“I’m revolting.”
“Against what?”
“No, revolting, Sister.”
“You’re God’s child.”
Wendell snickered. “You nuns.”
“We nuns. We’re right. And you’re stubborn.”
“This ain’t church,” he said.
God’s child, he thought. If only. That was a level of significance that would stop one’s breath, if it were true. But he wasn’t God’s child, or even his mother’s, anymore. Wendell had been reborn—recreated, some miasmic hatchling—in that building at the corner of the lot, his speciation making him a child to another parent. And for a moment he saw hovering in his mind two Cheshire cat smiles; the rest of the faces were gone but he knew the smiles belonged to Scotia and Thane, beaming down on him in his shackled bed like he was in a bassinette. But the level of significance that Agatha was tempting him to accept was too much. That he mattered to the old woman across the hall was one thing. But believing her meant not only belief in some bearded, enthroned deity, but also in some inherent value in himself, independent of thought and deed. Significance in suffering wasn’t enough; now she was selling significance simply in existing. To live was to matter. He wanted to laugh at her, while still wanting it to be true.
“When you’ve seen and done what I’ve seen and done,” he said, “then—”
“Come off it, Wendell. Just accept it as true. You’re a child of God, so you matter. You matter. Your life, your soul, whatever God knit together—”
“You think that’s what it’s all about. It’s your job—or your mandate, like you said—to sell me on that kind of stuff. Meaning and God.”
“Just because you’re a stubborn fool who can’t see—”
“So I’m a liar and a fool now?”
“A fool, yes. But just keep avoiding it all, Wendell. It seems you’ve been good at that for a long time.”
“No, Sister. It’s not that.” Wendell exhaled slowly. His desire to argue was fading, as were his chances of winning. “When you’re nameless,” he said, “and when you’ve always been that way, you make an easy target. They find you when you’re nameless.”
And with the immediacy of turning off a light switch, a shadow descended over Agatha’s face, like a pall over a coffin. Her color changed, and her eyes, flush with the harsh remonstrance of her last five minutes, softened. Her whole body seemed to sigh, and slide a little lower in her chair.
“I was a little girl,” Agatha said, “growing up in Pennsylvania coal country. And I remember a story that got itself splashed all over the local—and even some national—headlines. It wasn’t like it was one of those things that you knew existed, but just didn’t want to admit it. We didn’t deny something like this could happen because, at least back then, we really couldn’t conceive of something so terrible. So…black. It seemed that a little girl, five or six, had been horribly abused by her parents, since infancy. No, not abused. It’s almost too pleasant sounding. Tortured was more like it. Tortured.” The word hung in the air. “When the state police finally came, after a number of anonymous tips that could no longer be ignored, they found little more than a feral child, a wild and frightened dog with blonde hair and green eyes. I remember the eyes from a local magazine cover,” Agatha said, her own eyes fading out and going distant, focusing on a dying memory. “But these parents were barbarians, I mean real Nazis. This little girl, apparently an unwanted pregnancy, save for the fact that it gave these two people something to dominate, had no discernible language skills—nothing approaching English, at least. No one knew about her. No hospital birth record, since she probably was delivered in their own bedroom. Easier to keep quiet that way. She had nothing more than a dirty dog cushion for a bed, nothing more than table scraps and crumbs to eat, no crayons or toys or friends. Her world was the back of the basement door, locked most of the time, and the faint shimmer of sunlight through the windows when they let her out. She didn’t even have a name, Wendell. Even pet dogs have names.”
Her eyes were wet, and she kept staring past Wendell, to an image that didn’t exist outside of her own mind. Now she clenched both hands together, fingertips maroon and knuckles white.
“We do everyone a disservice calling people like that monsters. There are no monsters, Wendell, just abject, appalling, all too human evil. They were people, which is horrible enough to imagine.” Her eyes refocused onto Wendell. “But that nameless girl, that brutalized, victimized little child, after she was rescued from that hell hole, that only life she ever knew, she lasted only a few months. Dead. No birthday, no bicycle, no hula hoop or pretty dress. There was a big hubbub about actually naming her before her burial, something more personal than the usual Jane Doe kind of thing.” Tears were welling at the rims of her eyes. “Sad thing is, I can’t even remember what name they settled on. But I do remember seeing those two parents perp walked on the front page of the newspaper, those sick…people. Had I been a nun back then, I certainly wouldn’t have been protesting their executions, that’s for sure.”
She paused, the air between them pregnant with an unspoken answer to a question untapped. Wendell knew where she was going.
“No name, Wendell. No face that most anyone could remember. A headline on the library microfiche is all now. But I know, and you know, everybody knows…” She brought a hand up to wipe at her eyes. “Sometimes it takes something so abhorrent to show us that even the anonymous have names. That they have meaning, somehow, even if it’s beyond us.”
Agatha rose, looked around and fiddled with her hands, unsure of what she was to do next. She turned and walked into the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator, shuffled around a few glass containers, then closed it. She walked back to the table carrying two bottles of beer.
“I don’t drink,” she said, setting the bottles down and removing their caps with a bottle opener that she then dropped into her pocket. “Or, I don’t drink drink. This one here is for you.”
