Downbelow Domino, Chapter Two
March 25th, 20082.
Castle’s first impulse, when he wasn’t tired enough to know better, was to leave. It was his first morning waking up in Domino, and after his shave, shit, and shower, he wandered barefoot across the hardwood floors of the wide second-story hallway — the central one, the one the house plan (not the blueprint, but the simple roughscale drawing which seemed to be left over from some forgotten paraphrase) called the hallway major to contrast it from the hallway minor east and the hallway minor west — leaving damp but drying footprints behind him on the polish. He had his towel over his shoulder instead of around his waist, a habit he’d kept for so long he didn’t remember he’d begun it in his late teens to fluster and embarrass the maids, not until someone asked him about it.
There was no one in Domino to ask him about it, so he wandered the second floor, antsy and annoyed at the uncomforting smells of the house. It should have smelled stale, he couldn’t help thinking, musty, the way an unoccupied seasonal home often did. It annoyed the bugs out of his mother: she would rail at the servants, insisting they hadn’t aired the house out soon enough, that they were loafing again, getting away with murder just because her husband was dead. Two marriages after Jacob Finch and she still meant him when she said “my husband.” Everyone else got a first name or a Mister.
The house didn’t smell stale at all. No mildew. No dust. No old unbreathed air, no overlooked patches of decay giving off their puffs of uncollected oxygen, no hidden molds shedding spores into unmoved rooms. There was no specific smell, the way he would imagine if he thought back to other mornings, waking up in other places: no coffee brewing downstairs, no shampoo suds but his own dissipating into soap scum on the shower, no perfumes, no colognes, no wool sweaters with hints of dryer sheets, no suits fresh from the dry cleaners, no muddy tang of shoe polish, no petroleum song of lipstick.
But there was something. A something he didn’t expect, or a lack where he did. There was a warmth. There was an unstillness. There was a voidlessness.
The air felt like he was sharing it.
It was the normalcy of that, he decided, that made him feel like leaving, made that seem like a good and natural idea even for a lingering moment after he reminded himself it wasn’t possible: he hadn’t had time to get used to the idea of confinem– of staying here.
He didn’t want to think of it as confinement, imprisonment, house arrest, although each of those was technically accurate if you removed the courts and police from the equation and substituted them with the family Finch. He especially didn’t want to think of it as being grounded, which was maybe what it was. Go to your room, Castle. Go to your room and think about what you’ve done. Go to your room until you’ve learned some respect.
Just wait until your father comes home, Castle, just wait until. Welcome to the circus, Sebastian, show neither neck nor teeth.
He stepped down the spiral staircase still naked, still flaunting his vulnerability the way he’d loved to do, wondering as he passed the living room windows if anyone could see him. Wondering how much of a fishbowl he was in. Not much, he suspected, barring delivery people at the door and neighbors with telescopes.
Reynolds had stocked the kitchen with minimal basics, pending Castle’s delivery arrangements. The refrigerator looked nearly bare, but did have a bottle of orange juice, a half dozen eggs, and a link of dry salami. He made a quick omelette after finding a bowl, whisk, and pan, combining eggs and salami with the rosemary and dried garlic he found in the cabinet. No oil or butter, but the pan was non-stick and new, still smelling of the adhesive residue left when its logo sticker had been pulled off.
He’d always prided himself on an above-average ability to cook, and if nothing else, he’d have plenty of time to perfect that now. The beaten eggs paled and coagulated as they spread across the shining pan, proteins seizing up, salami warming in its yellow nest flecked with green rosemary, and he brewed a pot of coffee he suspected would be only a notch up from something you’d get at a restaurant. That would have to go on the list. Good coffee. Reynolds had warned him that particularly high-end items might take a few days to get to him, if they weren’t stocked in town.
When breakfast was ready and slid onto a plate, he had that moment of indecision — was it anxiety, almost, or a kissable cousin? — when he turned away from the stove unsure of where to eat, like when you wind up with a hotel suite to yourself and don’t know where to sleep, or rent three instead of one and don’t know which to fuck first. Would it be silly to sit in the dining room by himself? At a glance he estimated it could seat sixteen with luxurious free space between each diner.
