Captain Quad

by Sean Costello

  "You stay out of my room!" Peter screamed. "And stay out of my life!"

  Keeping one eye on Peter, Lowe hustled his entourage out the door. Peter heard him barking orders at a nurse—and knew that he was meant to hear every word.

  "I want him sedated," Lowe commanded in that cool, imperious tone Peter had come to despise over the years. "And I want someone from Psychiatry up here to see him today. He's agitated. Agitated and irrational." Underscoring the doctor's words, Peter heard the busy scribble of his pen on an order sheet.

  "Nobody touches me with dope," he hollered. "If anyone tries, I'll bite off his fingers!" Furious tears stung his eyes. "Do you hear me? I'll spit in the fucker's face! I'll—"

  You'll do what? a mocking voice interrupted.

  You'll do shit, another voice answered. That's what.

  Consumed with rage, Peter thumped his head repeatedly into his pillow, wishing it were a cinder-block wall.

  Sam turned up around four that afternoon, freighted with books, his pocked cheeks rosy from the brisk autumn air. He had gone first to the ICU, and was gratified to find that Peter had been shipped back upstairs to his room. In the glow of his relief, Sam had forgotten about the implant. The palpable gloom reminded him.

  He pulled up a chair and sat at the bedside. And although he secretly applauded Lowe for taking the initiative—what Sam didn't want was a dead brother—he decided to squat on neutral ground for the time being.

  "Want to talk about it?"

  Peter sighed. "What's there to say? The fucker went ahead and did it. I can't believe it, but there it is."

  Handling it gingerly, Sam examined the compact device. Hooked by two fine wires to a disc-shaped plate beneath the skin of Peter's flank, the stimulator looked like nothing more than a scaled-down Walkman, with two small calibrated dials and a glassed-in indicator that resembled a voltmeter. Another wire ran to the wall above Peter's head, where it jacked into an outlet labeled alarm.

  "I feel like a bit of a jackass," Peter admitted.

  "Why's that?"

  "I really blew up at Lowe over this thing." He chuckled humorlessly. "Called him some nasty names. I even gobbed on him."

  "You gobbed on him?"

  Peter nodded, the corners of his mouth twitching in the closest thing to a smile Sam had seen on his brother's face in years.

  "Not too bright, huh? Sort of like spitting in the judge's eye before the sentence is handed down."

  "Maybe he had it coming," Sam offered.

  "Fucking A, he had it coming," Peter affirmed, that impotent anger rising again.

  As much of that anger as Sam had been witness to over the years, it still distressed him whenever it flared. Before the accident, it had taken a lot to set Peter off—a direct slur on their mother, perhaps, or on Sam himself—but now, anger was Peter's only defense, his only release. And as ugly as it was, that anger was therapeutic.

  Sam drew it out.

  "Maybe we should hire a lawyer," he suggested. "Sue the bald bastard's ass."

  "Nice thought, but forget it. They're calling it a lifesaving maneuver." A defeated sigh escaped him. "And the hell of it is, they're right. I'm nothing but a fucking head, Sam, and still I'm afraid to let go. Some prize turnip, huh?"

  Sam's stomach rolled threateningly. The one thing he could not stand from his brother was this kind of talk—but the sickness he felt now bubbled up from someplace much deeper.

  (uhnn. . . fflug. . . idd)

  He wondered if Peter remembered his mute, late night entreaty.

  "Cut that shit," Sam said with forced levity. "Nobody wants to die. So you'd better not die, dickbrain, 'cause if you do, I'll come back here and kill you myself." It was intended as a joke, but the words hung heavy between them. "I meant—"

  "I know what you meant."

  A nurse came in then, carrying a small burgundy tray with a loaded syringe and an alcohol swab arranged side by side on its surface.

  "Hey, welcome to the Cocaine Café," Peter said cynically, doing a passable Cheech Marin. "What'll it be today, man? A hundred of Demerol to keep the feeb at bay? Or how's about ten of Valium? That oughta keep the kumquat quiet."

  Afraid Peter would create another scene—there had been many over the years, each of them ending with these forced injections, like punishments—Sam got quickly to his feet.

  "Stick around," Peter told him calmly, chuckling again, that same hollow, mirthless sound. "No pun intended." He grinned falsely at the nurse. "I'll go quietly."

