Chuck Palahniuk - Lullaby

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2024-12-07 0 0 513.27KB 131 页 5.9玖币
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Lullaby
By Chuck Palahniuk
Prologue
At first, the new owner pretends he never looked at the living room floor. Never really
looked. Not the first time they toured the house. Not when the inspector showed them
through it. They'd measured rooms and told the movers where to set the couch and
piano, hauled in everything they owned, and never really stopped to look at the living
room floor. They pretend.
Then on the first morning they come downstairs, there it is, scratched in the white-oak
floor:
GET OUT
Some new owners pretend a friend has done it as a joke. Others are sure it's because
they didn't tip the movers.
A couple of nights later, a baby starts to cry from inside the north wall of the master
bedroom.
This is when they usually call.
And this new owner on the phone is not what our hero, Helen Hoover Boyle, needs this
morning.
This stammering and whining.
What she needs is a new cup of coffee and a seven-letter word for "poultry." She needs
to hear what's happening on the police scanner. Helen Boyle snaps her fingers until her
secretary looks in from the outer office. Our hero wraps both hands around the
mouthpiece and points the telephone receiver at the scanner, saying, "It's a code nine-
eleven."
And her secretary, Mona, shrugs and says, "So?"
So she needs to look it up in the codebook.
And Mona says, "Relax. It's a shoplifter."
Murders, suicides, serial killers, accidental overdoses, you can't wait until this stuff is on
the front page of the newspaper. You can't let another agent beat you to the next
rainmaker.
Helen needs the new owner at 325 Crestwood Terrace to shut up a minute.
Of course, the message appeared in the living room floor. What's odd is the baby
doesn't usually start until the third night. First the phantom message, then the baby cries
all night. If the owners last long enough, they'll be calling in another week about the face
that appears, reflected in the water when you fill the bathtub. A wadded-up face of
wrinkles, the eyes hollowed-out dark holes.
The third week brings the phantom shadows that circle around and around the dining
room walls when everybody is seated at the table. There might be more events after that,
but nobody's lasted a fourth week.
To the new owner, Helen Hoover Boyle says, "Unless you're ready to go to court and
prove the house is unlivable, unless you can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the
previous owners knew this was happening..." She says, "I have to tell you." She says,
"You lose a case like this, after you generate all this bad publicity, and that house will be
worthless."
It's not a bad house, 325 Crestwood Terrace, English Tudor, newer composition roof,
four bedrooms, three and a half baths. An in-ground pool. Our hero doesn't even have to
look at the fact sheet. She's sold this house six times in the past two years.
Another house, the New England saltbox on Eton Court, six bedrooms, four baths, pine-
paneled entryway, and blood running down the kitchen walls, she's sold that house eight
times in the past four years.
To the new owner, she says, "Got to put you on hold for a minute," and she hits the red
button.
Helen, she's wearing a white suit and shoes, but not snow white. It's more the white of
downhill skiing in Banff with a private car and driver on call, fourteen pieces of matched
luggage, and a suite at the Hotel Lake Louise.
To the doorway, our hero says, "Mona? Moonbeam?" Louder, she says, "Spirit-Girl?"
She drums her pen against the folded newspaper page on her desk and says, "What's a
three-letter word for 'rodent'?"
The police scanner gargles words, mumbles and barks, repeating "Copy?" after every
line. Repeating "Copy?"
Helen Boyle shouts, "This coffee is not going to cut it."
In another hour, she needs to be showing a Queen Anne, five bedrooms, with a mother-
in-law apartment, two gas fireplaces, and the face of a barbiturate suicide that appears
late at night in the powder room mirror. After that, there's a split-level ranch with FAG
heat, a sunken conversation pit, and the reoccurring phantom gunshots of a double
homicide that happened over a decade ago. This is all in her thick daily planner, thick and
bound in what looks like red leather. This is her record of everything.
She takes another sip of coffee and says, "What do you call this? Swiss Army mocha?
