Black Horizon

by Robert Masello

  “I'll walk you down to the bus stop,” Clancy volunteered unexpectedly: he took his own coat from the hall closet.

  They descended the front steps, Clancy holding the wooden railing. At the bottom, he lighted a Marlboro.

  “So how's Mam?” Jack asked, now that they were out of earshot.

  Clancy drew on the cigarette. “She had a bad spell last week; I had to run her over to the clinic.”

  “What'd they say?”

  “The usual.” They turned down the street, toward Boulevard East. “She's not getting enough oxygen. Needs to rest. Keep taking the goddamned pills. All the usual.” For ten years, the emphysema had gradually been getting worse, and Clancy had taken it as a personal affront. There was nothing he could do about it, and he resented that deeply. It was one of the things that made him so irascible—not that there was ever any shortage of such things.

  “How's the lung?” The other had already been removed. “Is it functioning okay?”

  “Yeah, okay,” Clancy replied, “that's about all.”

  They walked in silence, past one after another of the small frame houses. Occasionally, a car crawled past them, looking for a parking place. Other than that, their footsteps were the only sound on the street.

  At the corner, they crossed over to the gas station and stood in front of the sign that listed the prices for regular and unleaded. The buses to New York made a stop here.

  “It could be a while till the next one,” Jack said. “You don't have to wait.”

  “I'll wait,” Clancy said. “What else have I got to do?”

  Jack had known that would be his answer. There was very little about Clancy that he couldn't predict—not because he was so easy to read, but because Jack had known and observed him all his life. When it came right down to it, Clancy was a much more complicated character than he first appeared. Jack could see beneath all the off-putting stuff, the anger, the bitterness, the coldness. What lay beneath it wasn't exactly a heart of gold, or even a very forgiving nature. But there were reasons down there, below the surface, for all that unpleasantness. For one, all his life he'd worked grueling hours in a machine-tool plant, and now he was finding retirement even harder to take than the job. His only child, Jack's mother, had been killed, as he once put it, “before she'd even had a chance to stop being a teenage jackass.” And now his wife, of forty-six years, was slowly being consumed by something he was powerless to stop. Clancy wasn't the kind of man to articulate his feelings—even his love for Mam. Or his fear of losing her. Instead, he bottled everything up inside, where it all curdled and turned sour. He was, in the end, someone who'd been frustrated and confused by life. And Jack felt sorry for him.

  Which still didn't make him any easier to be around.

  With relief, Jack saw the bus make the turn at the top of the hill and wait for the light.

  “Here it comes,” he said.

  Clancy took one last pull on his cigarette, then flicked the butt into the street. “Mam said to ask if you need any money.” He was already reaching into his trouser pocket, where he carried his money clip.

  Jack stopped him. “Hey, I'm working these days, remember?” He held out one arm to signal the bus to stop. “And it's union wages, too.” After he got on board, he raised one hand to wave good-bye, but through the tinted glass Clancy couldn't see him.

  Chapter Seven

  “I STILL DON’T get it.”

  Nancy was used to this; once again, she patiently explained what the institute was, how long it had been around, what the purpose of their research was. “And we will pay you for your time,” she reiterated. This Logan guy was a hard sell—first she'd had to go through all the hoops at the Post just to ferret out his name, and now that she'd found him she had to convince him to cooperate. He still sounded dubious.

  “Dr. Sprague will simply interview you about your experience outside the theater that night, and possibly conduct some tests—none of which will cause you any pain or discomfort. I promise you. People we've interviewed in the past have actually said they enjoyed it.” There was still a silence on the line. “Trust me.”

  “I've never even laid eyes on you.”

  “One more reason to come in,” she said, with a laugh. She didn't normally do this, flirt with a prospective subject, but Sprague would have her head if she didn't get Logan to come in. And besides, she had to admit, there was something about his voice that she did sort of like.

  “When would you want to do this?” he asked, still sounding uncommitted.

  “Anytime,” Nancy assured him. “Even this afternoon, if you're free. You could be in at three and out by four. With a hundred dollars for your trouble.” What else could she say to convince him? “It would really be a big help to us here if you could manage it.”

