by J. Thorn
No, not that one. Freeman hoped he would never have that one again.
He’d rather Dad be one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, with nothing under his black cloak but bones and disease. Dad with fluorescent yellow eyes glowing inside the hood. Dad with long claws clutching a gleaming scythe, come to harvest Freeman, who ran through the knee-high meadow until even the grass became his enemy, pulling at him, sucking him down—
No. Not that.
Think of something else.
And he thought of Mom, but every time he thought of Mom, he saw only one thing, the bathtub with the red streaks on the shower curtain and—
THINK OF SOMETHING ELSE.
He mentally shuffled through all of the possible distractions. A mental film fest, Pacino and De Niro facing off in “Heat.” Do-it-yourself cartoons, the ones you make in your head, where the clowns are jolly and the painted smiles have no teeth behind them. Imaginary music, where the notes hang fat in the air and you can bob them around like balloons.
In his manic state, he could conduct entire symphonies, break down each piece in his mental orchestra, build to throbbing crescendos of air and color. Which was good, because when he was manic, he couldn’t sleep. And when he slid down the brain tunnel into depression, he couldn’t sleep, either.
Right now, in his in-between state, all he had to do was avoid the nightmares and he could shut his brain off for a while. His medication made his head itch, and the blanket was rough against his skin. They’d put him on some new stuff, Depakote, and it was better than the lithium in some ways, but also brought a whole new group of side effects.
But none of the side effects were worse than the ones caused by Dad’s experiments.
Like the triptrapping.
It was bad enough when Dad put him in the closet and made him read the cards, kept them hidden while Freeman guessed stars or triangles or wavy lines. Except Freeman didn’t have to guess, he could see the cards as if he were looking through Dad’s eyes.
And that scary first time when the words “Billy Goat Gruff” popped into his brain for no reason at all, with Dad sitting across from him in the garage that he’d turned into a workroom.
“Goat Gruff?” Freeman had said aloud. “Like in the story?”
“Sure. What we’re doing, Freeman, is like when the goats triptrap over the troll’s bridge. I’m on one end of the bridge and you’re on the other, and you go trip-trap, trip-trap, trip-trap straight across and don’t let the ugly old troll know what you’re thinking. Because you know what will happen if he hears you?”
Freeman shook his head, and Dad jumped up, yanked Freeman by the hair, and pressed his mouth against Freeman’s ear. His words spat like hot bullets. “Because . . . he . . . will . . . GOBBLE . . . your . . . goddamned BRAIN.”
Then he let go of Freeman’s hair, patted him on the head, and said, “This is our little secret, okay, Trooper? I’ve got some people breathing down my neck that would make the Troll look like Little Red Riding Hood. You’ve got to work with me on this one. It’s going to hurt a little, but I promise it will be okay in the end.”
And Dad had gotten more bizarre from then on, zapping him with electricity, telling Freeman the pain was for his own good because it made his mind more pure and open. Dad stuck him with needles and applied the tip of the blowtorch and locked him away in the closet for longer and longer periods of time, and he even played games on Mom because she didn’t do anything to stop the experiments.
In the closet, with Dad’s weird machines humming, Freeman would triptrap into Dad’s mind and scream and scream and scream because Dad’s thoughts weren’t nice at all. And Dad was trying to put thoughts back into Freeman’s head, things he didn’t understand and which made no sense. That was how he learned about the Trust and why Dad was so scared.
But then Mom was dead and all those strange people from the Trust showed up, took Dad’s equipment away, and hauled Dad down to the police station. And Freeman went into protective custody and entered the foster system. And he didn’t triptrap for years. Then the gift crept back, as if it had been a hideous monster hibernating in the base of his skull.
Some of the telepathic glimpses were fleeting, some were robust and overwhelming, some were pleasant, and some were pitch black. He’d practiced until he could control the ability a little, because he was afraid of the Troll, though he never had figured out what Dad meant. Maybe it was fear, a big, black hungry thing inside. Though he tried to bury the gift, hoping neglect would make it disappear, he’d never been able to completely get rid of it.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to give it up, either. Mind-reading was kind of cool, even though it was freaky. And it definitely augmented his survival skills. He often knew which people to avoid and which people to mine for useful secrets.
But he was tired right now, and needed to shut down for a while. Because thinking of triptrapping always made him remember Dad, and memory could murder.