Coffee is supposed to taste like coffee."
Mona comes to the doorway with her arms folded across her front and says, "What?"
And Helen says, "I need you to swing by"—she shuffles some fact sheets on her
blotter—"swing by 4673 Willmont Place. It's a Dutch Colonial with a sunroom, four
bedrooms, two baths, and an aggravated homicide."
The police scanner says, "Copy?"
"Just do the usual," Helen says, and she writes the address on a note card and holds it
out. "Don't resolve anything. Don't burn any sage. Don't exorcise shit."
Mona takes the note card and says, "Just check it for vibes?"
Helen slashes the air with her hand and says, "I don't want anybody going down any
tunnels toward any bright light. I want these freaks staying right here, on this astral plane,
thank you." She looks at her newspaper and says, "They have all eternity to be dead.
They can hang around in that house another fifty years and rattle some chains."
Helen Hoover Boyle looks at the blinking hold light and says, "What did you pick up at
the six-bedroom Spanish yesterday?"
And Mona rolls her eyes at the ceiling. She pushes out her jaw and blows a big sigh,
straight up to flop the hair on her forehead, and says, "There's a definite energy there. A
subtle presence. But the floor plan is wonderful." A black silk cord loops around her neck
and disappears into the corner of her mouth.
And our hero says, "Screw the floor plan."
Forget those dream houses you only sell once every fifty years. Forget those happy
homes. And screw subtle: cold spots, strange vapors, irritable pets. What she needed was
blood running down the walls. She needed ice-cold invisible hands that pull children out of
bed at night. She needed blazing red eyes in the dark at the foot of the basement stairs.
That and decent curb appeal.
The bungalow at 521 Elm Street, it has four bedrooms, original hardware, and screams
in the attic.
The French Normandy at 7645 Weston Heights has arched windows, a butler's pantry,
leaded-glass pocket doors, and a body that appears in the upstairs hallway with multiple
stab wounds.
The ranch-style at 248 Levee Place—five bedrooms, four and a half baths with a brick
patio—it has the reappearing blood coughed up on the master bathroom walls after a
drain cleaner poisoning.
Distressed houses, Realtors call them. These houses that never sold because no one
liked to show them. No Realtor wanted to host an open house there, risk spending any
time there alone. Or these were the houses that sold and sold again every six months
because no one could live there. A good string of these houses, twenty or thirty
exclusives, and Helen could turn off the police scanner. She could quit searching the
obituaries and the crime pages for suicides and homicides. She could stop sending Mona
out to check on every possible lead. She could just kick back and find a five-letter word for
"equine."
"Plus I need you to pick up my cleaning," she says. "And get some decent coffee." She
points her pen at Mona and says, "And out of respect for professionalism, leave the little
Rasta doohickeys at home."
Mona pulls the black silk cord until a quartz crystal pops out of her mouth, shining and
wet. She blows on it, saying, "It's a crystal. My boyfriend, Oyster, gave it to me."
And Helen says, "You're dating a boy named Oyster?"
And Mona drops the crystal so it hangs against her chest and says, "He says it's for my
own protection." The crystal soaks a darker wet spot on her orange blouse.
"Oh, and before you go," Helen says, "get me Bill or Emily Burrows on the phone."
Helen presses the hold button and says, "Sorry about that." She says there are a couple
of clear options here. The new owner can move, just sign a quitclaim deed and the house
becomes the bank's problem.
"Or," our hero says, "you give me a confidential exclusive to sell the house. What we call
a vest-pocket listing."
And maybe the new owner says no this time. But after that hideous face appears
between his legs in the bathwater, after the shadows start marching around the walls,
well, everyone says yes eventually.
On the phone, the new owner says, "And you won't tell any buyers about the problem?"
And Helen says, "Don't even finish unpacking. We'll just tell people you're in the process
of moving out."
If anybody asks, tell them you're being transferred out of town. Tell them you loved this
house.
