The surreal sense of horror that suffused me when I saw Wheaton is ratcheting down to pure animal fear, but I force myself to look at Thalia. The bathwater comes halfway up her breasts, which because they float seem more alive than their owner. I see no obvious wounds on her body. One arm hangs limp in the water, the hand wrinkled like the skin of a prune. Her other arm hangs outside the tub. Peering over the rim, I discover that my fear has barely begun to ascend the scale of terror. A white venous catheter enters her arm at the wrist, held in place by medical tape. From the catheter, a clear IV tube runs in a serpentine loop around the base of an aluminum stand and up to a bag hanging from an IV tree. The bag is empty, drained flat.
“What was in the bag?” I ask, trying to control my voice.
Wheaton holds the brush poised motionless in the air, then strikes the canvas quickly and repeatedly.
“Insulin.”
I shut my eyes, recalling Frank Smith’s description of Wheaton’s suicide plan: Insulin is painless, but sometimes it doesn’t bring death, just brain damage and coma. . . .
“She’s in no pain,” he says, as though this mitigates the situation.
I try in vain to lift my right hand to turn off the faucet. “What’s wrong with my arms?”
Wheaton ignores me, flicking the brush over the canvas with remarkable speed. A belated impulse makes me turn over my own hand. The left one. It seems to take an eternity, but finally, on the outside of my wrist, I see a plastic tube running into one of my own veins. I try to yank it out but haven’t enough muscular control.
Wheaton admonishes me with an upraised finger. “Your bag is Valium. And a muscle relaxant. But that can easily change. So please, don’t bother the equipment.”
Valium? My second-favorite drug . . .
“I expected you to be unconscious for at least another hour.”
Wheaton suddenly straightens, then turns as though looking at himself in a mirror. Which is exactly what he is doing. To my right, propped between the bathtub and the wall, is a huge mirror like the ones used in ballet studios. Wheaton is not only painting Thalia and me—he’s painting himself.
“What are you painting?”
“My masterpiece. I call it Apotheosis.”
“I thought the circular painting back at the Newcomb gallery was your masterpiece.”
He laughs softly, as though at a private joke. “That was his masterpiece.”
My mind flashes back to the primitive, childlike images finger-painted on the floor beneath the drop cloth at the gallery. Then Wheaton carrying me, stepping over the stunned FBI man’s body. I’m not the man who painted that. . . .
“This is my last,” he says.
“Last what?”
He gives me a sly look I could not have imagined on the Roger Wheaton I met a few days ago. “You know,” he says in a singsong voice.
“The last Sleeping Woman?”
“Yes. But this one’s different.”
“Because you’re in it?”
“Among other reasons.”
“You’re not wearing your bifocals,” I think aloud.
“Those weren’t mine.”
“Whose were they?”
He gives me a look I translate as Duh. Then he says, “They belonged to Roger. The weakling. The fag.”
My stomach turns a slow somersault. Jesus Christ. Two FBI profilers and a psychiatrist sit brainstorming around a table, and the photographer turns out to be right.
MPD, Dr. Lenz called it. Multiple-personality disorder. Fragments of the psychiatrist’s patronizing lecture come back to me. That’s not how MPD works . . . that’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Welcome to my nightmare, Dr. Lenz. What else did Lenz say? Always caused by extreme sexual or physical abuse . . .
“If you’re not Roger Wheaton,” I say carefully, “who are you?”
“I have no name.”
“You must go by something.”
An odd smile. “When I was a boy, I read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I loved Captain Nemo. Nemo means ‘no one.’ Did you know that?”
“Yes.”
“Sailing beneath the oceans of the world, trying to cure man of his self-destructive obsessions. I’ve wandered some of those same oceans. But I learned the truth much earlier than Nemo did. Man can’t be cured. He doesn’t want to be cured. Only a child can express the purity in human nature, and already the world is bearing down on him with all its weight, its corruption and filth, its violence.” Wheaton bites his lip, the gesture strangely childlike.
