by Robert Pobi
“I may think that how he raised me—or didn’t raise me—was shitty, but his work is something else entirely. I don’t think that money is any sort of a problem but I haven’t spoken to his lawyer. Worst-case scenario, I sell the house and that should buy him ten years wherever he needs. What I want out of you is where those ten years should be.”
Sobel closed Jake’s badge and slid it back across the desk. “Do you want to be involved?”
“I think we are getting a little ahead of ourselves here but the short answer is no. I need to know exactly what is wrong with my father so I can start making the proper arrangements for his future. A future that I have no intention of being involved in.” Jake knew he sounded like a prick but he didn’t care.
Sobel turned his thoughtful nod back on. “Right now your father is still suffering the effects of shock, a little post-traumatic stress disorder, and he’s been taking painkillers. These things combined don’t give me a very stable subject to begin with and when you throw in the classic signs of Alzheimer’s, things get exponentially complicated. He’s confused, he’s irritable, and he’s aggressive.”
Jake held up his hand. “Dr. Sobel, my father has been irritable and aggressive as long as I can remember.”
Sobel signaled that he expected to be allowed to finish. “That painting on the wall of his room—” he paused, and his voice softened, as if he were speaking to himself—“showed no degeneration in his motor skill, which is something I should see in a man at this stage of AD. That piece shows that he is more than capable of abstract thinking—the mere fact that he was able to make a connection between his blood and paint is abstract enough but when we add in the kind of picture he painted, I feel he can clearly think in abstract terms.” The psychiatrist turned back to his notes, flipped through a few pages. “His vocabulary shows no degeneration as far as I can tell. Like I said, I don’t have an evaluation from before his accident, but your father is very well spoken, if somewhat opinionated.” Sobel looked up from the folder and leaned back in his chair. He clasped his hands on top of his head and continued, “Symptomatically speaking, he lies somewhere between early and moderate dementia, stages two and three respectively. There are signs of moderate dementia and yet certain telltale signs of early dementia are missing, and vice versa. This disease is different in each individual but there are certain symptoms that are—or should be—a given.” There was a shift in his voice that told Jake there was something he wasn’t being told.
“Are you saying that he might not have Alzheimer’s?”
“I know you talked this through with his GP but I’m working in a vacuum here.” Sobel shrugged and with his hands knit together on top of his head, it looked like an exercise. “I don’t have a lot of collateral history from relatives or friends, and that is one of the cornerstones of diagnosing Alzheimer’s. Your father spent a lot of time alone and that doesn’t help me. He’s also an artist and artists are eccentric to begin with. I need to know certain things that, at this point, I don’t.”
“What are we not talking about, Dr. Sobel?”
“Excuse me?”
Jake smiled. “I can tell when I’m being left in the dark.”
“Jake, I don’t know exactly what is going on with your father. What I do know is that his neural pathways are not translating the real world into terms that he can always understand. I usually get to see a patient long before they begin to have even minor accidents. Your father set himself on fire and crashed through a plate-glass window. I am having a hard time believing that he managed to get to this point and still be living alone. He should have been here long before this. A year, maybe. Possibly before that.”
“I found sod and keys and paperbacks in his fridge. I don’t know how the hell he managed to live like that. I am not going to sit here and make excuses that you don’t really care about anyway, but I’ve been off the Christmas card list for a very long time.”
Sobel nodded again. “He’s not malnourished. He’s not suffering any deficiencies. And his hygiene, although not perfect, was much better than I expected.” He paused. “I don’t like his nightmares—combined with that painting that he did on his wall—” Did Sobel know that he had taken half the wall down last night? “That portrait came from somewhere deep in his mind. He’s frightened of something and it’s manifesting itself in his dreams and his rantings and he’s bringing it to the surface and trying to show it to the world. All this talk about this man of blood living in the floor has me con—”
Jake stood up. “What?”
