Disgusting
Linen and Walter hold a negotiation; Walter's house explodes
[Back to The Sanguine Experiment, which is an urban fiction/metaphysical extension of that melancholy little horror novella, Sad Guy on the Bus. Short version of The Sanguine Experiment: It’s 1998; Walter’s a serial killer, though a pretty tame one. He killed one girl by accident back in 1990 and realized then he wanted to kill more people, so he spent most of the past decade isolating himself in hopes of never doing any such thing.
However, Linen more or less forced herself into his space. He tried to murder her and himself but changed his mind at the last minute; they both woke up as ghosts, or half ghosts. While they recovered pretty quickly, they still have odd powers. They’re sharing Linen’s soul between them. We don’t know where Walter’s went.
Walter is trying to wrap his mind around life with no desire to kill himself or anyone else. And just as Linen has lost her crush on him — well, you can imagine — he finds he has a huge crush on her. This one picks up a week or so after Bloudy Fielde, or six weeks after the Gift.
Looking for other stories or essays? Check out the Table of Contents.]
“To introduce change into a system while managing flux, it’s best to move slowly.”
Linen was sitting in the La-Z-Boy in Walter’s attic. Snow whirled past the window at the far gable, illuminating the piled-up bed coverings. Nearer at hand, the single-bulb fixture shed an amber light on the farmhouse table and the hardbound notebook Walter held open in front of him.
Walter continued, “I prefer a controlled, unidirectional rate of change, but in a complex system that’s rarely possible.”
He stuck a couple of slim Post-It notes on the notebook and handed it to Linen.
“What is this?”
“My plan to weigh 129 pounds by February 2001, no later and for preference no sooner. See — ”
He pointed to the columns with a metal retractible pencil. Inputs, expenditures, rates of change.
Linen leafed back through the notebook. So many numbers. She looked at Walter, who glanced from her to the page and back. The room spun. She tried to notice something objective. She studied the rows and columns.
“No input change for a while, why’s that?”
“Well, there is a new input, you see, me not bleeding myself, I have to find out how that affects the system. So I need to keep everything else steady for a while. I may have to reintroduce … ”
Linen tried not to look like she was going to throw up. She remembered Walter’s instruction: Slow, shallow breaths. Please don’t throw up on my armchair. She said: “This notebook goes back quite a while.”
“Not so very far back. It’s just detailed.” He nodded at a low shelf. “I have quite a few notebooks.”
Linen glanced at the shelf. Quite a few looked like more than a hundred notebooks. She had thought they were diaries. She supposed they were, in a way.
Walter continued: “But this is a new approach; mostly I’ve been concerned with minimum mass with minimum cognitive shift; that’s a tricky one and hard to measure. At least, hard to measure when the subject is you.”
He looked at her with something like whimsy. “I didn’t want to get too stupid to complete the experiment before I died, you see.”
“Yes, I see that.” She put her hand over the page. “You had equations for being smaller, now for getting larger.”
“Not always; it’s mostly been a kind of human version of a PID controller, aimed at maintaining a steady desired state.”
“What’s that acronym?”
“Proportional-integral-differential, it’s used in engineering; I can show you some equations. But bodies are quirky and human behavior is hard to govern, even mine. If this was simple, some clever control systems engineer would have teamed up with an endocrinologist and cured diabetes, for instance.”
He pulled a blank sheet of paper over and sketched out some equations that looked very long to Linen. “But to your question, I don’t need any kind of a system to lose weight; I do that without trying. It’s easy for me to fast; it’s eating that’s unpleasant and frightening, and the system helps me not starve myself by imposing some form of control.”
“Why 129 pounds?”
“Five-pound buffer. Last time I had an erection I weighed 124, that was back in 1990, June of 90, and I was younger and healthier then — ”
“What?”
“It’s not fair of me to make persistent demands on your time without any kind of return.” He took his notebook back. “I want you to be my girlfriend. I mean, if you’d like. And this seems like an important part of having a girlfriend.”
Linen raised her eyebrows. “I’m not sure I like you making these designs on my person.”
Walter closed the notebook. “Well, technically, they’re designs on my person.”
“If I like someone enough, sex doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
“Why?”
“Because if I had a girlfriend, I’d want us to have, you know, everything. And because of the bond. I’d want to create that bond with her.”
Linen had never imagined Walter as anything but solitary. And despite the fact that he’d (accidentally) murdered the long-lost Laura, that relationship seemed more imaginary than real. It was Laura’s memory he had loved, after all.
“You did before? I mean, you had girlfriends before?”
