Wally
Page 18
“What happened at Nando’s?” Doc asked. I turned to look at him because he’d stopped chopping, and his voice was low, serious.
“Nothing,” I said, sounding like a liar even to myself. “Why?”
He frowned and didn’t answer the question. “Are you feeling alright?” he asked.
“Yeah. You know. Tired.”
“You don’t want to sit down.” Not a question. He was tilting his head down and giving me a frown.
True, I really didn’t want to sit on the hard, wooden table chairs. I shrugged and kept pacing, but my walk was still just slightly funny; enough for him to notice. I couldn’t help it.
“Did Nando hurt you, or did you run into people on the way here?”
My body went stiff and—just for a second—I couldn’t finish taking the step I was in the middle of.
“Why would you think that?” I asked, as casual as I could.
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he said softly. “Was it Nando?”
I nodded.
“Let’s talk about it after we eat.”
I left the room, my shoulders pulled close to my chest. It was rude to walk away in the middle of a conversation, but I didn’t want to talk about Nando.
My feet took me to the other end of the house, into the living room, where I stared out the big window a little while. The house was dusty and kind of dark, even in the day. I wondered why he lived in such a big place by himself. There had to be a reason. It made no sense.
The sound of Doc’s shoes came down the hall, and I turned myself away, looking out onto the street.
“Lay down and sleep twenty minutes,” he said, “if you can.”
His dad voice put a crack in my emotions, and I looked over my shoulder at him. He looked worried.
My eyes were dry, but I felt as if my body was crying somehow. I could feel it in my chest, and in my skin, and even in my brain. Without looking at him, I carefully leaned over the sofa and rolled myself onto the cushions. Like Nando had done earlier, I fell asleep right away.
There was a clatter near my head, and it scared the shit out of me right before I recognized it as the sound of plates hitting the coffee table. The roasted potatoes smelled amazing. I’d been smelling them in my dreams. Doc had put some kind of spices on them. I sat up and picked the crud out of the corner of my eyes. There were potatoes, corn, some kind of beans, bread and butter…it was a lot of food.
Doc sat on the easy chair beside me and sat back with his plate on his lap. I leaned over my plate, stabbed at the food with a fork, and we started stuffing ourselves.
“It’s so good,” I said.
“It’s nice not to eat alone all day.”
I snickered, and it felt weird and fake to laugh at anything, but I still did it automatically.
“What?” He raised his eyebrows at me.
“Dude, you could eat with anybody you want. There’s endless people who would come over and cook for you and shit. You could have a party every single day and people would always show up.”
He didn’t laugh, just shook his head. “What makes you think I’d want people all over my house? Not a lot of people make good company. Most aren’t trustworthy.”
“Maybe you’re just grumpy,” I said, tearing into a buttery dinner roll. “Most people are alright.”
“No, they’re not. I can count the people I can enjoy a meal with on one hand.”
I tried not to smile, at least not a big, toothy smile like the one trying to push itself onto my face. If he hated people so much, that made me pretty special. Even with a hand over my mouth and my head down, I couldn’t hide how big my smile was. Doc smiled a little too, and neither of us could chew because of it. The situation was awkward, but it just made me smile more.
Yeah, he was definitely my Doc.
He picked up a remote and turned the TV on. I hadn’t even thought of that. The dusty screen showed some kind of cop show. I’d never seen it before, but I rarely got to watch any TV. Doc seemed to like it, but I didn’t understand it.
When the show was over, and we’d set our plates down, he turned it off and leaned toward me. Time for conversation.
“I need to tell you what’s going on with the batches of fielders,” he said, pressing the fingertips of both his hands together. It wasn’t the topic I’d expected. His hands weren’t very big. There was dark hair on his knuckles. “I’m going to tell them to use an older batch from last summer. It was one of the best batches—one of the safest—but they won’t be happy with me. I won’t be able to pull that off for long and then…I’m not sure what I have to give them won’t have some risk. I don’t have much time to try to take things in a new direction. Look, it’s complicated and nobody else right now is working on fielder formulas. Nobody cares about it the way we do in this town.”
I leaned my elbows onto my legs and turned my palms up. “There’s always risk. Does it matter?” I wasn’t sure why he was telling me any of it.
“It matters to me and to the people I send my formulas to. Listen, if you feel like you can still trust me, I want to keep supplying you three for free. It will come from my own small, basement batches. You’ll still have the crawls, but it’s the safest batch.”
“Is it a lot less strong, since it’s older?”
He looked away. “It’s from about eight months ago. It’s not so old.”
I nodded slowly and looked at the sky out the window. It was nice of him. “So…the three of us will be safe, but everyone else…you keep experimenting?”
“I can’t keep everyone on the safe batch, no.” He rubbed his palms together, and his forehead wrinkled up. “They’ll keep getting new batches. I’ve been told to stop sending fielder formulas that eliminate the crawls. The blood is a tourist attraction that brings them a lot of money each year, which means I’ll be taking my research down a path I don’t really want to take.”
