* * *
It is hard to tell when he is sleeping and when he is awake and when he has simply passed out. It is all dark. He must be awake because he can feel the pain in his head and the ache in his wrists and ankles. He can suck in air and taste the fabric between his teeth. He must be awake because he remembers the dream, Mary Margaret moving in the kitchen. He must be awake because he remembers the news report, the car crash, the bullet holes in the door, the covered bodies on the ground. Mary Margaret and Dale. The boy’s name was Dale. How could he have forgotten. Dale with his lockpicks, his snake rakes.
He needs to stay in this space, out of the dreams. He needs to stay in the dark, fight the pain and nausea, the shaking withdrawal, the fear. Fight the memories that are not his, that are things he created. Taste the fabric between his teeth. Feel his own hot breath on his face. Think of Mary Margaret. Feel her skin against his. Hear her voice in his ear.
Your name is Ashby, Richard John Ashby. Your mother’s name was Audrey. Your father’s name was Jack.
* * *
The first voice he hears outside of his head is a woman’s, but it does not belong to Mary Margaret. It is lower in pitch, flatter in tone. It comes from behind him, a few feet away from where his hands are bound.
“What do you need?”
The junkie’s greeting. How many times has he heard this. He can feel his own sweat now, he is aware of it for the first time, cold and slick on his forearms, soaking his shirt. Withdrawal sweat. He is shaking so much that his chair is creaking, another noise he is suddenly aware of.
“What do you need?” the woman asks again, and Dickie licks his lips and clears his throat and tells her, his voice hoarse and close in the hood. And then he is alone in the room and then she is back, or someone else is there, and his right arm is loosened, hanging useless and numb from restraint, then straightened and tied off and then the needle prick in the vein and then the blessed wash, the cleansing warmth, sweeping him away.
* * *
When he had finally learned to ride the bike, when he had stopped toppling off while Jack watched, smoking, from the garage, nobody could get him off it. He rode the streets of the air base, past the pavement and through the scrub brush and dirt to the high chain-link fence, watching fighter planes refueling, taking off, and landing in the distance on the other side.
He was riding home one afternoon when he saw a man leaving their house, another of the tousled collectors who came attempting to lure his mother back out into the world. The man stood in the driveway, holding his clutch of 78s between his knees while he lit a cigarette. Dickie stopped his bike. His father would be home soon. If Jack saw this guy he would beat the shit out of him on the front lawn. It had happened before. The MPs would come and pull Jack off and haul the beatnik down the street and out through the gates and come back and stand with Jack on the lawn and chuckle while Jack cracked a beer, fumed. Dickie sat on his bike at the end of the driveway and thought about telling this guy to hurry up with his cigarette and hightail it off the base. Instead he sat and watched, and when the man finally started moving again, Dickie said, “Why do you care?”
The man stopped, the cigarette burning between his lips. He loosened the leather strap from around the 78s, paged through them carefully, reading the labels as each sleeve passed through his fingers. He stopped on one, lifted it from the small stack, held it out. Dickie took the record, read the label, a song of his mother’s he’d heard a thousand times, a song his father put on the record player when he’d had too much to drink, when he was feeling maudlin or romantic. Dickie looked back up but the man was already walking down the street toward the front gate, unhurried, trailing smoke over his shoulder.
It would be years before Dickie understood. Playing the record, alone in Mary Margaret’s apartment, hearing his mother’s voice without her in the room. Just the hope and sadness, the fragile beauty of the sound.
* * *
Another voice in the dark. A man’s this time, small and pinched, slightly nasal.
“Do you know who we are?”
“Yes,” Dickie says. His throat is sore. His voice sounds weak within the hood.
“We know who you are,” the voice says. “You’re a ghost. Richard Hinkle.”
“That’s not my name.”
“Your license says Richard Hinkle.”
“My name is Ashby. Richard Ashby.”
“Who sent you?”
“You know who sent me.”
“Specifically.”
“I can’t give you a name. A real name.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know any real names.”
“You have two names and they have none.” The sound of chair legs scraping on the floor, the man’s weight shifting. “What were you trying to do?” the man says. “Following Buñuel, going to Zelinsky.”
“I was trying to find you.”
“Find us.”
“Talk to you.”
“Talk to us about what?”
It is hard to breathe within the hood. Dickie feels as if he can’t get enough air, that he is breathing fabric. The drugs are wearing off again. The hood is close, tight.
“Can you take the hood off?”
“No.”
“Take it off. Please.” There is no more oxygen in the hood. He’s just breathing his own bad air. “Can you take it off?”
No answer.
“Please.”
No answer.
“Please.” Dickie’s throat raw, his voice loud and painful in the hood, a frightening sound, sending his panic higher.
“Why?” the voice asks.
“Because it reminds me of the hospital.”
“The hospital.”
“Please.” Dickie’s face is wet. He wants to scream but he is afraid of what the sound of a scream in the hood will do to him.
