Or just go to the door. Go back to the ward and take the candy like a good boy and shut out the shibboleth forever. I could become the cage, instead of living inside of it.
Become the cage.
I bang on the door and yell at the top of my lungs. Long minutes banging until my throat is raw and my hands are sore.
Nobody comes.
Over at the gigantic air-conditioning units now. I can sabotage them. Once the air-conditioning units go out, they’ll send up maintenance men to repair them, right? That’s what they’ll do.
Standing near the AC units is like standing in the noise of a tornado. I find an access panel, but it has a padlock on it. I check the other units. The same.
I run my fingers around the edges of the panel door, find a grip, and pull as hard as I can, hoping to bend the metal door back. It’s not that thick, more like tin than steel.
There’s pain, there’s always pain. It’s our constant companion through life. This time in my hands.
Fingers gushing blood, bright. Dripping. Blood dripping from my hand.
I strip off my hospital shirt and wrap my hand with it, cursing into the steaming summer air, in French, German, Latin, and other languages I didn’t even know I knew.
I go back to the hutch and bang on it with everything I’ve got, leaving blood streaks that dry into brown smears right before my eyes on the sun-seared door. I scream until my larynx rebels and goes scratchy, sweat stinging my eyes and pouring off my body, down my naked torso and discoloring these absurd hospital pajama pants.
Chest heaving, I wait. Hoping someone—Sinequa, Buster, anyone—opens the door and takes me back downstairs and gives me water. A bandage for my hands.
No one comes.
I walk back to the edge and stare out at the grounds. Look again at the sub-roof, the howl and rush of the air-conditioning units deafening.
I’m too much a coward to jump, goddamn me.
Eventually, I slump down in the slowly moving patch of shade offered by the hutch. It lengthens to the east, slowly.
My head pounds like double kick drums. The pressure behind my eyes becomes near intolerable. I unwrap my hand just to peek at the bloody mess. It stings horribly and hurts deeper than just a cut might feel, as if the sharp metal sliced me to the bone.
I hang my head on my knees, panting in the shade, and wait for the sluggish blood to subside.
Pressure.
I must have dozed off, because the shadows are longer now and the whole world is wreathed in hazy streamers on this great height and the air roars with the white noise like it will never stop.
It’s hard to think now, and it’s not even been twenty-four hours since I found myself up here.
I stand, move my body in a creaky jumble of limbs over to the shrinking puddle and fall to my hands and knees. The water, heated by the sun and the semisolid tar of the roof, burns as it touches my lips and scorches my throat. But I drink, forcing my throat to work, up and down, taking the water inside me. As long as I can, I drink.
Pushing up, off my hands and knees, I stumble over to the crenellations above the sub-roof and stand in one of the gaps between teeth and sway there, hands upon the hot stone surface—radiant heat I can feel even through the swaddled mess of my left hand. Looking out at the tops of trees and the manicured grounds with the rush and howl of wind inside my head and pressure behind my eyes, I ready myself for the jump.
It’s there, on the ledge, standing between two worlds, one of sky and wind and pain and heat, and the other one, dark and limitless, that I feel the eyes behind my eyes open and I’m out above it all, looking down on the wasted mongrel-ape clutching the stone with one good hand and then falling away, higher and higher until I’m where the raven might fly, far above Tulaville and the Arkansas River winking like hammered silver in the bright light of day and then beyond that, higher and higher, until I can see the curvature of the earth far below me and taste the coldness of the silent void of space, airless and limitless, the cold silences between the stars. I move as thought does, beyond any idea of speed or physics, above the wheeling center of the galaxy where there slumbers some massive black hole devouring all, yet keeping all of creation held in orbit.
I’m transparent. I see all.
Something snaps. The moment of wild blue yonder is over, and my awareness is booted back into the meatsuit.
Dislocation. Confusion. Heart hammering, I tense my legs and feel my stomach burbling with the birdshit-tar water. I cramp, bend over, and send the liquid pouring out of me in a thunderous wrolf to the sub-roof.
