on his bull-like neck. “Filet de Boeuf grillé, sauce au poivre noir, or the Pasta ala Puttanesca?” he said and plunked a steak on the tray table, hurrying off before I could protest.
After a no-frill salad and a bottle of Evian I looked forward to unwinding, but coulddn’t, even though peace and quiet was on my side: the cabin was empty apart from a woman across the aisle and a little girl sitting in the back of the cabin. The mother (I presumed she was with the kid) was not my type, too White Cliffs of Dover with her pale skin and platinum colored hair, but her almost black eyes and scent, muguet, Lily of the Valley, Penhaligon’s if not mistaken, were not bad. How she’d hatched the little girl god only knows. Virgin-birth, eggs bought, sperm borrowed; an in-vitro-job probable. (Fetuses: disgusting—homegrown parasites lounging lazily in there, sucking you dry, dry dry.)
Mothers—at 35, I was still Mom’s good boy—she’d stolen my heart, and so when Dad lay dying, I felt nothing. She was my world, my sun. So radiant, so beautiful, like gold; no, I didn’t mind being her satellite.
I dove into The Stranger (Camus was my mother’s favorite author), this time hoping to get farther than the first two sentences. Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know, but I was too exhausted for serious literature and switched to something even more serious, Dostoevsky’s Demons, to challenge my exhaustion and world-weariness.
At page 13 a headache struck. I took a couple of GHBs hoping they’d ease the headache; my cousin, a psychopharmacologist, had discretely put a whole bottle in my pocket at dad’s funeral, ‘should things get too tough’. Rarely took drugs, exept for an occasional joint.
Suddenly my normally low body temperature shot up. Did I have a fever?
I flung the blanket down and myself into the aisle. Heading for the lavatory, static-blue electricity shot from my finger tips when I touched the headrests.
Removed the sunglasses. In the lavatory mirror I looked a hundred, except for the beet red face. And the left eye, swollen for a week, had almost closed. Anything with eyes and I freaked. Splashing my face with water didn’t help.
Back in the aisle, every one of my million trillion cells smelled the mother; heard, saw and knew her; zoomed in on her delicate-delicate white-white cleavage where an unusual cross nestled. Instead of one crossbar it had two: the upper set with yellow diamonds, the lower, black.
Hunger struck.
Fifteen minutes later I was in shock, being a vegan, for chowing down a blood-dripping steak, making it palatable with a bottle of red wine. What was happening to me? Had I caught something?
When the little girl two hours into the flight ran up to pester mama and stopped at my seat, the headache was gone and I felt less hot. “Uncle Bruno, why are you here and not there?” she said.
“I’m not your uncle, dear . . . but this is for you,” I said with an alluring smile and conjured three books from my satchel. “I’ve got Lolita—about a bad, very bad, bad, bad little girl. We also have A Clock Work Orange, and—and I definitely think this is you, Leviathan, the—ooh-ooh-ooh so terrible, ferociously-greedy and insatiable, child-eating-gnash-gnashy-gnashing sea monster. Might help you take your pretty mind off air pockets,” (there weren’t any). “What shall it be?”
“The one . . . the one about the child-gnash-gnashing sea monster,” she said.
Her mother smiled. “That’s terribly sweet of you. She reads the strangest grown-up things,” she said.
“Believe me she’ll have Hobbe’s philosophy analyzed in a sec. Kids today are so much smarter than we were,” I said, feeling the GHBs clicking in. I felt euphoric and horny.
“Covenants without the sword are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all,” she said as her daughter darted off.
“Impressed, is that what Hobbes wrote? Never read him, just carry him around. Eases my intellectual insecurities,” I said, noticing she looked different—better, almost pretty. I slithered into the seat to hide my erection. “And what are you reading?”
“A book on . . .” she mumbled.
“Can’t hear you,” I lied.
She leaned over the aisle, “A biography on Jean Paul Marat, the French revolutionary who turned from doctor and scientist to mass murderer . . . He made lists of whom were to be guillotined until Charlotte Corday dropped by and stabbed him to death in his bathtub,” she said, her face flushing.
