There were some green and distorted faces through the glass’s side’s steam. The face at eye-level belonged to the latest Subject, the dexterous and adoring Swiss hand-model. She stood looking at him, her arms crossed, smoking, exhaling greenly through her nose, then looked down to confer with another face, seeming to float at about waist-level, that belonged to the shy and handicapped fan who O.’d realized had shared the Subject’s Swiss accent.
The Subject behind the glass would meet Orin’s eye steadily but did not acknowledge him or anything he shouted. When Orin had tried to kick his way out was when he’d recognized that the Subject was looking at his eyes rather than into them as previously. There were now smeared footprints on the glass.
Every few seconds Orin wiped the steam of his breath away from the thick glass to see what the faces were doing.
His foot really was hurt, and the remains of whatever had made him fall asleep so hard really were making him sick to his stomach, and in sum this experience was pretty clearly not one of his bad dreams, but Orin, #71, was in deep denial about its not being a dream. It was like the minute he’d come to and found himself inside a huge inverted tumbler he’d opted to figure: dream. The stilted amplified voice that came periodically through the small screen or vent above him, demanding to know Where Is The Master Buried, was surreal and bizarre and inexplicable enough to Orin to make him grateful: it was the sort of surreal disorienting nightmarish incomprehensible but vehement demand that often gets made in really bad dreams. Plus the bizarre anxiety of not being able to get the adoring Subject to acknowledge anything he said through the glass. When the speaker’s screen slid back, Orin looked away from the glass’s faces and up, figuring that they were going to do something even more surreal and vehement that would really nail down the undeniable dream-status of the whole experience.
Mlle. Luria P———, who disdained the subtler aspects of technical interviews and had lobbied simply to be given a pair of rubber gloves and two or three minutes alone with the Subject’s testicles (and who was not really Swiss), had predicted accurately what the Subject’s response would be when the speaker’s screen was withdrawn and the sewer roaches began pouring blackly and shinily through, and as the Subject splayed itself against the tumbler’s glass and pressed its face so flat against the absurd glass’s side that the face changed from green to stark white, and, much muffled, shrieked at them ‘Do it to her! Do it to her! ,’ Luria P——— inclined her head and rolled her eyes at the A.F.R. leader, whom she had long regarded as something of a ham.
Human beings came and went. An R.N. felt his forehead and yanked her hand back with a yelp. Somebody down the hall was jabbering and weeping. At one point Chandler F., the recently graduated nonstick-cookware salesman, seemed to be there in the classic resident-confiteor position, his chin on his hands on the bedside crib-railing. The room’s light was a glowing gray. The Ennet House House Manager was there, fingering the place her missing eyebrow’d been, trying to explain something about how Pat M. hadn’t come because she and Mr. M.’d had to kick Pat’s little girl out of the house for using something synthetic again, and was in a too shaky place spiritually to even leave home. Gately felt physically hotter than he’d ever felt. It felt like a sun in his head. The crib-type railings got tapered on top and writhed a little, like flames. He imagined himself on the House’s aluminum platter with an apple in his mouth, his skin glazed and crispy. The M.D. that looked age twelve appeared with others wreathed in mist and said Up it to 30 q 2 and Let’s Try Doris, 385 that the poor son of a bitch was burning down. He wasn’t talking to Gately. The M.D. was not addressing Don Gately. Gately’s only conscious concern was Asking For Help to refuse Demerol. He kept trying to say addict. He remembered being young on the playground and telling Maura Duffy to look down her shirt and spell attic. Somebody else said Ice Bath. Gately felt something rough and cool on his face. A voice that sounded like his own brain-voice with an echo said to never try and pull a weight that exceeds you. Gately figured he might die. It wasn’t calm and peaceful like alleged. It was more like trying to pull something heavier than you. He heard the late Gene Fackelmann saying to get a load of this. He was the object of much bedside industry. A brisk clink of I.V. bottles overhead. Slosh of bags. None of the overhead voices talking to him. His input unrequired. Part of him hoped they were putting Demerol in his I.V without him knowing. He gurgled and mooed, saying addict. Which was the truth, that he was, he knew. The Crocodile that liked to wear Hanes, Lenny, that at the podium liked to say ‘The truth will you set you free, but not until it’s done with you.’ The voice down the hall was weeping like its heart would break. He imagined the A.D.A. with his hat off earnestly praying Gately would live so he could send him to M.D.C.