Box Nine

by Jack O'Connell

Wilson slides out of her seat and into Rourke’s lap and they start kissing, a weird, birdlike peck around the proximity of each other’s mouth, their tongues suddenly taking on lizardlike movement, darting in and out of the holes of their mouths like enraged snakes. They begin to lick each other’s face as Jacobi, still in his seat, begins to spit out filthy limericks that get unintelligible after the second one. Jacobi’s head starts to jerk in unexpected directions, as if someone had harnessed it and was tugging in random directions with too much force. The motion doesn’t seem to bother him, though. He smiles a big idiot’s grin as the head leaps side to side, up and down in jagged Tourette-like seizures.

  Rourke starts to unbutton Wilson’s blouse, his fingers flying, either unaware or uncaring of the others’ presence.

  Bromberg’s the only one who seems to be growing unpleased with her condition. She’s squatting against a wall, on the verge of hyperventilating, talking to herself. Eva tries to make sense of the sounds, but between Jacobi’s singsong babbling and the sucking noises issuing from the tangle of Rourke and Wilson, she has no success.

  All she can do is watch as Bromberg’s mouth starts to move open and closed, faster and faster, until the lips, tongue, teeth, gums, and black and pink interior are a blur, a messy haze of spastic tissue. An arena of muscles stimulated past known kinetics and into a world of helpless speed. It’s as if a point will come where the mouth will be forced to explode, where the tongue’s absolute, maximum capacity for movement will not be enough.

  Eva looks away from the sight and climbs down off the toilet. She doesn’t want to witness the arrival of that point. She stands rigid for a moment in the small confines of the stall, puts her hands against the cool green metal wall to steady herself, and closes her eyes.

  But she can still hear the sound, the awful, scratchy, buzzing sound, as if a high-speed motor had materialized in all their larynxes. As if a minute hive of unclassified insects had formed in the throats of all her carriers.

  The Barracuda flies through the five-way intersection at Hoffman’s Rotary, a new lesson in speed, congestion, and odds. Lenore maneuvers the car like she was the last fighter pilot left to hold the line against a barbarian aggressor. She comes inches from impacting half a dozen cars. Horns blowing the full range of the scales fill the air.

  Woo is almost on the floor. He screams, “Shouldn’t you have one of those flashing red lights mounted on the top?”

  “Probably,” Lenore yells, yanking the wheel to her right and missing the bumper of a Lincoln by a breath.

  They cross into the Canal Zone in minutes. There’s already a crowd down past the main boulevard that the locals insist on calling Rimbaud Way. The woodcutters and calligraphers have even made their own street sign. A block down Rimbaud, two patrol cars have blocked off the small alley that leads to the burned-out remains of the old Seward typewriter factory. Behind them are three other black-and-whites and a growing pocket of black-clad, one-hundred-pound zombie artists that the uniforms are trying to disperse or at least keep at a safe distance. Red and blue lights are flashing everywhere. There’s a plainclothes guy, Lenore thinks his name is Dennison, squatting behind one of the blocking cars with a bullhorn in his hand.

  Lenore pulls off the street onto the sidewalk and kills the engine. She yells for Woo to stay put, but he immediately follows her out of the car. She hauls her badge out of her back pocket and flashes it ahead of her body as she runs past the patrolman hoarding the bohemians into order.

  She squats next to the guy with the bullhorn, her back against the patrol car, and says, “You’re Dennison, right?”

  He just squints, waiting for an explanation of her presence.

  “Lenore Thomas, narcotics. My lieutenant just radioed me down here. Said you’ve got a situation I need to know about.”

  Dennison stares at her like he’s trying to decide if he should challenge her authority, then he looks around and starts talking. “The initial patrolman, Carson, he responded to reports of gunfire from down the old Seward shop. Figured it might be some more of those gallery freaks, those kids that load the old breech shotguns with paint pellets and blast away at reinforced plywood …”

  “The Black Hole Group.”