  He was silent again, then said, “Let me get a pencil.”

  Victory! she thought. And she gave him the address and whom to ask for when he got there.

  This was dumb, Jack thought, and maybe even larcenous. He was going to take these people's money and waste their time, answering a lot of questions he knew nothing about. The incident with Zakin was getting completely out of hand—he'd take these tests, or whatever they were, pocket the hundred, and let the whole thing drop. Today would be an end of it.

  At York Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street, he got off the bus and walked down to the institute, a nondescript block of gray stone, five or six stories high, with black wire mesh crisscrossing every window. Jack found that a tad disturbing.

  Inside, it wasn't much better. A uniformed security guard, with a face like a bulldog's, sat behind a semicircular counter that had several small video screens built into it.

  “What do you want?” he snapped.

  “I'm here to see Nancy Liu. She's expecting me.”

  Scowling, he pushed a clipboard at Jack to sign in on. Then he studied the signature as if he were sure this was some kind of fraud. Finally, he called her extension. “Yeah, I'll send him up.” He jerked one thumb toward the single elevator at the back of the entry hall. “Top floor, laboratory C. As in cat.” He said it as if it were a profanity.

  The elevator itself was small and rickety, and as it slowly went up past the first five floors, Jack wondered exactly what went on in here. Abnormal psychology. Were they interviewing chronic nail-biters, or teenage arsonists? Were there people in here getting electro-shock therapy, the way Jack Nicholson had gotten it in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest? Were there dogs and monkeys, in rows of cages, with electrodes in their brains and levers they had to push if they wanted to get food or water? He strained to hear some sound as the elevator passed each floor, but there was nothing. Not even Muzak.

  At six, it bumped to a halt. Nancy was waiting for him when the door slid open.

  She was black and white—that was the first impression to cross Jack's mind. Her hair was jet black and shone like a dark frame around her face; everything else was white—her pants, her shoes, the lab coat.

  No, not everything. Her eyes were black, too. And luminous.

  “You met Tulley downstairs?”

  “The guard?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nice guy,” Jack said. “I liked him a lot.”

  “Everyone does.” She smiled. “This is the only job he's had since his parole . . . for armed robbery and assault.”

  “Really?” Jack said, incredulously.

  “Really. Dr. Sprague had originally seen him as a patient. When he was up for parole, Sprague arranged for him to get this job. I just thought you should know that we do good works here.”

  “I'm impressed.”

  “I was hoping you would be.” She led him down a short corridor and in past a steel-plated door. “Before you meet Dr. Sprague, I need to get some information.”

  “Shoot.” Jack was surprised at how comfortable he already felt with her. She was very pretty, and probably the first Chinese girl he'd ever met who didn't play the violin . . . so far as he knew. Every string section he'd ev
er seen looked as though it had just come in from Hong Kong.

  He sat down in the contoured plastic chair across from the desk—whose contours ever fit these chairs? he wondered—and answered the questions she read to him from a printed form. So far, they were easy. Name, address, place of birth—stuff like that. At marital status, he said single, and while jotting it down, she nodded, almost imperceptibly.

  “Is that the right answer?”

  She blushed, and tried to cover by saying sententiously, “At the institute, there are no right answers—only right questions.”

  Then she ran down a list of diseases, asking if he'd had everything from mumps and chicken pox—yes—to serious afflictions like heart disease and tuberculosis—no. When she asked about his mother's medical history, it got tricky.

  “I don't know,” he said. “She died soon after I was born.”

  “Oh gosh,” Nancy said, looking up from the form, “I'm sorry.” Her pen slid down the page. “What about your father?” “I'm afraid that's a blank, too. I don't know who he was.” He said it as matter-of-factly as he could.

  Nancy, without comment, made some notation on the form.

  Over the years, Jack had gone through a lot of changes when it came to that last question. As a little boy, it hadn't mattered at all—as far as he was concerned, Clancy was his father. When he got a little older, and learned the truth—or what was known of it—it had gotten harder. For a while, he went through a phase in which he imagined all sorts of men, men he passed on the street or sat across from on the bus, to be his father, and half-expected any one of them suddenly to rise up in front of him, clasp him in an embrace, and declare himself. Of course it had never happened, and now, as a grown-up, he took some grim satisfaction from dealing with the question as bluntly as possible. There was some sort of retribution in it.