“What does that mean? Will it kill a lot of people?” I knew he wouldn’t just kill people if he could help it.
“They have all the formulas on file and will know if I send something older. They need better, stronger, new, and therefore, more unpredictable drugs. Stronger has always been easy to manage, but safe and new—those two things don’t go together. I’ve always done my best to test a batch before sending them the formula. I’ve tested a lot of risky new drugs on people, Wally.” He looked up from his hands, and we made eye contact. His eyebrows slowly went up, then down again, as if he were asking me a question. “I never thought I would do such reprehensible things.” He turned away from me and looked out onto the street. I wasn’t sure if he was done talking to me. I wondered for a few seconds if I should just get up and go away.
“Do you understand what I’m saying, Wally? How despicable that is?”
“I don’t know. I—well, I don’t know what reprehensible means, but you’re not so bad.” I hunched my shoulders and let my head hang. I’d been through a lot, and I didn’t want to deal with anything he was saying.
“I’m glad you can still trust me,” he said. “Okay, tell me, on a scale of one to ten, how happy are you right now?”
I didn’t know if it was possible for me to be less happy. Hopefully, what I was feeling was a fluke, and I didn’t want to mess up the doc’s data.
“Not a ten?” he asked. “Go ahead and think about it. Ten is the best thing possible. Zero is the worst thing possible.”
The worst thing possible was withdrawal.
I knew the question by heart, but it had never been so confusing. I rubbed my eyes and thought about snow. I’d seen a TV show once where people were trapped under so much snow they couldn't leave their house for days. They dug their way outside for chopped wood, things like that, and disappeared into the snow if they tripped—just completely out of sight in a split second.
“Question two,” Doc said. I was glad he was moving on. “You gave Fiona the only money so she could go to the field and try to score. Why her? How did you decide what to do?”
Doc sighed and shook his head through the whole story. “Just remember to call next time you’re in trouble.”
“Yeah, I promise.” I felt stupid in a huge way and didn’t need to be reminded.
“You don’t seem to blame me for the whole thing. It was my unpredictable drugs that got you into that situation.”
“No, you didn’t do it on purpose. Anyway, we’re all going to die young. I’d rather it be because of you than a lot of other things.”
He looked at me with his elbow on his knee and his hand pressing against his mouth. There was silence, and I wondered if it was awkward silence or regular silence.
“I heard about the dirty knives. A few people tried to pay me to help them, but for some, there was nothing I could do,” Doc said. “Would you mind if I took your blood again? Was Nando cut? Or you?”
I shook my head, not wanting to talk about Nando.
“Good. I’d like to take your blood, in any case.” He got up and brought a duffle bag from the hall. He brought it to me and set it down on the sofa. He sat next to me. I put my arm out automatically, and waited for him to put all the things he needed on the table, and tie the rubber thing around my bicep. “I made a few phone calls while you were asleep,” he said. “Breaking up with Nando won’t put you in danger.”
“Huh?” I sat back to look at him and shook my head. “I’m not breaking up with him. He was just crazy from the fighting. It’s no big deal.”
Doc didn’t look at me but ran two fingers down my arm, then pointed to my neck. Yeah, I was covered in bruises, scratches. I felt lightheaded and turned my face all the way away from him. I felt the pain of the needle going in and knew the blood was flowing through the little hose and into the vial.
“What do you do with all this?” I asked.
“Different things. I’m not checking you for vitamin deficiencies anymore, but I test for a handful of blood-born diseases. I’m sending a vial out of town to have a look at your DNA and several hormones. Cortisol, oxytocin, dopamine, and so forth. The ones that have an effect on your emotions. I’m also keeping track of your drug levels at different times of day.”
I nodded but didn’t know what the list of hormones was about.
“Would you like to do a huge favor for me? I’ll pay extra.”
“Sure.”
“Will you take these vials to the lab for me?”
“What? Downstairs?” What was he playing at?
“No, to a lab far away. Pretty far.” I let my arms and shoulders sink into the couch cushions. Was he really going to make me start a hike when I was so exhausted?
He put the used needle and trash in a hard, plastic container and started packing three of the vials in a black box with foam inside. “It’s in New York City. My brother will put you up for a couple nights.”
My mouth opened to say no, yes, or why, but I just sat there. He put the box of vials away and took an envelope and a paper bag full of something out of the duffle bag, putting all of it on my lap.
“This is a note with instructions. You need to take care of yourself. Promise me you will.”
I opened the bag and looked in. There were two tubes of some kind of cream and a bottle of pills. A note was folded so that the writing was on the outside, and I could read enough of it that I knew he was worried about my torn-up asshole. I stayed frozen, staring at it for a handful of seconds, then I nodded and mumbled something that was supposed to be a thank you, but wasn’t actually words.
“I’ll arrange for your train ticket and make sure you have everything you might need. Spitz and Fiona will get the good batch. Sound good?”
“Yeah, okay. But…” My forehead was so scrunched up, I was getting a headache. I rubbed at it and tried to say what I wanted to say without sounding like I was being a baby about it. “I’ve never left the city. I wouldn’t know where anything is. I’m gonna get fucking lost.”