My head spins and I think I’m going to fall forward, but I push away in the last instant and I truly fall—and it seems farther a journey than the last, flying back from the galactic center—but falling backward to the roof. My head bounces off the roof, hard, filling my vision with bright swarming motes and a matching bright pain in my mouth that fills with blood. Bit my tongue.
The outraged flesh.
On my back, staring up into the hard sky and brutal sun for a long, long while, waiting for the raven to cross the sky above me, waiting for a cloud to pass across the face of the sun, waiting for some indication that there’s life in this world other than the living pain wracking my incarcerado flesh.
When nothing happens, I close my eyes to shut it all out. The heat, the taste of my rancid burning mouth, the bile, the empty sky, the rush of incessant white noise.
I hold them closed until I know no more.
Night now, and I awake from a dream of vineyards and a girl in the moonlight and the taste of wine and her sweet mouth on mine.
The pressure is gone. The world below is filled with people, and I can sense them like a fish, swimming in coral, senses his own kind through silent vibrations. Through sworls and eddies of water. Through chemical trails and the scent of blood in the water.
I sense them.
Each one moves through his or her evening like upright unlit matches—this is how I see them. Each person a body wearing an unlit match head for a noggin. My brain conjuring images from each. A hurt, a love, a wedding, a funeral. A broken heart. The avalanche of memory crashes in on me in a mad tsunamic rush. But that part of me, the part that would erode and wash away—that part of me that was soft and unyielding—has become stone.
The memories wash over me and recede.
The stars wheel, and I reach out with the burning ember of my mind and light the matchsticks, all of them, flaring up in the darkness of the night. It’s like cobwebs burning away.
I look out from a thousand eyes. Listen with a thousand ears.
As one, they turn and look toward the ceiling, to the thing upon the roof.
It’s only moments before the hutch door opens and Buster comes through, followed by others. I see my wasted body lying there in the starlight from multiple perspectives at once, yet it makes perfect sense to me now, how I can inhabit a town, a Rider behind their eyes. Pulling levers. Working their legs. Arms.
Buster scoops up my prone form like holding a baby, and we descend through the innards of the building. On the first floor, he places me on a gurney and another nurse—her name is Becky Caldwell—gives me water and puts me on a saline drip and slathers some sort of unguent on my third-degree sunburns. Cleans and wraps my hand. I lie there as wasted as a mummy.
I am a dream to them, behind their eyes. I’ve learned kindness on the mountaintop. I pass from mind to mind like a daydream or an errant thought.
Buster doesn’t realize I’m with him or even that here is the boy who escaped. No, I am just a series of tasks that needed to be done, and now that they are, Buster is free to return to the fourth-floor ward.
I move through the minds like a wind over wheat, fast and leaving behind nothing.
In the patients, I cool them. I calm them. I settle upon them like some ghostly Haldol but softer and more beneficent. I race down their hallways and through their attics. There are terrible things there—countless horrors—stored away in cabinets and cubbyho
les and hidden in trunks and stashed away in closets. Fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters. War, sex, famine, abuse. Violence. Rape. Revenge.
The ones we love destroy us. The ones we love make us strong.
All of it I eat. I ingest the cancers because I can take it all now and not be hurt.
I am no longer human.
And the pressure never was behind my eyes. It was without. I feel it now like radiant heat from a stone or feverish boy—I can feel it emanating from the outside world. And with just a twist, I wall off these people—my people—like a levee protects its city from a storm.
Whatever’s there in Maryland, waiting, sending out its poison into the ether, it will not have these poor lost souls.
Before Buster wheels me into the private room where I will withdraw from the multitude, I wipe any memory of my passing from them all and make sure that they are lying down before I put them into a soft, restful sleep.
ELEVEN
Morning, and I can stand again. Move my body. Piss and breathe and walk.
But I can’t find Rollie in the multitude. The shibboleth has returned to me—it has changed and grown, or maybe I have—but Rollie is hidden from my sight.
I shuffle through the memories of the patients and hospital employees searching for her. It comes in fragments. Jumbled images. Poached memories. Stolen scenes.