-Walpole. The harsh sound he heard up close was the tape around his unshaved mouth getting ripped off him so quick he hardly felt it. He tried to avoid projecting how his shoulder would feel if they started pounding on his chest like they pound on dying people’s chests. The intercom calmly dinged. He heard conversing people in the hall passing the open door and stopping for a second to look in, but still conversing. It occurred to him if he died everybody would still exist and go home and eat and X their wife and go to sleep. A conversing voice at the door laughed and told somebody else it was getting harder these days to tell the homosexuals from the people who beat up homosexuals. It was impossible to imagine a world without himself in it. He remembered two of his Beverly High teammates beating up a so-called homosexual kid while Gately walked away, wanting no part of either side. Disgusted by both sides of the conflict. He imagined having to become a homosexual in Walpole. He imagined going to one meeting a week and having a shepherd’s crook and parrot and playing cribbage for a cigarette a point and lying on his side in his bunk in his cell facing the wall, jacking off to the memory of tits. He saw the A.D.A. with his head bowed and his hat against his chest.
Somebody overhead asked somebody else if they were ready, and somebody commented on the size of Gately’s head and gripped Gately’s head, and then he felt an upward movement deep inside that was so personal and horrible he woke up. Only one of his eyes would open because the floor’s impact had shut the other one up plump and tight as a sausage. His whole front side of him was cold from lying on the wet floor. Fackelmann around somewhere behind him was mumbling something that consisted totally of g’s.
His open eye could see the luxury apt. window. It was dawn outside, a glowing gray, and birds had plenty to say out in the bare trees; and at the big window was a face and a windmill of arms. Gately tried to adjust the vertical hold on his vision. Pamela Hoffman-Jeep was at the window. Their apt. was on the second floor of the luxury complex. She was up in a tree right outside the window, standing on a branch, looking in, either gesturing wildly or trying to keep her balance. Gately felt a rush of concern about her falling out of the tree and was preparing to ask the floor to maybe please relax its hold a second and let him go when P.H.-J.’s face suddenly fell and exited the bottom of the window and was replaced by the face of Bobby (‘C’) C. Bobby C raised a slow two-finger salute to his temple in an impassively mocking Hello as he scanned the evidence of serious bingeing in the room, through the window. Eyeballing Mt. Dilaudid with special attention, nodding down to somebody down under the tree. He edged forward on the branch until he was right up flush with the window and pushed up on its frame with one hand, trying to open the locked window. The rising sun behind him cast a shadow of his head against the wet floor. Gately called out to Fackelmann and tried to roll and sit up. His bones felt full of busted glass. Bobby C held up a six-pack of Hefenreffer and waggled it suggestively, like wanting in. Gately had just managed to sit partly up when C’s fist in its fingerless glove came through the window, spraying double-pane glass. The fallen TP screen continued to show shots of small flames, Gately could see. C’s arm came through and groped for the latch and raised the window. Fackelmann was bleating like a sheep but not moving; a syringe he hadn’t bothered with removing hung from the ins
ide of his elbow. Gately saw Bobby C had glass in his purple hair and a vintage Taurus-PT 9 mm. jammed into his spike-studded belt. Gately sat there dumbly as C clambered on in and kind of tiptoed through the various puddles and rolled Fackelmann’s head back to check his pupils. C clucked his tongue and let Fackelmann’s head fall back against the wall, Fax still softly bleating. He turned smartly on his boot’s heel and started across toward the apartment door, and Gately sat there looking at him. When he got to where Gately was sitting on the floor with his wet legs curved parenthesized out in front of him like some sort of huge pre-verbal rug-rat C stopped as if to say something he’d just remembered, looking down at Gately, his smile wide and warm, and Gately noticed he had a black front tooth just as C caught him over the ear with the Taurus-PT and put him back down. The floor got the back of Gately’s head worse than the gun-butt did. His ears belled. It wasn’t stars he saw. Then Bobby C kicked Gately in the balls, S.O.P. to keep your man down, and Gately drew his knees up and turned his head and was sick out onto the floor. He heard the apartment door opening and the leisurely sound of C’s boots going down the stairs to the complex’s door. Between spasms, Gately urged Fackelmann to go for the window as rickety-tick as he could. Fackelmann was slumped back against the wall; he was looking at his legs and saying he couldn’t feel his legs, that he was numb from the scalp on down and climbing.
