“So?”
“You read Scientific American?”
Barnes deadpanned. “Every day.”
“The hippocampus is the only place in the brain where new neurons can be built. Did you know that?”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
“So, if new neurons are being built to house these new memories”—he raised one eyebrow—“aren’t they likely to stick around?”
“You tell me.”
“Science says no. But look around you, man. Look at all the munkies walking and talking like they’re Tom Cruise or Tiger Woods. It ain’t an act. They paid their last dime for those memories, and they got their money’s worth—Tom and Tiger are still in there.”
“So go interview a munky.” Barnes got into his car and sat for a moment while Holston shuffled away. It was midmorning now. The neighbors were no longer on their porches. They had started their daily lives, their thoughts now overrun with the harrowing realization that it could have just as easily been them with a pickax in their chest. Instead they would be the stars of the day, telling their stories, watching the eyes of their audiences, hearing their gasps. They’d dwell on death for a day or two, and then blissfully pile benign thoughts on top of it—I can’t believe those people are dead. Anyway, what’s for dinner? And the next time someone was killed, they’d clutch their throats or mouths in shock all over again.
4
In relative terms, Saint Thomas of Assisi was a young church. There were no old brick towers topped with crosses, no walls of stained glass, no expansive narthex. But it’d been a fixture of Barnes’s life since his youth, so to him the building seemed ancient. It was a stocky structure, some parts painted cinder block, some parts vinyl siding. The lot was a spread of asphalt with worn lines and weeds peeking over cracked and crooked parking blocks. Legend held that the building had been a speakeasy during Prohibition, operated by Detroit’s infamous Purple Gang. It was eventually raided and boarded up until it was bought by the church in the seventies. Once a bustling hive on Sundays, these days the lot was more densely packed for Thursday-morning Machine Anonymous meetings. The Purple Gang would turn in their collective graves.
Ricky would laugh. The kid never took to religion, never bought into anything he couldn’t punch or kick. Mom once said God had given him a mule’s soul and a Glasgow Kiss on the day he was born.
“What’s a Glasgow Kiss?” Ricky had asked.
“It’s when you head-butt someone right in the nose.”
Ricky had smiled at that. He’d spent the next week proclaiming he’d kiss anyone who got too close. Barnes had opted against testing his kid brother’s commitment.
Barnes sat in the church parking lot, watching the cigarette-inhaling, coffee-guzzling MA reformers stagger into the church through the side door, some with their hair freshly shaved for that clean connection. He was certain those squinting in the sun were still suffering from the machine’s lingering effects. They held the door open and nodded curtly as one after another entered the church, full of the kind of humility only the morning after can bring.
The radio crackled a dispatch. Barnes turned the volume down. One of the MA attendees passed by Barnes’s vehicle, his head hung low. Barnes had nicknamed the man Pacino, due to the visible scar on his face and his dark hair. He often wondered how Pacino got his scar, imagining a knife fight in a dark alley. No doubt the real story would be much more mundane.
The machine junkies—munkies—met in the church basement. Barnes had spent many a Sunday morning in that same basement as a boy. Both he and Ricky. He recalled the basement layout, the green plastic chairs, the colored tape on the floor, the scents of watercolor paint and pine from the freshly mopped tiles. One Sunday morning, as Dad had pulled their red Chevy Cavalier into the lot, Ricky had asked, “Why do people come to church every week?”
“To be forgiven for their sins.”
“Every week?”
Dad had laughed. “Yeah, kid, every week.”
“What if they didn’t sin that week?”
Dad eyed Ricky in the rearview mirror, Clint Eastwood–style. “Think you can go a week without sinning, punk?”
Ricky waved a dismissive hand. “Pfft. That’s easy.”
Mom had stopped attending church by the time Barnes was twelve. A new pastor had recently arrived, to much fanfare, but each week’s sermon dug deeper into a new set of rules for parishioners to follow, particularly the women. No women should go into movie theaters; they’re dens of the devil. No women should smoke, drink, or wear blue jeans. But the straw that broke Mom’s back was a short film shown about a girl who listened to too much of the Rolling Stones and ended up overdosing. When Mom got home that Sunday, she’d cranked up the volume on her record player, dropped the needle on “Sympathy for the Devil,” and shouted, “To hell with those assholes!”