Rollie shuffling out of isolation, her face numb, seen by Betsy Russell, the scrappy nurse with the muscles. Rollie looked wasted and zombielike, Betsy noted, but Betsy felt very much the same way, not having slept at all the night before.
From Buster—who had managed to sleep two hours the night before—she seemed muted but said, “Sorry about the other day,” as he pricked her with a syringe brimming with Haldol. She followed it up with, “Where’s the new kid?” Buster was gracious enough to give a grunt. There was no change in her face as the drugs began to swim upstream.
Steve-O answered her. “Busted loose. Escaped. That punk kid.” Steve-O noted that Rollie’s expression curdled at the news.
From twenty different eyes a glimpse of her shuffling the halls, as if looking for a lost pet, muttering. As she passed Jacey Krews—the lean boy who so assiduously listened to Mr. Fingernails as he said such strange things—Rollie was saying, “Kissed me. Kissed me,” and scratching her wrists over and over.
After that she passed out of everyone’s sight for a long while except for a glimpse—from Jordan Stephens, a bipolar gay kid originally from New Jersey and voluntarily committed due to lack of sleep and suicidal tendencies—of her testing the doorknob of a supply closet, opening it, and peering inside.
When she did not turn up for her afternoon medication, Dr. Sinequa rousted the nurses on duty and had them search every nook and cranny of the ward.
It was Christina Fletcher, a plump country girl with a rich voice and a constant tune whirring and circling in her head—I am you and you are me though we always disagree—who discovered Rollie’s wasted corpse hanging from an exposed pipe in the janitors’ closet from a noose made of shop towels. Christina’s first thought was that she was surprised Rollie weighed enough to suffocate from hanging.
I am a ghost now to the nurses, doctors, and patients. I sense a few Riders, yet the staff makes no fuss or squawk as I walk among them, their gazes sliding over me like a snake slipping over a rock into a stream to disappear. The eyes I see from, they do not see me. The eyes the Rider inhabits … I do not know. But it told me to leave back at Casimir and now that I have, it seems content not to impede my departure.
Before the elder awakens.
On the ground floor, North Wing, I find an employee’s locker room and a nurse changing into his blue duds and squeaky shoes. I wait, sitting on the benches, as he changes.
It’s not that I’m invisible now. It’s that I’m the blind spot in their mirror. I’m a wee little adjustment in the ledger. But still, it’s weird to see a guy changing out of his street clothes, down to his tighty-whities, not five feet away from me.
When he finishes, I give a little twist, and he conveniently leaves his locker open on his way out.
He’s a little thicker around the middle than me, and a good three inches taller, so I have to roll the cuffs and put on two pairs of his socks even to think about getting the guy’s big black harness boots to stay on my feet. His short-sleeve shirt swallows my torso in a gulp. And though it’s not the most sanitary, I use his toothbrush and toothpaste to scrub the funk from my teeth. Focus on the tongue.
The reflection of myself in the mirror is gaunt, peeling. And sad. I look like a withered old man wearing the clothes of his youth.
I’ve grown old.
Sixteen and I’ve grown old. Deep lines shooting away from my eyes. Lean and angular and hungry. I don’t like the dead glint to my expression, but I can’t seem to wipe if from my face. It’s the dull gaze of a predator, the lifeless eye of a shark—cold, implacable. I try to sneer.
I can’t.
I’m not really me anymore.
Of all the souls in Tulaville Psych, Dr. Billy Grainger—and more specifically his 1970 Plymouth GTX—has my attention this morning. I want to burn the memory of Rollie and Tulaville out on the blacktop, but that particular bit of muscle car seems too suspicious and identifiable.
Given those I might not be able to sway or adjust with the shibboleth—and because I’d rather not be constantly adjusting the general pop—I go with Rusty Greewell’s Honda Accord, as bland as cafeteria food and just as safe.
In Dr. Sinequa’s office, I stand before his desk as he types a report on his laptop and sips coffee. He does not glance at me.