“Fascinating—the ultimate relaxing bath! Move over here, got plenty of room,” I laughed and I scooted to the window seat. “The whole cabin’s ours.”
“What does a person make a 180 degree turn from healer to killer?” she said and brought her alligator bag and mineral water. “I’m Dagmar.”
Of course I could think of a few things: Ungrateful patients, and jealous professors at the Parisian Academy of Science blocking your inventions in Marat’s case. In my case, when you’ve been taking your mother on skiing vacations in St Moritz, put her up in Manhattan’s Four Seasons, wined and dined poor artist friends, been patient and sweet for too long, your guardian angel (or demon) prods you to do a 180. Enough is enough.
Three hours into the flight, after plenty of Burgundy and spiking her wine with GHB, while she’d gone to the loo, this Dagmar looked beautiful.
“I knew I recognized you. You were in Loup-garou, ‘The Werewolf.’”
I nodded. Normally being reminded that Loup-garou was my only flick would’ve upset and reminded me of what a total failure I was. Now after the GHBs, I didn’t give a damn.
She stared at my sunglasses. I removed them. She looked concerned at my almost shut, red, left eye. “Hope you had it checked out . . . you could . . .”
“Go blind? That’s what worries me—and I’m very nearsighted,” I said.
And God had I been myopic. I should’ve chosen a profession more realistic than acting and grabbed a slice of the pie like my dodo-public school-mates, whipping their unimaginative selves into success, glory and fat Christmas bonuses.
Our conversation spiraled from conspiracy theories to doomsday scenarios (we tried to outdo each other). About Europe and China, with Russia on the sidelines, competing in snatching the reins from a spent US (she seemed to know her politics); Iran and North Korea still poking empty nuclear fuel rods at the Yankee lion, that by now nobody took their threats serious, being too busy with global warming, ignoring, or wishing for that last awesome nuclear fourth of July spectacle. Of course we didn’t forget how mamma Earth had been lipo-sucked dry-dry-dry.
The plane dropped and the, fasten your seatbelt sign blinked on. Outside lightening reigned the blackness, and according to my Patek Philippe, landing was in an hour.
I slipped a hand up under her English skirt, making her spill red wine on her breasts, cross, and blouse. “Why on earth do I wear silk, and white,” she said with closed eyes, trembling like an Icelandic volcano, hidden under years of beaten snow.
“I’m a great spot-remover,” I said, checking in on her daughter. Asleep with Leviathan on her lap.
Despite turbulence, we made it to the lavatory.
The stain seemed angrier the more I rubbed with the wet paper towel. She giggled, “Best time I’ve had in years. You’re tickling me.”
I became dizzy. Energy shot through my skull and settled in my crotch. I struggled to focus on the task, staring at the double cross in her cleavage for the first time noticing a black diamond snake S-ing the two cross bars. “Nearly done,” I managed, jolted by another energy-attack, and tore off her blouse, severing the chain to the cross. The bra came next. Her breasts were small. Like a young man’s.
Neurons fired wildly. My body quaked, climaxing in electric blues and scorching fireworks. And then the sign over the steel wash basin blinked Return to your seat. A kiss let to a bite—bites. What neck—and her heaving chest threatened to suck all the air out of the cubicle.
She pulled her skirt up and grabbed my cock. A flight attendant yelled: return to your seats immediately, we'll be landing shortly, accompanied by door-banging.
The plane descended, air pressure slackened as we lost altitude, and the engines decelerated. Get out of there now, we're landing! the captain? yelled, exactly as I, sweat dripping on her hair, thrust into her like an icebreaker and her muted scream cracked her body open exactly as those upsetting noises from the landing gears set in. She’d finally touched ground.
As the wheels touched the runway, I withdrew and knelt down and in awe opened the glittery-dark cauldron, yearning to vanish into it.
After I’d lapped up every last drop, I zipped my pants and looked at Dagmar curled up on the wet lavatory floor, with a happy smile. I noticed the cross. Picked it up. Looked at it. It was antique and maybe worth 10 or 20 thousand Euros? I put it in my pocket.
I disembarked charged with energy—the 3½ hour flight had felt like minutes—confident I’d get back up on the money pyramid.