He nodded, putting the notebook away. “Sure, I had a few girls, but I was young and stupid. I was more focused what was going on in my own head, or else I just used sex to make them more amenable to giving me what I wanted.”
This sounded terrible to Linen, but it also sounded like typical Walter. Then again, she used to use different boyfriends to test out versions of herself. It never seemed to go well. “Well, I was pretty stupid in college, too.”
“And you have to admit, you were much more tractable when you wanted me.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“You had a mad crush on me before, for a year you did.” He stood. “And I tried to avoid you because I knew it would make you, you know, more docile than you should be, and I didn’t want to hurt anyone like that again. Let alone take another life. You had a crush on me until the Gift, and you still like me now, but it’s not the same.”
Linen knew this, but had not thought through it so specifically before. She said first, clearing the ground: “I like you very much. More than anyone.”
The conversation became important to her. She perched straight up on the edge of the La-Z-Boy, sitting on one foot with the other foot planted on the seat of the chair. She rested her chin on her knee.
“Not like before,” he insisted. “I’d like some benign semblance of that feeling, if it’s possible. Maybe it isn’t.” He stretched. “Maybe the only thing that does it for you is the scent of sulfur.”
“No, my concern now is that you’re making plots and plans to have sex with someone two years out in the future, when they aren’t actually in a relationship with you, that’s cold-blooded, to say the least — ”
He rolled right through her sentence. “There’s a reason people steer clear of folks like me, even if they don’t realize they’re doing it. And there’s a reason some people, a few people, can’t leave my type alone, and that reason is the smell of blood. And I’m beginning to think your crush on me was no more than that.”
Silence.
“That’s sick. You’re — ” Linen caught the last word back.
A hundred years or so ago, when the house was already old, someone had finished most of the attic. But that long-ago builder paneled around the collar beams rather than give up too much space by enclosing them. Walter reached up and held a beam with one long arm, swaying from it a bit. The light illuminated his white shirt and made him seem to tower over Linen, who still knelt on the La-Z-Boy.
Of course he was not large. He was almost six feet tall and certainly did not crack 120 pounds. He was about as large as a broomstick. An illusion, she thought, a trick of light and shadow.
Walter studied her. He looked as if he was about to smile.
“Say it,” he said.
“It was nothing.”
His face didn’t change. He said quietly, “It wasn’t nothing.”
Linen did not know how to answer. She felt more afraid of Walter now than she had the night of the Gift.
“Say it,” he repeated in the same voice, with the same expression.
She shook her head.
“I know you’re no coward, so what does that leave you, dishonest? Say it, and we can be done here.”
He was smiling because he expected her to hurt him, Linen thought. He was smiling because he expected to welcome pain. It was his only guest, after all, most nights. Perhaps he had missed it. Why not have the table set and a smile on his lips?
Linen said, “I shouldn’t have thought those words. I apologize.”
“But you did think them. Your apology is irrelevant to the facts. Go on, say it out loud. Walter Uhlmann, you’re — ”
Linen took a breath. The path glimmered ahead of her, a step at a time, as if lit by starlight. “Walter — what was that last name?”
“Uhlmann.” He looked puzzled. “It’s a common name round here.”
She tried it. “I can’t get my tongue around your weird Pennsylvania names.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but that’s my name.” He came to the chair. “What do you call yourselves in Mississippi, then?”
“Beauregard. We’re all named Beauregard, boys and girls both.”
He leaned on the arms of the La-Z-Boy. “At least my parents didn’t name me Gustavus.”
“They should have,” Linen said. “Walter Gustavus.”
“Or Adolfo.”
“Or Chaucer Lupton. I knew a boy with that name. Walter Chaucer Lupton Uhlmann … ”
“God, no.”
He was laughing, not out loud, but his face held a laugh. Not a beautiful face, Linen thought. How did I ever find him beautiful? He had been a stranger, that was how, an unhappy stranger about whom she made up stories.
His face was long and narrow, almost lipless, with lines so clear he could have passed for 40 rather than his late 20s. But for a second amusement lit his features like afternoon light on a mountainside, turning the bare stone rose and gold. Then the sun went behind the cloud again. The eyes that had been smiling into hers turned hard.
“Now. Say it now.”
She held onto that gaze.
“Walter Uhlmann, you are disgusting. And I want to be your girlfriend.”
They were still, listening to her words.
“That’s it, then.” He looked at her for a bit. “I didn’t see how — I didn’t see a way forward.” He wiped his hand across his face. “I think we’ll manage.”
She reached to touch his temple but couldn’t finish the gesture. “You will, maybe. I can’t have these conversations all the time. Anywhere my mind turns, you’re there ahead of me, it’s uncanny.”
