Jacqueline stood a moment too long before the door, sorting through the curiosity of the stranger's statement. She barely knew her father and did not feel that there was any lack in her life for this fact. She could not think of many times in her life that her thoughts drifted to that branch of her family tree because they had never been her family, only genetically similar strangers. Yet the man, Wick, looked so serious about this statement. It seemed rude to her to say as much about her patrilineal relations.
"I have to attend to some small matter," she announced instead, assuming that the faint formality of this, the "attend to some small matter" in place of "do something," would better justify her brief absence from the room.
She quickly sized him up, deciding that Wick fell into the camp of "mostly harmless." He could be left in her home for at least a few minutes without the threat that he would murder her (indeed rude) or nick the cutlery (far from cutting edge in any sense).
"Do you want to come in?" she offered. "It shouldn't take more than a few seconds. Maybe a minute."
If he hesitated at all, she would have left him on the stairs. Time was of the essence here, at least for Houdini. Wick stepped in enough that she could close the door behind him but did not presume to find a seat. That suited Jacqueline, who wasn't ready to offer him one as her panic for the bug drowning in her bathroom had welled beyond where she could ignore the tightness in her throat.
She darted into her bathroom, realizing only as she flung open the door how indelicacy this rush might have seemed to an onlooker. Wick had interrupted her, and she couldn't find herself caring whether he might imagine that he had intruded upon a bout of gastric distress.
Houdini was doing the doggy paddle (buggy paddle) in the toilet bowl. His barbed legs would no doubt best a tree, but smooth porcelain was out of the question. He tried to escape onto drier land once more and slid back into the breach.
She was grateful suddenly that she had been remiss in cleaning; no caustic chemical could leech from water to beetle.
"I'm sorry," she whispered so the insect but not stranger could hear her apology, "but you have to take partial blame for your situation, for putting me in this position. I didn't want to hurt you."
Once it was in the air, this rhetoric struck her as abusive, like every wife-beater standing over a woman with a fresh black eye.
The urge to flush the toilet and be done with Houdini rose in her. It would only take another surreptitious flush to be done with the rest, consigning them to a watery grave from which she doubted they could return.
Instead of appeasing this intrusive thought, she opened the cabinet under the sink wanting, she supposed, rubber gloves that she was not fastidious enough to own. If have been a while since last the toilet had played host to another's waste -- though she couldn't be sure than Houdini was not shitting himself at present. The thought of dipping her fingers under the water to scoop up her victim should not have revolted her as profoundly as it did, but she could not surmount this disgust for the sake of having this done quickly.
She grabbed the plunger, scooping Houdini up and depositing the bug in her sink in one quick, though drippy, movement.
Houdini was motionless for a few seconds. Has she been too tardy to rescue it?
Houdini twitched his mandibles.
"I hope you didn't drink too much of that water," she said. "Can't be healthy for you. Though I suppose beetles aren't known for being picky."
She ushered Houdini to the side with her pinky, dripping a little water onto the corner of a washcloth, gently running it over the insect's cabochon back, and then brushing it down with the dry edge. It was a hasty job, but it was more tender care than most beetles deserved.
Jacqueline decided in half a minute that she had done Houdini no lasting physical damage, though she could not speak to its psychological state.
However tender this recovery might seem, she did not trust it out of her sight. She wrapped Houdini in toilet paper for cushioning and restricting its movement as she slipped it into her pocket.
She emerged to find the man still standing at her door, hands to his side, studying a decades-old photograph that Jacqueline had framed beside the door. It was not a flattering or even good picture, barely out of focus and taken at a mall, but her mother had placed it at the entryway of her own home. Jacqueline thought that it was as best a memorial as she was intent to make.
"So, my father?" she prompted.
"May we sit?" asked Wick. His eyes were so dark she could have mistaken them for black with a cursory glance, the effect of them almost as soothing as unnerving. "I think this conversation is better had not standing."
She motioned him to her kitchen. Her living room would have been more comfortable and made her a better host, but the aquarium of beetles remained below a corner window, blanket over it. She didn't trust them to be circumspect or Houdini to behave itself in their proximity.
Wick presumed to take the chair Jacqueline thought of as hers, not that anyone was around much to claim the other three.
"Bluntly," he began, "your father is in the process of passing."
"He's dying? Of what?" Jacqueline's interest in this point was not rooted in caring about a man she could hardly remember but in her own death. Her mother had been cagey about genetic conditions on her side of the equation. As far as her mother had said, all her deceased relatives had died of "old age," which was not an answer. "Old age" might have been a causal factor, but that wasn't what went on the death certificate.
"The questions are not so easily answered." Even explaining this little seemed to tax him.
"Both of them? Plural?"
He rubbed his mustache. "Yes, both."
"So, he's sick, but not dying?" she found Wick's demeanor, his graveness, almost comical. "What, does he need my kidney?"
"No," he answered, his voice low and deep, too proper and with an infection she could not place. "The answer is more complex."
Jacqueline had an insect wrapped in toilet paper in her pocket because she did not trust its intentions, one whom she had just rescued from accidental waterboarding. She was not sure Wick understood complexity.
She gave the lump in her pocket a subtle poke to be reassured her that it had not earned its nickname again. Houdini remained there, writhing a little at her contact.
"Can I get you something to drink while you make it less complex for me, Mr. Wick? Or is it Wick your first name?"
