LINCOLN

 

“What is all this stuff?”

I pretended I didn’t hear her.

“Hey, I said what is all this stuff?”

Norma was picking up glass beakers and tubes and looking at them as though she’d never seen anything like it in her life. If only she could see what else I had down here, weird things, abominable things she wouldn’t believe.

“Huh?” I grunted, finally looking up from the box I was sifting through.

“All this stuff. Is this, like, for all your medical work? Why did you get it all sent down here? You’re supposed to be on a break.”

“I don’t take breaks,” I said. “Besides, it’s not work to me. I enjoy it. It’s my entire life.”

She frowned and pulled a Bunsen burner out of a nearby box, slapping the rubber hose across her hand and assessing how much it hurt.

“You ever think mad scientists get sexy with these things?” she asked.

This was not the conversation I wanted to be happening with my mother in law.

“I hope not,” I replied although I knew better.

I’d always found the rubber hoses of Bunsen burners to be enticing. The smell, the way they squeaked when you pulled them tight and snapped back against your hand when you released them. They were beyond sexy. But as appealing as it could be to slap one against Etta’s bare ass, I suddenly felt a little pang of regret when I realized I hadn’t so much as spanked her with my own hand.

Yet I’d used the hose more times than I remembered. They made tremendous restraints when secured around someone’s wrists and made better weapons when pulled tight around someone’s throat.

Those vile, sadistic bitches inBroadwood, I’d killed a couple of them that way. That seemed so long ago now and Normont felt so far away.

“Bunsen burners are kinda old though, right?”

Norma was still blabbering, still rifling through my things. She was getting on my nerves but I didn’t have the heart to tell her to leave. She was a sensitive soul and I didn’t want to send her back upstairs to the nearest bottle.

“Yeah, they’re pretty old. Not used one in a long time.”

“Why you have one then?”

I gave up trying to do my own thing and sat back against the wall.

“I dunno, I guess I like the old timey aesthetic or something.”

“Remind you of the good old days when medicine was run by body snatchers?” she laughed.

“Er…. Not quite.”

Norma sauntered over to another box and began looking through a pile of wires. She pulled out a clump that was tangled together like a ball of spaghetti. Holding it up in front of her face, she squinted as she tried to figure out what it all was.

“What are you planning to do with all this?” she asked.

“Stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“Just… research I’m working on.”

She dropped the wires back into the box and walked over. Crouching down beside me, she searched my eyes but I couldn’t tell what for. The truth of what I was doing with all this stuff? The truth about what happened last night? Whatever she was looking for, she never said a thing.

“I know we’re going through a difficult time,” I said.

“You’re telling me!” she scoffed.

I reached out a hand and rested it on her shoulder. It felt weird and I quickly removed it.

“So, yeah.A horrible time. All this… All this tension between us. The memories, the feeling that…”
“Something bad is going to happen at any moment,” finished Norma. “The dread won’t go away. Not even when I’m asleep. Craig comes back in my dreams but…”

She lowered her head and rubbed the heel of her hand into her eyes.

“But he finishes the job,” she said. “In my dreams he finishes the job and…”

“Don’t,” I interrupted. “Don’t dwell on it. We’re down here now. Where the sun doesn’t stop shining and the margaritas don’t stop coming. There’s nothing to worry about. It’s all over now.”

She fell silent for a moment and rested her head against the wall.

“It doesn’t feel like that,” she said. “It feels like he’s always coming. Like… Like… You know in the movies and you know something bad is about to happen because the bad guy music starts playing.”

I nodded and gave her a weak, understanding smile.

“It’s like the bad guy music is always playing but he never shows up.”

A tear fell from her eye and down her cheek. I watched as it sank into her powdery makeup before dripping into her mouth.

“It’ll get easier,” I said.

She didn’t believe me but she patted my arm anyway and wiped her eyes.

“I trust you,” she said. “If you say it’ll get better then it must.”

Some part of me was warming to her. We’d not had the chance to bond like people are supposed to with their in-laws. It had all been so rushed and dangerous but increasingly, I was finding that it was just the two of us in this big house, bonded by our sadness and love for Etta.

Where was Etta? Maybe she came home already but was hiding somewhere. There was no knowing what she was thinking. Well, I could guess that she thought I was a cheat and a scumbag but I had to explain things to her. She had to understand that I didn’t want any of it to happen.

Or did I?

I couldn’t get my head straight.

There were flashing images in my head of remembering Lolita and her body. Of me wanting to touch her over the bar, to kiss her and feel her pressed up against me. But it was all just a fantasy. I never really wanted it. I just wanted to look and daydream. Yet some part of me must have wanted it because it happened. She’d fucked me and I must have let her. But she’d drugged me….