  Shooting a tense glance at Sam, the nurse swabbed Peter's thigh and injected the Valium.

  "Oww!" Peter squealed, tipping a wink at Sam when the nurse flinched back. Sam grinned, but he was not amused.

  "Be sure to tell them I was a good little squash," Peter said to the nurse as she left.

  Sam looked down at his shoes.

  "Not so impressed with your big brother anymore," Peter said, more than a little shame in his voice. "Huh."

  "That's bullshit and you know it," Sam protested, feeling angry now himself. "The way they treat you, it makes me want to cave their fucking heads in!" He sighed. "And yet, I know they're just doing their jobs. It's a trap, man. A god-awful trap." His eyes reddened with approaching tears.

  "Hey," Peter said. "Hey, man, I'm sorry. It's just that sometimes I get so damned angry I want to bust something, you know? Kick the living shit out of something. . . but I can't. So I crap on whoever's around. God help me, I've even done it to you."

  Sam started to object. . . but it was true.

  "It's almost impossible to think of anyone else's problems when you're in this kind of shape, Sammy. But that doesn't excuse it. Christ, just look at you. Trekking in here every day, doesn't matter if it's shitty outside or you're sick as a dog with the flu, you're here. Studying, holding down three jobs just so you can keep me in toys and the old lady in booze." Sam flinched visibly; this was the first time since the wreath that Peter had mentioned their mother. "I don't know how you do it."

  "Do you know why I do it?"

  "Yeah, kid," Peter said, compassion lumping his words. "I do."

  They were quiet for a time, the Valium having its way with Peter. Then: "You know, Sammy, I dreamed about her last night."

  "Who?" Sam said, guessing he meant Kelly. Peter rarely mentioned her anymore—the bitch had run out on him, just like all the rest—but Sam suspected that his feelings for her still ran deep.

  "Mom," Peter said, making the word sound profane. "I hadn't even thought about her in years, let alone dream about her."

  This was a lie, and Sam knew it, but he decided to let it slide. He made no comment, expecting the discussion to end there.

  But Peter pressed on.

  "It was the strangest dream, Sammy. It started with something similar to what happened on the night I nearly croaked." He told Sam about the floating, detached state he had found himself in that night.

  "Wow," Sam said, astonished. "I've heard of that happening. Sixty Minutes did a thing on it a few years back, or maybe it was W-Five. They called it an out-of-body experience."

  "Yeah," Peter agreed. "I saw that program, too. And I've read about the phenomenon." With a nod he indicated his well-stocked library, which occupied a tall stack of shelves against the opposite wall. "Truth is, I thought it was all bullshit. Until now."

  Sam regarded his brother with an expression of open wonder.

  "Then last night I was having the dream." Sam knew all about Peter's recurring dream. "It was the same as always, except at the point where I usually wake up I was suddenly hovering in the air above the whole scene, just like the other night. I guess my subconscious just built the experience into the dream.

  "But then I realized I was saying something, or my body was, down there on the road. . .”

  He took the story right up to the point where he arrived in that strange, dingy room, following the pull of that eerie music. But as he described the room in the meticulous detail of the dream, he witnessed a peculiar transforma
tion in Sam. Suddenly the kid was sheet-white, the hollows beneath his eyes a pale, unhealthy green, and he seemed to be having difficulty catching his breath.

  "Sam," Peter said, concerned. "What—"

  "You saw the shrine?" Sam blurted. "And the couch? And that crappy room divider?"

  "Sam—"

  Sam raised a forestalling hand. He was trying desperately to remember if he'd ever described the apartment to his brother. But no, Peter hadn't even allowed him to talk about the move. And without being able to stand there and study the room himself, even Sam could not describe it in such detail.

  "Sam, what the hell. . . ?"

  "That was no dream," Sam said finally, recalling his mother's drunken claim of the night before.

  (He was here, Sammy.)

  "What do you mean?" Peter said, a hint of fear in his voice.

  "You were there," Sam whispered. "You were actually there."

  (Your dear sweet brother was here.)

