Black Horizon

by Robert Masello

  “I'll speak to Dr. Sprague,” Nancy assured her, “and I'm sure he'll discuss your situation with Mr. Logan, too. That's all I can promise you at the moment. Please tell your husband we'll be in touch, whatever happens.”

  “Thanks. I will.” The baby let out a sudden squall. “Time to switch breasts. Thanks for your help—I appreciate it.”

  Nancy put the phone down and stared off into space. She hadn't begun the day with the clearest head, and now she felt in an absolute fog, genuinely troubled and uneasy. What would she tell Sprague about the Baldwin case? What would he tell Jack? What would happen? Again, she saw, opening before them all, an endless panorama of pain and suffering, a world of woe, now beating its way to the court of last resort . . . to the Institute of Abnormal Psychology, where miracles were performed by “the guy with mysterious powers.”

  The phone on her desk rang, but she didn't have the heart to pick it up. She simply looked at it, with vague apprehension, the way one might a snake in a cage.

  At two o'clock sharp, Jack checked in at the downstairs security desk. As he scribbled his name in the register, something he'd done a dozen times, he noticed that Tulley, who usually paid no attention to him, today was watching him closely.

  “How are you doing?” Jack said.

  “Can't complain.”

  This was about as sociable as he'd ever been.

  “You know, I read something about you in the paper the other day.”

  Jack slid the pen and clipboard back across the desk to him.

  “Said you brought this rich guy back to life. That why you're here?”

  “Yeah. I guess it is.”

  “It true?”

  That one Jack didn't have such an easy answer for. “Did I bring a guy back to life?” he said, buying a little time. “What do you think?”

  “I don't think—that's why I'm askin’.”

  Fair enough. Jack gave him a kind of knowing smile, and said, “Just between us, I wouldn't believe everything I read in the papers.”

  On the way up in the elevator, he thought, “Well, you've ducked the question one more time.” But how many more times could he duck it? How many more times could he tell people there was nothing to it, or imply that the press was just out to sell papers? He felt that, at any moment now, the truth would be found out, the truth that he himself had been grappling with, and trying to accept, for weeks.

  But Christ Almighty, how did you accept such a thing? And if you did, how did you live with it?

  The elevator bumped to a halt at the top floor. Just seeing Nancy, bent like a jeweler over an array of slides spread across a light box, gave him a little lift.

  “Pictures from summer camp?” he said.

  She looked up from the hand-held magnifier. “I didn't hear you come in.” She smiled. “I was so absorbed in these terrific pix.”

  “Oh yeah?” He took the magnifier and studied the same slide she'd been looking at. What he saw was a complex network of fine black lines, set against a pale purple background.

  “Looks like tree branches, in winter.” He looked up. “But I guess it's not.” Their faces were only inches apart.

  “You're right,” she said, “it's not.”

  He could feel her breath on his face.

  “It's a neuron, magnified four hundred times. The things that look like trees are dendrites.”

  “I should have guessed.”

  She didn't move away, and neither did he.

  “Dendrites funnel electrical signals to the cell.”

  He watched the way her lips moved.

  “Enough signals and the neuron fires.”

  “That's obvious.”

  Should he kiss her? The place was wrong, the time was wrong . . . but the opportunity was here. He had one arm resting on the back of her chair.

  “Then what happens?”

  She took a breath. “The neuron emits its own electrical pulse, down—”

  He kissed her, lightly, quickly, one hand resting against her back.

  She didn't respond to it. But he had hardly left her time to. She was looking at him very seriously.

  “—down something called an axon . . . Do you need to know more?”

  “No,” he said, leaning forward to kiss her again. This time her lips came up to meet his. His hand slipped up to gently cradle the back of her head; her hair felt like silk, fine smooth silk, in his hand. If only this weren't happening here, now, he thought . . . if only he could roll back time, to last night in his apartment. There, they had no reason to stop, and nothing to interfere.

  She took her lips away from his, and dropped her eyes. The dull white glare of the light box lit her face from below, and suddenly made him want to look away. The light was disconcertingly flat and empty. He straightened up, unbuttoning his overcoat, and saw Sprague standing directly across the hall, in the open doorway of his lab.

