I'm hosting a party, a reunion of sorts. Family and friends from all stages of the last four decades of my life are crowded into my living room. The small white-washed space has a sliding glass door on one wall and a cafeteria style kitchen along another. You can slide a tray across the aluminum surface, walk by the silent eye-level vapor shield, peer into the prep area unstaffed by white-clad, be-gloved food workers, and, despite the absence of french fries and lasagne, clearly make out the smell of deep frying oil and baking cheese.
Most people are coupled. There are older couples like my aunt Lydia and uncle Mark - a retired mafia don and a stocky ex-beauty pageant winner (not in that order). And younger: mostly friends from university or work. Except Daniel, an off-duty police officer I met one night on the dance floor. His wife Marisa is stunning in a simple maroon cocktail dress. Then the occasional single. Me. And my cousin Nancy - Mark and Lydia's only child.
My uncle is drunk; his anecdotes have been getting louder with each passing beverage on the rocks. It's so mathematically precise, I'm tempted to graph it. X axis in whiskey units, Y axis in decibels.
He is pointing across the room at Lydia, the star of his latest embellished tale, and suddenly his anger surges, his fist becomes a pistol, and he shoots her. Twice. She goes down.
Commotion, screaming. People try to scatter and cower simultaneously. Daniel vaults the plexiglass shield of the cafeteria, picks up a cleaver and hurls it Mark-ward. It flies through the air in slow motion, exactly like a ninja movie throwing star, each rotation audibly snicking through the air before embedding itself in my uncle's right temple.
The police must use time machines, they arrive so quickly. Then I realize Daniel's presence here, even off the clock, might explain that instead of one or two, we have twelve responding officers, and an entire SWAT team of detectives picking through evidence and taking statements.
Lydia's condition looks ominous. She is crumpled on the floor, a smear of blood across her ribcage. But the bullet is lodged in her the right side and she is still breathing, just unconscious. The paramedics tell me there is a good chance it missed vital organs though they won't know for sure till the doctors at the hospital examine her. She will need X-rays. Hydration. Years of therapy. She is whisked off in an ambulance, not the same one that carries away the body bag containing my uncle.
The only other person needing medical attention is Nancy. The right side of her face is covered in blood but after cleaning her off gently with a wet dish towel, I discover there is only a small wound on the top right side of her head, hidden almost entirely by her thick auburn hair. One of my uncle's bullets must have gone wide. Luckily the bullet only grazed her. She is in shock. I hand her off to the EMTs who dress her wound, cover her with a blanket and tell her she will heal just fine. I almost laugh at the absurdity of the statement.
"I've got blood," says one of the detectives, as she snap-snap-snaps her police camera. The team of detectives - only four people it turns out though they seem like a mob in my tiny living room - efficiently swarm and document evidence. One of them slips on the generic ivory gloves common to law enforcement and cafeteria workers and heads into the kitchen to hunt for the missing bullet; he finds it, buried in the far wall. On his way back, he stops to linger behind the counter, examining the surface for more clues. I barely resist the urge to ask him if the special today is Sloppy Joes.
Thanks to Daniel, I'm allowed to sit in on the detectives' meeting. They are working out why my uncle, now deceased, would want to kill his wife, still in a coma. Neither the "vic" nor the "perp" can currently answer questions. There are pictures of people and closeups of blood stains tacked onto a black marker timeline of events.
The criminologist stands up and points to several pictures - blood-stained carpet from my aunt. Bloody handprints on the coffee table where my cousin's wound was dressed. Cleaver protruding from a forehead, also dripping blood. "The blood sample from the perp does not match the victims," she says-
Well, duh, I am thinking, bristling at the notion that my family engages in incestuous marriages -
"There is another sample that matches the daughter, however."
-and it sinks in that she is referring to the victims in plural, not possessive.
During questioning, everyone's blood has been sampled. The criminologist's professional mask cracks just a little as she meets my eyes, "Yours."
It's the kind of match, she says, that you'd expect from a sibling. A half-sibling, to be precise - a half-sibling on the father's side because the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA is NOT similar.
My father. And Lydia.
And Nancy and me.
This is a lot to take in.
I sit down.
At that moment there is screaming from the morgue, which just happens to be next door. A woman in a lab coat and face shield, gloves covered in blood, bursts through the french doors. "He's alive," she shrieks. "I was about to start the AUTOPSY. Pulled the cleaver from his head and he MOVED." Another minute and she would have been cutting open his abdomen with a scalpel.
We troop in through the doors to see my uncle, dead-skin grey and woozy but upright on the stainless steel slab. It's not a homicide anymore, not even one perpetrated and the attempted murder charge he'll face no longer seems like such a mystery.
I head home puzzling over what I'll say to Lydia: I've got good news and bad news. The good news is your father came back to zombie life seconds before becoming a science experiment. The bad news...
Or: Good news: you have a sister! Your homicidal father is not really your father!!
Characters that appear in this dream bear no resemblance to persons living or dead, besides myself. The dream author also makes no claims of expertise in the fields of criminology or medicine, apart from what urban myths might be perpetuated by watching far too much ER and Law and Order.
No comments:
Post a Comment