“Oh Linen.” Walter got into the chair behind her, stepping over the arm and folding up like a stork. “Think about it. If I went to — where do Old English scholars go?”
“International Congress of Medieval Studies.” She wiggled aside so they fit better around each other. “Which is in Kalamazoo, Michigan, weirdly enough.”
“That’s weird,” he agreed. “So if I went there and argued with a bunch of scholars and tried to teach them their job, they’d have me tied in knots in a second. You’d have me tied in knots. Right?”
“Probably.”
“So this — how minds work, how my mind works, how people react to me, predicting what they’ll think and do — this has been my field of study for years and years now.”
He wrapped both arms around her. Linen, not expecting this, stiffened. Walter clasped hands, letting his arms rest around her in a loose circlet.
“You’re upset because I’m beating you on my home field, at a game I know and you haven’t had to learn. But you never needed to learn it. You’ve been able to learn gardening and, what else do you do, teach and read so many old languages — ”
“Bake, cook, can vegetables, make jelly,” Linen added.
“All those things,” he agreed. “And I have spent my adult life managing my illness, managing other people’s reaction to my illness, because if I don’t, I’ll hurt someone. Apart from the narrow technical demands of my profession, this is all I know and all I can do.”
Still feeling brittle, Linen lay back against him. Cautiously they relaxed against each other.
“There’s no need to be overwhelmed or afraid of me,” Walter said finally. “Sure, I can play a few mind tricks, but it’s all I have.”
They practiced settling into each other.
“When I look at myself, I see poverty of skill, spirit, body, emotion. When I look at you, I see joy and plenty.” Walter leaned his head on hers. “Can you wonder why I at least want to give you sex? What other excuse could you have to date a madman who lives in an attic, if he’s not a good lay?”
“Do you feel desire for me, now? You didn’t before.”
“I can’t, couldn’t feel it if I wanted to.” She heard the smile in his voice. “But I can imagine what it will feel like. So much debauchery.”
Linen shivered.
“Don’t worry, any debauchery is only theoretical for months and months yet. Maybe ever.”
“Your calculations.”
“What about them?”
“Well, now you’re a kind of stork person. But 130 pounds — ”
“One twenty-nine.”
“One twenty-nine might be like a blue heron, you know, with the big hunkered-up slate-colored shoulders. They’re pretty imposing, herons.”
“Whatever it is, I’m sure I won’t like it.”
Eeyore, Linen thought, but did not say it. Walter did not actually want to get an ounce bigger. He would complain the whole time.
She pondered. The bulk of their relationship would be about Walter and his obsessions — obsessions that did not even make him happy. Sadness is myopia, she thought. For a minute she grappled with it. And why do I keep making the same choice? She imagined Walter releasing her at the moment of his triumph. Saying: The door’s open.
He strove to choose, and to give her choice, even when the forces aligned against him were grossly unfair.
That’s right, she said to herself. I don’t have any fights; my life is easy. Here is an extraordinarily admirable fight. Who else in life gets this chance?
She said, “And you have me.”
He had fallen into a reverie. “What?”
“The things you said you didn’t have. Now you have me.”
“Ah.”
“If that matters.”
She felt a nod. “Yeah.” He held her more tightly. “The Gift was enough. This is overabundance.”
“And you still don’t like me.”
“Yeah, I hate nosy do-gooders. I hate people who make a career of martyrdom. But, you know, you carry it pretty lightly. Could be worse. Besides, you smell nice.”
“You always have a kind of acrid smell.”
“Irish Spring meets smoldering trash fire?”
“Something like that.”
“My body chemistry’s off. I’m sorry.”
They might have dozed off. Then Linen thought of something else.
“And magic. You have magic.”
Walter stirred. “About that … ”
Linen’s ears popped, then popped again.
The bulb in the light fixture burst.
Linen covered her mouth and nose, not knowing why she did it. Terror seized her. Then the fear narrowed to a point: her lungs. Something was trying to suck the air out of her. That’s why she had clapped her hands over her mouth and nose.
Walter stood, tumbling Linen to the floor. He crooked one arm over his face. Two steps took him to the front door where local folks often propped a loaded hunting rifle — or in Walter’s case, a pump-action 12-gauge shotgun.
He picked up the shotgun and pumped it — a reasonless, hereditary gesture. The pressure in the room dropped again. The floor buckled upward, scattering VHS cassettes. Then, as if a great creature had drawn breath and now expelled it, the pressure reversed. With a shriek of nails and a rending of tarpaper the roof tore away from the house and spun into the night sky with Walter, Linen, the shotgun, and the entire contents of the attic pinwheeling after it.