13 1/2

by Nevada Barr

  “Close,” Kowalski murmured.

  “Fuck you.” The last letters of the word “you” trailed out of Dylan’s mouth in smoke rings and broke apart around the doctor’s face. Around the still-red left eye. Dylan closed his eyes. Better the snake within than the one without. Panic was growing inside him along with the snake. Eventually it would be too big for his cranium and the bones would shatter, splatter out.

  “Good boy,” Kowalski said. More rustling. Then the doctor began to read from his notes. “You remember going to trial. Go there now. Go back to your trial. Are you there?”

  “No.” Dylan forced his eyes open. Stared at the doctor’s eye. It cooled to gray. He was going to be alright.

  Before the thought could stop the rising storm of panic, the psychiatrist’s face melted and reformed into that of the judge but wrong, pulpy; bits of it could fall off and drip onto the floor. “Shit,” Dylan whispered, then said, “I’m guilty,” because that was what he’d said when he was eleven.

  Judge Kowalski smiled. The snake rustled and sparked. “Gooooo oooood,” the judge said with the o’s flowing out of his mouth in pinks and greens. “Go back to the night it happened.”

  “Murder,” Dylan said. The word was red, blood red. It was such a cliché, he laughed. The wall behind Judge Kowalski, the one with the bad painting Dylan had grown familiar with during years on the couch, leaned in until it was almost touching Kowalski’s head. “Duck,” Dylan said.

  “You’re seeing ducks?”

  “I wasn’t.” But now two of them flitted past the corner of his eye.

  “Forget the ducks.” The judge was annoyed. He looked around, maybe for a gavel. Grabbed up snake pages instead. They slithered through his hands, making blue sparks.

  Spawn of the snake coiling in Dylan’s brain. The wall came closer. The door on the adjacent wall leaned in to meet it. Dylan put out his hands to hold them back.

  “You had the flu the night before. Remember?” The judge sounded peevish, and the peeve scoured the judginess from Kowalski’s face. He was just Kowalski again.

  “Goooooooood,” Dylan said and watched his own o’s flutter out and break like bubbles against the wall.

  “Go back,” Kowalski intoned, remembering he was on television.

  Dylan sank into the couch. The worn cushions rose up to embrace him, pushing his outstretched arms forward into the position of a man about to do a half gainer. “Diving in,” Dylan said and looked down. The floor rippled wetly. He wasn’t far gone enough to jump. “I don’t think I can fly yet,” he said seriously. To him this was a good sign.

  “Go back,” the judge ordered. “Your mom put you to bed. She put you to bed. Can you see the bed?”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” Dylan tried to explain. Acid wasn’t like that. It did what it did. “I’m just along for the ride.”

  “Your mom put you to bed,” Judge Kowalski went on inexorably. “You had on”-rustle, spark, slither-“flannel pajamas with cowboys and Indians on them.”

  Dylan remembered those pajamas. Really remembered them. He hadn’t thought about them, not ever, and now they were on him, soft, and warm, and smelling like home. Like soap and fresh air. Cowboys on horseback, little and perfect, galloped across his thighs and his chest. He didn’t so much see as feel them. Flannel and soft and purring. Ginger the cat, purring. She was on the bed. A ginger-colored cat, she purred like a machine gun rattling. He reached out and put his hand on her. No cat. Couch.

  Rich started to laugh and Dylan turned, expecting to see him in the doorway pretending to die a million ways. The door pushed closer. The laughter was there, bubbling and going farther away. “Rich!” he shouted, wanting him to come back.

  “Rich was there. Good.”

  Dylan focused on the doctor. Colors were rampant, raging; he squinted through them. The doctor’s lips were moving as if he chewed the air. Words fell out in chunks. They didn’t make sense. Panic rushed into Dylan until he was so cold, he shook with it, his teeth banging together.

  “Yergall ley wink ang deader mom.”

  “Mom.” Dylan recognized that word. “Mom,” he said again with relief. “Momma.” The room filled with butterflies. Kowalski’s words turned from chunks to butterflies; the colors stopped attacking him and painted their wings. The cubical was filled with them. Dylan looked up. The stone ceiling thirty feet above was a swirl of beautiful butterflies; they lined the blackened rafters. Their wings left trails of faint color in the air.