He looks good, rested. He woke this morning in his office, wondering how he’d fallen asleep and slept the night through. His phone showed multiple messages from his wife. His personal trainer.
But he had slept the night through in this chair and felt wonderful when he awoke. Surprised to find all his staff had the same experience. A blessing and a miracle, the more religious-minded of them had said, smiling.
That helps ease the pain of Rollie, some.
I watch Dr. Sinequa.
I could make him dance, make him give himself a dose of Haldol, enough to float an elephant in a canoe all the way downstream to zombietown.
I don’t. I just hold up a finger like a gun, point it at his eggshell cranium as he continues to type, and say, “Gimme all your money.”
He withdraws his wallet, places it on the desk. On a piece of paper, he writes, BANK OF THE OZARKS - PIN: 1947. FIRST SECURITY - PIN: 0531.
“Danke schoen, Herr Doktor,” I say.
I stop at the highway, look back at the brooding old hulk of Tulaville Psych. The roof looks so remote, half-obscured by the trees lining the drive.
Good-bye, Rollie.
Good-bye, Shreve.
Easy enough to look up her address on the computers at the John Gould Fletcher Library. I watch her house until she leaves, gets in her little sedan, and putters off to the local grocery store. A Kroger. Moms used to pronounce it “Kay Roger,” which was stupid but still made me laugh when I was a boy.
I follow, easing the Accord behind her.
Driving. I have no license. Just the memories of hundreds of people. I’ve flown airplanes, manned .50-cal chain guns on Hueys, and dived the Great Barrier Reef. Stolen memories. Tailing a septuagenarian in a Honda Accord is a cakewalk in the park, sniffing daisies.
She takes a long-ass time shopping. I twist and turn the dial on the radio and wait for her to come out. When she does, holding two small plastic bags, I put the car in gear, exit my parking spot, and pull up, blocking in her car.
Window down. My arm draped outside. Casual. Like I’m supposed to be here.
“Hey, Nurse Cheeves!” I say. This gets her attention. “It’s nice to see you again. I’m not here to hurt you. Actually, I’m very sorry for what happened. I made mistakes. Nobody is going to get hurt this time. I’m taking care of things.” If that’s not enough, I say, “I promise.”
She nods, almost imperceptibly. I can tell she’s terrified, little tremors in the flesh of her cheek, a quaver in her hands.
She’s standing by her car, holding her shopping bags and goggling at me through the window of the Accord. “I have a little favor to ask. There’s a photo that was in my cell at Casimir. I need you to get it for me. It’s a picture of Jack Graves and a girl.”
“Why, I—”
“If they haven’t tossed and cleaned my cell, it’ll be in the top drawer of the dresser. If they have tossed it, it’ll be in Administration. Sorry for the way this sounds but … I command you to get that photo for me. Understand?”
“Yes. I—”
“You will find that photo and mail it here.” I hand her a slip of paper on which I’ve written an address. The address of Jerome Abraham Aaronson. My old buddy from another hospital, another time.
I’m through with hospitals. I’m through with cages.
“Thank you. What I’m going to say now is not for your ears, and you will not remember it. It is for a man named Quincrux.”
She wavers, standing poleaxed. I wonder if she will fall. I open the door, leave the Accord idling in the parking lot, and escort her to her car.
Once her bags are in the trunk, she turns to me, her old rheumy eyes watering. I say, “Quincrux, I am coming for you.”
She blinks. Tears pool and make little paths across her wrinkled yellow skin. So small, this woman. I must be gentle.
“Nurse Cheeves? I know I’ve already done too much. To you. To everyone at Casimir. I’m so sorry. But I have one more thing to say. I command you to forget me and go be happy. Can you do that?”
She nods, pouring tears but smiling now. I spark inside her mind, for just an instant. Her match head ignites. Shines bright.
She will sleep well tonight.
Driving now, and every time I glance at the passenger seat, I feel its emptiness. I drive east, on 40, toward Memphis, Nashville. Beyond that, the East Coast.
The Shibboleth Page 9