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“Don’t you? Remember when you were a little girl? Remember when you believed in fairy tales? And the shock you felt as each one crumbled in the face of reality? No Cinderella. No Santa Claus. Your father wasn’t perfect. He wasn’t even good. He wanted things for himself alone. He wanted your mother behind a locked door. He wanted . . . other things. And it hurt you.”
Always caused by severe childhood sexual abuse. Always . . .
“There was no perfect prince waiting to carry you off to his castle, was there?” Wheaton’s smoldering eyes never leave the canvas now. “All the little pretenders wanted the same thing, didn’t they? They didn’t care about you. Not the soft little you that lived in your secret heart. They wanted to spend themselves inside you, anything for that, to use you and then ignore you, throw you away like trash.”
Wheaton’s getting wound up, and I don’t want him any more unstable than he already is. Time to change the subject. “I’m really hot now.”
He frowns in exasperation, but after a moment, he walks over and turns off the faucet.
“How did I get here?” I ask as he walks back to the canvas. In the deep valley between his back muscles, the bones of his spine show through his skin like a ladder.
“You don’t remember?” he asks, lifting his brush again. “You were conscious. Think back, while I finish your eye. And try not to move.”
I do remember some things. Flashes of light, waves of vertigo. A gray sky, bubbles of glass, a bridge of white tubes, and a long fall. “The roof. You took me out on the roof.”
Wheaton chuckles.
“But there were FBI agents up there.”
“Not after Leon was shot. They all wanted to see the trophy. There’s a catwalk of pipes running from the art center to the physical plant. It only runs over a narrow alley, but crawling over it with a woman on your back sure gets the heart pumping.”
“But how did you manage that? You’re ill.”
Wheaton’s lips curl in disdain. “That diagnosis is currently under review. Roger was weak. I am strong.”
What is he telling me? He’s not sick anymore? What did Lenz say about MPD? There’s a documented case of one personality needing heart medication to survive, and the other not. . . .
“Why am I not like Thalia?”
Wheaton keeps painting. “Because I want to ask you something.”
“What?”
“You’re a twin. An identical twin.”
“Yes.”
“I painted your sister.”
Oh, God. “I saw that painting,” I say aloud.
“I’ve done some reading on twins. It’s an interest of mine. And I find a consistent theme in their stories of childhood. Many twins share a closeness that borders on telepathy. They tell remarkable tales: precognitions of disaster, intimations of death, silent conversations when in the same room. Did you and your sister experience any of that as children?”
“Yes,” I reply, since the answer he wants is so clear. “Some.”
“You want to know if your sister is alive or dead, don’t you?”
I close my eyes against tears, but they come anyway.
“Don’t you already know?”
Through the tears I see Wheaton’s eyes locked upon mine. This is a test. He wants to know if I know Jane’s fate. He’s testing my assertion of paranormal ability.
“Which is it?” he asks. “Alive or dead?”
Trying to read him, I
’m suddenly thrown back to the street in Sarajevo, to the instant the world blacked out and I felt a part of me die. Despite all my subsequent hopes, despite the phone call from Thailand, I knew then that Jane was dead.
“Dead,” I whisper.
Wheaton purses his lips and goes back to his painting.
“Am I right?”
He cocks his head as if to say, Maybe yes, maybe no.
“Why are you so interested in twins?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Two personalities from the same genetic code? Twins are exactly like me in that way.”
I don’t know how to respond. He has clearly traveled far down this road, and I can only look for clues to what he needs to hear.
“When you first came into the gallery,” he says. “With Kaiser. I knew it was a sign. Sent by whom, I have no idea. But a sign nevertheless.”
“A sign of what?”
“That one half can survive without the other.”
His words hit me like a stake through the heart. Even though I knew it to be true, this confirmation dissolves some essential fraction of my spirit. “She’s dead?” I whisper.
“Yes,” Wheaton says. “But you shouldn’t be upset. She’s far better off the way she is now.”
“What?”
