Deceit

by James Siegel

  They were biologists studying a heretofore unknown species.

  The world’s first survivors.

  As doctors, they’d seen the human body attacked with all sorts of things-bullets, knives, shrapnel, gases, poisons. This was something else-bodies bombarded with neutrons, beta particles, and gamma rays.

  There seemed to be three distinct stages.

  First, the people who died in the first few hours or days.

  For these cases, they had to rely on the observations of the mostly bewildered Japanese doctors. Seemingly uninjured people had mysteriously succumbed, dropping dead on street corners, in their beds, while riding their bicycles. The doctors guessed that gamma rays had degenerated their very nuclei-literally broken down their cell walls.

  The second stage seemed to announce itself about two weeks after exposure.

  The victims’ hair fell out. They were wracked with severe diarrhea, uncontrollable shaking, and spiraling temperatures of up to 106 degrees. Their white-blood-cell counts plummeted; their gums became bleeding sores; their open wounds festered and refused to heal. Most who exhibited this latter stage of radiation sickness died.

  Those that didn’t awaited a third stage, where the body overcompensated, white-cell counts soaring to make up for the internal devastation. Infections set in-generally of the lung cavity-that came and went, lingered and regressed, spared some and took others.

  There was a fourth stage, of course.

  This was the stage they debated back and forth, whispered about, ruminated on, fueled by thimblefuls of warm sake-not bad, this Japanese hooch-the stage they could only venture guesses about since they wouldn’t, couldn’t know for years.

  What would happen after?

  After they rebuilt the city, after the shadows faded on the tombstones and the temple wall, after they all went home. What then?

  They could guess.

  The first glimmers of genetic mutation were beginning to emerge. Radiation not only lingered in the air; it lingered in the blood.

  They watched and observed as some of the survivors gave birth.

  As babies emerged with stunted arms and missing fingers and cleft tongues, or with mongolism-though frankly it was hard to tell with Jap babies, being that they already looked half-Mongoloid. Then there were the cases of leukemia, of puzzling and lethal blood disorders.

  An unofficial ad hoc quarantine began.

  The Japanese themselves began to shun the survivors, as if they were a painful reminder of their national shame. As if these burned and scarred and disfigured people were walking metaphors of their own disfigured country. Hiroshima and Nagasaki reduced to rubble and whole sections of Tokyo scorched from the incendiary bombs of the B-52s.

  They weren’t employable, these habakusha-radiation survivors. They were always getting sick and missing work. They were dying in droves. They were unpleasant to look at.

  No one complained when the army doctors shut some of the survivors away. Not even the survivors. They were tainted, poisoned, a new kind of untouchable. Better for us, and better for them, the doctors figured.

  They could more closely monitor the survivors, have a better chance to keep them alive-those they could. They took their blood, X-rayed their bones, checked their stools. They gathered greedily around the autopsy tables to see what they could find.

  Slowly, here and there, they began to experiment.

  At first, only on the ones barely clinging to life. The ones at death’s door. Feeding them certain diets or withholding food entirely. Bombarding them with X-rays to see if you could fight fire with fire.

  They would need this knowledge, they knew.

  The war might be over, but they’d simply traded one enemy for another. Japan was buckling under just fine-already pouring that nationalist zeal into economy building. Their onetime ally was a different story. The Russian Bear was in full growl, swallowing up all of Eastern Europe and poised to take the rest of it if given half a chance.

  No one was under any illusions.

  Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just the first two volleys in a new kind of shooting war.

  It might be cold now, but it could get hot at any minute.

  They needed to know what to do when the smoke cleared and all those millions of victims-because it would be millions-were cleared from the urban rubble.

  They needed answers.

  Most of them grew emotional calluses. It wasn’t that hard, considering they were dealing with the people who’d sucker-punched our naval fleet at Pearl Harbor. Who’d littered the Bataan Peninsula with American corpses.

  If they were a little cold and calculating about how they dealt with them, these survivors-if they began to treat them like squealing, screeching guinea pigs and not still-living, breathing human beings-it was understandable. It was for the national good. It was for the furthering of science.

  The experimenting might look un-American to some.

  But not when you looked at the big picture. Not then.

  They deserved medals.

  From their research would come the blueprint, the textbook on postnuclear survival.

  Even when the doctors finally came home, even when the Hiroshima program officially ended, the experiments didn’t.

  They continued.

  Special orders went through special channels to special places.

  This time the guinea pigs weren’t Jap survivors of a far-off blast.

  No.

  This time they were closer to home.

  Emotionally disturbed boys at a children’s home in Rochester, for example.

  The doctors formed a boys’ “science club” there.

  All the boys wanted in.

  After all, there was nothing much to do in that place but sit around and make baskets. And some of the boys weren’t really emotionally disturbed. No. They’d been dumped there by parents who couldn’t afford to take care of them. In the science club, they got to go to baseball games. They were given real hardballs and leather gloves and baseball caps.

  They were given something else.

  Oatmeal laced with radioactive isotopes.

  Every morning for breakfast.

