Deceit

by James Siegel

  Not to the Sikh-he remained buried in the newspaper.

  “Do you have any salsa?” I called out to him.

  He ignored me.

  “Salsa,” I said. “Where is it?”

  No answer.

  “Hey!” I said.

  The air conditioner began rattling. A car drove by.

  An alley cat screeched outside the window.

  The power lines snapped and crackled.

  Sometimes bits of knowledge come all at once-several distinct and awful realizations flooding your brain at the same moment in time, and suddenly, just like that, you can’t breathe.

  You’re drowning.

  I raced out of the store; the Doritos fell to the floor.

  I screamed his name out loud.

  “Dennis!” Flinging open the bathroom door and saying, “Oh my God, oh my God, Dennis, oh my God, Dennis…”

  Me, who generally avoided God’s name since he’d never done all that much for me, invoking it three times, like some sacred cant. Like the proscribed penance for committing a sin.

  I had committed a sin.

  I’d fallen asleep.

  FORTY-ONE

  We raced down the highway.

  Away from the station, where the Indian clerk lay face down in his newspaper-Indian, not Sikh, since his turban wasn’t really red after all, no, not until fifteen minutes ago, when someone had put a bullet into his head.

  It was different in the bathroom. There was nothing there to soak up the blood. It had covered the entire floor and part of the shattered bathroom mirror. A broken shard had still been lying there on the floor.

  The one the plumber must’ve used to slice out Dennis’s tongue.

  It rose up on our left, just two miles from the station-as if God said, you acknowledge me, I’ll acknowledge you.

  VA Hospital 138.

  Just like that.

  It looked ancient, more like an armory-all stone and turrets. But it was a hospital with doctors and nurses and medicine and Dennis was bleeding to death.

  On the way through the gate, I noticed the barred windows on the top floor.

  I drove the car up the front door and pulled Dennis out of the car and half carried him in. Which is when the admitting nurse took one look at him and said:

  “Mr. Flaherty, where the hell have you been?”

  Okay.

  We’d found our hospital.

  “All right,” the surgeon, a bristle-haired major Decola, said, after they’d finally stopped the bleeding-of all the appendages in the human body, it’s the tongue that bleeds the most. “What the hell happened to him?”

  “Someone attacked him,” I said.

  We were sitting in the lounge: tables, bridge chairs, two mostly empty snack machines.

  “No shit, Sherlock,” DeCola said. “Who?”

  “I don’t know. He was in a gas-station bathroom about ten miles down the road, and someone went in there and got him.”

  I left out the part about the gas-station owner being dead.

  Why?

  Because he’d been shot with my gun.

  They would find a.38 bullet in his head.

  I knew it.

  Not that the murder would remain a secret much longer-odds were that someone had already entered the station for a pack of smokes and found a body in rigor mortis instead.

  I would tell the police-I silently practiced this-that I’d been sleeping in the back. That I’d heard Dennis cry out. That I’d found him with his tongue cut out. That’s all.

  I got my chance a half hour later. Two detectives and a patrolman came and found me in the lounge.

  Major DeCola had called them, they explained.

  They knew all about the dead Indian.

  The patrolman was half the squad car that answered the call from a hysterical and nearly incoherent woman motorist who’d gone to the station for a fill-up and ended up running down the road in one high heel.

  I related my edited version of events.

  “You were sleeping in your car?” Detective Wolfe said. He had a certain tone to his voice. Maybe because people who slept in cars were usually the kind of people who committed crimes, as opposed to being victimized by them.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  When I told him I was a journalist, he looked even more perplexed.

  “What were you doing with Mr. Flaherty?” he asked. He had the kind of clean-cut all-American looks you saw on TV shows about the military-JAG, maybe. “Flaherty was a patient in the psych ward here, correct? He was MIA.”

  “Yeah. I was bringing him back.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Why?”

  “Why you, Mr. Valle? What’s your relation to him?”

  “I was interviewing him about a story.”

  “Really? What kind of story?”

  “About war veterans,” I said. “About the tough adjustment they face back home and the raw deal a lot of them have been getting.” I’m not sure why I said that instead of something else. Maybe because that’s the story Wren had done once upon a time. The story I now felt had led him straight to an even bigger one. I was connecting the dots. Or maybe because the plumber who’d cut out Dennis’s tongue had official access to my credit card receipts, and these were three more officials.

  “Okay. And both of you were sleeping in your car?”

  “That’s right. Dennis didn’t remember what hospital he’d been in. We were working our way south, checking them all.”

  “He can’t remember?”

  “He goes in and out, pretty much,” I said.

  “Uh-huh.” Detective Wolfe glanced at his partner, who was trying to get the lone remaining bag of chips out of a snack machine, smacking the side of it with his hand as if it were an unresponsive suspect.

  “So you say you heard Mr. Flaherty cry out,” Wolfe turned back, “and you ran to the bathroom and found him like that?”

  “That’s right. Then I drove here.”

  “You never went into the store?”

  “No.”

  “You never heard a gunshot?”

  “No,” I said. “But who knows, maybe that’s what woke me up.”

  “Who knows? You know.”