C returned shortly, and at the head of a whole entourage-type group of people Gately didn’t like the looks of at all. There were DesMonts and Pointgravè, Canadian Harvard Square small-time thug-types Gately knew slightly, small-time freelancers, too Canadianly dumb for anything but the brutalest work. Gately was unglad to see them. They wore overalls and nonmatching flannel shirts. The poor eczematic pharmacist’s-assistant guy was behind them, carrying a black Dr.-bag. Gately was on his back pedalling his legs in the air, which is what anybody that’s played organized ball knows is what you do for a brody to the groin. The pharmacist’s assistant stopped behind C and stood there looking at his own Weejuns. Three big unfamiliar girls entered in red leather coats and badly laddered hose. Then poor old Pamela Hoffman-Jeep, her taffeta torn and stained and her face gray with shock, got borne in through the door by two Oriental punks in shiny leather jackets. They had their hands under her ass and carried her as if seated, one leg out and a white stick of bone protruding from her shin, which her shin was a serious mess. Gately saw all this upside-down, pedalling his legs until he could get up. One of the big girls carried an old-type Graphix bong and a Glad Cinch-Sak kitchen-can bag. Either Pointgravè or DesMonts — Gately could never remember which of them was who — carried a case of bonded liquor. C asked generally if it was Party Time. The room brightened as the sun climbed. The room was filling up. Another of the girls made negative comments about the urine on the floor. Fackelmann in the corner began saying it was all a goddamned lie. C pretended to answer himself in a falsetto and said Yes indeedyweedy it was Party Time. Now a very bland groomed collegeish guy in a Wembley tie entered with a TaTung Corp. box and put it down by where the pharmacist’s assistant was still standing, and the bland guy rehung the teleplayer on the wall and ejected the TP’s small-flame cartridge, dropping it on the wet floor. The two Oriental toughs carried Pamela Hoffman-Jeep over to a far corner of the living room, and she screamed when they dropped her onto a box of counterfeit little Commonwealth of MA peel-off seals. They were small, the Orientals, and they were looking down at him, but neither had bad skin. A small grim woman with a tight gray bun and sensible shoes entered last and shut the apt. door behind her. Gately rolled slowly to his knees and stood up, still bent a bit at the waist, not moving, one eye still swollen shut. He could hear Fackelmann trying to stand. P.H.-J. stopped shrieking and blacked out and slumped down until her chin was on her chest and her ass half off the box. The room smelled like Dilaudid and urine and Gately’s vomit and Fackelmann’s bowel movement and the red leather girls’s fine leather coats. C came on over and reached up and put his arm around Gately’s shoulders and stood with him like that while two of the tough girls in their coats passed around bottles of bourbon from the case. Gately could focus best when he squinted. The A.M. sun hung in the window, up and past the tree, yellowing. The bottles were the black-labelled boxy bottles that signified Jack Daniels. A churchbell off in the Square struck seven or eight. Gately had had a bad experience with Jack Daniels at age fourteen. The bland groomed corporate guy had inserted a different TP cartridge and now was getting a portable CD player out of the TaTung box while the pharmacist’s assistant watched him. Fackelmann said whatever it was was a total goddamn lie. Pointgravè or DesMonts took the bottle C had taken from the tough girls and handed to Gately. The sunlight on the floor through the window was spidered with shadows of branches. Everybody in the room’s shadows were moving around on the west wall. C also held a bottle. Soon just about everybody had their own individual bottle of Jack. Gately heard Fackelmann asking somebody to open his for him he was numb to the ceiling and climbing and he couldn’t feel his hands. The small grim librarianish woman went to Fackelmann, removing her purse from her shoulder. Gately was figuring out what he was going to say on the Faxter’s behalf when Whitey Sorkin arrived. Until then he figured it was C’s party and just not to unnecessarily rile C. It seemed to take a long time to formulate mental thoughts. Pamela Hoffman-Jeep’s shin looked like ground chuck. C lifted his square bottle and asked for general permission to like propose a toast. P.H.