  How long had he been standing there?

  An earthenware jar, with a silver handle, dangled from two of his long, bony fingers, and he looked, to Jack, like some awful parody of a kid with his beach pail. He lifted his chin and the jar in unison, as if in greeting.

  “Afternoon, Dr. Sprague,” Jack replied, as much to alert Nancy as anything else. She instantly returned to sorting slides on the lightbox. “Is it okay if I ask what's in the jar?” He wanted to gain her a couple more seconds to compose herself.

  “Of course you may,” Sprague said, coming across the hall. Jack noticed he was careful to keep the jar from swinging. “It's all that's left—and in some respects all there ever was—of a male homicide suspect.” Sprague rested the jar, gingerly, on Nancy's desk. “It's his brain.” He smiled, wolfishly, and a vision of sweetbreads, as Mam had sometimes served them when he was a boy, flashed across Jack's mind; when he'd gotten older, and discovered what they were, he had steadfastly refused to eat them. “It's part of my research on cortical abnormalities,” Sprague explained.

  “Part of your research is about to escape,” Jack said, pointing out a loose clamp hanging from the lid.

  “I know,” said Sprague, “it's broken. So is my scale—I lent it last week to one of those idiots downstairs and now I could swear it's off. I'm going down to weigh this specimen now. Why don't you come? I don't think you've ever seen very much of the institute.”

  Jack had never known Sprague to be so affable. “Sure. I'll just leave my coat up here.” He turned his back to Sprague while taking it off, hoping to catch Nancy's eye, but she resolutely refused to look up from her work.

  “Come on.” Sprague gently lifted the jar from the desk, but instead of heading for the elevators, went straight to the opposite end of the corridor, where a steel door was marked with a red-and-white sign that said FIRE EXIT ONLY—ALARM WILL SOUND. He turned the handle, then butted it open with his shoulder. No alarm went off.

  “Can't stand to wait for the elevators,” Sprague said, “so I neutered the alarms.”

  Jack followed him into a cold, concrete stairway. They went down two flights, Sprague carrying the jar upraised like a lantern to keep it from banging into the iron handrail, and then in through another “neutered” door. The stench was overpowering.

  “It's worst at this end,” Sprague said. “The ventilation system blows everything this way before it goes out of the building.”

  It smelled like a zoo that hadn't been cleaned in years—a noxious mix of animal and chemical odors, fermenting in a contained space. There were long rows of metal cages, stacked on top of each other, and in them a veritable menagerie—rats, pigeons, dogs, cats, snakes, monkeys; the monkeys reached out through the bars as Jack passed, one of them succeeding in snatching his sleeve.

  “Whoa there,” Jack said, yanking the cloth away from the tiny, grasping fingers. The monkey screeched—in disappointment?—then fixed him with a baleful look. Sprague was already at the far end of the room, leveling accusations at two young men in filthy lab coats.

  “Its tolerance can be disturbed by anything great
er than eight pounds. What the hell did you weigh with it—an elephant?”

  “We don't have any elephants,” said the one with the brown beard; the other's was black. “We used it for a couple of snakes.”

  “Pythons?” Sprague shot back.

  “Garden-variety stuff, no more than five or six pounds at best. Hello,” he said, extending a hand to Jack. “Bill Potter.”

  His hand was grimy, and slightly damp.

  “Vladimir Cazenovia,” said the one with the black beard, in an accent right out of a Cold War spy movie.

  “Jack Logan.”

  Both of them suddenly stopped to appraise him. Sprague, noting it, barreled ahead.

  “I assume your own scale is in working order again—”

  “It is.”

  “Then I want to reweigh a specimen and see how it checks out against my first measurement.”

  “Feel free. Caz and I have work to do.” Potter and Cazenovia ambled off to a table in the corner, covered with a Plexiglas shield, and sat beside it on two high metal stools.

  “Incompetents,” Sprague muttered under his breath. He drew from a lower shelf a clean metal tray with its own weight calibration etched into the rim, then undid the clamps on the jar. There was a label on the jar, a white sticker with something typed on it, but Sprague had turned it so that Jack couldn't make it out.