But Mom and Dad insisted the boys continue Sunday school. Johnny and Ricky would stand on the steps of the church, waving to the red Cavalier as it peeled out of the parking lot—Dad hunched low so as not to be seen—and then the boys would run around to the back and slip beneath a fence into the wooded lot behind the church. They’d found a set of double doors near a thick oak back there—a hatch hidden on the ground with the word sanctuary carved into the panels. The doors opened up to a booze-runner tunnel that once led to the church basement. Somewhere in the passing years, a church official had sealed up the doorway on the other end, but the one-hundred-foot concrete tunnel was still intact. Johnny and Ricky had spent many Sundays in the tunnel reading comics by flashlight, playing Go Fish, War, and, when Johnny felt like putting Ricky through hazing rituals, the occasional game of 52 Pick-Up. They drank stashed Faygos and ate from a massive pack of communion wafers they’d stolen. After their hour of fun, they’d dust each other off and head back to the church parking lot to get picked up.
How many of these munkies were former Sunday schoolers, too? How many faces might Barnes recognize from the days of beanbag races, watercolors, and ceramics? How many could still recite John 3:16?
The MA meeting leader appeared in the church’s side doorway. He scanned the parking lot. Barnes checked his watch: 9:01 a.m.
The leader backed into the church and closed the door.
Barnes jumped at a knock on the passenger window. A man was standing there, bent at the waist and smiling. Barnes recognized him as one of the MA regulars, a munky he’d tagged James Dean due to his coiffed hair, perpetual cigarette, and a too-cool-for-school attitude. Barnes imagined him as one of those brooding, dangerous types women threw their panties at. A couple of months and a half-emptied bank account later, those same women would throw a coffee mug, a frying pan, or a hot iron at him. Barnes pressed the button to roll down the window.
James Dean tipped an imaginary hat as the glass descended down across his face. “Sorry for scarin’ ya.”
Barnes shook his head, pursed his lips.
James Dean lipped his smoke and thrust his hand through the open window, offered it to shake. “Damon Beckett.”
Barnes accepted. “John Barnes.”
“You coming in or what?” Beckett said, gesturing his head toward the church.
Barnes looked down, smirked.
“Seen you out here plenty of times,” Beckett said. “Thought I might check in on ya, see if you needed a guide mutt to find the door.” He stuck out his tongue and panted like a dog.
“I know where it is.”
Beckett nodded. He looked through the windshield toward the church, eyelids down to slits. “Look, Mr. Barnes, I don’t mean to be sticking my nose in other people’s business, but I know a man with a problem when I see one. Pains me to watch him suffer. I like to help people out when I can, receive help when it’s offered.”
“I appreciate your concern,” Barnes said. “I’m good.”
“Fair enough,” Beckett said. He double-tapped the car’s roof and stood up. He yawned, and his body bent backward like a longbow, both hands against his lower back. His T-shi
rt came up just enough to expose the nickel-plated .38 Special tucked into his waist.
Barnes sighed. “Hey.”
Beckett came back down, peered through the open window.
“You got a permit for that?”
“Permit for what?”
“The pistol on your waist,” Barnes said.
Beckett’s face turned sour. “What’s it to ya?”
Barnes flashed the badge from beneath his jacket.
Beckett dropped his head. His body began to shiver.
Barnes had seen the process before, had seen it in his own damn mirror. A short circuit of the mind. Beckett shook for a moment before his head came back up. He blinked repeatedly. And then, as suddenly as it began, it stopped. Beckett settled into a bashful grin, and James Dean became George Clooney.
Barnes thought, I swear I know that face.
“Well, of course I’ve got a permit for it, Officer,” Beckett said.
“Detective.”
“Even better.”
“Have a nice day,” Barnes said.
