He shook his head. They sat quietly. “You got the poison?” asked the man.
The question lingered between them.
“The poison?”
The man stared at him. Eventually he nodded.
“You be all right,” said the man, who looked off in the low visibility. People stood at the rear of their cars, filling them up at the Mobil station.
Before he stood again, the man said, “You oughta be thinking about getting yourself over to the shelter clinic on McAdams. Have the volunteer man check you out.”
Out on the old highway a man driving home steered his clattering pickup over to the shoulder. He pulled in twenty yards ahead of Tim and spoke to him through the passenger-side window when he caught up to the truck. The belly-white clouds foretold the coming blizzard.
“You look like you’re hurt,” said the man. “Do you need some help?”
He stopped before the window. He felt the hot blasts from the vents. They stung his benumbed skin and he took a step back.
“You have a bad limp there,” the man continued. “Are you a veteran?”
He didn’t reply.
“I was Third Battalion, Ninth Marines, in the first Gulf War,” said the man. “Now I help run a place, it’s kind of a safe haven for us. We feed everybody, everybody gets a place to sleep.”
“Do you have the poison?”
“The poison?” said the man.
He stared at him through the open window.
“I’ve never heard it referred to that way,” said the man. “I suppose I do, even if they tell me I don’t.”
He opened the car door and stepped inside the truck.
“Will you do me a favor,” the man asked, before he could put the car in drive, “and roll up your window for me?” He did as he was told. The man looked at his clawed grip crudely manning the handle as his stench grew strong in the cab. “Jesus Christ.” The man opened the driver’s-side door and stepped out. “I’m sorry,” he said, with the door hanging open. “I don’t mean to be rude. There’s just a smell.”
“That’s my leg,” he replied. He delicately rolled up his chinos to show the man.
“Hey,” he said. “Hey, you have to get to a hospital.”
He stepped out of the truck just as the man, who quickly began to roll down his window to let the air in before stepping back inside, got behind the wheel again.
“No way,” he said, standing again on the shoulder of the highway. “No hospitals.”
“Hey, I understand,” said the man. “A hospital is not my favorite place, either. But that infection, that could kill you.”
He shut the door. “No hospitals,” he said through the window.
“But you’re in danger.”
“Nobody asked you to stop for me,” he said.
Eventually he made it to the grounds of the local high school where he passed out on the baseball diamond behind home plate. He swooned in and out. He was awake for the first of the snow. He found the strength to remove his clothes so that he sat under the winter sky in nothing but boxer shorts, feeling the evaporating sizzle of the billowing flakes along his fevered body. He was euphoric with the certainty of physical death. The other had gone completely quiet. No more complaints of hunger or the cold. He had no memory of the last time it had managed to keep anything down. He was winning. He had never given much thought to heaven before, but now he was certain it existed. Without God, the body won, and that couldn’t be possible. He was one thing, his body a different thing altogether, and he was willing a separation, in which he went off to eternal repair while it suffered its due fate of rough handling, dirt, and rot.
Then he was made to stand and walk.
As the wind picked up and the snow grew frenzied he entered a small town. He walked barefoot and near-naked on the side of the road, his belly distended and his leg dragging along. No one can see me, no one would stop me, no one could help me anyway. They would just call the ________ but it would be too late. My only regret is ________. She’d have the coffee on. There was a time during my search for a cure when I tried everything to stop walking including giving up ________. The smell filled the ________. I loved to drink a ________ of ________ in the ________, to say ________; to ________ after we’d spent another ________; together. I’d tell her now it’s going okay except for the poison. It’s going okay except for how much I miss her and ________. ________?
________?! I’ve never been a very good ________.
He came up a final hill alongside a street opposite a multilevel parking lot and a courtyard with a fountain and a few other professional buildings. He wondered where he would end up, in what outpost of trees or behind what building, inside what unused doorway or, if he was lucky, what unlocked bathroom or backseat, his final resting place. But then the other let go of its mineral grip and he saw the doors part before him.
He went down on his knees on the rubber mat. “You son of a bitch! You can’t change the rules.”
The nurse saw him and started from behind the station.
“He changed the rules!” he cried, as an emergency crew came forward.
You didn’t really think I would let you kill us, did you?
He was lacking identification and admitted to the ICU under the name Richard Doe. He had renal failure, an enlarged spleen, sepsis-induced hypotension, cellular damage to the heart. He had trench foot and a case of dysentery. He required assisted breathing and intravenous antibiotics. He did not wake day or night.
The other made him say things. “Oof!” was one of them, “aaa, aaa” another. They entered into the type of interminable conversations that often break out in fevered dreams.
Q: What did you do for a living?
A: I was a ________.
Q: “Lawyer”?
A: Yes, that’s it. Is this an interrogation?
Q: A simple word, “lawyer.” Why can’t you remember it?
A: Intelligence has its limits. Knowledge cannot determine in its entirety the measure of a man’s ________.
Q: His what?
A: You know, his ________.
Q: “Soul”?
A: That’s it, soul, yes.