  “Ever seen a brain?” he said, removing the lid.

  “Nope.”

  “Then you're in for a treat.” He said it as if he meant it. After rolling up his sleeve, he reached into the jar and scooped out the contents—a wet, quivering lump, mottled gray and pink; Jack felt a slight twinge of nausea.

  “It's fresh as can be,” Sprague said, holding it up to the light. “Normally you have to wait a couple of weeks for it to solidify the way you want, but I wanted this one as close to the actual death as possible.” To Jack's horror, he inhaled deeply, as if savoring a bouquet of roses. “This one's rather special.”

  He placed it on the tray, waited a few seconds for it to settle, then bent, with his glasses on the end of his nose, to study the exact measurement. While he made a note of it on a pad taken from his breast pocket, he asked Jack if there was anything new to report, any sensations, problems, physical or psychological effects.

  The day before, in all its awful glory, reared up again, but what could he actually confess to? To playing so badly at the show that he'd had to be replaced (a short, and temporary, leave of absence)? To seeing his mother—his dead mother—clapping wildly from a nonexistent seat? To getting a back rub from Nancy Liu—and waking up hours later to a bizarrely real wet dream?

  “Well?” Sprague said, still making notes on his pad. A dog barked, twice, from one of the cages at the far end of the room.

  “Nothing much.” He pretended to be interested in the notes Sprague was taking. “What are you recording?

  “Color, texture, anomalies.” Sprague pulled a set of stainless steel calipers from the hip pocket of his lab coat. “You didn't answer my question, and you haven't been looking good lately. Is something affecting you that you haven't told me about?”

  Jack was torn between his reluctance to appear like he was falling apart, and a growing need to unburden himself, to spill everything—no matter how crazy it sounded—and let Sprague attempt to make some sense of it. Too much was happening to him, and too fast, and he was increasingly unsure he could control it. But should he confide in Sprague? Was he the best—or the worst—person to turn to?

  “Nothing I haven't already mentioned, to you and to Nancy Liu—the trouble sleeping, the aversion to bright lights. That cold, metallic smell once in a while.”

  “Nothing more?” Sprague was holding the calipers, pincers open, to both sides of the brain on the scale.

  “I lost my job.” There—he'd confessed to something.

  Sprague looked at him over the top of his glasses.

  “Temporarily,” Jack added. “But I've been so out of it, ever since that episode with Garcia, I've been playing every third note wrong.”

  The dog at the far end barked again, and a second dog picked it up, yapping excitedly.

  “What happened with Garcia,” Sprague said, slowly, deliberately, “may have revolutionary consequences. The whole world may change as a result of the research we're doing here. The whole world. I'm sorry you've lost your job for a few days, but the trade-off, to my mind, seems more than worth it.”

  Why did Sprague always have to get him wrong? “I wasn't saying that,” Jack replied. “I'm glad I could save the guy's life . . . It's just that I'm having trouble dealing with . . . all those consequences you mentioned.”

  Sprague removed the calipers, and in an awkwardly paternal gesture, put one hand on Jack's shoulder. “That's why I'm here,” he said. “To help you deal with them. To help you discover the source, and the extent, of your unprecedented powers. It's fortunate—amazingly fortunate—that you and I have found each other. You may be the only person in the world capable of doing what you do, and I may be the only person capable of understanding it.”

  The two dogs had been joined by a chorus of others, and the monkeys were chattering loudly and swinging from the bars of their cages. Potter and Cazenovia had gotten up from their stools and wandered over to see what was wrong.

  “Did you remember to bring me your birth certificate?” Sprague said, glancing over Jack's shoulder at the growing commotion.

  “I don't have it. Mam—my grandmother—does. I can go out there tomorrow and fetch it.”

  “Good,” Sprague said, distractedly. “Do. What's wrong with those goddamned animals?” he shouted at the other two scientists, who were standing in the midst of all the turmoil, looking puzzled.

  “Got me,” Potter said, lifting his hands. Even the pigeons were flapping their wings. The stirred-up air was making the lab smell worse by the second.

