“Wendell.”
“—use these lights on me, baking me, then injecting me full of all sorts of—”
“Wendell.”
“And the surgeries. They were endless. And I don’t know what they were taking out of me, or putting into me, but—”
“Who, Wendell?”
“What?”
“Who are these people?”
“I don’t know. Scientists. They’re called Unit 200.”
“Unit 200.”
“You don’t believe me,” Wendell said. “It’s okay. I know it’s messed up.”
“Wendell, you have to understand, with what you’re saying you’re taking me down a certain road, that’s very, well, it’s just very—”
“I know, I know. I get it.”
“But why? Why would anyone do something like that?”
“To make something new, they would tell me. To create a monster.”
“A monster,” Agatha said flatly. “Is that even possible, Wendell?” She shrugged and clasped her hands over her chest. “Is it possible? Turning you into something inhuman.”
“It’s real.”
“It’s not science fiction?”
“They can change your DNA. You hear about that kind of stuff on the news.”
“But you’re in a different ballpark here, Wendell.”
“They talked about it all the time. ‘Building blocks of life,’ they’d say, being torn down and rebuilt. Look, this is why I didn’t want to say anything.”
“But Wendell, even if that were the case, and they experimented on you to change you, why do it? What reason would they have?”
“I don’t know.”
But he did remember one day awaking to see Scotia, Thane, and three other men staring down at him, men in suits, thick-necked or no-necked, men whose shapes made Wendell think that they had traded military uniforms for designer suits for the day. The first was Asian, and Scotia spoke to him in a language Wendell didn’t understand, Chinese or Korean. The second spoke to Thane in whispers, and in his early morning haze Wendell thought he detected an accent. The third, Middle Eastern and mustachioed, kept his granite face unchanged, trained on Wendell like he was breakfast. Maybe Wendell was being made for them.
“In the end,” Wendell added, “it doesn’t matter.”
“It all sounds a bit Frankensteinish.”
“At least he was dead before they started working on him. I was alive.”
“Wendell,” Agatha said, squaring her shoulders and putting her forearms out at right angles, like she was pitching an idea in a boardroom, “you have to understand how this sounds. I know about the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, and those Cold War radiation tests, so I know that people do horrible things to each other in the name of science. But this is something else entirely. It sounds like you’re saying they turned you into a new species. Wendell, is it possible that…you might be…”
“This is stupid. I should—”
“Your hands,” she said, her eyes growing, as if she just had an epiphany, “the gloves.”
Wendell stood up, dropping the open bag of pretzels to the floor, unsure of what to do next.
“This was a bad idea,” he said. “I gotta—”
And before Agatha could reach out to stop him, he stood up and grabbed his coat, dropped the gun in the pocket, and headed for the door, opening and then closing it without looking back. Once out in the hallway he paused, expecting her to follow him out.
She’ll be right there, he thought, right behind me.
Nothing happened. He fished into the other coat pocket for his apartment key, unlocked his door and entered the dark apartment, closing the door behind him.
Give it a minute, he told himself.
Right there, she would be right there, knocking frantically on his door. Now that would be hope. But after a few long minutes waiting next to his door, Wendell went to the kitchen table, dropped his coat on it, and sat down.
“Shoulda died out there,” he said. “It shoulda all ended. Why didn’t she just let it end?” He picked up the small pencil on the table and tapped its point into the wood.
The day’s last hours were spent at the table, feeling his heart pump poisoned blood through his veins. He wrote on the table, absently drawing shapes that became the shapes from Scotia’s black miter in his dream, cabalistic and bizarre. He wrote more, his haphazard lines and chicken scratches bleeding into sometimes legible words—like mutant or bullets or murderer—or gibberish consonant strings like growls and groans spelled out, before completely fading into an alien illegibility. He squeezed the pencil until his hand ached.