Q: You believe in the soul now?
A: I do.
Q: I wasn’t aware you gave any thought to such things.
A: I haven’t, typically.
Q: Then what accounts for your sudden mystical impulse?
A: Without God, you win.
He didn’t think the taunting was fair, but then the other had proven it didn’t play fair. But how was it feasible? The other had co-opted his powers of recall and discourse. In his former life as a lawyer, the stress of an upcoming trial would cause him to dream of cross-examining expert witnesses on technical matters about which he knew nothing—handwriting analysis, abstruse accounting methods. The author of such dreams, he played both parts, interrogator and expert, but he knew only the interrogator’s questions. When it came time for answers, he listened as the expert whom he had conjured conveniently mumbled, or spoke too softly, or omitted entire words.
It was like that now, only the other was the interrogator and he the muttering subject of its dream.
He was hooked to machines and monitors. He heard their pulse and suspiration, the steady mechanical beep of his heart. He realized that the other was content simply to lie there, to let the drips and antibiotics work their magic. He wasn’t going to walk, the son of a bitch. The wily cunt wasn’t going to walk. The wily cunt had been made to suffer and brought close to death and then he changed the rules. It wasn’t fair. Tim tried to tear himself free. In so doing he learned how many fingers and parts of fingers he had lost. He was too weak to pull out a single IV and fell unconscious again.
Q: Are you aware that you can be made to forget words, if certain neurons are suppressed from firing?
A: Certain what?
Q: And that by suppressing the firing of others, you can be made to forget what words mean entirely? Like the word Jane, for instance.
/> A: Which?
Q: And do you know that if I do this—
[inaudible]
A: Oof!
Q:—you will flatline? And if I do this—
[inaudible]
A: Aaa, aaa…
Q:—you will cease flatlining? Do you really want to confuse that for God’s work?
He woke again, unable to move. He saw a man peering in at him from the doorway. Was the man smiling? Just before losing consciousness, he watched in horror as the man came forward—unmistakably the same man he had encountered on the bridge. The man was approaching and there was nothing he could do, no defense possible, he was utterly paralyzed and his eyes were closing. He was trapped inside. The paralysis was worse than movement. He wanted to call out, but his throat was plugged. The man stepped to the bed. Wake up! he cried to himself. Tears leaked out from his closed eyes.
The next time he woke he found the strength to tear the lines out of his veins and the tube from his throat. Alarms began to sound. He slowly climbed out of bed, which kept pulling him back in, as if he were in a gravel pit struggling to get a purchase on the collapsing rock. A nurse caught him at the doorway as he was leaving the room. He tried to scream but his vocal cords were out of commission and all he could produce was a long hoarse cry. “He’s tormenting me! He’s tormenting—”
He collapsed in the doorway, where he had another seizure. He shook on the floor with an animal gaze. His contorted mouth spat foam. The nurse came around quickly to cup the back of his head with her hands.
He was docile when the orderlies returned him to bed.
Q: If I can make you forget words, make you flatline, make you see things and seize up—
A: Oof! Oof! Oof! Oof!
Q:—is that not all the evidence you need that I control your fate, and that my fate is your only future? Why turn for comfort toward the fanciful conceit of corrupt men and frightened old ladies?
A: Aaa, aaa…
Q: It’s just you and me, pal. Forget God. Act like a man. It’s what we are.
He broke free every time he woke, so finally they strapped him down by the wrists and ankles, which made him thrash and weep and cry out without sound because hell was a bed, hell was a bed, while life, down the corridor and through the door, was out there—life and death both, it didn’t matter which.
He raged when the tube was removed and his voice healed. He refused to tell them his name or the whereabouts of his family. He spoke of hallucinations and visions. He said he had the voice of the devil in his head. He disrupted the peace of other patients and hurled curses at the frightened staff. They transferred him to the psych ward, diagnosed him with paranoia and schizophrenia, and started him on a cocktail of antipsychotic medications.
They continued to ask him his name.
“Who are you?”
“Depends on what you mean by ‘you,’ ” he said.
“Do you have family? Wouldn’t they like to know where you are?”
“I never told her how sorry I was for the life I led her into. I had hoped to start over with the new apartment. Now I’m trying something different.”
“Which is what?”
“I don’t call home anymore.”
“Where is home for you?”
“Home is where the heart is, right here.” He pointed to his chest. “I go where he goes, and he doesn’t give me much say in the matter.”
The medication began taking effect and they no longer needed to restrain him. Still he snuck out of bed and wandered the hospital corridors asking patients if they had the poison. Some engaged him and others thought he was crazy. Some seemed to know exactly what he was talking about.
“I been getting help from the twelve-strand Orion healing technique. You tried that?”
“And they wanna call it a fascinoma.”
“They keep threatening to cut me off.”
“The whole family been eccentric with mental problems all along.”
“Let me show you my scans.”
“We need to discuss the voices you’ve been hearing.”
“Voice,” he said. “Not voices. Voice.”
“Sorry, voice.”
“And it isn’t a voice. It’s a point of view.”