  The night following her son's ephemeral visit, Leona Gardner sat expectantly awake and painfully sober until just before dawn. With jittery fingers she rethreaded the tape again and again, barely noticing when at one point Sam stormed out of the apartment, slamming the door behind him.

  The music had brought Peter back to her the last time.

  It would do so again.

  When by four-thirty nothing had happened, and the shivery, gut-sick shadow of withdrawal had consumed her, Leona cracked open a fresh bottle of Jack and guzzled her way deep into its fiery oblivion. Sleep stole over her sodden gray cells like death, and she dropped precipitously away. Anyone seeing her there on the couch—half sitting, her skin a diseased yellow, the shallow intake and boozy outflow of her breath barely perceptible—would surely have thought her dead.

  On the table beside her, the tape flapped repeatedly. . .

  But the music played on, distant at first, rising from the depths of some unseen chasm, then swelling as her awareness of it heightened. Through slitted eyes she saw the dumb revolutions of the take-up reel, the loosely flapping tail of the tape, and now she sat up on the couch, her liver-eyes as round as saucers.

  The music wasn't coming from the tape.

  It was coming from the piano. . .

  But the benchseat was bare, the fallboard closed over the keys.

  Leona rose on slippered feet and wove her way toward the piano, shifting from handhold to handhold like a sailor on a yawing ship. She approached the instrument from its bent side, laying a trembling hand on its polished lid for support. The wood vibrated beneath her fingertips.

  With music.

  Like a mother snatching a child from a burning bed, Leona grabbed the fallboard and slammed it open, revealing the gleaming keys, like the teeth of a friendly monster.

  They were moving, up and down, like the keys of a player piano.

  Leona dropped to her rump on the rug. Before her eyes the air above the benchseat began to ripple like a desert heat shimmer, and then to take shape, human shape. . .

  Peter's shape.

  Intent and miraculously whole, he sat hunched over the keyboard as he always had, still transparent but hardening, assuming the lovely substance of reality. His sandstone-colored eyes were lidded in the rapture of creation, and his athlete's hands glided expertly over the keys. He glanced briefly her way, that funny, lopsided grin on his face, the one he always got when he played, then turned back to the keys.

  Stunned, Leona could only watch. . . and then crab her way backward as her son's image underwent a hideous metamorphosis, his lithe body wasting, his strong limbs retracting as the tendons shortened with audible creaks. The clean refrains of the sonata deteriorated into the inexpert plunkings of a beginner, and finally into the furious poundings of a retardate. As if in revolt, the fallboard slammed shut like an alligator's jaw, severing Peter's fingers at the middle joints. Rotating on the bench, he held up his hands for his mother's inspection, grinning at her from a face that was otherwise inert.

  I am not dead, the spidery ruin on the piano bench told her.

  Not dead. . .

  Leona awoke on the floor with her back jammed against the room divider, sweat oozing from her pores. On the coffee table behind her the tape flapped monotonously. She squinted at the piano in the dawn light—and saw blood drizzling from beneath the fallboard. She blinked. . . and the blood was gone. The fallboard gleamed in the morning's new light.

  Breathing hard, Leona rose stiffly to her feet. She stumbled toward the piano, meaning to lift the fallboard and examine the keys. . . but at the last minute she altered her course. If she raised that cover and found ten bleeding fingers underneath, she would run screaming off her tenth-story balcony.

  From the uncapped bottle on the end table, Leona swallowed the first of the day. She sat on the couch, wiped a hand across her booze-slopped chin, and rethreaded the tape.

  By midmorning Leona had passed out again. She came to just over eighteen hours later, sitting abruptly erect and uttering a startled cry. She gaped over the couch back at the piano, now a ghostly white shape in the unlit room, and felt a legion of invisible spiders skitter over her flesh. There was a terrible emptiness at the center of her being, and a frightful clarity dawning in her mind. For a moment, almost fondly, she remembered another life. . . then she realized what was wrong.

  She was sober.

  When her eyes had adjusted to the dark, Leona reached for her bottle. It sat on the far side of the coffee table, precariously close to the edge, and instead of closing around its comforting smoothness, her trembling fingers sent it tumbling to the floor.

  Leona cursed and jumped up, barking her shin on the corner of the table as she tried to save the precious intoxicant—this was her last bottle, and it was the middle of the night. She could hear the liquid gurgling out, seeping into the rug like spilled blood, and a degree of panic she had never know took hold of her like the hands of a frozen giant.