She says, "Everything else will just be our little secret."
From the outer office, Mona says, "I have Bill Burrows on line two."
And the police scanner says, "Copy?"
Our hero hits the next button and says, "Bill!"
She mouths the word
Coffee
at Mona. She jerks her head toward the window and
mouths, Go.
The scanner says, "Do you copy?"
This
was
Helen Hoover Boyle. Our hero. Now dead but not dead. Here was just another
day in her life. This was the life she lived before I came along. Maybe this is a love story,
maybe not. It depends on how much I can believe myself.
This is about Helen Hoover Boyle. Her haunting me. The way a song stays in your head.
The way you think life should be. How anything holds your attention. How your past goes
with you into every day of your future.
That is. This is. It's all of it, Helen Hoover Boyle.
We're all of us haunted and haunting.
On this, the last ordinary day of her regular life, our hero says into the phone, "Bill
Burrows?"
She says, "You need to get Emily on the extension because I've just found you two the
perfect new home."
She writes the word "horse" and says, "It's my understanding that the sellers are very
motivated."
Chapter 1
The
problem with every story is you tell it after the fact.
Even play-by-play description on the radio, the home runs and strikeouts, even that's
delayed a few minutes. Even live television is postponed a couple seconds.
Even sound and light can only go so fast.
Another problem is the teller. The who, what, where, when, and why of the reporter.
The media bias. How the messenger shapes the facts. What journalists call
The
Gatekeeper.
How the presentation is everything.
The story behind the story.
Where I'm telling this from is one café after another. Where I'm writing this book,
chapter by chapter, is never the same small town or city or truck stop in the middle of
nowhere.
What these places all have in common are miracles. You read about this stuff in the pulp
tabloids, the kind of healings and sightings, the miracles, that never get reported in the
mainstream press.
This week, it's the Holy Virgin of Welburn, New Mexico. She came flying down Main
Street last week. Her long red and black dreadlocks whipping behind her, her bare feet
dirty, she wore an Indian cotton skirt printed in two shades of brown and a denim halter
top. It's all in this week's
World Miracles Report,
next to the cashier in every supermarket
in America.
And here I am, a week late. Always one step behind. After the fact.
The Flying Virgin had fingernails painted bright pink with white tips. A French manicure,
some witnesses call it. The Flying Virgin used a can of Bug-Off brand insect fogger, and
across the blue New Mexican sky, she wrote:
STOP HAVING BABYS
(Sic)
The can of Bug-Off, she dropped. It's right now headed for the Vatican. For analysis.
Right now, you can buy postcards of the event. Videos even.
Almost everything you can buy is after the fact. Caught. Dead. Cooked.
In the souvenir videos, the Flying Virgin shakes the can of fogger. Floating above one
end of Main Street, she waves at the crowd. And there's a bush of brown hair under her
arm. The moment before she starts writing, a gust of wind lifts her skirt, and the Flying
Virgin's not wearing any panties. Between her legs, she's shaved.
This is where I'm writing this story from today. Here in a roadside diner, talking to
witnesses in Welburn, New Mexico. Here with me is Sarge, a baked potato of an old Irish
cop. On the table between us is the local newspaper, folded to show a three-column ad
that says:
Attention Patrons of All Plush Interiors Furniture Stores
The ad says, "If poisonous spiders have hatched from your new upholstered furniture,
you may be eligible to take part in a class-action lawsuit." And the ad gives a phone
number you could call, but it's no use.
The Sarge has the kind of loose neck skin that if you pinch it, when you let go the skin
stays pinched. He has to go find a mirror and rub the skin to make it go flat.
Outside the diner, people are still driving into town. People kneel and pray for another
visitation. The Sarge puts his big mitts together and pretends to pray, his eyes rolled
sideways to look out the window, his holster unsnapped, his pistol loaded and ready for
skeet shooting.