So tonight it was either music or the other thing that was foremost in his mind.
Vicky won out, and he thought of her until sleep pulled him under its dark sheets.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Bondurant rubbed his eyes. His hands trembled, fingers like blind snakes. The lights were low and he could pretend morning had finally arrived. The bottle of Crown Royal clinked against ceramic as he dashed some liquid amnesia into his mug.
The door to the outer office opened, and Bondurant froze in his chair, anticipating the knock on his door. This time, he wouldn’t answer. And perhaps never again. If anyone, or any thing, ever wanted him again, they’d have to bust down the door. Or walk through it.
He heard the familiar bustling of Miss Walters, the beeps as she listened to the messages on the answering machine, the sliding of file cabinet drawers. Ordinary sounds marking the start of another day. The rich smell of coffee crawled through the crack under the door. Bondurant wiped his sleeve across his mouth and rose unsteadily from his chair.
He stumbled to the door and knocked. It was unusual behavior, knocking from the inside, but Bondurant appreciated the substantial weight of the oak beneath his knuckles. All real and solid things were to be cherished.
“Miss Walters?” He sounded to himself as if cotton balls were tucked in his cheeks.
The door opened a crack, and for a moment, Bondurant was afraid the vanishing woman from the night before was waiting, her forehead scar smiling.
But there stood Miss Walters, in the dreary cardigan she wore on Thursdays. She looked at him, sniffed, then nodded as if reluctant to notice too much. “Good morning, Mister Bondurant. You’re here early.”
“Umm . . . do I have any appointments?”
“Not until ten. You and Dr. Kracowski are penciled in for a meeting in Room Twelve. A couple of the board members are popping in for a visit.”
Board members. Bondurant stiffened.
There were nine on Wendover’s board, all of good, white, Protestant stock, seven of them males. The board met every three months, and the order of business consisted largely of self-congratulatory pats on the back followed by a lavish tax-deductible meal. But every once in a while, some of the directors felt the need to see clients first-hand so they could don expressions of appropriate pity when begging for grant money or private donations.
L. Stephen McKaye and Robert Brooks were two of the most outspoken directors and occasionally voted against the majority on policy decisions. They weren’t easily fooled. Bondurant headed toward the coffee pot. He had a mission now, a role to play, business as usual. He would drive himself to a state of artificial alertness.
“You haven’t seen anyone else?” he asked.
Miss Walters sat at her desk and rummaged through yesterday’s mail. “Whom do you mean?”
“A woman. Maybe a housekeeper working on contract? Gray hair, hunched over, a scar on her face, older than you.”
“Older than me?” Miss Walters fussed with a button on her sweater.
“I didn’t m
ean that as an insult.”
“I didn’t see anybody. Unless you mean that 3,000-year-old crone who just walked out of a mummy’s casket.”
Bondurant chewed on a swig of coffee. “She was dressed in a dirty gray gown.”
“She’d fit right in around here.” Her eyes moved across Bondurant’s rumpled suit.
“Let me know if I have any other meetings. It’s Thursday, isn’t it?”
“All day long, last I looked. Except you know how us old people get a little bit confused.”
Bondurant closed his eyes and steadied himself against her desk. He could fake it. All he had to do was concentrate on the pounding of his pulse through his temples and he could almost forget that he’d seen a woman disappear.
He’d faked worse, such as the incident reports that went to the state after a couple of Kracowski’s “treatments.” Officially, he had blamed one client’s bout of unconsciousness on self-asphyxiation and the other’s on an asthma attack. Both conclusions reached, of course, after a “lengthy internal investigation.” If he could slip those reports by the Department of Social Services, then he could feign sobriety in front of two directors.
And he could also deceive himself into believing that ghosts didn’t exist.
“You want me to refill that?” Miss Walters said.
He opened his eyes. “Sorry, just a headache, that’s all.”
They both knew better, but they both were well-practiced at faking it.
At least Thirteen had a window in the door. Not the kind of place you’d want to stow a claustrophobic, but you could turn around in it. Freeman had been in worse. Even the mirror on the wall didn’t bother him. All group homes had these little “time-out rooms” with the two-way mirrors.
If you had a bug in a jar, it wasn’t much fun unless you could watch it crawl.