  She groped in the dark for the bottle. When she found it, it was empty. She thought of sucking the puddled rug and then recoiled against the couch, clasping her abraded shin and sobbing like a frightened child. She was cold and alone and she wanted her booze. . . but she couldn't move. Her brain was working again, and it lobbed unwanted truths at her like live grenades.

  That was no dream last night, sister, and it wasn't your son. It was the DTs, an alcoholic hallucination. Can't you see what you've done to yourself? You're a lush! A common drunk! You belong in a gutter. . . and what'll become of you when Sammy finally leaves? Have you thought about that? Ever slept in a Dumpster? Ever eaten garbage? Oh, you fool. You fool, you fool, you fool. . .

  I'll call somebody, Leona thought frantically. That's what I'll do. 911. The hospital. I need help. Oh, God, I need—

  Leona scrambled to her feet like a woman possessed. She stumbled out to the kitchen and groped for the light switch, found it, and then stood blinking in the light, trying to get her bearings. When the glare became tolerable, she fell to her knees and opened the cupboard under the sink. Desperate, she fished around inside, knocking unused containers of Windex and Easy-Off and Borax every which way, until she found what she was after.

  "My little ace in the hole," she crooned to the dusty bottle of Jack, thrusting it up to the light like a pagan idol. "I almost forgot about you." She unscrewed the top and drank deeply.

  Sam found her there six hours later, unconscious on the kitchen floor, a fresh scab forming on her shin.

  EIGHTEEN

  For the next two weeks Peter tried to duplicate the experience. These efforts had exactly nothing to do with wanting to visit his mother again, if that was in fact what he had done. No. What Peter was after was that gut-grabbing sensation of flying. For he knew that, even in the fleetest of jets, never would the thrill, the sheer exhilaration of motion, match what he'd experienced in that shimmering corridor of light. In contrast to all of the previous nights in which the dream had haunted him, Peter actively sought the dream now, tried to induce its occu
rrence.

  The dream came, but that was the only constant. Each night, as always, he awoke in a panicky fever, bare seconds before the truck barreled over his legs. Nothing he could do or imagine would prolong the dream beyond the thunder of the truck. Finally, in a funk of frustration, he gave up. And through some strange paradox, defeat was the needed catalyst.

  He felt low that night, lower than usual. For two weeks now he had allowed himself the hope that some new. . . what?. . . dimension? had opened its gates to receive him. And this hope had inflamed the old desire, the yen that had at one time consumed him. He wanted to fly again, to bullet through that vertical kaleidoscope of light until his senses reeled and his heart galloped free in his chest. It was this desire—this need—that canceled any compulsion to verify the reality or unreality of recent events. That part of it didn't matter. So desperate was he to escape the featureless drone of his life that he would do anything, endure anything—and believe anything—to make it happen again.

  Just once.

  That afternoon the Canadian Forces air show had taken place outside his ninth-story window. The Sudbury Science Center, which sponsored the show, had been its ground base, and thus the focal point of the breathtaking aerobatics. Strapped in his wheelchair, Peter had watched the show from the roof, which overlooked the science center and its newly sodded grounds. At first he hadn't wanted to go out, but Sam had coaxed him until finally he'd given in. In the end he was glad. . .

  Or so he had thought at the time.

  Now the memory of those sleek CT-114s, banking in a tight diamond formation or carving impossible loops, burned hot fire trails in his brain, and he ached to climb aboard one of them, to feel his fingers close knowingly around the joystick. During the show, Sam had run down to the recruiting trailer the forces had set up and had scored a large full-color poster of the nine red and white jets dwarfing the curve of the globe. At Peter's unthinking request, Sam had taped the thing to the wall at the foot of the bed. Now its presence seemed to mock him.

  But, oh, the wonderful thunder they had made, rocketing past at Mach 1 and beyond, punching holes in the sound barrier and causing the air to resonate with an almost electric intensity. That resonance had centered in his heart as he craned his neck to glimpse those smooth metal underbellies, and it had rippled down through his bones, creating the closest thing to an actual physical sensation he'd experienced since the fateful day of his accident.