After she was done skywriting, the Flying Virgin blew kisses to people. She flashed a
two-finger peace sign. She hovered just above the trees, clutching her skirt closed with
one fist, and she shook her red and black dreadlocks back and waved, and Amen. She was
gone, behind the mountains, over the horizon. Gone.
Still, you can't trust everything you read in the newspaper.
The Flying Madonna, it wasn't a miracle.
It was magic.
These aren't saints. They're spells.
The Sarge and me, we're not here to witness anything. We're witch-hunters.
Still, this isn't a story about here and now. Me, the Sarge, the Flying Virgin. Helen
Hoover Boyle. What I'm writing is the story of how we met. How we got here.
Chapter 2
They ask you just one question. Just before you graduate from journalism school, they
tell you to imagine you're a reporter. Imagine you work at a daily big-city newspaper, and
one Christmas Eve, your editor sends you out to investigate a death.
The police and paramedics are there. The neighbors, wearing bathrobes and slippers,
crowd the hallway of the slummy tenement. Inside the apartment, a young couple is
sobbing beside their Christmas tree. Their baby has choked to death on an ornament. You
get what you need, the baby's name and age and all, and you get back to the newspaper
around midnight and write the story on press deadline.
You submit it to your editor and he rejects it because you don't say the color of the
ornament. Was it red or green? You couldn't look, and you didn't think to ask.
With the pressroom screaming for the front page, your choices are:
Call the parents and ask the color.
Or refuse to call and lose your job.
This was the fourth estate. Journalism. And where I went to school, just this one
question is the entire final exam for the Ethics course. It's an either/or question. My
answer was to call the paramedics. Items like this have to be catalogued. The ornament
had to be bagged and photographed in some file of evidence. No way would I call the
parents after midnight on Christmas Eve.
The school gave my ethics a D.
Instead of ethics, I learned only to tell people what they want to hear. I learned to write
everything down. And I learned editors can be real assholes.
Since then, I still wonder what that test was really about. I'm a reporter now, on a big-
city daily, and I don't have to imagine anything.
My first real baby was on a Monday morning in September. There was no Christmas
ornament. No neighbors crowded around the trailer house in the suburbs. One paramedic
sat with the parents in the kitchenette and asked them the standard questions. The
second paramedic took me back to the nursery and showed me what they usually find in
the crib.
The standard questions paramedics ask include: Who found the child dead? When was
the child found? Was the child moved? When was the child last seen alive? Was the child
breast- or bottle-fed? The questions seem random, but all doctors can do is gather
statistics and hope someday a pattern will emerge.
The nursery was yellow with blue, flowered curtains at the windows and a white wicker
chest of drawers next to the crib. There was a white-painted rocking chair. Above the crib
was a mobile of yellow plastic butterflies. On the wicker chest was a book open to page
27. On the floor was a blue braided-rag rug. On one wall was a framed needlepoint. It
said:
Thursday's Child Has Far to Go.
The room smelled like baby powder.
And maybe I didn't learn ethics, but I learned to pay attention. No detail is too minor to
note.
The open book was called
Poems and Rhymes from Around the World,
and it was
checked out from the county library.
My editor's plan was to do a five-part series on sudden infant death syndrome. Every
year seven thousand babies die without any apparent cause. Two out of every thousand
babies will just go to sleep and never wake up. My editor, Duncan, he kept calling it crib
death.
The details about Duncan are he's pocked with acne scars and his scalp is brown along
the hairline every two weeks when he dyes his gray roots. His computer password is
"password."
All we know about sudden infant death is there is no pattern. Most babies die alone
between midnight and morning, but a baby will also die while sleeping beside its parents.
It can die in a car seat or in a stroller. A baby can die in its mother's arms.