  Every boy had to finish his oatmeal if he wanted to stay in the club. No exceptions.

  And there were the pregnant women at Vanderbilt University Hospital.

  The ones urged to take a special “cocktail.”

  What’s in it? the women would ask, women in their first, fifth, ninth months of pregnancy.

  Vitamins, they were told. Vitamins to make you and your baby stronger.

  There weren’t any vitamins in the cocktails.

  There was radioactivity. Headed straight for their uteruses.

  Drink up.

  And then there was a certain hospital out west.

  Marymount Central.

  Where pure plutonium was pumped into the veins of 320 selected patients.

  Some of them had cancer.

  Some of them didn’t.

  Some of them were terminal.

  Most of them weren’t.

  It didn’t matter.

  In the end, they were all doomed.

  By then, the army doctors had been subsumed into the fledgling Atomic Energy Commission, later itself subsumed into the Department of Energy. The DOE whose director would years later publicly apologize for these “sick acts.” But the doctors would keep the moniker they were given during the war as a secret badge of honor. Even fifty years later, it would be how they defined themselves. By three numbers.

  The 499th they’d answer, when asked in what regiment they’d served.

  The 499th medical battalion.

  FORTY-THREE

  I took an elevator to the top floor.

  The one with bars on the windows.

  As soon as the elevator door opened, I could feel them. There was an air of palpable constriction. It suddenly felt harder to breathe; I was walking with ankle weights attached to me.

  Maybe it was the thick metal door off the lob
by-though lobby was overdoing it, since the room seemed to serve no discernable purpose. There were no chairs and no reception desk, just an empty space between the elevator and locked door. There was an intercom on the wall.

  I buzzed it.

  A face materialized through the metal grill in the door.

  I know. It reads like a half-remembered dream. It felt that way. It was after midnight; I’d left Dennis in a morphine-induced sleep floors below.

  There was that incessant murmuring, a whispery tower of babble seeping through the locked door-everyone speaking separate languages that were decipherable only to themselves.

  “Yeah?”

  The voice belonged to the black man staring at me through the meshed grill. Mostly I could see the whites of his eyes.

  “I’m Detective Wolfe,” I said, flashing my wallet at the door and hoping the mesh screen would make it as indecipherable as his face.

  “Okay?”

  “An ex-patient was brought in today. He was attacked at a gas station down the road-you probably heard about it?”

  “Nope.”

  “He was a patient on the psych ward. Dennis Flaherty?”

  “Oh, yeah. Dennis. I heard something ’bout that. Cut his eyes out, huh?”

  “His tongue.”

  “Okay.”

  “He’s in pretty bad shape. Whoever did it killed the gas-station clerk, too.”

  “Uh-huh. Yeah.”

  “I’d like to take a look around if that’s okay.”

  “Here?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What for?”

  “Major DeCola said it’d be okay.”

  “Major who?”

  “DeCola.”

  “He’s a doc down on…?”

  “Surgeon.”

  “Right. He ain’t a psych. So-”

  “He said it’d be okay.”

  “Yeah. Well. I’m just sayin’…”

  “He’s a major,” I said.

  “Shit. Okay.”

  The magic words.

  The door opened electronically-at least, it was supposed to. The black man, who introduced himself as Rainey, had to push it open himself.

  “Everything’s fucking falling apart here,” Rainey said.

  Maybe it hadn’t been that hard for Dennis to run away, I thought. Maybe all he’d had to do was push open the door and scram.

  There was a small desk on this side of the door. Rainey’s, I guessed. A Styrofoam cup sat on an open newspaper as neatly arranged as a place mat. A metal bridge chair sat on the other side of the desk.

  The room itself was about the size of a two-stall bathroom. It smelled like one. There was the odor of stale urine and male sweat. Of confinement.

  “You knew Dennis?” I asked him.

  “You don’t know anybody here, man. You don’t want to know anybody. Most of them don’t know which way is up.”

  “He knew which way was out, though, didn’t he?”

  Rainey chuckled. “Sure. Okay. Dennis flew the coop.”

  “He stuffed a lot of meds in his pocket before he left, too. What floor’s the dispensary on?”

  “Not this one.”

  There was a door opposite the door I’d walked through. The door to the actual wards, I guessed. The looney bin.

  “Can I see Dennis’s room?”

  “It’s just a bed, man.”

  “Right. Show me anyway.”

  He shrugged, scratched his head, said: “You’re the boss.”

  He fumbled for a key and fitted it into the lock; the door swung open.

  I’d expected something worse.

  It looked like a dormitory. A dormitory in an old boys’ school-okay, an old, old boys’ school. But still. A regular-looking hallway led to regular doors that opened onto regular rooms with regular rows of cots.

  We stood in the doorway of Dennis’s old room and Rainey put his finger to his lips.

  Don’t make noise.

  I doubt we would’ve disturbed anyone. The patients were tossing, turning, mumbling in their sleep. Some of them appeared to be sleeping with their eyes open.

  “Which bed was Dennis’s?” I asked.

  “Let’s see…” Rainy whispered. “Over there.” He pointed to the far end of the room. “He liked the window. Liked seeing the sky. He was used to living on the streets, maybe.”

