His mind felt like it was burning with a fever, or something worse. The heat and the pain made it so hard to think. A fragment of him, though, stood to one side as if watching this all on a movie screen; and it was that small part of him that kept wanting to shout out the necessary questions. Where had the pills come from? Who had put them there? Why would anyone do that? If it was a prank, then why spend so much money? What was wrong with him that he was taking this as some kind of normal?
A lot of questions. Those and others. However, that small part of him had no voice. It had no more chance of engaging the rest of him than a theater patron had in opening a dialogue with the actors on the screen. He was merely a witness to a bizarre story unfolding around him, with him as the central character. Protagonist or victim, it was hard to decide.
So many whys kept flooding the spectator version of him.
The rest of him stood over the toilet, dropping the beautiful little pills into the churning water of the toilet bowl. Doing that—the act of picking up a pill and dropping it—felt like he was carving off pieces of his own flesh and flushing them. The process diminished him, moment by moment, pill by pill, flush by flush. And yet he couldn’t break his own rhythm. It was a task assigned in hell, and he knew that once committed he had to see it through.
It took a long time.
It took such a long damn time.
He was only awake for part of it. For the rest, he was elsewhere. Not asleep. He was simply not there.
INTERLUDE SIX
THE MONSTERS AND THE BABY
They played together in the dark.
The doctor, the nurse, and the baby.
Special games that they devised together.
Sometimes it was a poking game.
Not with the doctor’s finger. Oh, no, that would not do at all. Touching baby skin was nasty. It would be better to stick his fingers into hot coals. That would burn less. And those kinds of burns would heal. If he were to touch the baby’s skin, the burns might never heal. Babies are pure and filled with hope. That was a lesson the doctor had learned long ago. With other babies.
No, the doctor preferred to use a stick. Or a pencil. Or a rolled-up piece of paper. Anything that was on hand. Anything that was easy to hold and fun to poke with. A chicken bone was always nice, especially if there was still some meat and gristle on it; a little fat, maybe some blood. The chicken did not have to be cooked. Sometimes he let the nurse pick something. She liked sharp toys.
The baby was so much fun when they played the poking game. He screamed with such a high, sweet, piercing scream.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Rain grabbed his hands and held them. Squeezed them.
“God!” she cried. “The Fire Zone. Yes. That’s the name. I’ve been trying to remember it, and it’s been killing me that I can’t. But now that you said it … yes. A thousand times yes. Please, though … tell me about it. About how you see it. Tell me anything.”
Sticks did not pull his hands away. He held on, smiling, looking both scared and relieved. “It’s big,” he began. “It’s like a big part of the city. And it’s always night there. Or maybe that’s because I only go there when I’m sleeping at night.”
“It’s always night,” she said, nodding, knowing it to be true as soon as she said it.
Sticks’s eyes became unfocused as he looked inward instead of out. “There are these big clubs. Huge ones, and the music they play is alive. I mean they played it alive.”
“They call it Music,” she said, “with a capital M.”
“I’ve been dreaming about this place ever since I was in the VA hospital. I couldn’t wait to go to sleep because when I’m there, when I’m in the Zone, I’m not crippled. I can walk.”
“I dance in my dreams,” said Rain.
He nodded. “Me, too. Everyone dances there. Not all the time, but in the clubs—”
“—and on the streets,” she cut in. “In the parks. People love to dance there.”
“They do. Snakedancer leads them. He’s the dance master in the Zone.”
She said, “I can almost remember the names of the clubs. I can see them in my mind, but they’re hazy. There’s a big one, huge, with colored lights making crazy patterns on the white walls outside.”
“That’s Unlovely’s,” said Sticks. “That’s my favorite place.”
“Mine, too,” she said brightly. “It’s safe there.”
He frowned at that. “Safe? No … I don’t think so. Safer, maybe.”
They thought about it and nodded at the same time. “Safer,” she agreed. “Then there’s the one with the 3-D animated tornado outside.”
“Café Vortex,” supplied Sticks. “And the little one by the park. The Crippled Dwarf. I’m not allowed in there. That’s only for … for…”
“Invited?” she suggested. They paused for a moment.
“Invited,” he said, but he wasn’t sure. “We’re not invited. Not like that. We’re what the people in the Zone call refugees. But the other clubs are open to anyone. There’s another big one, but I haven’t been in there. It scares me.”
Rain thought about it and asked, “With a big red neon hand outside? Torquemada’s, maybe? Is that a real name?”
“It is,” he said. “I looked it up after the first time I dreamed about it. Tomás de Torquemada was the guy who pretty much ran the Inquisition. He tortured and killed people in the name of God. Witches and such.”
“So what’s that make the club? An BDSM joint?”
“No. It’s a dance club. I’m not sure why they picked that name. Clubs are like that, I suppose, even in the Fire Zone.”
“Yes,” she said, “but it’s definitely not safe.”
“No.”
“In my dreams,” said Rain, “I know I want to go in there because that’s where the best dancers go, but like I said, I’m not a dancer anymore.”
“I saw you running yesterday,” he said. “You moved pretty damn well.”
“It’s not the same thing.”