His hands. Wendell took the gloves off, and saw how his fingers were beginning to hook—to curl—which brought to mind the witch’s feet from The Wizard of Oz, in those black and white socks, melting and curling like candy canes and receding back under Dorothy’s house. There was still skin—split and peeling—covering the hands, but it wouldn’t last. He picked at the skin on his right pinkie finger, and it gave way in one large piece, sliding off the finger like a brittle sock. The skin beneath—if it could even be called skin—was nearly black with subtle grays and blues swirled in it like oil floating in water. At the tip, where once sat a nail, Wendell saw why nails were no longer needed: the finger itself tapered to a sharp point, which shone like polished metal, a claw.
Now he reached back under his shirt with his hand to feel his back. The lines there had become steep ridges, and painful to the touch. That skin too would soon tear.
“Maybe it’s not real,” Wendell said, turning his hands back and forth in front of his face. “All a dream. Just one big dream.” He squeezed his right hand into a fist, and his pinkie finger’s tip dug into his palm.
No mother, no father, no institution, no experiments, no apartment, no city. He would wake up and be someone else, in the suburbs or on a farm, a man with a family and a job, just with a habit of having monstrous dreams. His past and present would be nothing more than a conglomeration of nerve impulses and serotonin, random molecules making random arcs, pounding into each other to make nightmares. It was all that his life was: chaotic and brutal and short, someone else’s nightmare. Somewhere that someone would wake up, and Wendell would be gone, mercifully. If only.
He wanted a knock at the door like nothing else. Just a few short raps. If it were all real, then a knock would be Agatha, there to convince him that hope was real. If it were all a dream, then a knock would merely signal the mind to wake. But nothing came.
He squeezed both hands into fists, actually hearing skin split. “This is gonna be painful,” he said.
Hope was a nice notion, Wendell thought, best served in Sunday sermons or Hollywood endings. Perhaps it existed, this actuality that things potentially can get better. But too often it lived as an ambiguous, indefinable thing, hope, this word meant to warm the heart, to give people a purpose in getting up every morning, but which did little else. Wendell hoped for that knock on the door, but he knew it wouldn’t change anything. So he got up from the table and walked into his mother’s bedroom, yet still cradling deep within himself—and against his better judgment—a cooling ember of that now hated thing, that hope, which was proving difficult to extinguish. But he had to extinguish it, he told himself, knowing that it just kept him from accepting the inevitable. For now, he was just ready to put the day to rest. He kept the light off in the bedroom and dropped onto the bed.
DAY SEVEN
WENDELL LOOKED UP AT THE sky, seeing black clouds coming in from the west.
He awoke ten minutes earlier, muttering to himself, finishing a conversation from a dream he couldn’t remember. He remembered sitting up in the amber light that bled through the shades, turning to see them lined up like chess pieces on the night stand: five teeth. He didn’t recall pulling them out, and as each had its root intact, they hadn’t broken off. Running his tongue over the five new vacancies, Wendell realized that they had been pushed out by new teeth, the points of which were q
uickly emerging from the gums. He had merely lined the old teeth up on the night stand.
Now, he walked down the street away from the apartment building, tonguing the new teeth, which felt surprisingly sharp. He tried to remember what he was saying when he had awakened, but nothing came to him. His muttering only recalled his mother’s muttering from years earlier, when she would stay awake at night in her room, candles lit and books opened on her bed, mumbling or chanting or praying, turning from them only to shush him and tell him to go back to bed. The one dream Wendell did remember from the previous night was of trays of uncooked meat, mounds of red that seemed to breathe. He tried to correct himself—Like it matters, he thought, like I can do anything to stop it—by thinking of citrus: lemons, grapefruit, and oranges. Citrus was benign, even normal, and the thought of something juicy played to his intense thirst. And oranges were just a few blocks away, likely being stacked up into little pyramids in their crates as he walked. It was Friday after all, and Brewster’s Market opened early on Fridays. At least it always had. He turned onto Mortimer Street, and could just make out Brewster’s yellow awnings three blocks down.