  Dylan laughed. “Momma,” he said again, and the word broke into more butterflies, and they smelled of warm cotton and cherries. “Momma!” he cried, and the butterflies came down and lit on his arms and his hands, his shoulders, his hair. Their wings brushed his forehead, warm butterfly kisses.

  “What are you seeing?” The doctor’s words cut through the butterflies, killing those in their path.

  “Butterflies. Don’t talk-killing them,” Dylan said.

  “Killing? You are killing. Killing Mom?” the doctor demanded.

  Dylan closed his eyes so he wouldn’t see the saw-toothed words hack through the bloom of butterfly wings.

  “The baby, you killed her first, didn’t you? She was trying to get to her mom, and you killed her. That was first, wasn’t it? That was it.”

  Even with his eyes closed Dylan could see jaws of words chewing the lovely creatures from the air, spitting their still bodies onto the floor and the walls. He raised his hands to his eyes. He had forgotten he was covered with butterflies. They turned to paste under his palms, squished between his fingers. Their bodies ran warm and thick over his face and hands. “No!” he screamed and opened his eyes. His hands were red with blood. Blood covered his thighs and arms; his face was sticky with it, his hair stiff with blood. “It’s me! It’s me, I’m killing them,” he said, aghast.

  “Killing your parents, your sister.” Kowalski’s words came into Dylan’s ears sharply, cutting their way in past eardrum to brain.

  “No,” Dylan protested.

  The last butterfly, saved because it had hidden in Dylan’s mouth, flew out on the word and lit on his cheek, and he was home, little and in bed, a kiss like a butterfly warm from the sun, brushing across his cheek. A gold cross on a fine chain caught the light. The sweet cherry taste of syrup was on his lips, but wrong, the kind of wrong that lets you know there’s medicine under it and the cherry is supposed to fool you.

  Dylan wasn’t fooled. It’s hard to fool an eleven-year-old boy, but he’d taken the medicine with good humor to please his mother, and because he knew if he didn’t get over “the dread blue mucus” as his dad called the colds and flu that tormented Rochester ’s citizens from October until April, he wouldn’t be allowed to skate in Saturday’s hockey game.

  The medicine made him sleepy. His mom sat on the edge of his bed and sang to him like she had when he was little. He let her, so as not to hurt her feelings. Her voice was okay, kind of deep and skritchy, but she couldn’t carry a tune for sour apples and just sort of made it up as she went along. It reminded him of the Japanese singer they had to listen to in class to prove nobody was still mad over a long-ago war. For some stupid reason, she decided to sing a second song, “Hush Little Baby.”

  Singing it to Lena, who was two, was one thing, but his mom was slaughtering it and he was eleven for cripe’s sake. What was he supposed to do? Start sucking his thumb and stroking his blankie? He was about to tell her to go sing to Lena, or pester the dog, or do some other mom thing, when Rich stepped into the doorway and started “dying” all sorts of ways that cracked Dylan up: pulling up a noose and lolling out his tongue, shooting himself in the head and sliding down the door frame.

  Every time Dylan laughed, his mother turned, but there Rich would be looking innocent, like he was just enjoying the music. Finally, she gave up, kissed him, and left.

  That kiss was the last normal thing that happened to him. The last good thing. A warm butterfly on his cheek, someone who didn’t think he was a monster.
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  Next, there was yelling and bright lights, men with radios-cops. Sirens screamed from outside and more of them screamed in his head. His head was huge and broken, a piece of jagged glass slicing through his brain. Rich, limp and dead looking, his face the color of the zombies they laughed at in the old movies; but it wasn’t funny. Rich wasn’t goofing around. He was dying. One of the cops, a huge cop, like a giant with hands bigger than Dylan’s face, had Dylan by the back of the neck. He felt warm and wet and wondered if he’d wet the bed.

  He’d pissed the bed and his parents had called the cops. Rich had fainted because he’d peed in the bed. He laughed because it was too weird to be real. When he did, the cop’s hand tightened until he thought his head would pop like a ripe pimple, his brains squirting out like puss. “You fuck bastard,” the cop shouted.

  “Take it easy, Mack,” said somebody.