Wendell shook his head. “No, thanks.” His stomach was doing cartwheels.
Agatha shrugged as she sat down, and pulled one of the bottles towards her. “I’ve had this six pack in the fridge for a long time. Too long. A gift from somebody thankful for something. I can’t remember what.” She took a hesitant sip, then a longer drink. “I once heard a man call beer the Irish Eucharist. Blasphemer. Two guesses where a guy like that is now.” She looked up at him. “Sit down, Wendell.”
Wendell sat back down in his chair. He pulled the beer over to him, examining its label.
“You’re this throwaway person,” she said, “you’re this monster. You’re someone’s mistake. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes.”
“No. You’re missing the forest for the trees.”
She’s desperate, he thought, desperate to look into him, to find whatever last vestige of the human lay in there, an ember needing to be stoked. A fire for a different purpose, he thought. No more fuel for anyone’s machine. But it didn’t matter. Even the best-intentioned person—even the feisty and combative nun across from him—wouldn’t stop the inevitable press from the institution’s men. They certainly wouldn’t let any Good Samaritan stand in their way.
“They’re coming,” said Wendell.
“You’re not listening Wendell.”
“No, you’re not. This is what matters,” he said, with increasing urgency. “They’re coming. Today, tomorrow, some time very soon. And when they do,” and he paused, “I almost want to be a monster.”
“What?”
“They wanted me this way, didn’t they? So they’ll get what they want. When that door opens, and I’m staring at them, they’re gonna finally see…”
“See what?” She took another drink of her beer, but kept her eyes on Wendell.
“They’ll see me.”
“Like I see you right now?”
The headache was back, but now bigger, sharper, a skull-splitting monstrosity. The pain was focused in two points a few inches above each eye, like
mad animals trying to dig their way from the inside out.
“You’re not a therapist, Sister. You said so.”
“You’re right.”
“But you sound like one.” He stood up, removed his gloves, and let them fall onto the table. He held his hands up in front of his face. “What do you see?”
Her eyes widened, and Wendell saw in her face that she was working to hold it together, to retain some semblance of control. She set the beer bottle down hard, trying to hide the tremble in her arthritic hand.
“Wendell what did you…”
“Now you see.”
”How did this…Wendell, your hands.”
He was looking for the terror in her face, but found none. She should have stood up, clawed her way along the wall, reaching for her crucifix and screaming for Santos. Yet it wasn’t terror that he saw; it was sympathy. It was like she had finally remembered that little girl’s name. Her eyes welled with tears again.
Wendell looked at his hands, blackened and sharp, and the peeling skin that worked itself down each wrist, with cracks running like spider legs. All the nails were gone, with each finger tapering to a claw tip smooth like a beetle shell.
“You don’t see this every day,” he said, trying to smile but finding it impossible.
Agatha’s chin bobbed and her eyes stayed wide.
“And this ain’t all,” he added. “It’s all over me.” He turned his hands back and forth, then held them out, letting Agatha see them closer, but she retracted. “Legs, feet, my teeth,” and he tried smiling again. “And you should see my back, Sister. It’s like something from the movies. So who am I, right? That’s what you want to know. This is who I am. This is what they made me. And this,” he said, balling his hands into fists and bumping his chest, “this is what they’re after. They can’t have their science experiment roaming the countryside now, can they?” He clenched his jaw on razor teeth. “They can try to take me. They can try.”
And they would try. But it felt good, this assurance, this confidence. Yet as quickly as it came to him it was gone. He wasn’t even certain if it was confidence or something else, that new instinct without barriers, iron and brutal. And he shuddered, feeling that the end was near, as inevitable as death in autumn. They would appear at his door, flush with the thrill of the hunt, and they would see him, finally, their living grotesque, bearing their image. And he would have to fight with that breathless ferocity and cut through them like a can opener peeling open a tin can. And they would have to put him down with every weapon they have. It was all inevitable, written into his DNA and thus over before it even started.
“She did this to me too,” he said.
“She? Your mother?”
Wendell nodded, dropping his hands. “I saw it in the apartment, the power of attorney that she signed to put me in there in the first place. She forged my signature.” He shook his head. “She was my mother, my mother. As horrible as she was, I never thought… If she was still alive, I’d kill her, just put these hands to good work, kill her like she deserved. Cancer was too good for her.”
“Do you have that power of attorney?”
He opened his mouth to answer, but the phone rang—shrieked was more like it, in an apartment that quiet. Wendell’s limbs went taut and he turned for the door.
“No Wendell, no!” Agatha rasped. “It’s just Santos. I told him to call me.”
Wendell stopped, turned back to the table and relaxed.
“Why?”
“Don’t worry. I told you how Santos went out to Industrial Parkway. Today he went back, asked a few questions, then went downtown to dig a little deeper.”
The phone was on its fifth ring. Agatha hopped up, went to the end table next to the couch where the phone sat in its base, and picked it up.
“Hello? Yes, Santos. Yes, he’s here with me now.” She paused, and Wendell could hear a male voice on the other line, but couldn’t make out any words. She turned and looked at Wendell, then down at her feet, and back to him, trying to reassure him with a weak smile that the news was helpful. But Wendell noted the subtle drops at the corners of her mouth, and her hand gripping the phone firmly, then tightly.