“You’ve seen my paintings. The Sleeping Women. Surely you understand?”
“Understand what?”
“The point. The purpose of the paintings.”
“But I don’t. I never have.”
Wheaton lowers his brush and stares at me with incredulity. “The release. I’ve been painting the release.”
“The release?” I echo. “From what?”
“From the plight.” His face is like that of a monk trying to explain the Holy Trinity to a savage.
“The plight?”
“Femininity. The plight of being a woman.”
A moment ago I felt only grief. Now something harder quickens my blood. A desire to know, to understand.
“I don’t understand what you’re telling me.”
“Yes, you do. You’ve tried so hard to live as a man. You work relentlessly, obsessively. You haven’t married, you’ve borne no children. But that’s no escape. Not in the end. And you’re learning that, aren’t you? Every month, the little seed inside you cries out to be fertilized. Louder all the time. Your womb aches to be filled. You’ve let Kaiser use your body, haven’t you? I saw it the morning you came back with him, to the house on Audubon Place.”
So I’m not at Audubon Place. Of course I’m not. If I were, I would have heard the St. Charles streetcar bell by now.
“Do you mean that killing women somehow releases them from pain?”
“Of course. The life of woman is the life of a slave. Lennon said it: Woman is the nigger of the world. From childhood to the grave, she’s used and used again, until she’s but an exhausted shell, broken by childbirth and marriage and housekeeping and—” Wheaton shakes his head as if too angry to further explain the obvious, then dips his brush in paint and goes back to the canvas.
Different voices are speaking in my head. Marcel de Becque, telling me that westerners fight against death while the people of the East accept it: This posture of acceptance is portrayed in the Sleeping Women. John’s voice: All serial murder is sexual murder; that’s axiomatic. Dr. Lenz, saying Wheaton’s mother left home when he was thirteen or fourteen, details unclear. Lenz badgering Wheaton about it at the second interview, Wheaton evading the question. That’s what all this is about—the paintings, the murders, everything—Wheaton’s mother. But I’m not going to question him about her until I’m fairly sure I can survive the asking.
“I do understand that,” I tell him, my eyes settling on Thalia’s inert body. “That’s why I’ve lived the life I have.” How can this man possibly see the ruin Thalia is now as a release? “But the painting you’re doing now must have a different theme.”
He nods, flicking his hand right, then left, his eye leading the strokes with lightning precision.
“It’s my emergence,” he says. “My freedom from the prison of duality.”
“From Roger, you mean?”
“Yes.” Again the strange smile. “Roger’s dead now.”
Roger’s dead? “How did he die?”
“I shed him, like a snake sheds its skin. It took a surprising amount of effort, but it had to be done. He was trying to kill me.”
Now Frank Smith speaks from my memory, confiding that Roger Wheaton wanted his help with suicide. “Roger went to Frank Smith for help, didn’t he?”
Wheaton’s eyes are on me now, trying to gauge the depth of my knowledge. “That’s right.”
“Why go to him? Why not to Conrad Hoffman? Your helper? Hoffman set this place up for you, didn’t he?”
Wheaton looks at me like I’m three years old. “Roger didn’t know Conrad. Except from that first show, which he quickly forgot. Don’t you see?”
I can’t digest the information fast enough. “Does—did—Roger, I mean—did he know about you?”
“Of course not.”
“But how do you hide from him? How have you done all this work without him knowing?”
“It’s not difficult. Conrad and I set up this special place, and this is where I do my work.”
“Is that what you did in New York, too?”
Wheaton cuts his eyes at me, a wolfish look in them. “You know about New York?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“A computer program enhanced the faces in your earlier paintings, and an FBI man recognized one of the victims.”
“Kaiser, I’ll bet.”
“Yes.”
“He’s a sly one, isn’t he?”