“A point of view?”
“A bleak and uninspired one, but convincing. Very evolved. He gains control of my powers—rhetorical, argumentative. Don’t ask me how. There should be docket numbers to our conversations.”
“Is the voice still there, louder, fainter?”
“Fainter. He makes it known when he’s angry or wants something, but it’s quieted down since you patched me up.”
“That’s good.”
“Don’t be fooled. He’s just lying in wait.”
“But if you keep taking the medication, there should be no problem.”
“Pharmacology is only one tactical maneuver in a protracted war.”
“What war is that?”
“The one we’ve been fighting for centuries. The one we’ve always lost, so far as anyone can tell.”
“Sorry, I’m not sure I understand.”
“Death. The will to live versus inevitable decay. What’s not to understand?”
“Were you trying to kill yourself?”
“Depends on what you mean by ‘yourself,’ ” he said.
He resumed eating voluntarily. He got up and voided himself of his own accord. He was quiet in the evenings. They gave him donated winter clothes and released him.
He walked out in a gray hunter’s cap with fur brim and earflaps, a winter jacket. He stood just beyond the automatic doors where he had fallen to his knees almost two months earlier. He was trying to decide whether to go right or left, his breath visible in the cold. He had no impulse to undress and wander off into the winter. Ascension through annihilation wasn’t his immediate concern. The other was happy. The other liked the warmth, felt a little hungry. He knew his first task was to get his personal details in order—to call a private banker he knew in New York, who’d help him restore his identification and credit cards. He had these clerical impulses. The good hospital staff had restored him to the land of the pragmatic. In his pocket sat several prescriptions, some of which he even thought worth filling. Pharmacology was a legitimate tactical advantage. Eventually, he decided to turn right.
She let go the second she heard his voice and for the first minute of the call she cried with an abandon that he, on the other end, did not entirely comprehend. “Oh,” she said. He listened to her let out a heavy sigh in sobbing degrees. “Oh, Tim.”
“I’m not dead,” he said. “But I do have to take medicine.”
“Oh,” she said again. “I’ve been so…” She tried to collect herself. “Tell me where you are and I’ll pick you up.”
“But there’s one I just don’t take because it’s probably better to be dead than to go around feeling like that, all zombie you know, just totally whacked out and exhausted and who gives a fuck you can’t even think—I have two like that, actually—”
“Where are you, Tim? Please tell me.”
“—but the second is for the seizures and I probably shouldn’t, I don’t know—”
“Seizures?”
“Probably shouldn’t give that one up, I guess, even though I haven’t had one since I was in the hospital so maybe they’re gone now. I wouldn’t put it past him to make something just—poof!—you know, disappear. He makes his own rules and what the fuck am I supposed to do if they keep shifting? It’s like I told the doctors. Medicine can secure a base here and there but there will always be a battle going on somewhere else.”
“Tim, please tell me, please tell me where you are,” she said.
“I try not to pay attention and I do a pretty good job, too, when you consider how demanding he is, like I’m torturing him, you know, like I’ve taken him captive. For a while there we were trading retaliations in a zero-sum game. The chain of command was in constant flux. I thought I was winning but he changed the rules on me and t
hat’s when he got the upper hand, when I went down, and that lasted for, I don’t know. I was under maybe three weeks?”
“Under?”
“Three weeks of torment. I was defenseless. He just had the run of me. He doesn’t think much about God. I’ve come around on that matter. I believe in God now. Isn’t that something?”
“Tim, please listen to me. I want to say something to you.”
“Do you remember that doctor one time, he told us about the blood-brain barrier? Now, that’s a distinction. On the one hand you’ve got the blood, just dumb as a train full of rocks, important rocks but dumb dumb dumb, and on the other hand the brain, which is where, you know, the me and the you, where the me and the you come from, and with this barrier in place, you keep the bastard out, you see. Integrity is maintained. There’s a beautiful sanctity, when you think about it, a really holy and reverent sanctity that keeps the pure godlike parts from mixing with the rank and baser stuff, the rot, the decay, the blood, the rocks. That’s where the real armies of God are, right there on that blood-brain barrier, doing God’s work. I mean, that is the real frontline in the battle between the two—”
“What two?”
“The body and the soul. The blood-brain barrier and the synapses are the two main fronts. You’ve got both sides fighting for control of the dendrites and the axons and what all else I don’t know.”
“I don’t understand, Tim, I don’t understand.”
“But he still finds ways to break through, even when I’m taking the medication. He commandeers my mind. That’s my theory, anyway. Have you started drinking again?”
She was silent. “If I said yes,” she said, “would you come home?”
He didn’t reply.
“Tim, listen to me. Are you listening?”
He continued to say nothing.
“Scrub Island,” she said.
He was quiet.
“You know what that is,” she said. “Scrub Island. You remember Scrub Island?”
“Don’t drink,” he said. “Okay?”
“The little girl in the wedding dress,” she said. “The ostriches and the man herding them with the bullwhip. I know you remember Scrub Island.”
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