“Which hospital?” the voice asks.
“I can’t.”
“You can’t what?”
“I can’t talk.”
“You’re talking.”
“I can’t breathe, please.”
“You’re breathing.”
“Not with the fucking hood. Take off the fucking hood.”
“What do you need?”
“Please.”
The sound of another chair scraping. Someone else in the room. The girl?
“The same?” the voice asks. “The same as what you got before?”
“The hood, please.”
“What do you need?”
“The hood.”
Both chairs scraping and movement in the room and for a second Dickie thinks they are going to take off the hood, but then there is the sound of a door opening, hinges groaning, and then the door closes and he is alone. There are no other sounds except his panicked breathing, then his chair legs banging on the floor as he rocks back and forth, trying to tip himself, trying to smash the chair. Then nothing, no noise except the sound of his screams in the dark.
* * *
Early in MAELSTROM, he had called Father Bill from a pay phone outside of Ann Arbor, freaked over a protest at the university that had ended in a shouting match with a group of Young Republicans, spilling over into confrontations in various parking lots, skirmishes in back alleys. It was nothing Dickie hadn’t been involved in before, except this time when he was trying to break things up, pull his guys away, there was this YR with thick black glasses screaming at Dickie about the beauty of killing commie gooks. Dickie tried to ignore him, shot him a few warning looks, like back off, no, really, but the kid kept screaming, commie gooks commie gooks, his spit spraying Dickie in the face, and then suddenly Dickie was on him, he had this kid on the ground and was hammering his glasses into his face, the frames cracking and the lenses breaking, Dickie pounding away until he was pulled off by the guys he was pulling a
way just a second ago, the rest of the fight having ceased in the face of the ferocity of this assault, Dickie dragged out of the parking lot and this YR kid lying on the pavement crying and holding his hands over his eyes.
Later, in the phone booth, Dickie on the line with Father Bill, confessing, expecting Bill to respond with weary disappointment, to pull Dickie out, abort mission, and Dickie deserving this, he knew, for believing his own bullshit, for buying into his own cover to the point where there was now a kid with God-knew-what kind of damage to his eyes, and Father Bill taking a silent moment, processing, Dickie hearing only his own scared breathing in the phone’s receiver, and then Father Bill telling him that there was nothing better for establishing bona fides than forgetting your own cover to the point where you can’t be questioned, to where your motives are unassailable.
That’s good work, Dickie, Father Bill had said. They can’t touch you now.
* * *
“You’re calmer.” The man’s voice in the room.
“What did you give me?”
“I’ll bet you can make an educated guess. You seem well versed.”
Maybe he had slept. Maybe he is sleeping now. It’s hard to tell. The panic has subsided, though. He is warm, he is calm.
The voice says, “Can we talk now?”
Dickie nods.
“What did they send you to do?”
“Find you,” Dickie says. “Infiltrate.”
“Infiltrate.”
“That’s the term.”
“So far, so good.” The voice laughs. It’s an ugly sound, dented, a little cruel.
Dickie can smell the cigarettes as soon as they’re removed from the pack. The sulfur whiff as the match is struck, the tobacco burning. The voice sucks in, exhales. Smoke clings to the cloth of the hood.
“But you changed course,” the voice says.
“Yes.”
“Did you change course?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I read his books.”
“Zelinsky’s books.”
“I read the preacher’s tracts and those led me to the books.”
“Your masters didn’t give you the books?”
“No.”
“Interesting.” The voice sucks, blows smoke. “You read the books and what?”
“I’d always thought it was a dream. Or a fantasy. Something not real.”
“What?”
“The hospital.”
“You had dreams?”
“Yes.”
“You had moments, where, what?”
“I’d be back there.”
“But you thought they were nothing.”
“I thought they were nothing or that they were drugs or—”
“You thought you were crazy.”
“Yes.”
“What hospital?”
“I need you take take off the hood.”
“We don’t have to do anything.”
“I know. I’m asking you.”
The voice sucks, blows smoke. “We’ll see.”
“Please.”
“We’ll see.” Chair legs scraping. The man stands, his voice rising in height. “Were you working alone?”
“Yes,” Dickie says.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Footsteps, more than one pair, coming toward him. More movement, grabbing Dickie’s arm.
“What are you giving me?”
“Sleep,” the voice says.
“What are you giving me?”
“Sleep, sleep.”
* * *
It seems like one of the restaurants back in Davenport, an Italian place where he and Father Bill had lunch a couple of times, but it can’t be, it has to be a dream or something, the weather out the front window is all fucked, even for Iowa, rain, then bright sun, then rain. Dickie is ravenous, attacking a bowl of tortellini, half a loaf of bread. Father Bill sits on the other side of the table, sipping his seltzer, watching Dickie eat. A waiter stands back by the door to the kitchen. When Dickie looks he sees that the waiter is holding one of Javier Buñuel’s signs, the long list of the damned.