He was still naked, so he did want a table, rather than balancing the hot coffee and the plate on an easily-burned lap. After a stutter of missteps, he settled himself in the secondary dining room, which seemed meant for family use rather than entertaining. It was still a large table, but didn’t surround him with quite so much empty space.
This place was going to be a bitch to clean if he didn’t keep it somewhat tidy, he realized. Or hire a housekeeper. Jonathan hadn’t said anything one way or the other about live-in help, but if nothing else he could get a day worker.
He ate breakfast with nothing but silence around him, the scrape of fork against china, teeth against food, listening for an echo.
#
While Castle had wintered under watch of bodyguards and dear old Aunt Helene, Reynolds had been preparing Domino for him. The hallway — more like a tunnel, judging from the before-and-after photographs Reynolds had left in the manila folder containing “documents pertaining to the repurposing” — leading to the gatehouse had been extensively renovated, looking more like a hospital corridor now, with black and white marble tile clearly inspired by that of the foyer, and white walls lit by useless, decorative lights in muted pastels. The gatehouse had been staffed at some point, maybe during parties, back before closed-circuit cameras were available. It was the only entrance to the basement as well, which held nothing but an unfinished room and the bathroom Reynolds had mentioned: maybe it’d been dug to keep the gatekeeper from using the bathroom in the main house, or as a convenience so he wouldn’t have to leave his post for long.
Now, though, Castle thought of the gatehouse as the store. Or he didn’t yet: but he intended to. He was trying to think of the house in the long-term; to think of today not as his first day in Domino, but as a day in his home, albeit a new home. So far it wasn’t working.
The store had several large two-way drop boxes: someone outside could deposit the mail or deliveries in one, or collect the trash from another; inside, after entering the security code to unlock the latch, Castle could dump a bag of trash or take his mail. A doorbell chime sounded whenever something was deposited from outside. The idea was that the mailman wouldn’t have to knock on the door every day, and delivered groceries and other supplies would appear as if by magic; no additional element of human contact would be added to the sterile process of an ordinary life.
Now, with the doors locked and the light on in the foyer, that seemed a little ironic.
No mail except junk mail, which he put right back into the trash box. But his first grocery order had arrived: nondescript lumps of butcher paper, packed in dry ice, containing foie gras, ribeye steaks, and lamb chops. He hadn’t had any idea what to make for dinner so had typed into the email some of his favorite meals from remembered restaurants and hired cooks. The rest of the order was citrus fruit, a baguette and a crock of butter, marshmallow Fluff, brownie mix, potato chips with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, cream for his coffee, a vacuum-sealed bag of coffee beans that would pass muster, and a burr grinder to grind them in.
He’d need cooking oil to make the brownies, he realized as he looked at the back of the box, and somehow the idea of the meat seemed boring without much in the way of seasoning or accompaniment. But fuck it, he was hungry.
He put the steaks and chops in the refrigerator with the butter, put the coffee beans in the freezer, and eyed the foie gras as he opened the Fluff container and took a thoughtful spoonful of it into his mouth.
“Well,” he said, and stopped sharply. The sound of his voice startled him — it was the first word he’d said all day, the first word he’d heard all day. He hadn’t hooked up the televisions yet to the digital cable boxes, and hadn’t listened to a radio in this part of the country in years. “Well,” he said again. “What are we going to do with you?”
It needed something, right? He didn’t remember ever having just plain foie gras before. It was usually “foie gras with pepper jelly and roasted figs,” or “foie gras with duck cracklings and flame raisin coulis,” or whatever.
He cut a few of the oranges in half and squeezed their juice into one of the pans, squeezing them by hand, sinking his fingertips into the pulp and then picking out the seeds and bits of membrane, tossing them into the sink to await the garbage disposal. He turned the stove up and boiled the juice, washed his hands, watching it, until it seemed noticeably thicker, and then turned off the heat and put a new pan on the element.
