I leaned forward.
“So help me out here, Doc. How did the cops ID them? Where did those names come from?”
“Fingerprints. The state’s DNA database.”
“Negative and double-negative,” I said, shaking my head. “No entries for either man on either the fingerprint or DNA database. These guys busted into my house, tried to kill me, had it in their heads to rape my family, but they’d never been arrested. They’d never set foot in a jail or anywhere else they could have been fingerprinted. Isn’t that strange?”
“It is,” he agreed. His face remained impassive, unintrigued. I wondered if he, too, might be a golem.
“So I’ve got this crazy idea,” I said.
I licked my lips. This was harder than it sounds, with my tongue all dry and tacky.
“You ever heard of a golem?”
He blinked at me.
“I have.” His gaze felt, his voice sounded, as flat as old Coke.
I took a deep breath.
“This is just an idea, now,” I said, “just me thinking out loud. But what if…what if these guys were sent?”
“Sent by who? By someone out to get you?”
“Yes.”
“Who would that be?”
“I don’t know, but he calls himself the Bald Man.”
He looked down at the paper, scribbled. His lips pursed, and his goatee twitched. I noticed that his beard stubble continued only to a point on his cheeks where it suddenly disappeared, giving way there to older but smooth-shaven skin. He had shaved his beard stubble to accentuate the angles of his face, making him look thinner than he perhaps was. Even kale-eating psychotherapists, I observed, aren’t above a touch of baloney.
“Why would the Bald Man be out to get you? Why would anyone want to send golems after you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I thought of Angela then, her catatonic voice, her stumbling walk. “Why do bad things happen to anybody? How does God pick the ones who make the rest of us feel lucky and flock to Him for protection? Can’t say I understand how that works. Just that I’m blessed.”
“You’re blessed.”
I nodded. “Oh, yeah. On so many levels. All you have to do is look at what happened in my house last February and you’re like, somebody upstairs loves this asshole. And He took care of me again just this past Tuesday. Think about it: how many chairborne commando lilly-white lawyers stab muggers? How often does the mouse eat the cat? That’s God, man. Looking out for me.”
I’d been smiling, but it faded now.
“And I just wonder if maybe the Bald Man knows that. And maybe this whole thing is bigger than any of us really understand. Maybe I’m caught in a grudge match between this guy, this thing, whatever you want to call him, and a much higher power.”
“You’re Job,” he said. “From the Bible.”
I stared at him.
“No,” I said, after some thought. “Job got ass-fucked. I got a writeup in Southern Rifleman.”
He pursed his lips again. Another glance down at that notepad.
“What’re you thinking?” I asked.
“I think we need to go back to February,” he answered. “And discuss this whack to your head.”
20.
Once again, I left my therapist’s office feeling decidedly worse than I had when I walked in. Fortunately, I had some gears I could shift.
An hour before I met with Dr. Koenig, the Clerk of Court appointed me as guardian ad litem to an incompetency proceeding involving the Department of Social Services and a young man named Brandon Cross. With an interim hearing only two days away, I had to visit him as soon as possible to advise him of his rights. I had decided that I would do this after seeing Dr. Koenig this afternoon, partly for efficiency’s sake—my shrink’s office stood at the halfway point between my office and Brandon’s facility—and partly because I needed to see someone more miserable than Yours Truly.
Because Brandon Cross was worse off than me. Much, much worse off. He showed me what crazy meant, assuring me that I had a ways to go before I ever caught up with him.
Brandon ended up in a lockdown unit at Magnolia Plantation in northeast Burlington. While the name of this place evoked images of Tara from Gone with the Wind, the reality consisted of something entirely different. Magnolia Plantation was an ugly girl with a pretty name, a squat, flat-roofed facility of mildewy brick that looked suspiciously like a converted elementary school. Four long halls shot out of a central hub that had probably once housed a library, gymnasium or cafeteria but now contained the administrative and physical therapy offices. Down the corridors, the patients lived two to a room in pods that someone had carved from old classrooms. Industrial tile floors and cinderblock walls amplified every hoot, holler and footfall to create a discordant sonic background that made me wonder how any of these guys slept.
And the smell. I couldn’t figure out which of Magnolia Plantation’s features sucked the worst; the drab walls and floors, the Department of Corrections-esque soundtrack or the assaultive bleached air that tried and failed to cover the scents of mildew, body odor and urine. If insanity had its own scent, this was it: poor moisture controls, armpits, feet and pee sandwiched in between Clorox and Pine-Sol. Bon appetit.
I introduced myself to the duty nurse as Brandon Cross’s court-appointed attorney and she directed me to Room 408. She buzzed me into the men’s lockdown wing, where psychiatric patients of all ages wandered a Linoleum hallway. In the second pod on the right, I found my client.
I’d read the petition and the DSS attorney’s packet of medical records out in the parking lot. Respondent is a 24-year-old male with a history of severe physical and sexual abuse that led to his foster placement at age 12, I read. Respondent suffers moderate mental retardation and disappeared from his Alamance County foster placement at age 17. On Friday, October 25, Respondent was found wandering the highway north of Glen Raven poorly nourished, in a confused and disoriented state, wearing clothes not appropriate for the weather. Respondent suffers from memory loss and severe delusions.