  “I don’t remember hearing anything; I just woke up.”

  “And you didn’t see anyone-exiting the bathroom, out in front, anywhere?”

  “No. I was sound asleep.”

  “And you never went into the store?”

  “No.” He’d asked me that already.

  “There were two bags of-what were they, John?” he asked his partner.

  “Doritos,” John said, in a tone of voice intimating that he could use some right now. The snack machine had stubbornly refused to yield its bag.

  “Right,” Wolfe said. “Two bags of Doritos were lying on the floor. Someone must’ve dropped them as they were running out of the store-like they were in a panic. We were wondering who that was? Since you didn’t go into the store.”

  “The person who shot the gas-station owner?” I volunteered.

  “Mr. Patjy was just the night clerk,” he corrected me. “You think the shooter picked up two Doritos bags on the way out, and then said what the hell am I doing with these Doritos, and dropped them?”

  “Maybe he picked them up first,” I said.

  “You mean he went there to buy some Doritos and then decided to shoot Mr. Patjy instead. And cut out your friend’s tongue.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Yeah. I don’t know, either.”

  “What about the woman? Maybe she dropped them?”

  “Yeah, that would make sense. Only we asked her and she said no. So it’s kind of a mystery.”

  Silence.

  “I wonder why they cut out his tongue,” Detective Wolfe said.

  As a warning… don’t talk. Don’t…

  “I guess we’re going to have to wait for him to tell us,” Wolfe said. “Of course, he’s not going to be able to talk much, is
he?”

  “I don’t know; is he?”

  “The doctor says no. And he goes in and out, that’s what you said. So it might not do us much good.”

  “He was in Desert Storm,” I said. “He’s convinced he was poisoned-by the oil fields they lit on fire.”

  “He probably was,” Detective Wolfe said. “It was a fucking disaster over there.”

  “You were there?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Army?” I asked.

  “Jarhead. How come you didn’t go into the store?”

  “What?”

  “Well, you found Mr. Flaherty covered in blood. His tongue had been cut out. Why wouldn’t you run into the store for help? Or use the phone to call an ambulance? You have a cell?”

  “It wasn’t charged,” I lied.

  “Uh-huh. So why didn’t you use the store phone? Why didn’t you run in there to get someone?”

  “I don’t know. I panicked, I guess. I just wanted to get out of there.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, maybe the security camera will tell us what happened to him,” he said, staring at me with an unwavering directness.

  Then he said, “Oh, I forgot. The fucking thing’s broken.”

  They put Dennis in recovery, next to a soldier covered in shrapnel scars.

  “He get that in Iraq?” the soldier asked me about Dennis.

  I was sitting in a bridge chair by Dennis’s side. It was evening; the fluorescent lighting over his bed kept erupting in crackling bursts of blue and white that reminded me of distant rocket fire.

  I was thinking that there was something about this hospital.

  VA Hospital 138 in Oregon.

  “No,” I said. “Right here at home.”

  “Shit. His tongue, huh?”

  I nodded.

  “Tough. His old lady’s not going to like that. She can sue the army for loss of marital services. If you know what I mean.” He stuck his tongue out and wiggled it back and forth.

  “I don’t think you’re allowed to sue the army,” I said.

  “You’re not? Fucking bullshit lawyer of mine.”

  When I didn’t answer him, he said, “I’m just jerking your chain.”

  Dennis came to about an hour later.

  I must have been dozing; I woke to a plaintive mewling-like a stray cat trying to cry its way into a house.

  It was Dennis.

  He couldn’t form actual words.

  What was left of his tongue was covered in stitches.

  He had thick cotton wadding stuck into both cheeks.

  “Don’t try to talk, Dennis. I’m going to give you some bad news. But it could’ve been worse. Okay?”

  Dennis’s eyes widened; they were bloodshot and swollen. He looked Chinese.

  “Are you in pain? Nod your head if you’re in pain, Dennis. If you’re hurting, you can push that little button on your IV and pump some more morphine into you.”

  He continued to stare at me.

  He continued trying to speak.

  “Whoever attacked you cut out your tongue, Dennis. Not all of it. But a lot of it. I’m not sure what that means as far as… well, talking. I don’t know. You understand what I’m telling you?”

  He didn’t respond yes or no.

  Instead he turned his head, as if suddenly searching his surroundings.

  “Do you remember what happened, Dennis? Do you remember who attacked you?”

  He was searching for something else now-his tongue-rapidly swallowing in an effort to find it, then placing two shaking fingers into his open mouth trying to feel what wasn’t there anymore.

  He was crying.

  “Keep your fingers out of there, Dennis. You’re all stitched up.”

  He closed his eyes, moaned, banged his head against the pillow.

  I looked away, at the grimy hospital window. A tree branch was tapping against the outside of the glass as if trying to get in. I waited till Dennis calmed down, till he stopped banging his head against the bed.

  “If I ask you some questions, can you write down the answers?”

  He stared straight up at the ceiling.

  “Just a few questions Dennis.”

  There was a tooth-bitten pencil on his bedside table. I picked it up and placed it in his hand-he didn’t exactly grip it, but he didn’t drop it either. I found a discarded Oregonian lying out in the hall. I ripped out the full-page ad for Oregon’s best used-car dealership and put it in his other hand.