I hope so. As Wheaton paints on, I ponder the chances of the FBI finding me here. They know what happened by now, of course. John and Baxter. Lenz. The NOPD. They know Gaines was not the killer. They’ve seen Wheaton’s finger painting, found Agent Aldridge. But what could possibly lead John to this place? The infrared photos? FBI planes shot total coverage of the French Quarter and the Garden District; they have a definite number of houses with courtyards by now. Dozens of agents are probably at the New Orleans courthouse right now, wading through the deeds to those places, searching for any connection to Roger Wheaton or Conrad Frederick Hoffman. Will they include houses with conservatories? Yes. John will be thorough. We talked about houses with skylights; anything that lets in lots of light will be on the list.
How long have they been looking for me? Is this the evening of the day Gaines was shot? Or the next day? Or the next? I suddenly realize that I’m terribly hungry. Thirsty, too.
“I’m starving. Do you have any food?”
Wheaton sighs and looks up at the glass roof, checking the diminishing light. Then he sets down his brush and walks to my left, out of my field of vision. Straining to turn my neck, I see him reach down into a brown grocery bag and bring out a flat narrow package about eight inches long. Beef jerky. Suddenly I’m standing in Mrs. Pitre’s driveway, outside the garage apartment Conrad Hoffman rented, where John found Hoffman’s stash of junk food. Beef jerky was part of it.
Beside the grocery bag stands something else that must have been Hoffman’s. An Igloo ice chest. The standard three-foot-wide plastic model, big enough for two cases of beer. Or IV bags filled with saline and narcotics. It depends on the customer, I suppose.
Wheaton’s gloved hands give him difficulty tearing open the yellow pastic wrapper of the jerky, but he knows I can’t manage it in my present state. At last he pulls it apart and walks over to the tub. With tremendous effort, I raise my hand and take the brown strip from him.
“Very good,” he says.
Ugh, I think as I slide the tacky stuff into my mouth. But when I grind the flat strip between my back teeth, my tongue savors the grease expressed from the meat like crème brûlée. If only I had some water to go with it. I could cup some bathwater and drink, but I don’t fancy a mouthful of urine. If I regain my muscular c
ontrol, I’ll drink from the tap.
“How do you know Roger is dead?” I ask. If I have a potential ally in this room, his name is Roger Wheaton.
The artist laughs softly. “You remember the finger painting on the floor at the gallery?”
“Yes.”
“That was his last gasp. His death throes. An infantile attempt at some sort of confession. Pathetic.”
“And now you don’t need your—his—eyeglasses anymore?”
“You see me painting without them, don’t you?”
Yes, but you’re still wearing your gloves. “What about your other symptoms?”
Wheaton glances at me, and his eyes flicker with confidence. “You’re very close to it now. You see, Roger’s efforts to kill me aren’t anything new. He’s been trying to kill me for a long time now. More than two years. Only I didn’t know it.”
“How?”
Wheaton pauses with his brush, then adds a few judicious strokes. “Autoimmune diseases are poorly understood. Multiple sclerosis. Scleroderma. Lupus. Oh, doctors understand the mechanics of how they kill you well enough. But the etiology? The cause? You might as well consult a witch doctor. Do you know what an autoimmune disease is? A phenomenon in which the body’s immune system—which evolved to protect the body from outside invaders—actually malfunctions and attacks the body itself.” Wheaton gives me a triumphant look. “Isn’t that food for thought? How did the weakling come upon it? Perhaps his guilt and self-disgust were so consuming, his desire to kill me so powerful, that they manifested themselves physically. My disease waxes and wanes in severity as it progresses, and I noticed that the waxing phases occurred when Roger had control. Then he began actively trying to murder me, with Frank Smith’s help. With insulin. You know what that told me? There were chinks in the wall that separated us. He was beginning to see into my mind. That’s when you walked into my life. A mirror of a woman I’d already painted. A woman who was dead. Yet here was her double—her other half—perfectly healthy. I knew then. A new vision had come to me, and this painting was part of it. I had to save myself.”
I stare speechless from the steaming tub. The complexity of his delusion is staggering. Born in the mind of an abused child, it blossomed and flowered in the crucible of a dying artist’s fear of extinction.