One-hundred eighteen, one-hundred nineteen.
The man is still and lifeless but Michael does not release him. He sees the black and terrible face of the woman from his nightmares. Her eager eyes and grinning mouth show she is pleased with his work.
At one-hundred twenty, Michael flexes his arms and pulls as hard as he can. He feels the shattered and splintered pieces of the man’s neck shift and stab and come to rest flattened beneath his forearm.
He counts ten more before relaxing his hold. And ten more before he drops the dead body onto the driveway.
He stands over the corpse, straddling it, looking at it unbelieving. His arms tingle from the strain. They feel artificial and wrong, like prosthetics. Someone else’s limbs. Not his own. Not Michael Oswald’s. Someone else’s.
His balance is compromised from the heavy breathing and he staggers back a step and then lowers himself to the ground. He sits and stares at the body. He draws his knees up to his chest and wraps his arms around them staring at the mass in the black and white shirt.
He slows his breathing with one long steady exhale. He wants to sit and think about what happened, quiz himself on how he knew to grasp him in that way to crush his larynx and strangle him so easily, so naturally, but he doesn’t dare.
He is not ashamed of what he’s done, nor is he afraid of the police except insofar as they will delay his quest and waste his time. This was self-defense. A white middle-class tourist attacked by an Hispanic gang-banger. But he doesn’t want to be bothered with the paperwork.
He stands up and straightens his shirt, pulls up his pants, and rifles through the dead man’s pockets. He finds a roll of bills and slides them into his own pocket. He pulls at a gold ring on his left hand, but his fingers are swollen and it won’t come. In his other hand, the gun dangles from a bloated trigger finger. It is a silver .45, pearl handle grips. A pimp’s gun. The safety is still set which explains why it didn’t go off when Michael murdered the man.
He opens the lid on the stinking dumpster to a cloud of flies bearing the stench of decayed vegetables, rotten meat, yesterday’s papers. The body is heavy. Michael grunts to lift it, but he manages, holding it under the arms in a lock he didn’t know he knew. He folds him over the plastic lip and tips him in, ring, gun and all. He closes the lid, looks up and down the driveway and then casually returns to the street looking for a place to rent a car.
Three blocks up he finds a bus stop and sits down. He doesn’t wait long. He boards the first bus that appears. He finds a seat in the back and stares out the window. Two blocks on, his hands start to shake. Three blocks more and his breathing catches and his eyes fill with tears. Four more and he can’t stop crying.
“You alright, hun?” asks a woman in the next seat. Her hair is in pink curlers, she wears a green house-coat and blue plastic sandals. Her purse is as big as his carry-on.
He shakes his head at her, turns back to the window and lets tears run freely down his face.
To her credit, the woman doesn’t say anything more. When her stop comes, she quietly drops a packet of tissues on the seat beside him and disappears from his life.
Chapter Twenty-One
The bus lumbers away in a cloud of gray diesel exhaust leaving Michael on a street not much different from where he’s just killed a man.
He is composed. He’d gotten hold of himself before the second bus transfer. By the third and final one, he’d been fine, eager to continue his quest, annoyed at the distractions.
He compares the scribbled words on the back of his boarding pass to the street signs and starts counting numbers on mailboxes.
Three blocks on and he stands in front of a knee-high, chain-link fence surrounding a modest one-story house that looks to have been built in the forties during the war years.
He knows this is the right house. He knows also that she is home though there is no sign of occupancy. What he doesn’t know is if he’ll go to the door. He knows that if he goes to the door he will find answers he’s looking for. He will find out who that man is who killed today, that other man inside him.
Strangely after so many days of obsessive movement toward this gate, he can pause and consider his choices. It’s as if someone’s been marching him forward at the point of a sword, driving him to this place, only to leave him here now to take the final steps alone. He must make the choice willingly or not at all.
He is not blind to what lies ahead. He does not know the details, does not know the why, but he’s been shown the what. There is a Michael Oswald that he knows, that Carla married, that his children grew up with, and then there is this other man. He cannot call him Michael Oswald. He must have a different name because he is such a different being than the other. He is a being that dreams in nightmares and kills strangers with the deftness of a commando and finds secret graves in the dark.
If he passes this gate and goes to that door and confronts the woman waiting inside, he will come face to face with that other being and he is not sure he wants to. He has forgotten that other person and he knows there was a reason for the forgetting.
He tells himself it is but a step. It is not the conclusion. How can knowledge be a bad thing? Lying is coming easier to him.
He pushes open the gate and goes to the door. The bell rings with a long, complicated chime, Bach, Beethoven or Deadmau5, he’s not sure.
“Hello? Who’s there?” comes a voice behind the door.
“Mrs. Brennan? Rebecca?” he says. “My name is Michael Oswald. I need to talk to you. It’s about my time as a foster child.”
“I don’t know a Michael Oswald,” she says.
“I’m sure that’s not my real name,” he says. “I was with the Hilchens for a while.”
There’s a long pause while he waits. It’s telling that she doesn’t answer him.
“Please,” he says. “I’ve come a long way.”
He hears shuffling inside and then the sound of locks unfastening, chains being removed. The door opens.