-J.’s lips were blue with shock. Gately felt bad that he felt so little romantic concern now that she’d fallen out of the tree. He spent no time wondering if she’d ratted them out, if she’d brought Bobby C to them or vice-versy. At least one of the girls in the red leather coats had an awful big Adam’s apple for a girl. C roughly turned Gately’s shoulders toward Fackelmann in the corner and toasted to old friends and new friends and what looked like a serious fucking-A score for Gene Gene the Fax Machine, given the size of this Dilaudid-pile and all the evidence of some serious fucking partying they could see, and smell. Everyone drank from their bottle. The grim-faced little woman had to help Fackelmann find his mouth with the mouth of his bottle. All three of the big women displayed Adam’s apples when they tilted way back to chug. The polite swallow of Jack almost made Gately heave. C’s Item in his belt pressed against Gately’s thigh and so did some of the belt’s spikes. DesMonts and Pointgravè both had S&W Items in shoulder-holsters. The Oriental punks didn’t display any arms but had a look about them like they didn’t ever even shower unarmed; safe bet they at least had little weird sharp chinky things you threw at people, Gately figured. Several of C’s group chugged their whole bottle. One of the big girls hurled her bottle at the west wall, but it didn’t break. Why is it you feel it in your gut and not your nuts per se, when you get brodied? Gately was turning and looking wherever C’s arm was turning him. The contorted face on the rehung viewer from the corporate guy’s cartridge was Whitey Sorkin’s, a portrait Sorkin had let some neuralgic painter do of him having a cluster-headache out at the National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation in the city, for a series for an ad for aspirin. The cartridge seemed like just a continuous still of the painting, so that it looked like Sorkin on the wall was sort of presiding over the gathering in a mute pained way. The librarianish little woman was threading a sewing needle with thread, her mouth real tight. The pharmacist’s assistant was getting little skin-flakes all over the black bag as he hunkered down over the bag removing several syringes from the bag and filling them out of a 2500-IU ampule and handing them up to be passed around. The N.C.-F.P.F. painting had a red fist pulling a handful of brain out of the top of Sorkin’s skull while Sorkin’s face looked out of the viewer with the classic migraine-sufferer’s look of super-intense thought, almost more meditative than hurt-looking. One Oriental kid was squatting chinkishly in the corner drinking Jack and the other was sweeping up spilled laminates off the floor, using a flap from the TaTung box for a dustpan. Chinks could do some serious sweeping, Gately reflected. Another of the gir
ls threw her bottle at the wall. It was when C didn’t even have Gately facing them that it dawned on Gately the girls in coats and slatternly hose were fags dressed up as girls, like as in transvestals. Bobby C was beaming. The first bit of real personal-ass fear Gately felt was when he realized these people looked like mostly members of Bobby C’s personal set, that they weren’t the people Sorkin would dispatch if he was sending his own people and coming himself, soon, that Sorkin’s painting on the wall was symbolic of Sorkin wasn’t coming, that Sorkin had given Bobby C free rain on this piece of painful business. The pharmacist’s assistant removed two pre-filled syringes from the bag, unwrapping their crinkly plastic. C told Gately quietly how Whitey said to say he knew Donnie wasn’t part of Fackelmann’s score to fuck Sorkin and