Sobel froze, as if he had said something wrong. “This happens a lot. That painting is a manifestation of whatever he fears, and by bringing it out, he’s trying to tell us—”
“Forget the clinical diagnosis. I want to know what he said—exactly.” Jake reached across the desk and tore the file folder from Sobel’s grasp.
The doctor pushed his chair back and stood up. “Jake, I do not—”
“Sit down or call security,” Jake said flatly, and scanned the page of notes. “Here,” he said, pointing to Sobel’s notes. “Read this.” He spun the folder on the desk and held his finger to the page, like a drill instructor showing a drop zone to a cadet.
Sobel leaned over and focused on the writing. “For about fifteen minutes this morning the patient appeared lucid and was aware that he was in the hospital. Blood pressure and heart rate were stable and commensurate with a man of his age and general health. Only signs of the onset of dementia were several comments patient made regarding someone he called the blood man. When asked to explain, patient grew agitated, apologized. Heart rate and blood pressure began to climb and breathing became shallow, panicked. Patient asked the nurse to check the bathroom and the closet. Particularly the floor.” Sobel looked up. “Do you know what he’s talking about?”
Jake felt his heart hitch a beat. Then a second time. Jeremy had his ex-friend who lived in the floor. The floor back at his old man’s house. Jeremy had called him Bud. Jake thought about laying it all out on the table, but there was no way a psychiatrist was going to help solve this. Not now. Not in a day. This was going to take a strong stomach and federal resources. What he needed from Sobel was information. “Does he know what happened to the nurse who looked like my mother?” It was a valid question. Maybe he had heard the other nurses talking.
Sobel raised an eyebrow. “She did look like your mother, didn’t she?”
Jake nodded. “A little.”
Sobel shrugged. “I know none of the staff would tell him. And I haven’t heard anyone gossiping. We had two reporters come by this morning but security escorted them from the building pretty fast. So I don’t think he knows. How could he?”
Jake was thankful for that, at least. “Yesterday he didn’t recognize me once during the three times I was here. He’s come apart a little. Maybe this man of blood is just the rantings of a scared old man who made a lot of mistakes in his life. The man of blood could be—” He stopped and triangulated the past few days. Blood man. Blood. Man. Bloodman. Only a three-year-old would say it differently, wouldn’t he? He wasn’t saying Bud, man. He was saying Budman. Bludman. Bloodman.
Bloodman.
Sonofabitch.
Sobel’s face shifted. “Something’s going on inside your father, Jake. Something one part of him wants to verbalize and another desperately wants to keep suppressed. He has opposing emotions about this man of blood—whatever that is.”
Jake thought about the text that covered his skin, about the Canto, about the men of blood that Dante had described. The violent, the viscous, the dangerous. Kept in a lake of fire and blood where their screams echoed and their souls were tortured. Was his old man talking about them? “All you seem to be telling me is that my father may or may not be in the early-to-mid stages of Alzheimer’s—”
Sobel shook his head, held up his hand. “If this talk about the blood man is just a misnomer for something—or someone—that he’s afraid of, it could be that he’s just over-compartmentali
zed his life in order not to have to face whatever it is that’s scaring him. And he is scared, Jake. The man inside is hiding from something.”
“He’s been doing that since my mother died.” Skinned, the little voice hissed.
“That was the summer of ’78, right?”
Jake nodded. “June sixth.”
Sobel made a note on the chart. “Jesus, how time flies. I’m sorry about your mother, Jake. Besides having a killer backhand, she was a lot of fun. Elegant. Every woman at the club was jealous of her.”
“I remember that. Living with her was like living with Jackie Kennedy. She could make an egg-salad sandwich and a Coke look refined.”
“Could this have anything to do with your mother? Her…accident was never solved, was it?”
Jake shook his head.
“So could it?”
Jake shook his head and shrugged at the same time. “I don’t know. Maybe. Yes. No. All of the above. I’ll figure it out.”
“If all of this is tied in somehow, maybe your father is afraid of something out of his past. Maybe it’s just a flashback to her death. Bad memories coming back.”