"Just Wick is fine."
"Well, Mr. Just Wick, what's your poison?" Her head was already in her refrigerator, taking stock of her beverages. "Orange juice -- oh, that seems old; cola, diet and otherwise; milk -- do people drink milk straight after childhood? Water, of course. I have an astonishing variety of teas. I'm more of an aspirational tea buyer, and then I drink the same black tea. I have some ground coffee in a vacuum pack in my freezer. I was told that makes it last virtually forever. I am an infrequent drinker of coffee; though, when I want it, I'm desperate for it. Or beer. Is it too early in the day for beer? I buy it, but then I don't want to drink alone -- that's pathetic -- so then it ends up sitting in the back of my fridge until I have company. It's good beer, though. A microbrew or something. It says it is blueberry."
Wick received this barrage of words like a peppering of light hail.
"I think you'd be doing me the most like a favor by wanting tea or beer."
"Beer then."
She pulled two bottles from the back with relish. She'd wanted tea -- she liked using her kettle, another item she had purloined from her mother's home -- but beer might loosen Wick up enough for a straight answer.
Wick looked at her blankly when she handed him his bottle. She took it back, twisting it open.
"I never trusted bottle openers. I always thought I'd break the bottle, though I guess that I've never seen that happen in real life." She twisted he own open, tapping it against the stem of his. "Cheers. Now, let's hear your complexity. What does my father want?"
"Your mourning."
"But he's not dead?"
"It's more--"
"Complex. You mentioned." She took a sip, motioning him to do the same. He obliged after a second of seeing that Jacqueline was insisting. "He's in the hospital or something? He was never in my life, you know." She sniffed. There was not even the suggestion of blueberries in this beer. It was as though, during the fermentation process, someone a block away had tried to remember what the berries were called.
Wick had a strange, restrained expression again.
"Or maybe you don't know. Are -- or were, I guess - you close with him?"
"We've never met."
Houdini twitched in her pocket. She was not keen to add another participant into an already confusing conversation.
"Complex indeed," Jacqueline granted. "She might be too fully sober for his. "But you know him?"
"Of him."
"From?"
"My father, in a sense."
They were getting somewhere. She didn't hate his company, and what better thing did she have to do today? Though she did not think Wick was intentionally evasive, the conversation had not been speedy. "Your father is friends with him then?"
"Associates," said Wick. "How much do you know about your heritage?"
"Mom: dead at fifty of stupidity. Father, deadbeat at two years -- my two, not his, obviously. They weren't married or anything. I doubt they were even together, but he stopped coming around when I was tiny. We didn't miss him." Jacqueline took a deeper drink. "He's not getting my kidney."
"Only your mourning is required."
Jacqueline gave a sour, though still amused, sneer. "Required?"
"Requested then."
"Better," she said. "I solemnly swear I will mourn him in my own special way. Send me his memorial card -- you know, those laminated prayer things -- from the funeral, okay?"
"There is more to it," said Wick. "Rather too much."
"You aren't drinking," she said. "Not enough blueberry for you?"
"It's fine," he said in the way that told that he thought nothing of the sort. "You need to visit him. There are rites."
"Need?" she asked, her sneer less amused.
He did not back down. "Need, yes."
"I don't deal well with need."
"It is not necessary that you enjoy it, only that you fulfill this obligation."
"It's not my obligation," she said. "I didn't agree with this. So, I'll take a prayer card, thanks. You can finish your beer, of course. I'm not rushing you out of here, and I'd like to know more, but I'm not interested in any need or obligation."
Wick finished the beer in one draft. "There are things a great deal more important than what either of us wants. Your father sent his emissaries to--"
At this word, Houdini did all he could to burrow out of her pocket. Jacqueline pulled the bundle out, dropping it on the table as though it contained a thumb-sized Judas Iscariot.
"You are saying that--"
Wick unwrapped Houdini. "Why did you have a toilet paper wrapped scarab in your pocket?"
"I had to clean it up, and then I didn't trust it on its own." Jacqueline stopped herself. "Scarab?" The word dug into memory from high school. "Houdini is a dung beetle? I don't feel as bad about dropping him in the toilet, but I wish I'd washed my hands more."
"You threw a sacred scarab in the toilet?" Wick asked, aghast.
"It literally eats shit. And I didn't mean to. I was interrogating it." Wick looked at her with horror she did not feel he was entitled to.
"We're getting off-topic. You believe my father sent the beetles -- the scarabs -- to--"
"Portend the need of his only blood relation to mourn him."
"Instead of a letter? Email? Even a phone call? I'm not that hard to find," said Jacqueline. "Not bugs. That is what we are saying? He has magical control of bugs?"
Wick looked relieved and satisfied at her asking these questions, which did not make her believe a word of it. On the other hand, Houdini danced on the table in what might be mistaken for joy in something with a more developed nervous system. That was harder to argue against.
"Is my father some kind of wizard? Are there wizards?"
Wick tapped his fingernail against the empty bottle, the sound of it both percussive and resonant. "Your father is, in a sense, Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead."
Houdini wriggled circles around the table in the excitement of hearing this name. In the living room, the minute tapping on glass and skittering on dirt told Jacqueline the others were as excited as Houdini that she was getting a clue.
"I might have preferred a wizard, all things considered."
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.