Across the street, walking in the opposite direction and pulling a little boy by the hand was a woman, pencil straight and with a face of unblinking fatigue, wearing a black ankle-length skirt and black blouse, looking the role of mortician, minister and mourner at her own funeral. The little boy—somewhere in that black suit there was a boy—scanned the sidewalk for loose change, saw a coin by a bus bench, slowed to pick it up, and then was reminded with a curt yank on his arm from mother that there were more pressing issues down the street. And right then Wendell remembered making a similar walk as a child, pulled by a mother who could see things down the street that Wendell could not, dark and selfish things, unreal but holding her every thought. Wendell saw it as if it had happened yesterday: their long walk to church.
It was a twenty-nine-block walk from the apartment building, and it had to be walked, as if somehow the walk itself was an act of contrition. But it was contrition of her own peculiar sort, repenting not of any impure actions or motives, but for her broken body, deteriorating due to her lack of will, her inability to focus her worry like a laser beam on the myriad ailments she claimed were constantly afflicting her. Diane wasn’t strong enough to destroy the sickness—and the sicknesses revolved in her mind like horses on a carousel—so she walked, head down, a flagellant dragging a little boy instead of a whip, intent on getting those “churchy folk,” as she called them, to purge her with whatever holy fire they might possess. Their faith was nonsense, she always told Wendell on the way to the church, but it was her faith that mattered, her faith in rites that she herself had emptied of any of their intended meaning, rites that became personal magic for her, esoteric, as she added a meaning that only she could discern. The churchy folk became her dupes, and their church her own mysterious self-serve pharmacy. She would smile, would nod politely and strain to find kind words, and then pocket their blessings like stolen change. Worse still, on the walk home, a spring in her step, she would be convinced of their efficacy, as fleeting as it always seemed. Within a week, her penitent’s walk began again.
The Church of the Holy Spirit of Grace and Truth was a perpetual tent revival sunk into concrete and sandwiched between a billiards bar and a pet shop, with six stories of apartments pressing it down from above. A deli in its previous incarnation, along came a group of assiduous Pentecostals to hollow it out, splash it with paint, and sanctify it as “in the city” but not “of the city,” their beachhead on an enemy shore, with the oft-raided crack dens a block down and the strip club across the street. So, on Saturday nights, when the working girls began to slink in the back door of the strip club, and the lowriders with their spinning hubcaps began to crawl the streets, people started to line up at the church’s front doors. Limps, leg braces, migraines and tremors. And interspersed among the physical ailments were the silent pains, hidden in cranial walls. Fears, obsessions, even some voices and visions, these were Diane Mackey’s people. 7:00 pm, and the doors opened.
Met at the doors with a smile. Always.
“This here is Moses floatin’ in the Nile, all them Nile crocs about,” said the doorman, a gangly black man with cheery eyes and palsied hands. “This here is Noah’s ark on the stormin’ seas.” His flannel shirt was tucked too tightly into his pants, cinched in place with one of those brown rope belts that comes free with a pair of chinos. He cupped the people’s extended hands in both of his, more an embrace than a shake. When his own hands trembled too much, he touched one of them to the brim of his fedora, and bowed his head slightly. “Come on in, folks. Water’s warm, spirit’s movin’. We gonna see somethin’ special, an’ y’all’re gonna be a part of it.” He pushed his fedora back on his head and ushered the line in with a sweep of his arm. “All of y’all. Room for all, water’s warm.”
Diane approached with little Wendell at her hip. Wendell looked up at her. Her plastic permasmile had to have been hurting.
“Any seats at the front?” she asked the doorman.
“Just come on in ma’am, water’s warm an’—”
“I just want to make sure,” she began, being pushed from behind. The line had grown. “I just want to make sure that—”
“It’ll be all right,” the doorman said, touching the brim of his hat. He looked down at Wendell. “It’s gonna be just fine.”
