She leaves him the cigarette to hold in his lips while he speaks. He tells them of his time in Vietnam, in the underground. The same establishing of credibility that worked with the student groups. Except this time he tells them everything, about Father Bill, about the explosion in Portland, about Jack in his Davenport apartment. The truth is all he has. No one is looking for him here, no one is going to rescue him. He can see that these two will only believe him if he gives them everything, if he holds nothing back. All in.
When he is finished, Walter and the girl stand, and the girl brings Dickie another cup of water, a few pills that she places on his outstretched tongue. And then they are gone, the door closing behind them, and Dickie is alone in the room again, with the lights and the drain and the colorless flag.
* * *
A tall black kid was untying him when he woke, pulling the last of the straps from Dickie’s wrists. Dickie’s arms hung heavily at his sides. Everything logy, slow to respond. Whatever they’d given him made him feel like a big, dumb animal.
The kid was a few years younger than Walter, in his early twenties, so thin as to seem almost emaciated. He looked like one of the runaways Dickie had seen on Hollywood Boulevard, crossing below the stairs of Javier Buñuel’s perch carrying bedrolls and ratty backpacks. Everything skinny except for the full Afro sitting on top of his head like a space helmet. He was surprisingly strong, though. He got Dickie up and over to a corner of the room. There was a hole in the floor where Dickie could relieve himself.
Nothing much else on this side of the room. Just the hole, a water spigot set into the wall, a big iron door, now closed. The kid helped Dickie out of his soiled clothes, left the room, came back in with a hose, which he attached to the water spigot. Dickie washed himself. The kid stood at the door, looking down at his tennis shoes, chewing a fingernail. When Dickie was finished, the kid left the room again, returned with an outfit of green hospital scrubs for Dickie to put on. Nothing for his feet. While Dickie was getting dressed, the kid left again, came back with a plate of black beans and rice, a lump of boiled carrots. Dickie sat against the wall and devoured the food, grabbing clumsily with his fingers, choking, too much too soon. He asked for some water and the kid nodded to the spigot.
He splashed water on his face, drank from his cupped hands. Looked around the room, studying the walls, searching for a hole, a deep crack, something they could be watching him through. Not sure why it mattered, but he wanted to know where they were, where their eyes were hiding.
The kid was gone. Dickie’s plate was gone, the iron door was closed. The lights buzzed overhead. He crawled to a corner, as far as he could from the chair where he’d been bound. He lay down, closed his eyes, slept.
* * *
“My name is Sarah. That is my real name, my only name.”
Dickie opened his eyes. The blond girl was there, Walter’s sidekick. Dickie was lying on the floor, cheek pressed to the damp cement, so everything appeared sideways. He felt slightly more alert, was able to get to his knees, turn the room back to its upright state. He was still untied, and alone in the room with her, so he figured there was some mechanism in place if he were to make a move, someone watching, aiming something at him. Or maybe she was tougher than she looked, maybe she’d have him back on the floor in no time flat if he tried anything. Either way, he accepted the food she’d brought, the water, the pills, the cigarette.
She was wearing a loose summer dress, its straps hugging her pale shoulders. Her feet were still bare.
The chair with the straps had been removed from the room. They sat in the remaining two chairs, and she talked while he ate, telling him her story, starting with her childhood, her abusive parents, working up through her teenage years, the boy-and-drug experiments, through to a year of junior college, a suicide attempt, hospitalization. She presented it all without shame or guilt or remorse. It had the dry, confessional ring of a rehab monologue, the rap Dickie’d heard from many of the kids in the army hospitals in Vietnam. Dickie smoked, watched the gnawed cuticles of her fingernails as she gestured and spoke. He had heard this story before. It was recounted, almost verbatim, by a character in one of Zelinsky’s books.
She left him, and while he was alone he slept, or walked the room, looking for holes in the walls. Wondering who was watching, Sarah or Walter or the other kid. The overhead lights burned all the time.
When she returned they sat in the chairs and Dickie ate and listened to more of her story, the experiments in the hospital, the torture, the sensory deprivation, the drugs. He remembered it all from Zelinsky’s book. They had sucked out her identity, her name and personality, leaving a clean white space. Then she was given a new name, with new memories, a loving childhood, a spotless adolescence, this new person squeezed into her brain, one drop at a time, until she was full with it, and then she went out into the world and lived that life.
She came and went. Each time, she picked her story up exactly where she’d left off. Dickie wasn’t sure how long she’d been talking, over how many hours or days. He tried to get his head out of the room, think past the walls, the current moment. Didn’t have much success. He was here, that was all. Whatever they were giving him now was not as powerful a sedative as before, but it still kept him cloudy and slow. He considered not taking what was offered, but figured that they’d find out soon enough, simply inject him with what they wanted him to have. That and the memory of withdrawal kept him swallowing the pills Sarah held out for him.
She came and went. She gave him back the copy of Johnny Tremain that Zelinsky had given him. She told him about the new, false life she’d lived. Her job, her fiancé, a failed pregnancy. The moment, on the drive home from her gynecologist, when she realized what had been done to her and began to piece together her old, true life.
