get the hang of it,” he said triumphantly, as if that phrase had a special meaning for him. He said lots of such phrases with delight. “Lo, dear, the coast is clear! Ah, Rowan, bubble bubble, toil and trouble.” And sometimes he just sang rhymes that he had heard that were sort of jokes.
“Mother, may I go out to swim,”
“Yes, my darling daughter.
Hang your clothes on a hickory limb,
But don’t go near the water!”
He went into great peals of laughter at such things. Mary Beth had said this one, and Marguerite had said that. And Stella said: “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers!” He said it faster and faster until it was a whistling whisper and no more.
She began to try to amuse him, testing him with various little verbal tidbits and such. When she hit him with bizarre English constructions, like “Throw Mamma from the window a kiss,” he became damned near hysterical. Even alliteration would make him laugh, like the song: “Bye, Baby Bunting! Mamma’s gone a hunting, to get a little rabbit skin, to put her baby bunting in!”
It was as if the shape of her lips amused him. He became obsessed with the rhyme, told to him by her, “Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater, had a wife and couldn’t keep her. Put her in a pumpkin shell, and there he kept her very well!” Sometimes he danced as he sang these songs.
In the realm of the spirits, music had delighted him. He could hear it at times when he could hear no other emanation from humans. Suzanne sang as she worked. A few old phrases came out of him, sounded Gaelic, but he really didn’t know what they were! Then he forgot them. Then once he broke into plaintive Latin and sang many verses, but he could not repeat them when he tried.
He woke in the night talking about the Cathedral. About something that had happened. He was all in a sweat. He said they had to go to Scotland.
“That Julien, that clever devil,” he said. “He wanted to find out all those things. He spoke riddles to me, which I denied.” He lay back and said softly, “I am Lasher. I am the word made flesh. I am the mystery. I have entered the world and now I must suffer all the consequences of the flesh, and I do not know what they will be. What am I?”
He was by this time conspicuous but not monstrous. His hair was now loose and shoulder length. He wore a black hat, pulled down over his head, and even the most narrow black jackets and pants fitted him loosely as if he were made of sticks, and he actually looked like one of the crazed bohemian young people. An acolyte of the rock music star David Bowie. People everywhere seemed to respond to him, to his mirth, to his innocent questions, to his spontaneous and often exuberant greetings. He struck up conversations with people in shops; he asked questions about everything. His enunciation had taken on a sharpness with a touch of French to it, but could change while he spoke to her, back into her pronunciation.
When she tried to use the phone in the middle of the night, he woke up and tore her hand off the receiver. When she rose and tried to go out the door, he was suddenly standing beside her. The hotel suites, from now on, had bathrooms without windows or he found them unacceptable. He tore out the phones in the baths. He would not let her out of his sight, except during that time when she would lock the bathroom door before he reached it.
She at last tried to argue with him. “I must call and find out what happened to Michael.” He struck her. The blow was astonishing to her. He knocked her back on the bed, and the entire side of her face was bruised. He was crying. He lay with her, suckling her, and then entering her, and doing both at the same time, the pleasure washing through her. He kissed the bruise on her face and she felt an orgasm moving up through her even though his cock was no longer inside her. Paralyzed with pleasure, she lay with her fingers curling up, her feet to the side, like one who is dead.
At night he talked about being dead, about being lost.