  “You crazy fuck bastard,” the giant shouted, his face so close Dylan could smell the stale coffee on his breath and see the bristly hairs on his cheeks.

  He raised his hands to push the man away, and they were red. Red-red and sticky. He was covered in the cherry medicine. Too red. Blood, he was covered in blood. His chest was smeared with it. The covers on his bed were soaking in blood. It was on his face and his arms. Vomit choked off the laugh.

  “Let’s go take a peek at your handiwork, you sick little prick.”

  “Mack, back off!”

  But Mack didn’t. Dylan felt himself being pulled from the bed by the scruff of his neck like a cat. The pain in his head brought down black around the edges of his eyes, and his legs didn’t work right. The cop, Mack the Giant, was dragging him from the room. Two men had taken Rich into the hall and were doing things to his crotch, or that’s what it looked like.

  “Is he dead?” Dylan managed.

  “Not yet, you fuck,” said Mack, and Dylan wondered if they were going to kill him, if maybe they weren’t real cops but men dressed as cops who’d come to kill them. They’d killed Rich, and now Mack was going to take him someplace and kill him too. They must already have killed his parents, or his dad would have gotten his double-barreled shotgun from behind the dresser and blown them into tiny pieces.

  “They’re dead,” he screamed to Rich, to get him to wake up and run or fight, to let him know there was no help coming. “Momma and daddy are dead!”

  “Aren’t you a proud piece of shit,” the cop said and hauled him out of the bedroom and into the upstairs hallway. All the lights were on, glaring and cold, and there was a man with a camera that flashed and burned the back of Dylan’s eyes. “Look, you lousy fuck.” The cop pushed him to his hands and knees in the hallway.

  Lena, little Lena, lay face down in the middle of the skinny rug that ran down the hall to protect the hardwood. Her head was in two pieces, like in the cartoons when somebody unzipped somebody else and they fell into halves.

  “Happy?” Mack yelled and shook him. “Lots more to see.”

  He was lifted by the neck again. His feet tried to keep up so the cop wouldn’t pull his head off. Mack, the cop giant, was taking him to his parents’ room. Dylan didn’t want to see what they’d done to his mom and dad. With a strength born of sheer terror, he began to kick, and bite, and scream. He did wet himself then and didn’t even care. The world had gone insane.

  But it hadn’t. Dylan had.

  “No!” he screamed.

  “Look,” Kowalski insisted. “Look. I found it for you.”

  Dylan looked hard through the falling colors, through the blood in his eyes, through the dark from the walls leaning too close. Kowalski had something across his knees. He was holding it in his lap like a child.

  “Look what I brought for you,” the doctor said. “I brought this to help you remember. This is the axe. The one you used to hack your family to pieces. Look at it. Look at the axe. Remember the axe? Here it is. See the axe. I brought it for you.”

  Dylan looked. The axe. Blood poured from his eyes; he could feel it hot on his face. Panic clanged in his ears so loud he couldn’t hear anything else. The axe lay there, alive, waiting. Dylan looked at Kowalski’s face. It changed again. No judge. A cop. Mack, the giant cop, the fake cop, the bastard cop who had dragged him from his bed. This time he wouldn’t be afraid. This time he wouldn’t stop. This time he would get them all.

  With the power of the snake in his brain he rose from the couch on a clear, cold wave of revenge, rose like a god, shooting up. His hands caught the axe from Mack the Giant’s grasp. It weighed nothing. He was a man now, not a little boy. He was strong. The axe swung high over his head, the blade glittered. The butterflies were coming back. He could save them.

  With an exultant cry he brought the blade down onto Mack the Giant’s skull.

  15

  Again and again Dylan chopped. The axe blade sang; the butterflies flashed brighter and faster. Dylan could feel the muscles working beneath his skin. If he looked, he could see them, see through them to the bones, hard and long, wielding the axe.

  Mack, the giant cop, the fake, bastard, fuck cop, fell from the chair but wouldn’t die. Dylan swung harder, driving the blade through the crawling back, hacking where arm met shoulder, down again through spine and base of skull.