“I don’t think so. After my mother’s death, Dad never talked about it. Never seemed to react.” Liar. He sat in front of her car every night with a bottle of booze and wept until he fell asleep.
“The memory is a peculiar place, Jake. It functions under different basic tenets than the rest of the mind. Maybe he is being plagued by ghosts you don’t know about.”
Jake thought about the blank bloody face that he had splattered on the hospital room wall and realized that Sobel had to be partially right. “Maybe he’s had a real struggle,” the psychiatrist added. “Maybe his accident wasn’t an accident at all.”
“Are you saying that he burned off his hands on purpose?”
Sobel’s head clicked from side to side but the grimace refused to be shaken loose. “On purpose is a little strong. Sometimes we do things for reasons we’re not aware of. Maybe your father wanted to leave the house. Maybe a part of him knew that it wasn’t safe for him because of exactly the same reasons you cited—he opened the fridge and saw sod and keys and he couldn’t understand why they were there. The rational part of his brain realized that the environment wasn’t good for him. Maybe he had an accident so he could leave. And maybe the blood man is just his way of lumping his feeling of insecurity into a neat package. I think that something has your father very frightened. Something he’s calling the blood man.”
The receptionist was jammed into her office chair, scowling over the Day-Timer, crossing out appointments with a red marker, the phone pressed to her ear. “Yes, that’s right, Mr. O’Shaunnesy, we have to recalibrate with the storm. I don’t know when we’ll be back but you will be at the head of the line. Of course. Of course. At least four days…”
Jake nodded a thank-you as he walked past her desk.
The little girl was still folded into the lotus position under the coffee table and by now the two-foot-by-five-foot surface was armored with a layer of candies, laid out in a brightly colored mosaic. From beside the receptionist’s desk, Jake saw the wrappers at an angle, a shelf of color. The girl was staring straight ahead, her hand dipping into the bowl like a metronome counting time, not missing a beat. As before, one candy would be placed in an empty slot at the far upper-left-hand corner of the table, the next somewhere in the middle, as if she had a pattern laid out in her head and was merely illustrating it for her mother—but the woman was still engrossed in her shitty book.
Jake’s head swiveled as he passed the girl, scanning the pattern on the table. The mother didn’t lift her eyes from the novel and the little girl kept dipping her hand into the bowl and laying out the candies as single pixels in a digital image.
Jake was almost on top of her when he stopped.
She had laid out a copy—a nearly exact copy, limited by the size of the surface she had to work on and the colors at her disposal—of the cover of her mother’s book. Jake froze in midstep. Two beautiful candy people embraced, a cubist mansion in the background, a tree line behind. The Bluebloods of Connecticut spelled out in cursive sweets.
Each candy was a component.
A speck of color.
A single pixel.
Like Chuck Close’s work.
“She does that all the time,” her mother said in a thick Long Island accent.
Jake looked up, saw the book folded in her lap. “It’s beautiful,” he said.
The mother shrugged. “I s’pose. I try not to get annoyed but it’s hard sometimes. She’ll do this with anything. Playing cards. Scraps of paper. Dead leaves. Thumbtacks—but I try to keep her away from them. She even does it with bits of food. Can’t give her no Froot Loops or nothin’ with color or she’s makin’ pictures of faces and stuff. When you scrape dried raisins off the car seat for the fifth time in a week it gets old real quick.”
Jake was trying to listen but the image of the Chuck Close painting back at the beach house wouldn’t leave him. He saw the sliced-out eyes, the pixilated image of his father’s face staring out of the huge canvas. He thought about the dreary little paintings stacked up in the studio, random nothings that seemed meaningless and incomplete. He thought about the whole often being greater than the sum of its parts.
And suddenly he knew what the canvases stacked in the studio were.