After again tipping an imaginary hat, Damon Beckett waltzed off toward the church, flicking away his cigarette butt as he neared the door. It sparked as it bounced on the asphalt.
Barnes left the church parking lot and drove to his small ranch home. His carbon-copy house could have been catapulted across town from Kensington Street, or vice versa. His shutters were red. He made his way to the side door and let himself into the kitchen. He passed the stacks of unopened mail, take-out boxes on the table, and the murky science experiment in the sink. He entered the living room and plopped down on the couch. There was a bottle of ibuprofen on the coffee table. He shook out three pills, popped them dry, and fell to his side to try for sleep, but the gears in his mind turned, whirred. A series of memories flooded in, most of them not his own.
First he was Edith MacKenzie, an East Side hairdresser two years divorced from an abusive addict. Calavera had used rubber tie-downs to bind her to a chair in her own living room. Her mouth was gagged, her lips stuck together with duct tape. She saw the man in the sugar-skull mask and thought maybe it was her ex, stoned and crazy from some masquerade party. She grew confused when the man waved to her and said, “Hello, Detectives.”
She screamed against the duct tape when she saw the pickax.
As her body died, Edith MacKenzie wondered why this was happening to her and what would become of her quadriplegic daughter in the next room. She imagined Jesus’s face in stained glass with sunlight pouring through, praying that God would take her daughter as well, if only to save her from the hell of a life with a man who didn’t have the capacity to care for his own child.
Next Barnes was Edith’s daughter, Kendra. She thought she must be dreaming, seeing the strange mask hovering above her in the darkness. Did Mom put the wrong drugs in my drip? Her eyes shifted toward the window past her IV stand as she tried to determine the time of day. She felt an impact as the bed shook. She never saw the pickax until it was in her chest. She wondered why the floating mask in her dream said to her, “Hello again.”
Now Barnes was Chunk Philips. That’s Raymond to you, sir. Only my friends call me Chunk. Whatcha wearing a mask for?
Barnes got up and went to the kitchen. He poured three fingers of bourbon into a glass tumbler and downed it all, squinting and gritting his teeth. He went back to the couch and lay out, straightened his legs, kicked off his shoes. For distraction from other people’s memories, he whistled the theme to Super Mario Bros. He imagined the sprite, Mario, running across the side-scroller while punching question-mark bricks and hopping mushroom-shaped assailants. He and Ricky had loved the game, loved the Nintendo that had replaced the Atari 2600 in their home. Barnes had caddied all summer to make enough money to buy the system; Ricky had saved his allowance to buy games. Dad had been proud that the boys had done it on their own. “It’s good for them,” he’d told Mom. “They’ll appreciate it more.” They’d played that system until it hurt. It’d gotten to the point where Dad, who never once touched a handle, had been humming the repetitive tune to Ring King as he headed off to work, and Mom would say things like, “What does being a plumber have to do with any of this?”
Handles. That’s what they’d called the rectangular gaming paddles that came with the system. Barnes envisioned the red buttons, A and B, the black wire that fed out to the console. He felt the calluses in his palms and on his thumbs from long days of Metal Gear and Kid Niki. You couldn’t save games back then, only continue, like it or lump it . . .
He awoke two hours later. His neck was kinked, his right arm a shaft of pins and needles from having slept on it wrong. He sat up and struggled to open a fist robbed of blood. Eventually it came around. The drunken sleep hadn’t done much, but it was enough. He stretched to the point of trembling with the echoes of eight-bit Nintendo songs still in his head. His chest—rather, Kendra MacKenzie’s chest—ached where the pickax had done its damage. The phantom bruise was tender to the touch. Kendra had never felt the pain, but Barnes’s mind had made the psychosomatic leap.
You lay slovenly
Sucking at love’s teat,
You do nothing
Make no impact;
Your broken back
Is no excuse,
With a glorious mind
Still very much intact;
Burdened with the eyes
To better see calaveras.