  “Yeah, them. So Carson comes down the boulevard and turns down the alley, and bang, his windshield is blown to shit by a forty-four slug. He manages to pull out and call in backup. It’s a girl, for Christ sake. Young kid. She’s up the goddamn telephone pole, climbed up the spikes right to the top. She’s got a bird’s-eye view and she’s cranked on some badass speed. Over the edge. She’s babbling away up there a mile a minute and you can’t understand a word of it. Every now and then she lets a bullet fly. We don’t know if she’s aiming for us or not. We don’t know if she’s even aware she’s here.”

  “Anyone in the crowd identify her?”

  “Not yet, but she doesn’t look like she’s from down here. She looks more like Bangkok material. Street thing. Burned up. Seven-teen years tops. Big head of red hair.”

  “That’s my girl,” Lenore says, “and I need her in one piece.”

  Dennison looks away and gives a sarcastic bob with his chin. “Wish I could promise delivery, Detective, but as you can see, it’s kind of a volatile situation. We don’t know how much ammo she’s got up there.”

  “Whatever was in the chamber. Nothing more. Guaranteed.”

  “Oh, thanks, I’ll just charge right in.”

  There’s a pair of department binoculars on the ground near Dennison’s feet. Lenore gestures to them and asks, “Can I take a look?”

  Dennison nods. Lenore picks up the binoculars and crawls back toward the trunk end of the patrol car. She comes up over the edge of the car and peers down the alley. It’s an unsettling feeling, the eyes suddenly on top of the weird, decayed remains of the Seward factory, charred ruins from one of the hottest fires in the city’s history. It was an arson case, never solved. The property was sold to a company that went bankrupt. The city condemned it, but each year failed to come up with the funds to tear what was left of it down. Now the Canal Zone’s various art groups and fringe sets use the place for everything from Black Masses to audienceparticipating theaters.

  At the very end of the alley, about thirty yards from the entrance to the boulevard, sits the telephone pole. Lenore starts at the street and follows it up to the big, grey metal box mounted near the top and the thick black cables that run off into the air.

  Then she centers her vision on Vicky, Cortez’s runaway hooker. Vicky’s bare feet are planted on the top climbing spikes and she’s got one arm hugging the splintery wooden pole. She looks like a graphic symbol of hell, a child possessed and tormented beyond descriptive words. She’s dressed in a floor-length, satiny, black nightgown. She has the remains of the bottom half, torn and shredded most likely on her climb upward, haphazardly pulled together, sort of gathered up slightly and held against the pole. Above the waist, the gown is form-hugging and sparse, held on her body by a single thin strap around her neck. Her left breast has fallen out of the gown and is exposed to the air and the public. But it’s Vicky’s face that captures and assaults Lenore’s eyes. Lenore knows, from the moment she sees it, that it will perpetually define, give image to, maybe even devour, the word torment, for the balance of her life.

  The face is a masterpiece of the pure lines and curves of horror, of a primal fear. The eyes are bulging and yet sunk back a full inch into the skull. The skin is unblemished but sallow and taut to the point of ripping off the bone. The cheeks protrude at the sides of the nose, as if casting a furious vote for skeleton over cartilage. But it is the mouth that is the center of everything, opened into an endless-seeming hole, a bottomless O. It appears never to draw breath but moves ceaselessly, so fast that its motions begin to blur within the lenses of the binoculars. Vicky is forming words faster than her tongue, lips, full mouth can handle. It’s as if they’re all instruments pushed suddenly far beyond the limits they were designed for, as if they were inade
quate substances, forced to the point of shattering under immense and unnatural forces of speed and gravity.

  “I have to talk to her,” Lenore says.

  “You know her number,” Dennison jokes, pleased with himself, searching through his sport coat for a cigarette.

  “I need to speak with her,” Lenore says slowly, enunciating each syllable as if Dennison were an inattentive child.

  “Hang in,” he says, mimicking her voice. “This could take a while.” Then he goes back to his own voice and says, “My guess is she’ll go over the top in a while and drop like a stone. Whatever crap she’s on is going to burn her down sooner or later. We’ll just wait for the fall.”

  “I’m going down there,” Lenore says.

  “Like hell you are.”

  “I need to ask her some questions.”

  “Then you better hope she can still talk after she hits the ground.”