  He stared at it with a blank expression. Then he wrote something down in an uneven, childish scrawl.

  Why?

  “I don’t know, Dennis.”

  Why? he wrote again.

  Why… why… why… over and over, like a kid who won’t listen till he gets his answer-why’s the sky blue… Why do birds fly… Why did someone cut out my fucking tongue?

  “The person who did this to you-what did he look like?”

  He shook his head. He pushed the magic button on his morphine drip.

  “Was he strange-looking? No features, kind of?”

  His eyes fluttered, half closed.

  Sleepy, he scrawled.

  “Did he look like that, Dennis?”

  Sleepy.

  “Right, it’s the morphine.”

  I asked him again, but this time he didn’t bother to answer.

  He was drifting; I watched him fall asleep.

  Except he couldn’t.

  His eyes would slowly shut, then suddenly fly open as if spring-loaded, as if he’d seen something in there that had scared him half to death. The bathroom. The plumber coming at him with a shard of broken mirror.

  After a while, he picked up the pencil again.

  Tell me a story, he wrote.

  “A story?”

  Bedtime story.

  “I don’t know any bedtime stories, Dennis.”

  Sleepy.

  “Okay. Then go to sleep.”

  I’m scared. A story.

  “Look, Dennis…”

  Mom.

  “Your mom’s back in Iowa. I’m Tom. You’re in the hospital.”

  A story.

  “I don’t know any stories, Dennis.”

  “Come on, man. He wants a story.” The soldier had woken up and joined the chorus. “Poor guy’s got no tongue. Don’t you know any bedtime stories?”

  “No.”

  “What about ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’? Shit, everyone knows that one.”

  Dennis’s eyes fluttered open, fixed on my face.

  “Okay,” I said. “Sure. I know a story. A true story.”

  “Shoot,” the soldier said.

  “It’s a ghost story.”

  “I thought you said it was a true story?”

  “It is.”

  “Hear that, Dennis? A true ghost story.”

  “There were these men,” I began. “These doctors-”

  “When?” the soldier interjected. “When are we talking about? Now?”

  “No,” I said. “Not now. 1945.”

  FORTY-TWO

  The first day they arrived, they gathered at the Gokoku Shrine.

  Partly because it had already become the stuff of legend. That wasn’t surprising to them; a kind of witchcraft had been unleashed upon the world. It needed its totems and idols.

  They stared at the granite tombstones, and sure enough, there were shadows seared into the stone. And yes, okay, if you squinted and stared at it long enough, they could, in the right light, appear to be the shadows of people.

  Of ghosts.

  There were other shadows. On the roof of the Chamber of Commerce building, imprinted onto the tower of the Chugoku Electric Power building, and two of them on the only wall of the temple left standing. But it was the shadows on these tombstones that had captured the popular imagination. Why not? That imagination had been geometrically altered, expanded beyond all previous comprehension.

  One month ago this had been a city of 300,000, a military industrial hive.


  Now there were six buildings left standing.

  What the initial shockwaves hadn’t obliterated, the resultant fires had. The population had been cut by two-thirds-not neatly, but in excruciating and distinct stages that were only now making themselves known, if not actually understood.

  They stood on the verge of a voodoo science, although it was more of a precipice, since there was nothing but a massive void of knowledge.

  They were here to fill it.

  Some of them had been in New Mexico, keeping a wary eye on the technicians and scientists and plain laborers who worked directly with the stuff they’d dubbed Kryptonite, in a not altogether playful allusion to the element that could bring even Superman to his knees. Everyone knew it was insidious stuff-it was a matter of degrees.

  How much, how long, how often?

  They considered themselves snake charmers trying to lull the cobra that Oppenheimer and others had coaxed out of the bottle. You danced around the danger and hoped you wouldn’t get bit.

  Or maybe cobra didn’t do it justice-more like a dragon. That’s what the techies called it when they put together the fissionable material by hand-tickling the dragon. Hoping you didn’t get burned. One did-a physicist named Louis Fruton, cooked to death in 1945 by a sudden radioactive burst.

  When they’d dropped Trinity at ground zero, a miniature sun had lit up the early morning sky-two thousand times hotter than the one the earth actually circles. The seven-ton drop tower had incinerated into air. Grains of sand had fused into glass. The first mushroom cloud in history had spiraled up to the heavens and sent a soft shower of white snow fluttering down on the army ants below.

  The second mushroom cloud in history came three weeks later over the military industrial city of Hiroshima.

  The snake was out of the bottle; its poison was in the blood.

  They’d first gathered on Okinawa-the army doctors from Los Alamos and Walter Reed and Rochester, and even a few from the Mayo Clinic.

  They compared notes and rifled through the existing literature. There wasn’t much, and what did exist was laughably ill informed. They waited around a lot.

  The war ended on August 13, but they weren’t allowed into Japan until late September.

  There was a seventeen-square-mile laboratory waiting for them inside Japan-160,000 living corpses that needed to be poked, prodded, X-rayed, documented, and autopsied. Mostly watched.