Savage Love by Douglas Glover Read Free Book Online Page B

Rose, even when she wept and threatened to kill herself. His new therapist asked him what he made of the fact that his family name was Thorn. Tobin held his breath until he passed out. Seeing himself in the men’s room mirror, in the ghastly glow of the strip lights, he realized he was beginning to look like his father. They had the same sinister leer, the same feminine belly, the same hermaphrodite penis. This realization gave him an erection. He felt suddenly powerful. He felt an overpowering urge to find Rose or to dig a hole. But Rose had mysteriously left Cedar Vale. No one could explain it, but he took it as a sign of love.
    Years seemed to pass. Tobin (Thorn), along with his crown of thorns plant, moved back with his parents. The house had an antiseptic air, something like a barracks or a prison, much like Cedar Vale Centre. His mother and father rarely spoke to Tobin, or anyone else for that matter. They locked him in his room at night. Their lives seemed shrouded in a dense, greasy fog. They moved awkwardly around the house in synchronized patterns like automata. They wore matching cardigan sweaters with deep pockets. At night he could hear them weeping. The backyard was pocked with unfilled holes, the rose arbour upended, the roses dead, their arched stems prickly in the moonlight like the backs of prehistoric monsters. He looked for jobs involving excavation. He found himself attracted to backhoes and barbed wire. He wore a cardigan sweater with deep pockets. He thought how everything repeated in his life, beginning with the moment when he fell in love with Aganetha. There were remnants of yellow plastic police tape in the backyard. When he came home, there had been a pile of letters in an unknown handwriting. He dared not open them, but he fondled them and got erections. After he got an erection, he would wet the bed. His erections were signs that a higher power was controlling him. The mysterious envelopes prompted him to write letters to the newspapers accusing the staff of Cedar Vale Centre of murdering Rose and concealing her body on the grounds. He also mentioned the alarming disappearance of a girl named Aganetha some years before. He fell in love with the music of Kurt Cobain. When the police came, he remembered the psychologist from before.
    She said, “You know your parents say there never was a babysitter named Aganetha.”
    Tobin (Thorn) said, “Without Aganetha I am nothing.”
    At the cemetery where he found work, Tobin met a woman named Dolores. She was typical of the women to whom he found himself attracted — melancholy, shy, sexually demanding, lonely, and possessed of large breasts. She lay down beside a headstone (a rose engraved in granite) and invited him to have sex with her.
    After he fainted, she said, “Are you a virgin?”
    He said, “Every woman I have loved has been murdered.”
    â€œWas that before or after you had sex?” she asked.
    â€œBefore,” he said.
    Tobin felt himself getting woozy again, talking so intimately with those large breasts, which, now that he thought of it, reminded him of his mother. Once, he had seen his mother naked on her bed, her breasts slung to the side; like boat bumpers, he thought.
    â€œThen you’re a virgin,” said Dolores. “How old are you?”
    â€œForty-two,” he said.
    â€œYou’ ve wet your pants,” she said.
    *
    Everything reminded Tobin of everything else, as if the world were made up of signs and omens that only referred to other signs and omens. He understood that his life was ruled by a principle of recursion. It occurred to him that he might be nothing but a robot with a short circuit, that consciousness was a flaw that only caused anguish, anxiety and alienation. He filled his room with thorny houseplants — barrel cacti, firethorn, Argentine mesquite, stinging nettle, Russian thistle, acacia, goat’s thorn — so that he could sleep safely at night,