“Baby Michael,” she says. “Hello. I’ve been expecting you.”
“How? Why?”
“I got a call from Calum Lane. He said you were poking around in your past. He apologized to me for giving you my name.”
“Why?”
“Because he figured out who you were after you left him.”
“Who am I?”
“Come in,” she says.
She’s in her late sixties. Her hair is long and completely gray. It’s pulled into a ponytail with a black elastic. She wears no makeup which fits well with the hippy aesthetic the house is decorated in. Grateful Dead posters hang on the walls, ticket stubs wedged into the frames. Next to the psychedelic images are diplomas and degrees, awards of achievement from assorted California institutes concerning at-risk children. She has books in piles leaning against walls and tucked into corners, paperbacks mostly, dog eared, read, and loved. The house smells of sandalwood incense and curry. A cat watches them as she leads Michael into a bright room at the back of the house where hanging plants absorb sunlight from a wall of glass windows. Outside, he sees a neat and tended garden, herbs, vegetables and roses. She gestures to an antique chair with embroidered pillows and he sits down laying his broken bag on the floor beside him.
“Would you like tea?”
“Sure,” he says. “If you’re having some.”
She disappears through a doorway and he hears water running and china rustling. In a moment, she returns carrying a cardboard banker’s box. Michael gets up to help her but she brushes him away.
“Sit down, Michael,” she says. “So you’re Oswald now?”
“Yes Oswald. They fostered me, but I’m afraid they’re all dead.”
A shadow crosses her face. “How?”
“Car accident for my folks,” he says. “My sister died badly, though. Drugs.”
The answer pleases her and she relaxes.
“So who was I before Oswald?” he asks.
“It’s not that simple,” she says
with a sigh.
“Why isn’t it?”
“You just want a name?”
“That would be a good start.”
“Michael before I tell you more, you should know that you are a survivor. Calum told me how well you’ve done. You have a good job, a family. You’re stable.”
“I’m none of those things,” he says. “I’m divorced and I lost my job. Doesn’t the fact that I’m sitting in your house right now in a cold sweat tell you that I’m not stable? I’m not stable at all.”
She looks at him with appraising eyes. “What I’m trying to say, is that you’re doing well. You are a success story. I’m sure people would like to write papers about you. I’m surprised they haven’t. No. Actually, I’m not. That would jeopardize everything, the same way you’re jeopardizing it now.”
“What is it?” Michael is losing his patience, he’s getting sick of this dancing around a straight answer.
“Your success, Michael. You are a survivor.”
“You act like I had polio or something. What does that mean? I’m special because I managed to get through foster care? That’s what makes me neat? Paper-worthy? A kid who went through the system and didn’t turn to crime?” He almost said murder.
“No. It’s a technical term, actually,” she says calmly. “What you went through most people do not recover from. Ever. Regardless of age or support or anything. Most don’t make it.”
“Rebecca, I can sense you’re a good woman. I remember you, a little,” he lies. “I know you’re trying to look out for me, but I’m an adult. I want to know. I want to remember. And I want to know why I can’t remember.”
“You can’t remember because…” She takes a deep breath and pauses as if weighing a great moral decision before saying, “because Michael, you were taught to forget. You were deprogrammed.”
“What?”
“Bad things happened to you,” she said. “You saw things. Bad things, very bad things. For your own health, we taught you to block that out. Like a bandage over a hemorrhaging wound. Please don’t ask me to pull that off. These kinds of wounds never heal. Nothing good can come of this. Let me give you tea and hear about your life. Tell me about your kids. How’d you lose your job? Have you been to the beach?”
“No. Tell me. I need to know. You need to trust that I’m strong enough to know the truth. I deserve it.”
She slowly shakes her head.
“It’s like it happened to another person” he says. “What little I remember about the Hilchens and the early days of the Dormitory are like stories I read long ago. I don’t associate them with me as an actualized adult. Any wound is scarred over. I just want to know why the flesh is dead there. Please.”
A low note rises from the kitchen, a hum to a howling whistle.
“I’ll get the tea,” she says.
Michael eyes the box she brought in. He doesn’t know what’s in it, but he takes it as a good sign that she’s ready to tell him, perhaps even eager to tell him. He has only to convince her that he’s safe to tell. He thinks he can. Lying is become easier.
The mugs look to have been hand-thrown and are the size of breakfast cereal bowls. He takes one and smells fruit.
“Do you have any sugar?” he asks.
She raises and eyebrow.
“You’re right,” he says quickly. “I should try it first.” He does. “Raspberry?”
“Strawberry,” she says. “Artificial flavor, but still good.”
“Yes it is.”
“Still want sugar?”
“No. It doesn’t need it,” he lies. He drinks more for effect.
She sips and looks hard at him as if trying to read an answer on his face.
“I’m here for a reason,” he says hoping he doesn’t sound fateful. “Please.”
“Your original name, the one you were born with, is Michael Hammond.”
“I’ve never heard that one before.”