  Jack felt a shiver—a reaction to the awful odor?—pass down his spine . . . and he noticed a low buzzing in his ears. He almost felt a little faint.

  “Somesing has disturbed zem,” intoned Cazenovia, turning slowly, mystified, in the aisle.

  “Brilliant,” Sprague muttered. He shoved the calipers back into his pocket. “I've got one other thing to discuss with you,” he said to Jack, “but this is clearly no place to do it. We'll go back upstairs.”

  The buzzing in his ears was more persistent now, like static. And he thought, beneath it, he could detect a voice, straining to be heard.

  “You'll have to help me with this,” Sprague said, “it's settled.” He slipped his hands under the brain on the scale, in preparation for lifting it. “Hold the jar over here.”

  As the wet mass was gently separated from the tray, Jack could swear he heard a voice, still indecipherable, whispering in his skull. Male this time, and guttural . . .

  A dog let out a yowl like a wolf baying at the moon.

  "Hold the jar over here,” Sprague repeated insistently.

  Jack lifted the jar, the label turned away, and held it out toward Sprague. The preserving solution—formaldehyde?—sloshed around inside it.

  “Hold it still,” Sprague admonished him.

  Jack was trying, but he felt more faint all the time, and the voice was growing louder. At the moment Sprague slid the brain down into the dark interior, the voice broke through the barrier of static, hissing, almost spitting, one word in Jack's ear: Diablo!

  And Jack knew, without even looking at the label, whose brain was in the jar.

  Chapter Eighteen

  WHEN DAWN BROKE, he was sitting at the card table, sipping a cup of decaffeinated instant. He watched, silently, as lights went on, here and there, in the apartment building behind his. Around seven or so, a woman with nothing on scampered up to her open window, threw it down, and scampered away again. At eight, the elderly twins turned on their TV set, and the heavyset writer settled into her desk chair. At eight-thirty, the gay dancer lifted his shades and did some warmup exercises.

  His
own bed was rumpled, but not slept-in. He'd lain down, playing Coltrane over the headphones for a while, but closing his eyes was an invitation to trouble. Thoughts came . . . and possibly worse. He'd gotten up again.

  Not that that had stopped them; all night he'd sat brooding over the events of the past few weeks. Nothing in his life was the same anymore—his old girlfriend was gone, his job was in jeopardy, Mam's health was worse (when he'd called about his birth certificate, her voice had been alarmingly weak and paper-thin); everything in his life felt as if it was coming apart at the seams, and he feared, most of all, that his mind might be following suit.

  Now that was a conundrum worth puzzling over: how did you decide, with a mind you weren't sure was sound anymore, if your mind was still sound? Talk about a dog chasing its own tail. Saving Adolph Zakin, he felt now, had cracked open some sort of doer in him; saving Ruben Garcia (though what for, now?) had kicked it open completely. What that door was, where it had come from, and what was likely to pass through it next—none of that was clear to him. But the possibilities—hadn't he already seen his mother? heard Garcia?—made his mind do backflips and his heart beat harder in his chest.

  In the vacant space—you could hardly call it a yard—between his building and the next, a dog chased a pigeon off a packing crate. He glanced at his watch—nine-twenty. If he was ready to abandon all hope of sleep, he could head out to Weehawken now.

  He abandoned all hope.

  Outside, the cold air actually made him feel a little better, momentarily clearing his head and lungs. It would take about an hour, but he decided to walk to the Port Authority bus station. What else did he have to do today?

  On the way down, he took Columbus Avenue, and browsed in the trendy shop windows as he went. Most of them had some sort of Christmas trappings—red-and-white candy canes, glittering ornaments, colorful lights. It occurred to him that he hadn't bought anything for anyone, and then it occurred to him that aside from Mam and Clancy, who else was there to buy for? For some reason, he found himself staring into a toy store window where they had one of those inflatable figures, about four feet high, that has sand in the bottom and rocks back and forth when you punch it. He'd had one of a clown when he was a kid; this one was a smiling doctor, in a white lab coat. Lab coats made him think of Sprague, and Sprague made him think of Nancy. Wouldn't she think it was fun to have her very own Sprague to punch in the nose whenever she felt like it?