After eyeballing how many he’d need, he crushed a two handfuls of potato chips with the rolling pin, and rolled the foie gras in the crumbs, pressing them in to the wet, slithery surface before plopping it down on the pan. The chips browned in the melting fat of the liver, but most of them fell off as a result. Maybe they’d left some of their seasoning behind.
He buttered the baguette while watching the foie gras cook, and then dumped it onto a plate and poured the reduced orange juice over it. “There we go,” he said, knocking some of the fallen potato chips back on top of the plate. “Foie gras with orange reduction. Foie gras a l’orange. Foie gras a l’orange avec frites de pommes de terres. Take that, you goose liver bastard.”
He decided to overlook the fact that he’d served himself a four-person serving of foie gras for dinner, and ate enough of it to warrant the effort before flushing the rest down the disposal. The foie gras itself tasted fine, if a little scorched — but it was swimming in a soup of soggy potato chip and sauce that tasted like Minute Maid frozen orange juice concentrate.
“You’ve won the battle, foie gras,” he said solemnly as the disposal whirred flesh into froth. “But not the war.”
#
He unpacked everything, leaving downstairs the effects which would eventually find their way to whichever bedroom he chose, and programmed all the cable boxes and the TiVOs, and killed hours shopping online. On Friday he sat in the living room, with the curtains pulled closed enough that he saw only silhouette through the fabric, and listened to the landscapers mow the lawn. He joined Netflix, GreenCine, Yudoo, SugarDVD, and the Exotic Fruit of the Month Club, and spent days reading through critics’ movie reviews in order to decide what to rent, arranging curricula that would take him through Dutch erotica of the 1970s, cutting-edge Japanese horror, Hollywood screwball comedies, and the oeuvre of Raquel Welch.
Every morning, he dropped the previous night’s bed sheets, soaked through with sweat, down the laundry chute, and on Saturday he did the laundry and sealed the third-floor bathroom shut, carefully supergluing it so that it would neither open, nor would he be constantly confronted with the fact of his work, the way he would be if he’d nailed it or boarded it.
He had always been good at starting things, and at losing himself in something briefly, but it didn’t take long for him to feel the increasing weirdness of the lack of human contact. He’d been avoiding calling anyone. There were very few friends he’d told about Domino, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to talk to them, much less to family. That left the friends who’d been given, or would overhear, the cover story — and as much as he hated the truth, he didn’t feel like lying, either.
Several friends — the ones in the know — had promised to visit him, to do so frequently even. Who knew if that would happen; he’d said the same when Benny did a year in a state facility for possession with intent, and the year had somehow melted away and taken the promise with it.
He chatted on the internet off and on, but his typing wasn’t great, and neither was his spelling. He kept getting distracted by feeling self-conscious about it, and embarrassed for the other users, with their “omg” and “lol11!!11″ The slowness and stillness of it drove him nuts. At least he wasn’t a party kid, though. Going from the the-action-doesn’t-start-till-midnight scene, with its constant noise and movement and energy, to Domino — that would have cracked him.
The internet being what it was, spammers in the chatrooms hit him with ad after ad for porn and phone sex.
He called the first few numbers he found, and was redirected to chat lines, recordings at 4.99 a minute, and bored-sounding women reading from scripts. He hung up on two, feeling like an idiot making an appropriate noise or request here and there, like he was trying to figure out what his part in the script was.
The idea was in his head now, and it had been awhile since he’d had sex. He hadn’t even jerked off since coming to Domino. Maybe part of why he felt silly was that he was sitting at the computer, after all, at the desk. It wasn’t like this was studying.
He wrote down a bunch of different numbers from web pages that had ads different from the first ones he saw — ads that mentioned names of girls, had pictures that looked less like models, seemed somehow more personal — and took one of the cell phones, the cobalt blue Sprint he’d picked up in the Vineyard, and wandered around the house. “If I were a horny guy looking to get comfortable and get off on the phone,” he murmured to himself, “where would I go?”
A bedroom seemed practical, so he picked the red room, with its velvet-upholstered loveseat in the corner, its mahogany armoire, its burgundy window treatments and four-poster bed. He cracked one of the windows open, just enough to get some of the outdoor noise, some of the smell of the grass, some of the world, and took off his jeans and shirt, and after a moment’s consideration, his socks.