“I have a phone you can use that has GPS, and a map app I’ve set up to lead you where you need to go. I’ll show you how to use it.”
“Do you know where the bad neighborhoods are? I don’t want to walk into some big-city hellhole.”
“I hadn’t thought of that. Sorry. I’ll draw a map of the bad areas, but I have people from here to the city who will be informed of your trip, just like they are of all my activities. People loyal to both me and my brother. You won’t be without help.” He got up and left the room. I sat with the things on my lap, still and quiet. I would have liked to stay like that for a long time. Leaving Doc’s wasn’t something I wanted to think about, much less leaving the city. He came back in the room after a few minutes with a drawing in his hand. It was a map with big X’s all over it. I took it and nodded to show I understood.
“It always helps me,” he said, “to get out of town when things are difficult. The trip will do you good. Really. Do you like to read?”
“Well, sure. I read comics sometimes.” I scratched the back of my neck. My reading wasn’t very good.
“I’ll give you a tablet for the train. Don’t play with your phone the whole time and drain the battery.”
“I won’t.”
He stood there looking down at me and seemed like he was trying to decide something. He sat in the arm chair, hitching the legs of his pants up and leaning his elbows on his knees.
“Wally, do you think you can answer me now? How happy are you?”
I moved the stuff off my lap to the sofa cushion beside me and felt like I wasn’t the one moving, and I wasn’t the one about to speak. I knew when I told him, it wouldn’t feel like my voice saying it. That made it a little easier to do.
“Not ten,” I told him. “It’s not a ten.”
◆◆◆
Doc said he wanted me to have better clothes to wear to New York. I didn’t see why, but the thought of newer, hopefully warmer, clothes cheered me up. Down in the lab, he found a measuring tape and told me where to measure myself while he wrote it down.
“I’ll send Jace. He’ll come up with something by morning. You’ll be stopping by here to get the bag I pack for you. You can leave your own things here. Everything I give you is a loan. Understand? If anything gets sold, I’ll consider it stealing.”
“I wouldn’t steal from you,” I said, and I meant it. I hadn’t stolen anything, even when I first started working, and I definitely wouldn’t start.
“I’ll take you to the train station. You can follow my instructions from there. My brother runs the lab and will be expecting you. Give him the vials, but I have a few other things for you to deliver.”
“What is it?” Maybe I shouldn’t have asked, but I was the one who would be carrying it on a train.
“An ingredient that’s hard to find. It’s a trade. I have a runner I usually use, but this will kill two birds with one stone. Well, three. I really do think you will benefit from getting some distance.” He looked down at me in that way that I liked—chin down, looking at me like he was worried but knew how to fix me up.
I tried a smile. “If you say so.”
I glanced over at the laundry room and bathroom. I didn’t need either—I’d showered a few hours ago—but I wanted to stand in the hot shower and scrub off. I wanted fresh clothes. I just did.
“Go on and take a shower and all,” he said. I hadn’t meant to be obvious.
“I’m fine. What are we working on today?” I didn’t want to waste his time.
“You’re working on getting washed up. I’m working at the computer and making sure you’re ready for tomorrow. Go on.” He waved me away, and I went to the laundry machines, pack in one hand, and the paper bag in the other. Doc had left a pile of towels there for me so I shut the door, got undressed, and put a towel around my waist so I could put everything wa
shable in the machine. When I took my underwear off, I saw blood but ignored it and put it in with everything else. What make me freeze up and feel sick was seeing that the blood was on my pants too. It was only a dime-sized spot in the crotch, and it was completely dried. It had probably dried on my way to Doc’s, which meant it hadn’t gotten on his couch, but maybe he had seen it. Maybe that was why he was worried about me cleaning up and taking care of my ass.
I’d never been so mortified in my life. How long had I walked around his house and talked to him that way. He knew the whole time. I dropped the pants in the washer, wanting to put all of it in the garbage, and with a towel around my waist, I hurried around to the bathroom and got in the shower. I scrubbed myself with the liquid soap like there was a race. When I’d washed every inch of myself, I started over. I could see all the marks on my skin, but I pretended it wasn’t there.
I put my face under the clean, hot water. My eyes were shut against the stream, and behind my eyelids, I was in the dark. I had my face against the bed and his weight against my body.
I sucked air into my mouth so fast, I coughed hard on the water. My eyes opened wide and water stung them. I turned my back to the hot stream and stared at the shower wall while I coughed for a good minute.
A while later, I was still standing like that, and came back to the real world wondering how long I’d been spaced. I hurried out of the shower just as fast as I’d gotten in. Drying off, I looked around to make sure I hadn’t left any kind of mess. I got some water off the floor with my towel before putting it back around my waist.
The paper bag was sitting there on its side. I knew he’d put things in there to take care of my asshole, and I just didn’t want to. Maybe it would help the soreness—who knew—but I wanted to kick it all in the corner and forget it. I stared at the bag a moment before picking it up. Tubes of antibacterial goo and a bottle of pills.