Horns

“When you went to college.”

“Yeah. Well. My father wouldn’t let me take the theology course I wanted, but he couldn’t stop me from auditing it. I remember the teacher, a black woman, Professor Tandy, she said that Satan turns up in a lot of other religions as the good guy. He’s usually the guy who tricks the fertility goddess into bed, and after a bit of fiddling around they bring the world into being. Or the crops. Something. He comes into the story to bamboozle the unworthy or tempt them into ruination, or at least out of their liquor. Even Christians can’t really decide what to do with him. I mean, think about it. Him and God are supposed to be at war with each other. But if God hates sin and Satan punishes the si

“Yer whisperin’ in my ear,” Ig whispered. “Tell me all the things I wa

Dale laughed again. “No. Not those Romantics.”

Ig said, “They’re the only ones I know.”

He eased the door gently shut on his way out.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

IG SAT AT THE BOTTOM of the chimney, in a circle of hot afternoon light, holding the glossy mammogram of Merrin’s breast over his head. Lit from behind by the August sky, the tissues within looked like a black sun, going nova, looked like the End of Days, and the sky was as sackcloth. The devil turned to his Bible: not to the Old Testament, nor to the New, but to the back page, where years before he had copied the key to the Morse-code alphabet from his brother’s encyclopedias. Even before he translated the papers within the envelope, he knew they were a testament of a different sort: a final one. Merrin’s final testament.

He started with the dots and dashes on the front of the package, a simple enough sequence. It spelled FUCK OFF, IG.

He laughed-a dirty, convulsive shout of crowlike amusement.

He slipped out the two pages of notebook paper, covered in dots and dashes, both sides, the labor of months, of an entire summer. Working with his Bible, Ig set to translating them, occasionally fingering the cross around his neck, Merrin’s cross. He had put it back on as soon as he left Dale’s. It made him feel she was with him, was close enough to lay her cool fingers on the nape of his neck.

It was slow work, converting those lines of dots and dashes to letters and words. He didn’t care. The devil had nothing but time.

Dear Ig,

You will never read this while I’m alive. I’m not sure I want you to read it even if I’m dead.

Whoo, this is slow writing. I guess I don’t mind. It passes the time when I’m stuck in a lobby somewhere waiting on the result of this or that test. Also forces me to say just what needs to be said and no more.

The sort of cancer I have is the same that struck my sister down, a sort known to run in families. I won’t bore you with the genetics. It is not advanced yet, and I’m sure if you knew, you would want me to fight. I know I should, but I’m not going to. I have made up my mind not to go like my sister. Not to wait until I’m filled with ugliness, not to hurt the people I love and who have loved me, and that is you, Ig, and my parents.

The Bible says suicides go to hell, but hell is what my sister went through when she was dying. You don’t know this, but my sister was engaged when she was diagnosed. Her fiancé left her months before she died. She drove him away, one day at a time. She wanted to know how long he’d wait after she was buried to fuck someone else. She wanted to know if he’d use her tragedy to win sympathy from girls. She was horrible. I would’ve left her.

I’d just as soon skip all that, thanks. But I don’t know how to do it yet, how to die. I wish God would find a way to do it to me all at once, when I’m not expecting it. Put me in an elevator and then have the cable snap. Twenty seconds of flight and it’s over. Maybe as a bonus I could fall on someone bad. Like a child-molesting elevator repairman or something. That would be all right.

I’m afraid if I tell you I’m sick, you will give up your future and ask to marry me, and I will be weak and say yes, and then you’ll be shackled to me, watching while they cut pieces off and I shrink and go bald and put you through hell, and then I die anyway and ruin what was best in you in the process. You want so much to believe that the world is good, Ig, that people are good. And I know when I’m really sick I won’t be able to be good. I will be like my sister. I have that in me, I know how to hurt people, and I might not be able to help myself. I want you to remember what was good in me, not what was most awful. The people you love should be allowed to keep their worst to themselves.

You don’t know how hard it is not to talk about these things with you. That’s the reason I’m writing this, I guess. Because I need to talk to you, and this is the only way. A bit of a one-sided conversation, though, huh?

You’re so excited to go to England, to be up to your neck in the world. Remember that story you told me about the Evel Knievel trail and the shopping cart? That’s you every day. Ready to fly bare-naked down the steep pitch of your own life and be flung into the human stream. Save people drowning in unfairness.

I can hurt you just enough to push you away. I’m not looking forward to it, but it will be kinder than letting this thing play itself out.

I want you to find some girl with a trashy Cockney accent and take her back to your flat and screw her out of her knickers. Someone cute and immoral and literary. Not as pretty as me, I’m not that generous, but it’s okay if she’s not terrible-looking. Then I’m hoping she will callously dump you and you will move on to someone else. Someone better. Someone earnest and caring and with no family history of cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, or any other bad stuff. I also hope by then I am long dead so I don’t have to know anything about her.

You know how I want to die? On the Evel Knievel trail, roaring down it on a cart of my own. I could close my eyes and imagine your arms around me. Then go right into a tree. She never knew what hit her. That’s how. I would like very much to believe in a Gospel of Mick and Keith, where I can’t get what I want-which is you, Ig, and our children, and our ridiculous daydreams-but at least get what I need, which is a quick, sudden ending and the knowledge that you got away clean.

And you will have some stout and kindly mother-wife to give you children, and you will be a wonderful, happy, energetic father. You will see all of the world, every corner of it, and you will see pain, and you will ease some of it. You will have grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. You will teach. You will go for long walks in the woods. On one of these walks, when you are very old, you will find yourself at a tree with a house in its branches. I will be waiting for you there. I will be waiting by candlelight in our tree house of the mind.

This is a lot of lines and dots. Two months of work, right here. When I started writing, the cancer was a pea in one breast and less than a pea in my left armpit. Now, wrapping up, it’s…well. From small things, Mama, big things one day come.

I’m not sure I really needed to write so much. Probably could’ve saved myself a lot of effort and just copied out the first message I ever sent you, flashing you with my cross. US. That says most of it. Here’s the rest: I love you, Iggy Perrish.

Your girl, Merrin Williams