He started to say something ironic, something sarcastic, and just shook his head. He didn’t want to get into the habit of talking to himself. Instead he flipped open his notebook and started making his way through the numbers.
The first few were busts — more script-readers or recordings, one of them nothing but an ad for “hot dates in your area,” which was unlikely given that his area was three floors and part of a basement. The next couple flirted, but kept slinking away from the matter at hand — which frustrated him, making him grind his molars as he dialed. It was a phone sex service; he didn’t want them jumping right in, but Jesus, it wasn’t like prostitutes pretended they were there for dancing.
He got maybe eight or nine numbers down in his list, and at this point, his cock kept twitching in anticipation but he knew it’d need more than just straight-up masturbation. He’d promised it too much and delivered so little.
“Hello,” the voice on the other end of the line said, after he button-punched his way through recorded menus and lists of fetishes. The voice was young but not too young — twentysomething, in the middle of that particular decade, if he had to guess. Younger than most of the voices he’d been hearing; older than the babydoll affectations of the recordings. “What’s your name?” She didn’t sound bored, and she wasn’t purring, either. He’d quickly come to hate the sound of women he didn’t know purring before they got to know him. It was like hookers telling him they loved him.
“This is David,” he said. For as long as he lived in Domino, he’d be David Boyd. That’s what the credit cards said, and the utility bills, and the checking account, and everything short of the deed and the power of attorney forms. “What’s yours?”
“Just call me Babe,” she said, and there was a little something in her voice like a twang, but not southern. “How you doing today, David?”
“Not bad, Babe. Where’re you from?”
“Somewhere with cicadas, if that tells you anything. You?”
“Somewhere without. Massachusetts. So, uh. What do you look like?”
Now the spiel voice came in, the recital voice. “Well, hon, I’m about five foot six, with long blonde hair with just a little bit of curl in it. I weigh about a hundred and thirty pounds, and I’ve got bright blue eyes, full red lips, and 34B breasts.” Uh huh, he thought. Sounds like everyone. “Did you see my picture on the site?”
“Oh, yeah. Well — I guess I did. Hell, I don’t know.”
The silence on the other end stretched longer than it had with any other calls. “Hon, you don’t sound too into this, you know? I mean, it’s your money. What’re you looking for?”
He sighed, leaning his head back against the pillows. “I’m sorry. This is the tenth number I’ve called or something like that. They’ve all been so terrible. Porn would have been a better idea, I guess.”
“But with porn, you don’t get the interaction, the personal touch. Look, just relax. Are you on a budget?”
“How do you mean?”
“You know — more than forty bucks out of the bank account and the missus will notice, or only thirty left on your credit card, anything like that?”
He laughed a little. He could have bought a condominium with what was left on this credit card. “No. No, don’t worry about that. God, the last thing I want is another call with the girl rushing it. Like I said –”
“Porn would have been better for that, sure. You sound lonely, sugar. I know the sound.” She sounded a few years younger now — the bit about lonely wasn’t said the way a forty year old would’ve said it, with tired wisdom. It was more like something a Cure fan would say. Or whatever sad college kids listened to these days.
“I don’t get to see people as often as I’m used to,” he said. “Work keeps me busy.”
“So you need to talk, huh? Maybe the sex, too, get a little naughty.”
“Sure. Yeah.” He thought about it. “Yeah, honestly, I’m horny as hell, frustrated, it’s driving me nuts. But I just needed some random chatter, too.” He got up from the bed, where he was too antsy, and paced the room a little.
“How old are you, David? What do you look like?”
“I’m thirty-two. About six feet. Probably getting a little out of shape now that I’m not hitting the gym anymore.” Come to think of it, he should order some equipment. The door looked wide enough to get it through. “Light brown hair. Light brown eyes. So pretty much –”
“Like everyone else,” she said, with a smile in her voice.
“Yeah. I’ve got a tattoo, though, on my arm.”
“Like everyone else.”
“True that. True that.” Silence again, like she was waiting for him to break it. “So what do –”
“What’s it –” she said at the same time, then said, “Oh, sorry.”