  “I think we're done with the background information,” Nancy said, in subdued tones.

  That was the only drawback to his brutal honesty—it made other people embarrassed for him.

  “So what happens next? You tie me down and perform the lobotomy?”

  “Close, but not that bad. Have you ever had an EKG—electrocardiogram—or an EEG—electroencephalogram—done?”

  “No.” Nor did he want to now.

  “They're really very simple, and totally painless.”

  “Trust you?” Jack said, recalling their phone conversation.

  She laughed. “Trust me.”

  In an adjoining room, Jack found an examination table covered with the standard white paper, and surrounded by the usual paraphernalia of a doctor's office. “You want me on the table?”

  “Please.” She was wheeling away from the wall a wide metal trolley, with two blue machines roughly the size of typewriters resting on its top shelf; both machines had strips of paper, about six inches wide, fitted into their top surface. On the shelf below them, between a jar of tongue depressors and a box of rubber gloves, Jack thought he spotted a Sony Walkman.

  “You'll have to remove your shirt, your shoes, and your socks.”

  “Isn't this a bit kinky?” Jack said, starting to unlace his sneakers.

  “You ain't seen nothin’ yet.”

  He wedged his socks into his shoes, and let them fall to the floor. When he'd taken his shirt off, Nancy folded it and put it on the counter behind her, then cranked the top of the table to a slightly elevated position. “Now if you'll just lean back,” she said, rolling the cuffs of his jeans up above his ankles. Taking one of the tongue depressors from the lower shelf, she dipped it into a jar of Vaseline and spread the petroleum jelly in smooth patches on the inside of both ankles.

  “You weren't kidding.”

  “It gets better.” Over the skin she'd just coated, she strapped two thin bands of black rubber, which were themselves attached to wires that fed into the machine on the left. Then she came to Jack's side, and spread more of the Vaseline on either side of his chest, just above the nipples. Her hair, cut straight across at shoulder level, fell forward as she worked.

  “This part you're gonna love.” Squeezing two hollow suction cups between her fingers, she stuck them to the spots she had daubed on his chest, and gave them each a little twist to make them stay.

  “Almost done.” Quickly and expertly, she anointed each of his temples, two spots on his forehead, and another at the base of his skull in back; to each of these spots, she attached a small, sticky electrode, all of which were wired back to the blue machine on the right.

  “Don't I at least get a last cigarette?” Jack said.

  “Nope. The whole building is a no-smoking zone. But you do get headphones.” With this, she produced the Walkman Jack had seen earlier. “These are just going to play a relaxation tape for you. After you put them on, I'm going to start both machines, simultaneously, and let them run for about ten minutes. All you have to do is lie here and think about anything you want. Just don't try to get up or do anything. . . . Any questions?”

  “What's the tape?”

  “Heavy metal.” She slipped them onto his head, adjusted some dials on the machines, then said, the way an emcee might, “You're on.”

  Over the headphones, he heard nothing but a little static, and then, far off, what sounded like the plaintive cry of a sea gull. It was, because the next thing he heard were waves, breaking gently against a shore. Ebbing, and flowing, breaking, and retreating. He smiled and closed his eyes. This was a piece of cake, for a hundred bucks. The machines gave him no sensation at all; there was only a slight tugging on his chest where the suction cups were attached.

  Think about anything . . . anything at all. At first that meant the crackly feeling of the paper sheet beneath him, and the slight chill where the Vaseline wasn't sufficiently covered by the cups or electrodes. The table itself was pretty comfortable; he wriggled his toes and felt the constriction of the ankle bands. He cracked one eye open; Nancy was jotting something down on a clipboard. He liked the way, with her head bent forward, her hair curved inward around her face. She caught his look, put the clipboard down, raised ten fingers to indicate how long she'd be gone, and left the room; when she closed the door behind her, a draft blew across his bare feet.