There are so many people with infants, my editor said. It's the type of story that every
parent and grandparent is too afraid to read and too afraid not to read. There's really no
new information, but the idea was to profile five families that had lost a child. Show how
people cope. How people move forward with their lives. Here and there, we could salt in
the standard facts about crib death. We could show the deep inner well of strength and
compassion each of these people discovers. That angle. Because it ties to no specific
event, it's what you'd call soft news. We'd run it on the front of the Lifestyles section.
For art, we could show smiling pictures of healthy babies that were now dead.
We'd show how this could happen to anyone.
That was his pitch. It's the kind of investigative piece you do for awards. It was late
summer and the news was slow. This was the peak time of year for last-term pregnancies
and newborns.
It was my editor's idea for me to tag along with paramedics.
The Christmas story, the sobbing couple, the ornament, by now I'd been working so
long I'd forgotten all that junk.
That hypothetical ethics question, they have to ask that at the end of the journalism
program because by then it's too late. You have big student loans to pay off. Years and
years later, I think what they're really asking is:
Is this something you want to do for a
living?
Chapter 3
The muffled thunder of dialogue comes through the walls, then a chorus of laughter.
Then more thunder. Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early
1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.
The stomp and stomp and stomp of a drum comes down through the ceiling. The
rhythm changes. Maybe the beat crowds together, faster, or it spreads out, slower, but it
doesn't stop.
Up through the floor, someone's barking the words to a song. These people who need
their television or stereo or radio playing all the time. These people so scared of silence.
These are my neighbors. These sound-oholics. These quiet-ophobics.
Laughter of the dead comes through every wall.
These days, this is what passes for home sweet home.
This siege of noise.
After work, I made one stop. The man standing behind the cash register looked up when
I limped into the store. Still looking at me, he reached under the counter and brought out
something in brown paper, saying, "Double-bagged. I think you'll like this one." He set it
on the counter and patted it with one hand.
The package is half the size of a shoe box. It weighs less than a can of tuna.
He pressed one, two, three buttons on the register, and the price window said a
hundred and forty-nine dollars. He told me, "Just so you won't worry, I taped the bags
shut tight."
In case it rains, he put the package in a plastic bag, and said, "You let me know if
there's any of it not there." He said, "You don't walk like that foot is getting better."
All the way home, the package rattled. Under my arm, the brown paper slid and
wrinkled. With my every limp, what's inside clattered from one end of the box to the
other.
At my apartment, the ceiling is pounding with some fast music. The walls are murmuring
with panicked voices. Either an ancient cursed Egyptian mummy has come back to life and
is trying to kill the people next door, or they're watching a movie.
Under the floor, there's someone shouting, a dog barking, doors slamming, the
auctioneer call of some song.
In the bathroom, I turn out the lights. So I can't see what's in the bag. So I won't know
how it's supposed to turn out. In the cramped tight darkness, I stuff a towel in the crack
under the door. With the package on my lap, I sit on the toilet and listen.
This is what passes for civilization.
People who would never throw litter from their car will drive past you with their radio
blaring. People who'd never blow cigar smoke at you in a crowded restaurant will bellow
into their cell phone. They'll shout at each other across the space of a dinner plate.
These people who would never spray herbicides or insecticides will fog the neighborhood
with their stereo playing Scottish bagpipe music. Chinese opera. Country and western.
Outdoors, a bird singing is fine. Patsy Cline is not.
Outdoors, the din of traffic is bad enough. Adding Chopin's Piano Concerto in E Minor is
not making the situation any better.
You turn up your music to hide the noise. Other people turn up their music to hide
yours. You turn up yours again. Everyone buys a bigger stereo system. This is the arms
race of sound. You don't win with a lot of treble.
摘要：

LullabyByChuckPalahniukPrologueAtfirst,thenewownerpretendsheneverlookedatthelivingroomfloor.Neverreallylooked.Notthefirsttimetheytouredthehouse.Notwhentheinspectorshowedthemthroughit.They'dmeasuredroomsandtoldthemoverswheretosetthecouchandpiano,hauledineverythingtheyowned,andneverreallystoppedtolook...

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