  Lenore looks to the ground, waits a second, cocks her head, and smirks at Dennison. “You want to do this your way,” she says, “then great, we can do it your way. But I’ve got to tell you I’ve got weight on this, okay? I’m with DEA on this. Maybe others. If you want I can go back to my car and call it in. I can say I’m getting no cooperation and we can wait five minutes for some Federal boys to come down and insult the way you dress. They’ll pull your authority in front of all your people. If you want it that way, fine with me.”

  Dennison’s head is rigid, and Lenore thinks a good wind would cause it to fall from his shoulders in a pile of heavy dust. His jaw is thrust out toward her and finally he opens it and says, “You are a real bitch.”

  “Absolutely,” she says. “Now’re you ready to help me out?” He stares at her and she says, “I’m going to advance from the left side of the alley. Our left. I’m going to want the bullhorn to start out with. I want a line of your best shooters—what’ve you got, four, five guys with rifles—I want them in position, fully focused, but absolutely no firing unless she lets one fly …”

  “You could be dead by then,” Dennison says.

  “Odds are I’m safe. She’s a teenage hooker. Even on her best day she’s not a sharpshooter. In this condition she’d need a miracle to get anywhere near me.”

  Dennison shrugs and turns away, snapping his fingers to reposition his men. Lenore looks around to find Woo at her shoulder and says, “You should really wait at the car, Freddy. Play the stereo till I get back.”

  “I should probably go with you, don’t you think?”

  Lenore just laughs.

  “Seriously. I’m the only one who’s witnessed this before. Out at Spooner. If she can be talked to …”

  “Her mouth was moving like, out of control. I wish I could hear what was coming out.”

  Woo shakes his head no. “Very unsettling noise,” he says.

  Lenore lowers her voice and says, “The two guys out at the prison, when they went nuts, could you talk to them at all? Was there any communication?”

  Woo breathes out heavily. “Hard to say. My guess is they understood me, but it was as if they couldn’t—” he trails off, pauses, picks up—“slow down, slow their nervous systems. Maybe their brains, their language centers, couldn’t slow them down enough to make it a dialogue.”

  “If the girl has gotten into some Lingo, and I’m certain that’s the story here, we don’t know the dosage or anything …”

  “It’s all up in the air, Lenore. That’s why I suggest—”

  She cuts him off. “Just go back to the car. Just wait for me at the car.”

  She turns to Dennison and says, “We all set?”

  A beat-up Lincoln Continental screeches to a stop at the police line, lights and sirens engulfing it.

  “Oh, shit,” Lenore says, infuriated.

  Zarelli jumps out and runs toward the blocking cars waving his badge and gun high in the air. Lenore hears at least one uniformed officer say, “What an asshole.”

  Zarelli practically dives to the ground between Dennison and Lenore and says to Dennison, “Zarelli, narcotics.”

  “Another one,” Dennison says, and rubs at his eyes.

  Zarelli turns to Lenore and says, “It’s all right, honey, I’m here.”

  For a second, Lenore doesn’t know what to do. She’s astounded by his presence, let alone his words. She opens her mouth, but nothing comes out. Then she decides to forsake language entirely. She lifts her pants leg and pulls, in a furious motion, her secondary weapon, a .38 revolver, from an ankle holster. She sweeps her hand upward and presses the side of the barrel, not the front, to Zarelli’s forehead. She leaves it there for only a second, but it’s long enough for him to flinch brutally, fall sideways toward the ground, snap his eyes shut, and scrunch his face into a grotesque expression of shock.

  Dennison lets out a bubbly, surprised bark of a laugh. Before Zarelli can recover any composure and speak, Lenore is gone.

  She moves around the trunk of the patrol car, the bullhorn in her hand, out in front of her like a gun. She moves to the exposed corner of the car’s bumper, squats down, raises the bullhorn to her lips, and says, “Vicky, honey, where are you?” in a bad southern accent, made bizarre by amplification.

  She looks up to see that Vicky has heard her call. Her head juts from one side of the pole to the other, insectlike. Her free arm shoots straight up into the air, waves a weapon, a Magnum, Lenore thinks, like a flag.