“You gave them your name,” Father Bill says. “Your real name.”
“Yes.”
“That’s what I like to see. That level of commitment.”
“I know.”
“All in.”
Dickie takes another mouthful of pasta. “They’re not just a bank crew, are they?”
“We have our suspicions.”
“Meaning what?”
“If I knew that,” Father Bill says, “you wouldn’t be here.”
“Here?” Dickie lifts his face from his bowl, looks around the restaurant.
“What was that you said about a hospital?” Father Bill asks. “You mentioned a hospital and they bit. If they were just a bank crew that line would have landed with a thud.”
Dickie sets down his fork, wipes his mouth with a napkin. He pulls The Night Visitor out of his back pocket, sets it on the table. “Do you know these books?”
Father Bill looks at the cover.
Dickie says, “The author said he heard Buñuel’s story, other victims’ stories, and incorporated them into the books.”
Father Bill picks up the book, flips pages.
“It’s about a guy named Mr. _____,” Dickie says, “and his band of Merry—”
“Schizophrenics?”
“You know the books.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Maybe he heard their stories,” Dickie says. “This group. Put them into the books.”
“This man in the room with you,” Father Bill says. “You think he’s Mr. _____?”
“Is that how you pronounce it?”
Bill studies the cover, looks pensive. “What are their stories?” Bill says “stories” with an additional affect. Stories meaning fiction. Stories meaning delusions.
“I don’t know,” Dickie says.
“Well.” Bill sets down the book, looks past Dickie, out the restaurant windows. “Then that’s why you’re here.”
* * *
He opens his eyes into brightness. He has to squint. His pupils are sensitive from the time under the hood, but he tries to force them wide, absorb the light. He is hungry for it.
He breathes deeply. The hood is gone. The room comes slowly into focus. A large cement box, walls chipped, flaking skins of old paint. A damp space, humid, lit with two rows of fluorescents in protective cages, fastened to the low ceiling.
He is alone in the center of the room. There are two empty chairs a few feet in front of him. There is something on the wall behind the empty chairs. Something large, a rectangle with long alternating bars of black and white, a gray square in the bottom corner, rows of small white stars.
His eyes focusing, slowly. It is a flag hanging in front of him, an inverted American flag, black and white and gray, a reversed image, a colorless twin.
He cannot see behind him. He suddenly needs to make sure there is no one else in the room, no one watching, but he can’t turn his head that far. His hands and ankles are tied. A leather belt encircles his stomach and the back of the chair. He is wearing the same clothes they caught him in, jeans and a western shirt. He has soiled himself, he can tell by the feel and the smell. He has no idea how many times it has happened, how long he has been sitting in it. His feet are bare and cold.
A door opens from somewhere behind him and he tries to turn his neck but he can’t swivel far enough. Someone enters the room. Footsteps on the cement floor. He notices a drain in the floor for the first time, directly under his chair. The footsteps get closer, and then a man is there, passing Dickie, sitting in one of the chairs opposite. The man is Dickie’s age, short and slight, with a full b
rown mustache but a hairline that starts up at the top of his head. He is wearing a checkered shirt tucked tightly into stiff-looking jeans. Everything about him seems small and hard, precise. Hands like paws. Front teeth protruding slightly from his closed lips.
A girl passes by. Dickie hadn’t heard her enter, and then he sees why: bare feet stick out of the bottoms of her jeans. She sits next to the ratlike man. She is probably six inches taller than he is. Blond, fresh-faced, with that serene, half-glazed look common to cult members, religious casualties. Like the light in her eyes has, maybe, a dimmer switch.
He has seen their faces now, so he knows a decision has been made. He’s either leaving the room with them, eventually, or he’s not leaving the room.
The man lights a cigarette, passes his pack and matches to the girl. She sets them in her lap. They both watch Dickie.
“My name is Walter,” the man says. “That is my real name, my only name.” The familiar, reedy voice. “You are Richard Benjamin Hinkle of San Francisco, California.”
“That’s not my name.” Dickie’s voice is little more than a dry whisper.
“It is for now.” Walter glances at the girl and she stands and walks past Dickie, reappears a moment later with a paper cup. She holds it to Dickie’s scabbed lips. Cool water. He almost chokes, coughing and sputtering but refusing to stop until he has drained the cup.
The girl sits again, places the cup in her lap beside the cigarettes and matches.
“We’ve never caught a ghost before,” Walter says. He tilts his head to the side as he smokes, studying Dickie. “Tell us your story, Richard Hinkle. Tell us your ghost story.”
“Can I have more water?”
Walter nods and the girl stands again, filling the cup from somewhere on the other side of the room, returning to hold it to Dickie’s mouth. She lights a cigarette and takes a drag and then holds it for Dickie. He inhales deeply. He looks up at the girl, nods, grateful, embarrassed, suddenly, of his smell and mess.
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