“I should go,” he said.
“No, just wait a minute Wendell. Keep going Santos.” And she went quiet again. Her head nodded. “Yes, that makes sense. But Santos, did they… Were you able to see them? No, no, I understand. Should I call any— No? Okay then. Well, get back here soon, and we’ll talk more.” She hung up the phone and looked at Wendell.
“I need to go.”
“No you don’t,” she said, putting a hand to her forehead. “And put those gloves back on. I can’t… I just don’t want to…”
Wendell put them back on and stood at the ready, itching to leave.
“According to Santos, who’s hard to convince of anything, your little institution doesn’t exist, at least on paper.”
“Doesn’t exist?” Wendell said. “We used to get protested. News vans and reporters and famous—”
“I said doesn’t exist, present tense. It has a past, and probably a controversial one. But right now, it doesn’t exist. Santos went to the city records office, and found nothing on it. The building’s there, and there are people going in and coming out of it—he even got a few photos of it—but it’s not there either.” She gestured to a chair. “Sit down Wendell.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Fine by me.” Agatha sat. “Santos then talked to a friend of his in a commercial realty firm, and the place is supposed to be an abandoned building, scheduled for the past few months to be demolished. Santos then got pretty close to it, even thought about walking through the front doors, but a few men stopped him. Armed men.”
“So I’m not crazy.”
“This is all crazy to me. You, your stories, this building. Wendell, we need to call the police.”
“No. No way.” He took a step back. “You do that and I’ll—”
“Fine, fine. Maybe you’re right. Because Santos talked to a few cops as well. He used to do grunt work for a private investigation firm, so he knows some guys, and apparently there’s an investigation going on around here,” and she tapped her foot onto the floor, “in this building. It’s for what they’re calling a ‘potential threat,’ and… Wendell, stop please.”
He didn’t even realize he had taken a step backwards.
“It doesn’t look like they’re targeting you,” she continued. “Santos seems to think that it’s related to Drake.”
“Which is related to me,” Wendell said. “Since I killed him.”
“Wendell, you didn’t.”
“You need more convincing?”
“They think, like I said before, that it’s a prison thing, an Aryan thing. Drake was a real believer. But…” and she hesitated, chewing on her words, “Santos can’t be certain. This ‘potential threat’ could be an Aryan thing, or a drug thing, or both, or it could be what Santos called a wildcard.” She looked up at Wendell.
“I’m the wildcard.” He turned and moved to the door.
“Wendell. Wendell.” Her chair scraped across the floor as she stood abruptly.
He stopped, but opened the door a crack. A police siren rose and fell outside the building, getting closer.
“I have to go,” he said.
“No, just stay, and we’ll figure this out.”
“No, I have to go.” Wendell opened the door farther but turned back to her. “I figured they were just being friendly,” he added, “just offering their help. They sounded like experts. A name like Unit 200 sounded official enough to me. And who wants insomnia? Or headaches? They were the doctors, right?”
“Tell me about it, about them.”
“There’s nothing more to tell. You see what you see, and believe me, it’s far worse.”
“Do you know what happens next?” Agatha asked. “You leave, and then do you know what happens?”
“I can’t stop any of this.”
“We
ndell…”
He opened the door fully and stepped into the hall.
“You’re not like that,” she said. Outside, the siren swelled from minor key to major.
“You don’t know.”
“They don’t see what I see.”
“Something lonely, right?” he said. He didn’t look at her but could feel her gaze, which made his headache grind into his skull.
“Yes, Wendell. I know that who you are is—”
He closed the door.
“Open the door,” he said, “open it up again. Just open it.”
You do it, he thought, and she’ll be a target too.
He reached for the knob, but turned instead and went to his own door.
And then it hit him, an epiphany, sudden and incandescent, glowing in his mind like a light bulb filament. It would be bold, irreversible, and absolutely brilliant. When they finally arrived they would be enraged, but there would be nothing they could do. It couldn’t be undone, and that was the brilliance. He knew what to do. He knew how to regain control.
He would mutilate himself.
They had already done it, Wendell reasoned, they had already mutilated him, albeit in their own antiseptic, rigorous way. He would just negate their work. Destroy it. All their effort gone, with blade and torch put to their painted canvas. And he had the perfect tool for the job.
The knife.
It was a thick black blade, serrated, which was good, because it had a lot of work to do and it wouldn’t be easy. But this wasn’t surgery; it was revenge. And revenge was meant to be jagged and bloody. It just wasn’t revenge without pain.
All of this was giving him a heretofore unfelt devilish glee. It was somehow insanely sane and exciting. Finally, he was in charge.
It was waiting for him where he left it, the knife, on the refrigerator, next to the first aid kit and the gun.
Not the gun, he thought. That’s too easy. They need to see what I did.
When they came, they would find pieces of him like a gory trail of breadcrumbs, leading to the finished product: Wendell, felled and logged and split and in a tidy pile on his mother’s bed. And with what was left in him, he would smile, even laugh.
The Death of Wendell Mackey Page 22