46
He tried to get Jeremy to explain the man in the floor, to describe him in some concrete way, maybe even to summon him. But when he had pressed—really pushed the boy—he had run to the middle of the living room, jumped up and down, and screamed, “Bud! Bud! Bud!” over and over until Jake had finally picked him up and told him to forget it. And for some reason this made Jeremy even more frustrated, more angry, as if jumping up and down in the middle of the living room was the answer.
Jake and Kay spent the morning photographing the paintings in the studio. Kay held the digital recorder and Jake flipped through the paintings, holding them up one at a time—just long enough for the camera to capture it—then he moved onto the next. Jake knew that when the video was finally viewed, it would look like a meth addict’s homage to Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” But he had spoken to the lab back at Quantico and they had software that could isolate each individual canvas and apply it to its place in an overall pattern.
They worked fast, some minutes capturing up to forty canvases, others barely getting ten. By the end of the first hour they had cataloged 1,106 canvases. By the end of the second hour, another 897—a sizeable dent in the process.
“I need a sandwich,” Kay said, her arm up on the camera, bent at the wrist, the word L-O-V-E inked across her knuckles.
“And a Coke,” Jake added.
Jake didn’t want Jeremy in the studio proper where the studies of the faceless men of blood looked down from everywhere, so he had been relegated to the studio’s small entryway, doing a pretty good job of entertaining himself with more Hot Wheels mayhem. Kay had found a Patti Smith album in one of the milk crates under the ancient freezer-sized oak stereo and Jeremy was using the soundtrack to his full advantage, little imaginary car-accident victims meeting their maker to “Redondo Beach.”
“You want a coffee, Moriarty?” Jake asked above the music, and walked over to the entryway. He stepped in. “A big coffee?”
Jeremy laughed. “I don’t like no coffee, Daddy. I like milk and apple juice.”
Looking at his son now, sprawled out on the tiled floor of the entryway with his cars shining like metallic insects, he could see the machinations the boy’s mind was going through to forget what had happened that morning. The part that frightened Jake was that his son refused to talk about it. What was he afraid of? Was it the same man in the floor that had his father spooked? Was it a communal hallucination or was it something more tangible? The answer was easy in coming: hallucinations couldn’t finger-paint a skull over your son’s face in blood.
“So let’s get some lunch,” Ja
ke said, to Jeremy and Kay’s applause. “You guys are easy to please.”
“That’s us, easy-peasy!”
“Well, Mrs. Easy—” he said, winking at Kay—“and Mr. Peasy, how about some tuna sandwiches?”
Jake looked at his watch and saw that they had about an hour before Kay and Jeremy headed back to the city, and he wanted to catalog as many of the paintings as possible. They headed inside, Jake carrying Jeremy in his arms, Kay with the camera and tripod over her shoulder like a spear-bearer. Kay flipped off the lights.
The outer edge of the storm had made landfall and the sky was gone in a mass of gray and white that misted the coast with a solid shower. The grass was already saturated and the falling water pushed by the wind that had fired up etched shifting patterns in the rolling chop of the ocean. Jeremy laughed as Jake ran through the rain, swearing in Moriarty-friendly language that made him sound like a crazed Yosemite Sam.
Jake held the door for Kay, his hand protectively covering the back of Jeremy’s head. Wind ripped into the house and dust devils and papers swirled in mini funnels. The wind slammed the door for him as he jumped inside after her.
“I don’t want to be here when Dylan rolls in, Jake.” Kay took the camera off the tripod.
Jake put Jeremy down in the kitchen and dried his hair with a fistful of paper towels. “I say we have some sandwiches, then hit the road. Who’s with me?”
Jeremy shot his arm into the air in a Fascist vote and Kay nodded, grinning brightly. “What about the case?” she asked.
“F-U-C-K the case,” he said. “We are leaving.”
Kay’s T-shirt was wet and clung to her body and her nipples earned her a happy stare from Jake. “After a quick nap, that is,” he added.
“All right, coffee, Moriarty?”
Jeremy shouted, “I said I don’t drink no coffee!”