“No, you go ahead.”
“What’s your tattoo of, David?”
“There’s a stairway leading up a mountain, and seven shooting stars surrounding it. It’s a painting by William Blake, and there’s a line from the poem it went with, underneath it: ‘When the stars threw down their spears.’” He peered at it, in the hallway mirror.
“Tyger, tyger, burning bright,” she said, and he should have been too jaded to be surprised.
“Yep,” he said.
“Well, at least it’s not a skull. So why’d you pick that? It sounds pretty elaborate — is it a personal thing?”
Well, he owned the painting in question, which hadn’t been part of Blake’s published version of Tyger. Edmund Castle, his grandfather, had bought it for him when he was born, and it had hung — in vacuum, behind protective glass, in a frame that cost more than a used car — in his bedroom for as long as he could remember. It was still in the box right now, until he picked a bedroom or decided to put it somewhere else. “I’ve just always liked Blake’s work,” he said. “You know how it is. I had it done when I was 23, 24, somewhere around there, back when I was a kid.”
“Watch it, sailor,” she said, and laughed a little. “I’m only 22 over here.”
“Yeah, well, it’s … different for girls.”
“Speaking of girls, sailor, got any? Are you married? Got a girlfriend? Anything like that?”
“Nope and nope.” He found himself walking around the hallway major, from east to west; it was large, nearly square, high-ceilinged, like a small hardwood-floored ballroom. “She left me.”
“How long since you last had sex?”
“Six days.” Maria, the waitress, with small dark-nippled breasts and a generous mouth. “Feels like longer. I haven’t jacked off since then, either.”
He heard something, as he paced the hallway barefoot. Footsteps — he stopped, in case they were his own, and didn’t hear them again. But they’d sounded like shoes. Like high-heeled shoes on a hardwood floor, a sound he knew as well as any other.
“What?” he asked, realizing the silence was one he was supposed to fill.
“I said, what was the last thing you fantasized about?”
“My ex,” he answered truthfully, “but I don’t want to think about her right now.”
“Okay, let’s try another tack, to get your engine going: who’s the first girl you remember really wanting? Not kid crush kind of stuff, but you know –”
“Wonder Woman,” he said. “Lynda Carter. Or is that kid crush kind of stuff?”
“It’s kid crush kind of stuff. Someone, you know, real. A babysitter or that kind of thing.”
He thought about it, and wandered from the hallway minor east to the hallway minor west, curious about that footstep noise. Old houses could sound like all sorts of things when they settled; he knew that. And it might have been from her end. Hard to tell what he heard, with one ear on the phone –
Through his distraction he suddenly found the answer to her question, and spoke it exactly as he remembered it. “Olivia Naples,” he said, “Eighth grade, math class I think, first day of school, she sat down a couple rows in front of me and crossed her legs as she sat, facing off to the side a little, you know? She had that — that 80s hair, not the big mall hair, but the good 80s hair, kind of … wavy and short but not butch-short. Material Girl, not True Blue. And her skin — I mean, the reason I remember this is that it’s the first time I remember noticing a girl’s skin. I’d ‘discovered girls’ already, but it wasn’t until the end of junior high and the beginning of high school that I discovered they could be beautiful. Her skin was creamy, I guess you’d say. Fair but not pale. Soft.”
“Perfect,” she said. “So when you used to fantasize about Olivia, what did you imagine? Close your eyes and tell me.”
He leaned against the wall and spoke into the air, with the phone held near his mouth. “The earliest times? I don’t remember. But I kept thinking about her from time to time. We’d never been close-close — never dated, different circles of friends — but our families knew each other. Anyway. There was this party, maybe sophomore year, we’d gone off to different schools but were both back for Christmas break. A friend of a buddy was having the party: minimal guys, lots of hot girls. Olivia was one of them. I went into one of the bathrooms to do some coke, and she was in there: it was one of those two-room bathrooms, you know? Double sink and toilet in one room: bathtub in the next. She was sitting on the toilet, with the seat down, talking to someone in the bathtub, through the door. I found out later her friend Stacey — we’d dated for like a weekend — had tried to overdose and only managed to puke all over the tub, and then locked herself in.”