  He closed his eyes again. Stephanie came to mind, unbidden, unwanted. He thought about the last afternoon he'd seen her, when she came to pick up that Schubert score. She'd looked good; she always looked good. Maybe too good; maybe that's why he'd wanted her so badly, and why it hurt as much as it did to lose her. If she'd been the right person for him, they'd have gotten along better than they did—right? And she wouldn't have felt the need to go looking for a Kurt . . . Kurt and Stephanie. Together. Stephanie and Kurt. Before he could stop himself, he was envisioning the two of them going to dinner, browsing through the flea market on Columbus Avenue, taking a drive in the country. Waking up in the morning. Making love . . . He saw Stephanie, tilting her chin up, the way she did just before coming; and Kurt, whom he'd seen only once in his life, bearing down on her, staring down into her eyes the way Jack had liked to do. Involuntarily his eyes squeezed harder shut, to banish the image: himself, he thought, think of himself instead, the first time that he had made love to her. Think of that. In his studio, that summer afternoon; they'd been out walking in the boat basin. Stephanie was wearing jogging shorts and a “Mostly Mozart” T-shirt. He gave her a glass of orange juice, with ice. She had gulped it down so fast a trickle of juice had run down her chin. He had wiped it away with one finger, then licked the finger. Then her. He remembered taking the bottom of the T-shirt, and lifting it up over her head. She was full-breasted, but never, as he would learn, wore a bra. He had dipped his finger in the orange juice remaining in the glass, then touched it to her nipples. “It's a good way to prevent colds,” she had said, as he cupped each breast, licking away the juice. “Vitamin C.”

  He felt now a certain tension in his crotch, and thought, for one awful moment, that the machines might somehow have recorded what he'd been thinking about, or his phys
ical response. No, no, nothing like that could have been done, he told himself—these machines couldn't read his mind, they could only record . . . what? Ups and downs, fluctuations of his heartbeat, the frequency of his alpha waves, whatever . . . but nothing concrete, specific.

  Still, he didn't want to think about Stephanie and all that anymore. Something else, he thought, think about something else. He concentrated again on the sound of the waves playing softly over the headphones. The waves made him think of the beach, and the boardwalk at Asbury Park. Mam and Clancy had taken him there many times when he was a kid. He remembered walking over the wooden slats, worried that his foot would slip and get wedged between them. And riding the Ferris wheel with Mam, the car they were in swaying as it finally lurched to the very top and stayed for what seemed an eternity. The ocean in the distance, just beyond the lighted strip of beach, had looked to Jack like the night sky—black, boundless, but with moonlight, and the occasional boat beacon, speckling it like stars.

  He had played on the beach many summer days over the years—with a red pail when he was very young, with a transistor radio when he was older. He'd always been a builder, of sand castles, moats, tunnels to China. But eventually the tide would rise like eager fingers, to pull down the walls of his fortress, or fill the hole he was still busily excavating . . . a hole in the sand that got darker and colder the deeper he went, and that he couldn't ever keep from crumbling inward . . . as it had that morning, that hot summer morning, with Freddy Nunemaker.

  Mam had warned him, stay away; the cyclone fence had a sign saying DANGER. But Freddy said come on, and Jack followed—over the fence, and into the deserted construction site. A huge yellow crane towered, like a slumbering dinosaur, high above his head. “The Desert Fox!” Freddy cried, bobbing and weaving across the site as if avoiding gunfire, his toy bazooka mounted on one shoulder. “Cover me!” He was wearing a G.I. Joe helmet made of green plastic, and a pair of Keds with one long, white lace untied; it trailed after him as he scrambled up a mountain of sand, hot and dry on the surface, still damp, from the night's rain, below. Jack said, “I don't think you should try that,” but Freddy was already halfway to the top. Behind him loomed a red steel scaffolding, ten or twelve stories high—an addition to the office complex being built. “King of the mountain!” Freddy shouted. He aimed his bazooka at Jack, standing far below him, and fired; a blue plastic shell popped out of the muzzle, and tumbled harmlessly through the air.