Calavera had written the poem beneath a painting Edith had attached to the ceiling for her immobile eighteen-year-old daughter to view. The painting was a palette-knife oil rendering of a city at dusk, freshly wet from rain. There were two lovers strolling along the city streets. As Kendra died, she imagined the sensations the woman in the painting certainly knew—a man’s erection inside her, his body above her, his sweat dripping down onto her skin. Walking. Arm in arm with her man in a rain-soaked city, her legs a little shaky as they sought an all-night diner to kill french-fry cravings. Kendra felt renewed hate toward her mother for putting up the painting, for reminding her of the life she could never have. She died with the scents of mud and grass in her nose, residuals from that day, five years ago, when her treasured and trusted horse, Paddie, had bucked her off and ended her movement.
Barnes’s cell phone buzzed with a text from Warden.
She’s ready.
She.
The machine.
Barnes got up and went to the bathroom. He liberally coated his head with Barbasol, gagging all the while at the shaving cream’s scent. The gag reflex was Pavlovian, he knew; the scent was supposed to be pleasant. He dragged a cheap Bic razor from his forehead straight back as far as he could reach, and then rinsed the blade in the sink.
Once he was fully shaven, Barnes tore off pieces of toilet paper to blot a few cuts on his head. He offered a smile to the man in the mirror, but it came out deformed, like he was smiling at himself from beneath a cheap Halloween mask.
5
Barnes walked across the police station parking lot. The wind blew cold against his shaven scalp. A few cruisers dotted the scene, sporting the signature white paint job and cursive script, DETROIT POLICE. The precinct itself was a brown brick building, late nineteenth-century architecture. Three stories and a basement. The outside was riddled with chipped bricks, unidentifiable stains, and a score of bullet holes that’d been patched but not painted. It looked as tired and as beat-up as the city it was sworn to protect.
Barnes pushed through the station doors, moved quickly down the hall, and entered the technical lab to find Franklin, Warden, and the female tech from the Wilson home inside. Franklin and Warden were standing over a woman in a hospital bed on the near side of the room. She had an IV drip and tubes running to the oxygen mask on her face, suction cups against her bald temples. To one side sat a life-support machine, to the other side, the machine. The phantom bruise on Barnes’s chest ached at the sight of it.
Franklin read the woman’s chart while Warden said, “The family wants the plu
g pulled by noon or they sue. Doesn’t matter. She’s not gonna break the record, anyway.”
Barnes took off his jacket and shoulder holster, laid them both over the back of a nearby chair. He sat down on the available hospital bed, started rolling up his right sleeve. “Not gonna break what record?”
“For longest memory pull,” Warden said. He checked his watch. “She’s given nothing for the last few minutes, so she’d have fallen short even if we could keep at it. Still, a five-day pull is impressive. She’s only been hooked in for a half hour or so.” He popped the suction cups from the woman’s temples and slid the needle out of her arm.
“Five days isn’t a record?” Franklin said. He tossed the woman’s chart onto her covered shins.
“It’s six now,” Warden said. “Some guy in Kansas. Took a bullet in the stomach, lived for a while until the infection got him.” He detached the needle and its clear, plastic tubing from the front of the machine, wound it all together, and stuffed the package into the hazmat box hung on the machine’s cart. He wheeled it away from the woman’s bedside, into the corner, and started disinfecting the suction cups with a wet wipe. His cell phone rang. “Warden.” There was a short pause, and then, “Sure, come and get her.”
“What happened to her?” Barnes said.
“Domestic,” Franklin said. He came over and leaned against the wall near Barnes’s hospital bed. “Broken neck.”
“Poor woman.” A husband’s voice.
“Shhh.”
Barnes nodded. The wife-abusing husband would no doubt pick the machine’s punishment combined with a lesser sentence. The arrogant ones always did, figuring they’re so badass they can handle it. Most were trained chimps once they were done. Docile as babies.
Franklin reached over and ripped a blood-blotted inch of toilet paper from the back of Barnes’s head. “Get yourself a better razor.”
“Get yourself a better tailor,” Barnes said.
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