It was all too confusing. Just thinking about it made the nausea return all over again. I just wanted to be left down here with my things and the dark coolness of the basement. I wanted to start work again.

“It’s been a few hours,” she said. “Where do you think she is?”

“She can’t be far away. She left her purse here and didn’t take the car.”

“But it’s so hot out there. Where is she?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

I squeezed her hand and she squeezed back.

“We’ll probably find her out by the pool with her favorite book and a mojito and we would have worried for nothing.”

I could tell Norma wanted to believe me but there was a skeptical look in her eye.

“Let’s hope so,” she said. “But a mojito does sound nice. Care to come back upstairs and join me?”

“No, I’m okay. Think I’ll begin setting all this up.”

She looked around the room and shook her head.

“Good luck,” she said. “You scientists confuse the hell out of me with all your bleepybloopy machines. Have fun.”

“I will” I said as I watched her ascend the stairs. “If you see Etta tell her I’m down here.”

I waited until she was out of sight and her footsteps were stomping across the floor above me before I began unpacking my things. Turning on the air conditioner, I made it as cold as I could get it.

It was never too cold here. I’d grown up in the north my whole life and although I’d acted out a glamorous existence and taken vacations in distant, tropical lands, I always returned to the cold. I needed it. It motivated me, made me work harder. It reminded me of being a child and the heat never being turned on, but it didn’t matter because we were throwing a ball around the back yard and we were dripping in sweat.

I didn’t want to think that far back. I wanted to think about my plans right now, needed to continue my work no matter what.

“No matter what…”

I said the words to myself and they hung in the air. They sounded as though they came from someone else.

Turning the air conditioning up some more, I picked up the nearest box and emptied it out onto the floor. Wires and circuit boards tumbled out, scattering across the concrete floor with the sound of scuttling cockroaches.

Plans, I had them before all this chaos began. What were they?

Like an ancient mage with his book of secrets, I wrote everything down in a diary in old fashioned pen and ink. There was something so satisfying about the pressure of the pen on the paper and how the letters could be formed with perfect symmetry.

I pulled out my diary and lay it open on the workbench. There were sketches inside from when I was so much younger… and poorer. At the time they were nothing but pipe dreams but now… now they were all possible.

If someone were to stumble across them they’d be forgiven for thinking the sketches were the work of a cyberpunk Leonardo Da Vinci. Machines, hundreds of them were depicted on sepia toned paper in black ink with wires, devices, and valves from another era far into the future.

Microchips as small as a pinhead were created to replicate human cells in which to test drugs, heart valves with lazer sensors, hearts with no valves at all, synthetic lungs created from the skin of mice, mice with hearts made of silicon that pumped data instead of blood.

Humans with no hearts.

Norma’s footsteps returned above me. It sounded like she was on her way back down the stairs.

“Fuck, sake. Leave me alone.”

The door creaked open and her heels clicked on the tiled steps.

“Lincoln?”

“Yep.”

“She’s not here.”

“Did you check the pool?”

“I can’t find her anywhere,” came her terse response.

There was a new, worried tone to her voice like her throat was pulled tight.

“I’m sure she’s up there somewhere,” I said.

As I turned round, I saw she was only a few inches behind me.

“Jesus, Norma. You scared the crap out of me!”

Her eyes were wide, her hands curled tightly into fists by her side until her veins and tendons were pulled like ropes down her arms.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“She’s not up there.”

“I’m sure she’s around. She wouldn’t just leave.”

Or would she? She couldn’t! There were things I needed to explain. Things that bonded us.

“She left her things here,” I said. “She has nothing on her.”

“That’s why I’m worried.”

I couldn’t tell if she was just being an overprotective mother. After what Etta had been through, I couldn’t blame her for being anxious.

“She’ll be back,” I said.

But the look in her eye was only intensifying.

“I think something’s happened.”

I was starting to think the same thing but I didn’t want to. I wanted to think that she was just blowing off steam somewhere and she’d be back any moment. At the back of my mind, I was hoping everything was a bad dream. I’d never met Lolita and Etta was still upstairs without a care in the world.

“Nothing’s happened,” I said despite a knot forming in my stomach.

Norma pressed her lips into a tight line and frowned.

“Give it another hour,” I said although I wasn’t sure I could wait that long either.

“An hour…”

“Yeah. I’m sure she’ll be back by then. She probably just got chatting to someone in town. You know she loves to make friends with everyone.”

Norma nodded and forced a smile.

“You’re right. She’s probably making some old man’s day.”