Eighties Bill. That he didn’t need to do anything except kick back and enjoy the party and let Fackelmann face his own music and to not let any like 19th-century notions of defending the weak and pathetic drag Gately into this. C said he was sorry about the bit of the beating, he had to make sure Gately didn’t try and get Fackelmann out the window while he was down unlocking the door. That he hoped Gately wouldn’t hold it against him ’cause he wished him no particular ill and wanted no beef, later. This was all said very quietly and intensively while the two fags in wigs that had tried to break bottles were sitting on a box filling the Graphix’s huge party-bowl with grass from the Glad bag, which contained grass. DesMontes sat in a director’s chair. Everybody else was drinking out of their square bottle, standing around the sunny room in the awkward postures of way more people than seats. Their arms were pale and hairless. The two Oriental toughs were tying each other off. The draft through the fist-hole in the window made Gately shiver. The other fag was making like comments about Gately’s physique. Gately asked C quietly if he and Fackelmann couldn’t get cleaned up real quick and they could all go see Sorkin together and Whitey and Gene could reason together and work out an accord. Fackelmann found his voice and asked loudly if anybody wanted to hike on over here to Mt. Dilaudid and get fucking fucked up. Gately winced. Bobby C smiled at Fackelmann and said it looked like Fax had had about enough. But at the same time the psoriatic assistant came to Fackelmann and checked his pupils with a penlight and then shot him up with a pre-filled, using an artery in his neck. The back of Fackelmann’s head hit the wall several times, his face flushing violently in the standard clinical reaction to Narcan. 386 The pharmacist then came C and Gately’s way. The portable CD player started in with poor old Linda McCartney as C held Gately and the asst. pharmacist tied him off with an M.D.’s rubber strap. Gately stood there slightly hunched. Fackelmann was making sounds like a long-submerged man coming up for air. C told Gately to fasten his seatbelt. Urine had turned part of the apt.’s luxury-hardwood floor’s finish soft and white, like soap-scum. The CD playing was one C’d played all the fucking time in the car when Gately had been with him in a car: somebody had taken an old disk of McCartney and the Wings — as in the historical Beatles’s McCartney — taken and run it through a Kurtzweil remixer and removed every track on the songs except the tracks of poor old Mrs. Linda McCartney singing backup and playing tambourine. When the fags called the grass ‘Bob’ it was confusing because they also called C ‘Bob.’ Poor old Mrs. Linda McCartney just fucking could not sing, and having her shaky off-key little voice flushed from the cover of the whole slick multitrack corporate sound and pumped up to solo was to Gately unspeakably depressing — her voice sounding so lost, trying to hide and bury itself inside the pro backups’ voices; Gately imagined Mrs. Linda McCartney — in his Staff room’s wall’s picture a kind of craggy-faced blonde — imagined her standing there lost in the sea of her husband’s pro noise, feeling low esteem and whispering off-key, not knowing quite when to shake her tambourine: C’s depressing CD was past cruel, it was somehow sadistic-seeming, like drilling a peephole in the wall of a handicapped bathroom. Two of the transvestals were doing the Swim to the awful tape in the swept center of the floor; the other had one of Fackelmann’s arms while the bland guy in the Wembley tie gripped Fackelmann’s other arm and was slapping Fackelmann lightly as the Dilaudid fought the Narcan. They’d seated Fackelmann in his corner in Gately’s special Demerol-chair. Gately’s balls throbbed with his pulse. The pharmacist’s assistant’s face was right up in Gately’s. His cheeks and chin were a mess of silvery scaly flakes, and an oily sweat on his forehead caught the window’s sunlight as he gave Gately a tight smile.
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