She nods. “You were born in a suburb of Chicago. You had a sister named Sarah who was six years older than you. Your father was Gabriel, your mother was Pam. Your father was in the financial sector and did pretty well. Your mother was a stay-at-home mom. By all reports, you had a happy childhood.”
“Chicago? Do I have family there?”
“Dammit,” she says. “This is wrong. I shouldn’t. I can’t.”
“Can’t what? Tell me?”
“Michael…” She trails the name into the air like a sigh, steeples her fingers to her lips and closes her eyes.
“Finding your Zen place?”
“Wrestling with demons,” she says.
Michael digs his fingers into armrests but releases them in time, before she sees it.
“I’ve come a long way,” he says, “in more ways than one.”
“There might be a law against this,” she says.
“You’ve already begun.”
“I’m conflicted. I should never have—”
“You’re conflicted?” Something in his voice snaps her to attention and a shadow crosses her face. He’s been too stern. He’s frightened her. He softens his voice, calms himself. Puts on the mask. Lies. “I wouldn’t want you to do anything wrong, but we’re talking the past, not the present. There is only the present. I know that.” It’s hippie speak and he hopes will sways her.
“What are they going to do to me?” she says with a forced grin.
“Whoever they are, right?”
“Okay,” she says and settles back into her chair. “When you were seven, when you were recovered, the closest living relative you had was a second cousin in New Jersey who was barely making it.”
“I’m listening,” he says. He drinks a deep gulp of the tea. It’s hot and burns his mouth, leaving it tingling. He likes that. A little pain for punctuation.
“When you were three years old, on a rainy June morning, your father packed the family car for a vacation. You were going to visit Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone Park, drive the Coast Highway and end in Disneyland for five days at the Disney hotel. Your father arranged for the neighbors to feed your dog and watch your house. He handed over the keys and waved goodbye to them at ten o’clock in the morning. Your mother complained about the late start. The neighbors were the last people to ever see your family alive.”
She pauses, looking for a reaction in Michael. He shows none. There is truth in his story about all this being so long ago, happening to somebody else. He nods only for her to continue.
“There wasn’t much of a search. The neighbors alerted the police when your father failed to call. The police in Chicago did a little work. You had reservations in Custer South Dakota that you never made. Of course nothing in Yellowstone, Oregon or California. The FBI was called in and the Highway Patrol. People were on the lookout for you, but not looking for you. They couldn’t really. Too much space to cover.”
“That’s understandable,” he says.
“Nine months later, in Iowa, a farmer tills up soil on an access lot. He had no business dropping a blade there. Officials believed he was looking to plant something illegal.”
“How many were in that grave?” asks Michael.
She’s surprised. “Yes it was a grave,” she says. “They found your family buried there.”
“Anyone else?”
“No.”
“How’d they know it was my family?”
“The FBI did the dental thing. The news got wind of it and the tragedy was splashed across televisions and newspapers for weeks. The hook was “Baby Michael.” “Whatever happened to Baby Michael.” They made a big deal about it, you not being in the grave. It was ugly. It lasted a news cycle. A boxcar exploded in Nebraska to kick you off the front page, but for a while, you were a celebrity in absentia. Baby Michael.”
The name is remembered but not familiar. She says it with such gravity that it cannot be a term of endearment. It is a title. An epithet.
“Skip ahead four years.” She laughs nervously. “God. That’s what we were trying to do with
you—skip those four years.”
“That’s when I was recovered?”
“Yes. Barstow California. A traffic stop gone wrong. Ten-hour standoff. Seven dead. Baby Michael recovered.”
She opens the box and hands Michael a yellowing newspaper in a plastic bag. On the cover is a small house surrounded by police and SWAT commandos.
“The name on the “father’s” driver’s license was Greg Kalson, but that’s most likely a false name,” she says. “The “mother” of the group went by the name Leslie. They had an older boy, not their own, called Christopher, about eighteen, and a girl of sixteen, also not their own, called Lynette. They called you Michael. You were the youngest.”
Michael shakes his head. None of this means anything to him. The reaction pleases his host and she goes on.
“Officer Day pulled Greg Kalson’s van over after he failed to come to a complete stop at a stop sign at two in the morning in mid-July. The most trivial, rinky-dink, bullshit traffic stop in the playbook. He ran the tag and found it was supposed to be attached to a Lincoln town car in Carson City, Nevada. A stolen license plate. He radioed it in. It being a slow night, backup was available.
“When it arrived, officer Day was lying next to his car. He’d been strangled to death with a piece of leather cord. Not shot. Not stabbed. Strangled. His gun was still in his holster. The van was gone.”
She hands Michael another yellowed newspaper clipping in a sealed plastic bag.
“It didn’t take long to find though. The next morning it was seen in a carport. That’s it there in the picture with a different license plate. That one belongs to a neighbor up the street.”
She takes a deep breath and a slow sip of tea. She leans back in her chair and swallows hard.
“Three policeman charged into the house that morning. Two went in the back. One the side. A fourth cop waited outside with a rifle and managed to get two shots off at Lynette at the side door before she pulled a twelve-year veteran sergeant down with a handkerchief. Who killed the other two officers was never established, but they were found later in the house.”
What Immortal Hand Page 18