“Uh-huh,” Babe said. “Go on.”
“For a minute, I just had this picture of her, this snapshot: leaning forward, nothing on but a pair of white panties and a pink T-shirt — she’d been asleep when she heard about Stacey — makeup smudged, hair messy, midriff bare and part of her breast showing as her T-shirt hung down.”
“Perfect,” she said, and there was definite satisfaction in her voice. “Keep your eyes closed. Are you comfortable?”
“Hang on. Do you mind if I put you on speaker?”
“As long as you’re comfy, hon.”
He flipped the cellphone over to speaker mode and rested it on the floor, but stayed standing. Somehow, leaning against the wall, eyes closed — that’s what was comfortable right now. “Okay. I’m comfortable.”
“You’re standing there in the doorway, maybe a little intoxicated, a little fucked up, definitely more than a little horny. There I am, with my platinum blonde hair all tussled, my baggy T-shirt hanging down so you can see most of my left breast, and I don’t see you at first, when you come in. I’m not talking to anyone — not in this fantasy. I’m leaning forward, and my hand is between my thighs, rubbing my pussy through those white panties. Just a little. Like I’m addicted to it. Like it’s compulsive.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, eyes closed, listening to her voice in the huge empty wooden cave, his hand cupping his crotch and rubbing like she was talking about, just a little.
“I see you, and we talk, just a little, just a tad, and I keep rubbing myself. Pretending you don’t notice even though it’s right in front of you. Neither of us mentions it. And then I slide down off the toilet, onto my knees. I crawl over to you, and I nudge your crotch with my head. Letting you look down my shirt at my tits, my nice young tits. Leaning up to rub them against you, and unbuttoning your jeans, pulling them down, licking my lips…”
She kept talking, and he imagined it — almost exactly as he’d done in the past, although he didn’t think he’d thought of Olivia in more than a passing way — much less a sexual one — in over a decade. He rubbed himself through his boxers first, then reached down the waistband and gripped himself, stroking to the picture she painted, cock unconsciously aimed at the phone.
“Ohhhh, Christ,” he groaned as he came, eyes opening — hadn’t he read that you always close your eyes when you come, or was that sneezing? — a spoonful that felt like a flood landing on the floor.
“Was that what you needed?” she asked, and now she was purring, not only satisfied but smug.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I think so. I’m going to –”
“I know,” she said. “But if you want to call again.”
“I think I will. I really think I will.”
An automated “thank you for your call” announced the length and price of the call to him, as he pulled his boxers up with one hand and staggered to the bathroom for a wad of tissues to clean up the floor. His thighs felt like jelly; his head like a helium balloon. He actually grabbed the side of the sink for support when he got to the bathroom, not because he needed it so much as that he enjoyed that spent, emptied feeling.
He grinned to himself and flicked the light on to look around the still-unfamiliar for the Kleenex box.
The face in the mirror wasn’t his.
He yelled, stumbling backwards as his heart stuttered like a startled bird in his chest, and caught the door knob in the small of his back. With his eyes shedding the afterflash of the lights, he recognized himself again. A little stubbly, maybe. Just a little stubbly, and worn around the edges.
For a moment he was sure he saw a girl. Not a girl with stubble, that was for damn sure. A girl naked at least from the waist up, with hair wet and slick from the shower or swimming pool, a girl maybe 20 years old at the most. It was a vivid, immediate, fleshy image, a certain one, but one he dismissed anyway, at least for now. He’d look up his pills on the internet. He’d see if hallucinations were a possible side effect. Maybe he’d get the dose adjusted, or switch to something else to get to sleep at night.
His chest and back still hurt with tension when he walked back down the hallway, and before he could even lean down to clean up the mess he’d made, he felt cold shock seep through his skin, so deeply and relentlessly that his feet tingled with sweat. The curlicue puddle of semen was gone, already cleaned away: and drying in its place, as if responsible for its removal, was the unmistakable sheen, complete with a tiny silvery air bubble, of saliva.
Like someone had lapped his come off the floor, in one thorough lick.