  Still, the man crawled, scuttling crablike, making for imagined safety beneath the desk. Dylan followed, his legs strong now, not the skinny pins of a little boy. The floor shuddered with each mighty step, and Dylan laughed. This time Mack wouldn’t do it; he wouldn’t drag Dylan down the hall and show off his grisly work. With Mack dead, the butterflies would be safe. Everybody would be safe.

  The last of the cop disappeared beneath the old battered metal desk, his feet tucking up inside like a kid hiding from his brother, like the Wicked Witch’s toes curling under Dorothy’s house. Axe held loosely in his right hand, Dylan grabbed the edge of the desk with his left and heaved. His strength was a hundredfold. The heavy metal desk rose up and smashed against the wall. The murky painting broke loose and fell.

  Again, Dylan raised the blade.

  “There is no axe! There is no axe! The axe was a joke. There is nothing in your hands! Guard! Guard! Help! There is no axe. Your hands are empty. Jesus! Help me-somebody help me. Guard!”

  The curled thing on the floor, the cowering coil of flesh, screamed these words, had been screaming these words. Noise became language; language became English and began to make sense.

  “Your hands are empty, you fucking psycho. There is no axe!”

  Dylan brought his hands down from over his head. He held nothing. Nothing. His fingers curled around empty air. He stared down through where the axe handle had been to the man at his feet. The cop was gone. Mack the Giant was Kowalski. Nobody was dead. Nobody but his family. And the butterflies.

  Dylan shut down so hard and fast he never even felt himself falling.

  He came to slowly, nausea rising out of the depths to meet a shrieking headache. His mouth was sour with bile and the faint taste of decay heavy sedatives leave behind. He twitched, wanting to raise his hand to scrub the cobwebs from his face. His arms were strapped down. Dylan knew the feel of them; leather cuffs lined with sheepskin and chained to the bed. Kowalski favored them for shock therapy.

  For a hellish heartbeat, Dylan thought he was there for that purpose, that any minute the volts would rage through his brain, ripping thoughts and memories out by the roots.

  If it hadn’t already happened.

  Then he remembered the acid: the acid, and the axe, and the butterflies. He couldn’t remember if he’d killed Kowalski or not.

  But then he wouldn’t remember, would he?

  “Fuck,” he groaned. Whether Kowalski still breathed or not didn’t change the fact that he was still alive. His throat was so dry he could scarcely swallow, and his bladder felt full to bursting.

  “Hey,” he croaked. He started to turn his head but it hurt too much to move. “Hey!” he shouted again after a moment. “I gotta take a piss.”

  That brought an
orderly running. They hated like hell to clean up piss.

  They hated like hell to do anything for the inmates.

  Dylan listened to the shuffle of rubber-soled shoes on the linoleum. He was in the psych ward. It was the only place other than the infirmary where they used the leather and sheepskin cuffs. After Kowalski had fried his brain, he’d woken up here. Even without the cuffs Dylan would have known where he was without bothering to open his eyes. The psych ward had a distinctive odor. The usual smells of bodily effluvia and pungent cleansers were there, as was the stink of stale food and medicines, but added to that familiar brew was a scent Dylan had identified in his mind as hopelessness. The odor, slightly like that of rank earth, came into the brain as a low note into the ears-dust dropping into a place where there was no wind to blow it away. Breathing the mixture made it hard to believe the sun shone anywhere on Earth, that all cats did not eat their kittens, and that there passed a single parade unrained on.

  “Hey!” Dylan called again.

  “Keep your pants on,” came a bored voice. “I’m coming.” It was Clyde.

  That was good. Clyde was okay. He was old, slow and stupid, but he wasn’t full of hate. In Dylan’s world that qualified a person for near sainthood.

  “You going to go chopping me up with an invisible axe if I take you to the toilet?” Clyde asked, as he undid the cuffs. Dylan guessed the orderly was under orders to have him use the bedpan. But that would mean Clyde would have to wash it. Grateful for the old man’s laziness and the shred of salvaged dignity, Dylan assured him he would not chop him to pieces but, indeed, would give him an invisible twenty-dollar bill if he could close the bathroom door.

  “No dice.”

  Dylan had only asked to be asking for something. Since he’d been put away he’d done nothing in private, including dream. Sometimes he wondered if, when he got out, he’d need an audience to get himself to take a dump.