He gave her a look. “You’re telling me that you can’t even party dance? I find that hard to believe.”
“I can’t dance anymore,” she said, putting enough claws in it to stop that part of their discussion.
He didn’t argue. Instead, they talked about it for half an hour, trying to pull more details out of what they remembered, and feeding off half-remembered bits from each other. She had some of it and he had some, but apart from the clubs and the Music, none of the other details were shared. Mute, faceless dancers who dressed in colorful leotards and danced and danced to try to save their souls. Types of music with odd names like “othertone,” “ultrafusion,” “demitrend,” “musica morbifica,” and “suicide blues.” Rain knew that people left their real names behind and took strange nicknames; but it was Sticks who came up with some of those new identities. A DJ named Oswald Four, a bartender named Brutal John, a pharmacologist who called himself Doctor Velocity, an ancient and wizened repairman named Caster Bootey who Sticks said was kind of like Yoda.
“He always says cryptic shit that you know is important,” said Sticks, “but which don’t make much sense. I think maybe it’s like Zen, where you have to puzzle your way through it ’cause if you don’t figure it out, then the answer won’t mean as much.”
Eventually, they talked themselves out and fell into a mutual silence, smiling at each other. The smiles faded.
“Well,” said Rain, “either we’re both completely out of our freaking minds or we’re going to the same place.”
“In dreams,” he corrected. “Only in dreams.”
“Maybe,” she said. “We were both on Boundary Street.”
Sticks winced. “Okay, but that place scares the shit out of me. I never want to go back.”
“Even if that’s how you get to the Fire Zone?” asked Rain. “For real, I mean. What if you have to cross Boundary Street in order to find that hill that goes up to the Fire Zone?”
“You want to know what hap
pened when I got home yesterday?” said Sticks flatly. “I was sick as a goddamn dog. I threw up. I crapped my brains out. I even had some blood in my pee. I started feeling sick as soon as I stopped my car by that alley, and it got worse the whole drive to the Port Authority. I thought I was going to shit in my drawers in the Rocket. Made it to my apartment just in damn time, but it was close. And all last night, I had some of the worst nightmares I ever had. Do I want to go to the Zone again? Sure. In dreams. But no way am I ever going back to Boundary Street. No fucking way.”
When Rain did not answer for a long time, Sticks’s face fell. “Oh … shit. That’s why you called me, isn’t it? Aw, fuck, man. You want me to take you back there?”
“Sticks, I need to figure out what’s happening to me. I need to find that little boy. Whether he’s my son or not, I need to find him. He’s alone and he’s scared and he’s in trouble.”
Sticks leaned back from her. “And we’re the rescue party? I don’t want to be mean here, Rain, but we’re a cripple and a crazy lady. If there are monsters out there, then how are we going to fight them? Seriously, tell me how.”
“We have to try.”
“The fuck we do,” he said with real heat. “I fought my war and look what happened. I got nothing left to give. I drive a car and I live small and I got next to nothing, but I don’t want to lose what little I got left.”
“He’s a kid, Sticks.”
He took a breath, let it out. “He’s not my kid. And there’s a real good chance that, taking into account all the drugs you said you took, he’s not your kid, either. Maybe he’s not even there. You even said it, Rain—maybe this is all you flashing back or losing your shit. I don’t know, but if you’re auditioning for the remake of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, then I’m not volunteering to be part of your Scooby gang. That’s TV shit. In the real world, the Big Bad chews you up and spits you out and grinds what’s left into the pavement.”
“Fuck you, Sticks,” she said, but there was no emphasis in it. Rain slid out of the booth and stood.
“Wait,” said Sticks, making a grab for her. She eluded him easily, fished in her purse for money and threw it down on the table. “Don’t do this,” he begged.
She looked down at him. “You had me for a moment there,” she said coldly. “The Fire Zone … all of that. I thought you understood.”
“I do,” he insisted but then slapped his hand against his walking sticks. “Seriously, though, what can I do?”
“You could believe me.”
He said nothing, and his silence lasted too long.
Rain turned and walked out of the diner.
INTERLUDE SEVEN
THE MONSTERS AND THE TODDLER
They ran together in the dark.
Well, not together. Not exactly.
The toddler ran, and the monster chased him.
The monster was fair about it. He always gave the toddler a lead, let him take a dozen steps, two dozen. Then he would run after him with his long, thin legs. The monster always caught the toddler. And even when he gave him a hundred steps, the toddler could only run so far. The cellar was big, but all the doors were locked, and the toddler had never learned how to climb stairs. Even if he could, there were monsters on the stairs, too. The Mulatto was there most of the time, sitting still and quiet and always watching. Or the nurse was there, her sharp silver knitting needles going clickety-clickety-clack. Sometimes the stairs were covered with nightbirds, sitting five to a step, watching with dead eyes.
It was fun, sometimes, to let the toddler keep trying to run, to keep looking for a way out or a place to hide. That was part of the fun. That was delicious.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Rain wanted to run.
Not run home. Just run. Any way. Far away. She wanted to outrun her life. She wanted to run so far that no one she’d ever meet would know her name. It was so tempting.