But the next sentence really raised my eyebrows.
Respondent believes he is a Navy fighter pilot.
I found two young men—Maverick and Goose from Top Gun, I guess—in Room 408 at Magnolia Plantation. I knocked on the door frame and stood there for a moment trying to figure out which one of the guys sitting Indian-style on their beds and watching Dr. Oz was Brandon Cross. Neither one of them looked at me. I waited a minute, then asked them.
Without even taking his eyes off the television for one second, the man closest to the window raised his right arm and hand straight out from his body and pointed his index finger at the other man. Who, unaware that his roommate had dimed him out, continued to ignore me.
“Thanks,” I said. I approached Brandon Cross. “Brandon?”
No response. Dr. Oz must have been on fire this afternoon.
“Mr. Cross? Brandon Cross?”
Still no response. He blinked when I talked, though, which suggested that he at least perceived my presence but chose to ignore it. Probably because he was a fighter pilot, a Navy officer, and I wasn’t addressing him correctly. I stared at his profile, pawing through the shallow understanding of Navy ranks I’d gained through reading Tom Clancy novels until I found a word that might fit. “Ensign?”
Now he looked at me. “Lieutenant Junior Grade,” he said.
He pronounced it wootenant juniuh gwade, unable to pronounce the “r” or “l” sounds. “I’m Kevin Swanson,” I said. “I’m your court-appointed attorney in the incompetency proceeding filed against you by Alamance County. You mind talking to me a bit?”
That was a lot of information for a patient in a lockdown unit to process at once. He blinked at me for a moment, and I thought, out to lunch. His head looked impossibly narrow, like he’d spent his formative years squished between two bricks. This promised a very quick, very simple and very shallow interview; if I didn’t want to go back to my office this afternoon,
I’d have to find another excuse. Because an in-depth meeting with a respondent like Brandon Cross wasn’t going to happen. Mentally, I started formulating my very quick, very simple and very shallow report to the Court.
And then he asked, “Go somewhere else?” Go somewhewh ewse? He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at his roommate. “Nosy.”
“Uh…sure. Is there somewhere we can sit?” I remembered who he thought he was and added, “Sir?”
Wownge, he said and slid himself off the bed. Walking with a pronounced limp, he led me down the hall to a little room decorated with motivational posters, a ficus tree and what looked like dorm furniture or decades-old leftovers from the principal’s office back when this place used to be a school. Bright sun streamed in through the window, but the lounge was bereft of patients. Probably because it didn’t have a television.
Still limping, Brandon dragged a chair up to the coffee table—not as cheap or scarred as the one in Dr. Koenig’s office but pretty bad in its own right—and motioned for me to sit down. He took the couch.
I showed him my copy of the petition and notice of hearing. “Seen these before? Sheriff’s deputies bring them to you?”
He nodded.
“So you know what this is about?”
He shook his head and told me that he couldn’t wead.
“How does a man get through Officer’s Candidate School and learn to land an F-14 on an aircraft carrier if he can’t read?”
“F-18. F-14 decommissioned.”
“My bad. How’d you get to be a fighter pilot if you can’t read?”
He snorted and shook his head again, a sullen gesture that said man, this is some bullshit, having to explain this again. He looked out the window, deep in thought. He took a breath, opening his mouth like he was about to say something, then thought again and closed it. His brow furrowed.
“What is it?” I asked.
“This hard,” he replied. Dis hahd. “I a…retard.”
“Take all the time you need.”
“I retard,” he repeated. “Retarded. Can’t think right. Can’t read.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “Just tell me how a man gets to fly fighter planes when he can’t read.”
He looked over my shoulder, and I turned to see a hunched-over old man hobbling past the lounge. Brandon waited for him to shuffle away, then leaned forward and hissed, “Not fighter pilot.”
“Really?” I said it like this was a surprise.
“Here,” he continued, “Retarded. Can’t read. Can’t think. Cloudy.” Cwowdy.
“What do you mean by ‘here?’”
He pointed at the coffee table. Then he pointed everywhere. “Here,” he said. “Here, here, here! Retarded!”
“You mean…when you’re in this place, you’re retarded?”
“This world.”
“When you’re in this world, you’re retarded.”
He nodded emphatically, smiling now, pleased that I understood.
“But you’re not retarded…in another world?”
He drew his lips into a tight grin and shook his head.
“In another world, you’re a lieutenant junior grade in the Navy and you fly F-18s.”
At this point, I felt like I had all the information I needed to make a recommendation to the court. I didn’t need to sit here on the state’s dime talking to a guy so obviously incompetent to handle his own affairs that I could have figured it out if he spoke only Chinese. Professional pride, though—and a desire to not return to the office any sooner than necessary—kept me in my seat. Brandon Cross may have been a mental incompetent, but the nurses and orderlies weren’t. When they saw his lawyer jetting out the door five minutes after he signed in, they’d say, that’s a court-appointed piece of shit right there. Didn’t hardly spend any time at all with the man.