  “Vicky, child,” she tries again, “it’s your sister Darleen. I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

  Though Vicky’s mouth continues to move at its unnatural, blistering speed, her head and eyes seem to be moving separately, trying to focus on the direction of the voice, trying to lock on something familiar.

  Lenore starts to take small, slow steps down the alley, her left hand holding the bullhorn up, her right hand gripping her gun, held slightly behind her back. “Why you hiding from me, Vicky?” she yells. “I need to talk to you now.”

  She continues down the alley, and after the halfway point she starts to hear the noise. At first she thinks it’s coming from the telephone pole itself, from the grey metal box and the wires. It’s a humming sound, slightly electrical, a weird buzzing noise, sort of like a hornet, Lenore thinks suddenly, or a whole swarm of hornets, recorded on tape and played back a bit faster and louder. And then she remembers Woo’s tape of the inmates, Jimmy Lee Partridge and William Robbins. She knows the buzzing sound is coming from Vicky’s mouth. The buzzing sound is Vicky pumped on an unspecified amount of Lingo and turned into something horrible, a monster out of some child’s nightmares, a demon out of some fanatic’s fantasy. And with a language, or at least a sound, a noise, so disturbing it makes Lenore want to run to the other side of the city.

  But she doesn’t. She continues to approach the pole at a consistent pace, void of any jarring motions. She feels waves of a heavy nausea pass over her and a sweat breaks on her forehead. She wonders if this is caused by Vicky’s noise or her own fear or lack of a hit of speed this afternoon.

  “Why did you run from Darleen, honey?” she says. “You know Darleen wouldn’t hurt you.”

  She starts to walk across to the pole side of the alley in an angle, talking the whole way.

  “I’m your sister, Vicky. I’m here to help you, sweetheart. You don’t need to be afraid no more. I’ll take care of everything.”

  She slows to a wedding-march pace for the last ten or so steps to the base of the pole.

  “Now, come down here right now, Vicky. C’mon. Darken is waiting.”

  If Max is wrong about Vicky having a sister named Darken, she’ll take some action against him. At this point she doesn’t know what it will be, but there’ll be some retribution, something to help him remember his mistake. But even if there is a legitimate Darken, Lenore has no way of knowing if Vicky is far enough gone to think she’s speaking with her. Normally, she enjoys a big gamble, a pure tough-odds situation. But her heart isn’t in this one. She thinks if she’d just gotten a chance for a quick
hit of speed, a little crank to reheat the system, she’d be on her game, in full control of both rational thought and instinct. But right now the buzzing sound is bringing her close to vomiting.

  She advances to the pole, stops, and stares up at Vicky. “You took some bad medicine this time, sister,” she says. “You come down and Darken will help you.”

  The buzzing noise halts and is replaced by an awful combination of muted grunt and raspy breath. It’s as if the girl on the pole has had her tongue severed and is making a horrible effort to speak through her throat or nose. It’s as if there were some awful confusion in the prenatal stages and she never developed the skeletal structure necessary for speech. Lenore cringes listening to her pull air into the lungs, then try to pump it back up and out of her body, transformed into words she once had no problem producing.

  Vicky starts to go through a series of terrible sounds, mostly choked-off, spastic explosions of wind and spittle. Then she starts to hyperventilate, exhaling more air than she’s taken in.

  Lenore starts to panic a little and fights against it. “Just calm down, now, Vicky. Just do what Darken says, now.”

  But Vicky gets worse, her arms start to flail and her body seems to buck away from the pole like she was losing all motor control.

  “Who gave you the medicine, Vicky?” Lenore yells, now frantic. “Who gave you the drug, Vicky?”

  Vicky hangs out from the pole with one hand on a spike. Her head is quaking on her shoulders. Lenore sees a small thin stream of blood seeping slowly from her right ear.

  “Who?” she screams.

  Vicky’s full mouth starts to vibrate, the tremble of the lips and all the skin within about a half inch of the lips, begins to increase geometrically, until the bottom half of her face is a sickening, surreal blur.

  Then the vibration ceases all at once and her tongue comes in and out several times, complete with a white, foamy cover. Lenore takes a step forward, her eyes focused in on the mouth. It opens, trembles barely, comes together, and opens again to form a single word: Mingo.