  “Maybe.”

  “See, just an empty bed. Told you.”

  “I want to take a look at it.”

  “You are looking at it.”

  “I’d like to take a closer look.”

  Rainey shrugged.

  We walked down the center aisle, past the murmuring, shifting bodies flanking both sides of the room. The smell was worse here-sour and medicinal.

  Thin beams of platinum moonlight spilled across the wooden floor. I nearly tripped over someone’s shoe.

  “This one?” I said. It was the last bed, directly under the window. The mesh screen sliced the moonlight into neat little squares.

  “Uh-huh.”

  The bed was made up in military style, the gray blanket pulled tight in impeccably neat corners. You could probably bounce a quarter off it. A wooden shelf hung over the bed, but there was nothing on it.

  I sat down, tried to imagine what it was like to live here-among other disturbed people who once carried guns.

  “What about that one?” I asked.

  The bed directly across from Dennis. It was the only other empty bed in the room.

  “That one?” Rainey said. “Oh, that was Benjy’s.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  Benjamin’s shelf was still filled with stuff.

  Old books, mostly-primers, textbooks, comics, the kind of things that parents usually lock away in an attic chest for safekeeping. Only there weren’t any chests in a VA hospital, certainly no attics, and no parents to lovingly store the mementos of childhood.

  “He was black,” I said. “Benjamin was black.”

  “Black as me,” Rainey said. “What you interested in him for?”

  “He flew the coop too, didn’t he? Dennis wasn’t the only one who knew the way out.”

  Rainey nodded.

  “I think he took something of Dennis’s with him,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  “How long was Benjy here? In this hospital?”

  Rainey smiled. “Shit, who knows? He was a lifer, man.”

  “A lifer, sure. But Benjy wasn’t a vet, was he?”

  “It’s a vet hospital, ain’t it?”

  “Yes. But maybe it wasn’t always a vet hospital?”

  “Can’t help you. Before my time. Just knew the poor fool was here forever.”

  “Was he a fool?”

  “Shit, he was here, wasn’t he? Of course he was a fool.”

  “You ever talk to him, Rainey?”

  “About what?”

  “About anything? The weather. The World Series. The price of gas?”

  “Hey, I told you. You don’t want to know the people in here. They come here, they got no minds. They’re as nuts as Dennis. Benjy talked to himself.”

  “Was he on drugs? Like Dennis?”

  “Every color in the rainbow, man.”

  “Right. Maybe that’s why he talked to himself.”

  Rainey shrugged.

  “I don’t think Benjy was a poor fool,” I said. “I think he was a poor something, though. When did he break out of here?”

  “I don’t know-a while ago. Before Dennis.”

  “Sure, before Dennis. Were they friends, Dennis and Benjy? Did they hang out together?”

  Rainey shook his head. “Told you, Benjy was a lifer. Lifers stick to themselves. Dennis was fresh off the streets.”

  “Do you let patients keep their wallets, Rainey?”

  “Sometimes. We let them keep a little money-you know, for snacks and things. Some of them have pictures in their wallets-you know, of their wives or kids. So why not?”

  “They ever get their hands on more than
a little money?”

  “Well, they’re not supposed to.”

  “Yeah, but do they?”

  “Sure. I guess. People visit. They get sent stuff. They play poker-supposed to be for matchsticks, but you know?”

  “Yeah, I know. So maybe now and then, those wallets have more than just snack change and pictures.”

  “Okay, sure.”

  “Did Dennis ever play poker?”

  “I guess. Why?”

  “Benjy ended up with Dennis’s wallet. I was wondering if it had a lot of money in it. Poor fool that he was, he knew enough to know he’d need some cash to get from here to there.”

  “Where’s there?”

  “California. To see his mom.”

  “Oh yeah? How you know that?”

  “Right after he saw her, he got into an accident.”

  “A car accident?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “What kind of accident?”

  “A fatal one.”

  “Yeah? Too bad.”

  We were whispering, but I could see one or two heads rising from beneath white sheets like ghosts.

  “Where would Benjamin’s medical file be?”

  “Down in Records, I guess.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “On four. He broke outta here just to see his mom, huh?”

  “Well… he hadn’t seen her in fifty years.”

  “Huh? Why’s that?”

  “He didn’t know she was alive.”

  “For fifty years? How’s something like that happen?”

  “Easy. They told him she was dead.”

  “Well, why didn’t she come see him?”

  “Because they told her he was dead.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “Is there a TV here in the ward, Rainey?”

  “Uh-huh. They like watching the soaps-and those three motorcycle rednecks on Discovery.”

  “What else do they like?”

  “Golf. All that whispering soothes ’em.”

  “What about the morning show on NBC? They ever watch that?”

  “Sometimes, sure.”

  I began collecting the dusty books from Benjy’s old shelf.

  “Don’t worry; I’ll return them,” I said, even though it looked like Rainey didn’t really care.

  “Hey,” Rainey said, “if he thought his mom was dead, how’d he know she wasn’t?”