Had she not moved, the line would have moved her. She and Wendell entered the doorway, painted blue by the neon sign just inside that read Holy Spirit Healing Assembly and had an arrow pointing to the left. In the main room were rows of metal folding chairs filling up quickly. Church members greeted each other with shoulder pats, women fished for Bibles in handbags, and three young men moved a microphone to the center of a plywood stage that rose two feet above the gray linoleum. Along the far wall, next to the step up to the stage, a crowd was beginning to coalesce into another line. Diane saw it, coughed twice hard, and then a third time to get something loose in her throat, clutched her chest, and heaved a sigh as she dragged Wendell towards the step.
“We can start the line here,” she said to the group, smiling, then coughing softly into her fist. A woman with glasses thick like shot glasses and a pronounced bald line splitting her red hair smiled, nodded, and stood behind Diane.
“You can sit down if you’d like,” the woman said to Wendell, reaching out to pat him on the head, then retracting when she saw his response. “You’re a healthy little boy. This line is for those who need God’s touch.” Her smile took on a wince at the edges, as if he reminded her of another child, long since a memory. Her hand extended again, stopping five inches from his face. Her eyes wrinkled at the corners, her lips pursed, and she seemed to stroke his face with her knuckles, without even touching it. Wendell backed towards the wall. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m so sorry.”
Diane pulled Wendell towards herself. “Let’s just form the line ma’am,” she said to the woman. “We’ll just wait for the Good Reverend.”
The Good Reverend Wallace Biddle. He was huddled in the corner with a group of men and women, their heads lowered but bobbing rhythmically as Biddle spoke in hushed words. Biddle, Wendell always thought, wasn’t the name for someone like the Good Reverend; better for some little old spinster, someone weak and small. Wallace was too big for his own name with a smile too big for his face, tall and broad, cutting a swath through any crowd standing before him. A high school wrestling standout, Biddle talked about being “tapped on the shoulder by God” in college, which lead him to seminary, and then into the military chaplaincy and the 82nd Airborne. “The Army gave him his Bronze Star,” the doorman liked to tell newcomers, “but God gave him that heart of gold.” It was a silly line, well-rehearsed and oft-used, no doubt meant for church publications. Biddle though, humble but rarely quiet, never mentioned his military service. Still, Wendell liked to imagine him, fatigues instead of a suit, with the same fire in his words and the sam
e smile on his face, in some distant jungle or desert, preaching to men with guns and tanks.
Wendell watched the group huddled in the corner, hands on each other’s shoulders. There was something in the air that night, an electricity, and Wendell felt it building in the growing line behind his mother, in the pace of the footsteps shuffling on the linoleum, in the reverb hum of the microphone, and in the spontaneous claps and songs that, while emerging from conversations between friends, had been growing and solidifying into a group movement like a wave building and about to crest. Perhaps this was the breath of God, Wendell thought. As this electricity grew, the heads in the corner with Biddle bobbed quicker, affirmative nods to a question to which they all knew the answer. There was no need for someone to approach the microphone to call the meeting to order; everyone knew something was happening. All the seats were filled. The crowd now clapped in unison. Biddle provided the necessary spark. He clapped his hand on his closed Bible, and with a sharp “Amen!” ended his prayer meeting.
Biddle climbed the step on the side of the stage opposite Wendell, and the crowd ballooned up out of their seats. Claps and hoots were punctuated by “Hallelujah!”, “Praise Jesus!”, and “Father A-men!” Biddle surveyed his crowd, nodding his head, feeling the rhythm of the room as he walked in a slow arc, pointing to worshipers, smiling, holding out his right hand as if to feel the heat radiating off of them.
On the wall opposite the old store front, behind a long counter that once stood as the butcher’s counter, was a band: a guitar, bass guitar, and a plump woman in a yellow dress tight enough to have been painted on standing behind a microphone. The drum set sat at the end of the counter. The band began to play, and the woman behind the mike broke into song, soon joined by the people in the seats. Biddle sang too, casually conducting the crowd with one hand. One praise song rolled into another, and then another. When the singing stopped, the band’s music continued, though quieter, just background. Everyone waited.
The Death of Wendell Mackey Page 17