When she was finished telling her story, she stopped coming. Dickie waited, read his copy of Johnny Tremain. Alone for hours, maybe another day.
When she returned, it was with Walter.
“Your story panned out,” Walter said. “The explosion in Portland, the dead man.” He lit a cigarette. “But what does this give me, really? You didn’t tell me anything I couldn’t have read in a newspaper.”
“So you read the newspaper.”
“Don’t fuck with me.”
Dickie motioned for a cigarette. Sarah looked to Walter and when he nodded she lit one, handed it to Dickie.
“There was a police shooting,” Dickie said. “Somewhere in the plains, I think. It was on the news when you found me.”
Walter worked his lower lip against the bristles of his mustache, nodded.
“A young woman and a young man were killed,” Dickie said. “Radicals from the Portland explosion.”
“Yes.”
“How long has it been?”
“Nice try.”
“Not long?”
“No.”
“I knew them,” Dickie said.
“They don’t have the boy’s name.”
“They don’t, yet?”
“No.”
“I do.” Dickie sat, an attempt to give Walter a slight height advantage. “I’ll give you the name and you have someone make a call. Let the cops check it out.”
Walter worked his mustache, finally reached into the front pocket of his jeans, came away with a handful of pills, shook out a few he was looking for.
“Take these.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Take them.”
Dickie reached forward, took the pills, dumped them into his mouth, swallowed. He was dizzy immediately, the room starting to spin, gathering speed.
“The name,” Walter said.
Dickie gripped the sides of the chair, feeling like he might lift off at any second, spiral out across the room. He managed to get Dale’s name out before his blood pressure shot through the top of his head, the room going dark, Di
ckie flying, untethered, off into space.
* * *
Strapped to a chair in the black room, a metal helmet tight on his head, needles passing through bone, squeezing memories, squeezing the new person into his skull, the soft tissue within.
Richard Benjamin Hinkle of San Francisco, California. A newspaper reporter, a burnout, a dropout, an addict and alcoholic.
An orphan.
No, this is Sarah’s dream, Zelinsky’s dream. This is Dick Hinkle’s dream. This is not his dream.
This is his dream:
“You look good,” Father Bill says. “You’re losing weight.”
“I’m hungry all the time,” Dickie says, mouth full.
“That’s good. Staying hungry is good.”
The restaurant is empty. The waiter with Buñuel’s sign is gone. It’s still raining, then sunny, then rainy. Dickie cannot eat his pasta fast enough. He is terrified that someone will take it before he finishes.
Dickie says, “Your real name isn’t Bill, is it?”
“Isn’t it?”
“What about the seminary? The wife and kids?”
Bill sits back in his seat. “Let’s not make this personal.” He pushes a basket of bread across the table to Dickie. “How crazy are these kids, scale of one to ten?”
Dickie swallows, wipes his mouth. “Twelve?”
“Crazy is dangerous,” Bill says. “Crazy is unpredictable.”
“But it doesn’t mean they’re lying.”
Bill places an index finger on the handle of his unused fork, shifts it a quarter inch, lining it up beside the knife, the spoon.
Dickie says, “Are they lying?”
Bill looks over his shoulder, ready for the check, maybe. He turns back to the table, pulls his chair in tight, sits looking over his silverware, the position of his plates.
“We have a saying,” he says. “My people. The listeners. The worriers. It’s what keeps us going, keeps us scared.” He turns his salad plate, just a hair, lets it sit. “Our motivational motto. Do you know what it is?”
Dickie shakes his head.
Bill touches his plate again, looks at the position of the knife, the fork, hesitating, unconvinced.
“Just three little words,” Bill says. “You never know.”
16
Summer 1971
Ginnie started painting again after Hannah left. Rediscovering the impulse surprised her, as if everything that had been removed from her life had revealed it again, a long-lost friend.
She built small wooden frames, purchased paint and lengths of canvas from the art supply store near the park. At night, after Thomas was asleep, she worked on the living room floor, under the shelves of Henry’s books.
Cutting the canvas, stretching it across the frame, pulling it taut. Muscle memory she had assumed was lost. Holding the carpet tacks between her teeth while she hammered the canvas to the frame. Her fingertips running across the pebbled fabric. The smell of the wood, the hardware. She’d forgotten how much she loved the feel of tacks in her mouth. Memories of her father working in the barn when she was a girl, hammering loose boards, his lips bristling with nails.
She talked to Henry while she worked. She always had, in Chicago, in Arlington. She painted while he read in a chair on the other side of the canvas. She saw no reason to stop their conversation just because he was no longer in the room.
She painted large shapes, blocks and lines of color. When she was younger she had brooded over canvases, believing that the blank space should only be defiled if it could be improved upon. She had no such qualms now. She painted to feel the ache in her shoulders after a few hours at the easel, to feel the wring in her lower back. The sensual nature of her body’s fatigue after work. Lying in the tub, the hot water untangling her muscles, her fingers bleeding green and yellow swirls across the surface of the bath.