“Why don’t you tell me how that works?” I asked. “Living in two worlds, I mean. Do you just jump back and forth between realities whenever you feel like it, or is it more of a surprise, like you’re sitting on the john on an aircraft carrier one minute and suddenly whoa, you’re in a mental hospital?”
He shook his head energetically. The grin had disappeared.
“No? No what? No, you can’t control it, or no, it isn’t a surprise?”
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Behind him, clouds obscured the sun on their way across the sky and the window turned from yellow to gray.
“No two realities,” he said, pronouncing it weeawitties.
He opened his eyes.
“That real,” he said. “This a nightmare. And I stuck.”
21.
Brandon’s DSS file waited in my email inbox when I got back to the office. They’d pulled him out of his mother’s home at age twelve, when her boyfriend had taken a shine to him. His special education teacher noticed him walking funny at school one morning and when she asked him why, he said that when he walked like that, his butt didn’t hurt as bad. Mama and Boyfriend went to jail, Brandon went into the foster care system. He spent the next five years shuffling from placement to placement until he ran away at seventeen. Nobody saw him again until they found him on the highway up there in Glen Raven.
For the first time in forever, I went more than five minutes without wallowing in my problems. I felt pretty good until I looked on my things-to-do list and saw the notation:
Find neurologist
Right. Because a baseball bat had connected squarely with my skull. Shortly thereafter, I’d popped back up and shot the batter. Yet another miracle. Or not. Neither I—nor Dr. Koenig, for that matter, being a psychologist—knew diddly squat about head injuries. Was that particular aspect of the shooting so miraculous? I didn’t know. But, I’d been thinking, a neurologist probably would.
My father still had a few colleagues practicing at Catawba Memorial, and I decided I would seek advice from one of them. I buzzed Kristin, my secretary, to have her go online and find me somebody, but when the intercom returned only dead air, I looked at the clock and realized it was six P.M. and everybody but the lawyers had left. I could go online myself—maybe I couldn’t type very well, but I could surf the web with the best of the best—but nobody’s office would be answering phones at this hour. So I wouldn’t get this question answered tonight.
I set the receiver back in its cradle and sat back in my chair. On my desk, the folder Craig had brought me from the Burlington Police Department sat beside a stack of credit card statements received from opposing counsel in one of the dozens of marital Vietnams in which I stayed involved all the time. I picked up the folder, opened it. I flipped slowly through the useless sheets of paper until I came to the photocopy of the first video store card.
Ryan’s News and Video. It made sense that Pinnix and Ramseur would not only frequent a pornographic video store, but hold membership cards. They had probably been going there for years, seeking porn that got sicker and sicker as time went on and they became harder and harder to impress. At some point, watching actresses cry out in fake pain during fake rapes didn’t cut it for them anymore. And they’d taken things to the next level.
Note to self, I thought. Check and see if golems like porn.
Given what they’d tried to do, they probably liked it a lot. Which meant that they probably stopped by Ryan’s News and Video frequently. Which in turn meant that the clerk there could probably tell me something about them if I caught him at the right time. I could put my Alamance County Courthouse ID around my neck to make me look official, make him think he had to answer my questions. If he wanted to get cute, if he wanted to pull customer privacy on me, I could threaten to subpoena him to a deposition. Tell him I could make him produce all his business records, all his security tapes, everything. I couldn’t do this—not without filing a bona fide lawsuit first—but he didn’t know that. He would understand, though, that his business depended largely upon discretion. And that if I shined the light on his little store, the cockroaches would stop coming.
The sun was
on its way down by the time I stepped out of the building and into the parking lot, but it had dropped entirely by the time I merged onto the Durham Freeway from the interstate. Electric light and the headlamps of a thousand cars beat the night back to the edges of the highway, where it pressed against the guardrails in an effort to collapse the whole works. When I got off the freeway, it suddenly hit me that Ryan’s News and Video probably didn’t rent commercial space in the best part of Durham, and I was going there at night. Evidently, since Pinnix and Ramseur screwed up their chance to kill me, I wanted to give their neighbors a crack at it, too.
This is some stupid shit, Swanson, Bobby warned me. You need to turn your ass around.
“Fuck it,” I growled. I turned onto
Holloway Street and followed the directions as the robotic voice of my GPS delivered them. I arrived at the Water Street address on the photocopied card and stopped. Ryan’s News and Video looked exactly as I’d pictured it: an adult bookstore set up in an old gas station. The owner had painted over the windows and bricked in the service door. A single island standing before the building hadn’t sheltered gas pumps in many years, but the overhead lights still worked and these threw a sickly yellow light over the storefront. It provided enough illumination by which to see and avoid tripping over the many places where the ancient asphalt had buckled, but not so much that the casual observer could ascertain one’s identity. Five or six cars and pickup trucks stood parked outside, all but one—probably the clerk’s car—backed into their spaces. Despite the poverty of the surrounding area, none of the vehicles looked more than five years old, and when I backed the BMW into the last remaining space, it didn’t look out of place. The business attracted a certain clientele from outside the neighborhood.
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