Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(63)
Every now and then he will come down hard on her, usually at his wife’s behest. “We are supporting you,” he will tell her, “and you need to support us. You need to contribute to the household.” She will cry and through her tears tell him how hard it is, how terrible she feels. He will comb his fingers through her hair and say, “There, there,” and she will dab her eyes and wipe her nose with a shirtsleeve and promise to do better. And she will.
He is always working, his wife is always working, and while they are gone Sridavi will make their beds, vacuum the carpets, scrub the coffee grounds and red wine blotches from the counters—and then, after a week or two, her room, and the rest of the house, will slip into the disrepair that is her standard. The coffee table has ghostly rings on it, like raindrops in a mud puddle. Unfolded laundry remains piled in the hamper. Crumbs spot the carpet. Mildew crawls along the corners of the shower. When doing yard work, she will leave the lawn half-mowed, a pile of branches trimmed but not bundled, everything unfinished, as she goes inside to get a drink of water and then forgets.
Sometimes, when he is on the phone with his friend Keith, when they are talking about prions, about the possibility of an inoculation, Neal will grow weary and distracted and interrupt the conversation to ask about Keith’s boy. “Is he the same? Is he like Sridavi? Lazy and unmanageable, sneaking away at night and sleeping all hours of the day?” But Keith always says, no, no, his boy’s a pretty good shit. And Neal is happy for him, he is, but another part of him wishes the boy were a problem. Then he could write off his daughter’s affliction as a product of her age instead of this disease. Something she might grow out of.
Sometimes, when he comes home from the lab, he has no energy to do anything but watch television with a plate of cold food in his lap. Usually he flips to the History or Discovery Channel and watches shows about evil dictators, Sasquatch and Loch Ness, the predictions of Nostradamus, what the world will look like after the people are wiped out by a disease that eats its way through the population or an asteroid that comes flaming out of the sky. He particularly loves the shows about haunted castles, houses, caves, catacombs.
He remembers one episode about a suburban home in Pennsylvania. A family moved in, and soon after, strange things began to happen. The lights would flicker and dim. The windows would open and close. A glass of water would drag across the table and shatter on the floor. One night, when the parents were reading in the living room, the couch turned over and the windows blasted open and from them came a wailing, like the noise of banshees. And another time, in the bathroom, the father noticed the paint bubbling and when he pressed his finger to it, it popped and bled. Soon after that, they brought in a psychic, a large black woman in a purple muumuu named Madam Serena, thinking she might identify a demon or an Indian burial ground.
Instead she claimed the haunting came from the daughter, a teenager, black haired, black fingernailed, dosed up on medication for her depression. She was possessed by a darkness that had in turn possessed their home. “She is devouring you,” Madam Serena said.
When Neal sits in the living room illuminated by the flickering light of the television, when he sees the vomit-splattered toilet bowl and hears the moans coming from his daughter’s room and faces the stiff, cold silence of his wife in bed, he, too, feels as though his daughter is slowly devouring him, devouring them all.
He isn’t sure what to blame, the drugs or the disease. Sometimes the drugs seem like the disease. He remembers a story his amah told him when he was a boy. He would help her in the kitchen, standing on a chair so that he could reach the counter—blending spices, mashing peas and potatoes, sculpting samosas—and she would tell him fairy tales about tigers and rupees, asses and elephants, magic fiddles, broken pots, the boy with the moon on his forehead and a star on his chin.
One of these stories was about a village that hired a snake to kill a troublesome jackal that ate babies and stole treasure and kept everyone awake at night with its cackling. The snake spread its jaws wide and ate the jackal whole, and for many minutes its wriggling form could be seen surging its way down the snake’s throat and distending its belly, where it at last went still. The snake then curled up and slept in the village square and digested the jackal and around it the villagers danced for many days in celebration, and eventually their stomping feet and jangly music woke the snake, which turned to them to satisfy its renewed hunger. In this way one beast replaced another. That is how he feels about his daughter.
Lycans used to take a high dosage of quaaludes—labeled Wolfsbane. Then, in the eighties, Volpexx hit the market, a chemical cocktail of antipsychotics and benzodiazepines / sedative-hypnotics. Over the years the formula has undergone many changes, but in its current form, the pills—taken twice daily, as round and white as miniature moons—are a stiff blend of 20 mg haloperidol and 4 mg lorazepam laced with silver. The drug is mandatory and available free to all registered lycans. There is no limit on the number of refills—there is only the demand that a patient test positive during the monthly blood test or face imprisonment. All one needs is an excuse—a bottle of pills misplaced—and a new prescription is filled.
Most people would not want to take more pills. Most people find the drug imprisoning, deadening, a denial of self. But his daughter is not most people. She takes Volpexx with Robitussin and NyQuil. She takes it with weed, with Red Bull, with Sudafed and Benadryl. She pops it and snorts it. Sometimes her skin seems so thin, as transparent as cellophane, that he can see her pulse in her veins from across the room. And sometimes she cries for no reason at all, cries for hours on end, her tears like dark rivers.