All she had to do was go. She could figure it out. Food, clothing. Whatever. She’d lived hard before and she could do it again, but this time without drugs. Without anything or anyone. It would be like she died here and was reborn somewhere else. Why not? After all, dying was easy. She’d done it twice already.
Nothing would feel more right. Nothing felt sweeter to her. Screw Sticks, screw Doctor Nine, screw his nurse, screw psychosis, screw LSD and Void flashbacks, screw NA, screw everyone. If she could have gotten a match and a big enough gas can, she’d have set it all to burn.
Halfway home, she stopped and looked at a bus that was rolling toward her. She could get on and go. To hell with whatever was back home. Her charger, her clothes, her laptop. Could she leave that behind? There had been plenty of times when she’d had less than she had now. No possessions meant no attachments. No obligations. There was a song lyric playing in the back of her head. Something about freedom meaning that you had nothing left to lose. Rain didn’t know what song it was from. It made sense to her, though. Nothing left to lose and nothing left to care about. Things you owned also owned you. She’d read that in a book once.
The bus driver saw her and angled toward the curb. The door hissed open, and Rain took one step toward it.
“Anytime now, sweetheart,” said the driver. He looked bored and disinterested.
Rain almost took that next step. Almost.
Almost.
Almost.
Bug was at home. Small, vulnerable, innocent. Bug needed her.
“Sorry,” she said. “Wrong bus.”
The driver gave her a quizzical look. “Only bus on this route.”
“Sorry,” she said again. “My bad. Sorry.”
The driver’s eyes lingered on her for a moment longer, and then he shook his head and pushed the button to close the door. The bus pulled away, and she stood there and watched it go. A pair of black crows flapped lazily after it. Another squatted on the roof of a liquor store across the street. Watching her.
“Up yours,” she said.
The bird opened and closed its mouth very slowly as if taking a bite out of the moment. Thunder rumbled in the east.
Bug. Sweet little dog.
And Dylan.
The weight of the impending storm crushed down on her. Rain turned and walked away beneath clouds that sometimes rained on her and sometimes blew cold wind in her face. It was as aimless a walk as yesterday, but this time she was in her own neighborhood. The stores were familiar, their lights on, doors open, signs welcoming. After a fashion. This was still what Yo-Yo called the “closeout sale rack” of Brooklyn after all. No one had gentrified this part.
She kept trying to be furious at Sticks, but it took too much effort. It wasn’t his fault, and she knew it. This was her stuff. Either her madness or her twisted reality or her horror show. Whatever. It was hers, not his. Not anyone else’s.
So she went home. To Bug. To the emptiness. The bathroom was still empty. Of course it was.
She sat on the edge of her bed and removed the knife from her purse, feeling stupid now that she even carried it. Rain put it back in its drawer in the kitchenette, shucked off her clothes, put on sweats, and crawled under the covers with Bug. Raindrops began beating against the window.
Once upon a time, during a therapy session with one of the few shrinks who was not simply going through the motions with the inmates at the rehab center, she’d gotten a lecture about that. The shrink—and Rain had long since forgotten the man’s name—said, “Rain, you think you’re addicted to DMT and crack cocaine, but those are almost incidental. What you’re really addicted to is guilt. And not actual guilt, because you feel guilty for things that were or are beyond your control. You borrow guilt, or maybe you’ve been told that the guilt is yours to own. It’s not. I mean, seriously, how can you really be at fault for what happened when you were born? How can you be in any way genuinely responsible for the complications of her pregnancy that resulted in her being unable to dance professionally?”
Rain had argued with him about that. About her fucked-up karma, but the doctor was
n’t buying.
“You blame yourself for what happened when you gave birth,” continued the doctor, unperturbed. “You suffered an amniotic fluid embolism resulting in cardiac arrest. That is extremely rare and very dangerous. The fact that they were able to save the baby with a C-section and save your life, too, is frankly amazing. It’s miraculous. Sure, there was some nerve damage, but that’s a small price to pay for your overall health. You delivered a healthy baby, and you are a healthy young woman, even after your subsequent drug use. In previous sessions, you’ve said that you have proof that the universe is out to get you, but I don’t see it quite the same way. And, although I am not a person of deep faith, I can’t help but think that there are very positive forces at work in your life.”
Later in that same session, Rain had tried to pin him down as to his professional opinion of what was going on with her. Were the voices in her head real or not? Was she crazy or not? Was there any hope for her or not?
“Hope,” he’d said, coming at it very carefully, “is a tricky thing. Some people say that it’s the most dangerous emotion, because it can encourage you to believe that things will get better than they are right now. Sometimes that’s true, but sometimes it’s not.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?” she’d demanded. “Give up and accept that my life is shit and I’m shit?”
“No,” the doctor replied, “that’s not what I said at all. I said hope was dangerous; I didn’t say it wasn’t worth the risk.”
He never really answered the question as to whether she was crazy or not. He’d given her some runaround about her facing challenges and needing to accept realities. She tuned out most of it even though the doctor, as shrinks went, wasn’t a total waste of human tissue. What he had said about guilt and hope stuck with her. It should have been a comfort to her, but it wasn’t.
She stared up at the cracked ceiling above her bed and wished she was dead.
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