Once, during one of their more heated arguments, Hannah had accused Ginnie of being dead inside, and Ginnie had immediately thought of painting. This part of her that Hannah didn’t know. She had still been able to feel it, a small warmth in her chest, in her fingertips. It was all that had sustained her in the hours after the argument. Ginnie convincing herself that it wasn’t true, that she couldn’t be dead inside if she still had this desire somewhere within.
* * *
“At night I split apart,” Thomas says. “Parts of me fly all over the world, even farther. In the morning I only have a few minutes to get them all back before I wake up.”
Ginnie squares the edges of a new frame, pulls a nail from her mouth, sets the tip into the soft wood. “What if you wake up too soon?”
Thomas watches the head of her hammer as it strikes the nail, strikes again. “Then part of me would be missing,” he says.
* * *
Someone on the other side of the food pantry makes a joke and someone else laughs and Thomas laughs, too. Ginnie stops what she’s doing to watch him, wondering if he is responding to the humor or simply mimicking the sound.
He listens closely to people, he absorbs their words and phrases but also their inflections and quirks of delivery. Repeating what he has heard days or weeks later. I believe Richard Nixon is one of the three most intelligent presidents in American history, he says, and Marion at the pantry asks who he thinks the others are. Thomas looks off to where the wall meets the ceiling, makes some of the bleeping noises that arrive when he comes up empty, like a computer realizing a gap in its programming.
That night after dinner he consults the encyclopedia, and the next day at the pantry he finds Marion. Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he says. Possibly John Adams, whose son John Quincy Adams was the sixth president of the United States but who is not on this list.
* * *
She had trouble with her heart. There were days when she was too weak to get up off the couch. Her chest weighted like it was made of stone and Marion or the boy from the pharmacy delivering her medication. Thomas in the kitchen making his own lunch. Eating at the table just out of her line of sight and then bringing her a bowl of soup, still warm.
Marion once gave her a pamphlet for a group home in Oak Center, a place where young men like Thomas shared apartments, worked part-time jobs. Ginnie thanked Marion for the pamphlet and then didn’t speak to her for a week. Feeling accused again, judged, like she was back with the doctors in Arlington.
She knew that she had no idea what he was capable of, what he could do on his own. She wanted to believe that she kept him close for his own protection, but she knew that was no longer true. She was keeping him close because of her own fear. She was more afraid of the world than he was, possibly. Thomas offering to walk to the pharmacy and Ginnie calling Marion, calling the delivery boy instead.
She kept the pamphlet in the drawer of Henry’s old desk in the basement. Photographs of men Thomas’s age, working the checkout at a supermarket, clearing a table in a restaurant. A phone number on the front, New Resident Applications. The pamphlet waiting for the day when Ginnie would be weak enough to throw it away, or strong enough to carry it back aboveground.
* * *
She saw the man in the parked car glance over the top of his newspaper, saw him see her at the front window of the house and then look down, quickly, and before she knew exactly what she was doing she was out the door and across the lawn, striding up the middle of the street toward the gray sedan.
She wasn’t sure what had come over her. She’d had enough possibly. All of this sneaking around.
The man in the car noticed her too late, fumbled with his paper, his keys, but she was already there, trying to suppress her surprise at the face she recognized. He frowned, folded his paper, rolled down the window.
“Wouldn’t you rather come inside, Roy?” she said.
In the kitchen, she made coffee, poured two cups. Roy took a seat at the table. Thomas stood
in the doorway, watching.
“This is Mr. Pritchard,” Ginnie said. “He’s come to see us a few times. You might not remember him.”
“I remember him.”
Ginnie placed the cups on a tray. “What do you remember?”
Thomas stared for another moment. “He took my picture when I was a baby.” He turned and disappeared into the living room.
“He seems to be doing well,” Roy said.
“Yes.”
“He looks like Henry.”
Ginnie carried the tray to the table. “You could just come to the front door and knock.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
She took a breath. “Has something happened?”
Roy poured milk into his cup, stirred. “No.”
“Would you tell me if it had?”
He lifted his spoon from the coffee, tapped it dry on the edge of his cup. “How’s Hannah?”
“I haven’t seen her in six months,” Ginnie said.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It’s not as bad as it could be. It’s been a year before. Longer than a year.”
“Have you ever thought of going down there?”
“I don’t want to destroy what little is left. I’ll take six months over nothing.” She looked at Roy. “Have you been down there?”
Roy shook his head.
“You’re not watching her?”
“Not as far as I know. There isn’t any reason to.”
“Is there any reason to watch us?”
“I don’t know.”
“I see you, I see the others, and it gives me hope,” she said. “When you stop coming, I’ll know he’s really gone.”
“I’m not here to mislead you, Ginnie.”
She stood from the table, carried her cup to the sink. “Do you remember that day in Arlington, when you brought Henry home? I was standing at the door, watching him come up the walkway in the snow, his coat open, his hat crooked. I thought, I had the thought, that this was the worst moment. That this feeling, the fear and helplessness, watching him come to the door, I thought that this was as bad as it could ever get. I could see, right then, a life without him, and I didn’t know how I could do it. I couldn’t imagine that life.”
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