Randy had shown up in the middle of language arts class right when Freeman was almost bored out of his brain by Herman Melville. Randy said something to the teacher and escorted Freeman down the narrow hall to Thirteen, punched some numbers on the door’s electronic lock, then sat him on the cot. Randy had Freeman unbutton his shirt, then applied electrodes to his chest and his temples. Freeman hadn’t worried, because people didn’t shock kids anymore. They were probably monitoring his heartbeat to gauge his reaction to stress and fear.
He kept his cool even when Randy had him lie back on the cot and fastened leather straps across his upper chest and waist. When Dad had given him treatments, he’d often inserted a hard piece of wood in his mouth so he wouldn’t bite his tongue. No mouthpiece, no shock. So this was no problem. He stared at the mirror and relaxed as Randy left the room.
Somebody was undoubtedly on the other side of the mirror, making careful note of his reactions.
He let his knees twitch and threw in some spasmodic eyebrow movements. Let them think he had Tourette’s Syndrome. He’d met some Tourette’s sufferers, and the condition was a real bitch, but at least you could get away with some random cussing and spitting.
The gimmick got old fast. The morning had dawned overcast, and Freeman had felt the weight of the sky on him even before rolling out of bed. Getting dressed was an effort, even with Isaac making his goofy narcolepsy face by squinting his eyes and blowing a raspberry snore. Freeman was going from In-Between to the Gray Zone and was probably on the elevator bottoming out at Pitch Black Basement.
Blame the brain chemicals. The shrinks said his mood swings were all the fault of serotonin, which couldn’t seem to regulate itself inside his head. Love and chocolate, they said, both gave you the same kind of high. He didn’t know about love, but he knew a chocolate bar was pretty valuable inside a group home.
And he’d never heard of either of those giving you the ability to read minds, unless you counted Mom, who seemed to know everything Dad said before he said it, and reminded Dad of it constantly. Maybe that’s why Mom was dead and Freeman was sitting under a shrink’s magnifying glass.
While Dad was bouncing around in a rubber room somewhere.
But that line of thought was not going to do anything to help fight the depression that was coming on. Because no matter which textbook the psychiatrist showed you, there was no escaping the idea that depression was your own fault, that you should somehow be able to just “make yourself happy.” That was a snake-eating-its-own-tail argument, because you then felt sorry for yourself because you couldn’t fix what was wrong. Guilty by reason of self-awareness.
“Why blame yourself?” he said aloud. A small air vent in the ceiling undoubtedly held a microphone. These guys were pretty smart, up on all the mental espionage tactics. No doubt the Trust had a mole in here somewhere. Maybe they could open a drive-through therapy business. Pull your car up to the window, blather out a list of symptoms, and receive a paper slip as you paid your bill.
The slip could contain Chinese-fortune-cookie platitudes like “All the truth you need lies within” or “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
You could even sell French fries on the side, or maybe an add-water baptism or instant communion—
“Who else is there to blame, Freeman?”
Freeman’s eyes twitched again, though this time involuntarily. The amplified voice had no doubt come from the face behind the mirror. Freeman wished he were on an up, so he could triptrap the hidden person and nip the brain drain in the bud.
“I don’t blame my own face,” Freeman said.
“Excuse me?” came the male voice.
“I was just thinking that whoever’s talking must be watching me from behind the two-way mirror. Because I’m certainly not talking to myself.”
“Dissociative personality disorder is not on your diagnostic axis.”
The voice was metallic and clinical, and the transfer through electronics and speakers kept it from being trustworthy. Not that Freeman would have trusted him anyway.
“I’ve never been shrunk except face to face,” he said.
“You’ve never been treated by me before, either. That’s obvious, since you still have problems.”
“You’re quite sure of yourself, aren’t you?”
“Success breeds confidence, Mr. Mills. That’s one of the things you’ll learn in our sessions together, while we’re on the road to healing.”
“Therapy is a two-way street.” Freeman wasn’t going to let this bug-watcher off easy.
“Just beware the exit ramps.”
“Not only are you too chicken to meet your clients face to face, your extended metaphors are pretty lame.”
The room grew silent as the microphone switched off. Freeman made funny faces in the mirror while waiting. The Clint Eastwood squint worked well in the regular population, but you had to give the shrinks a little something extra. Maybe go over the top like Pacino in “Scarface” or Keifer Sutherland in practically anything.
Soon the voice came again. “Are you ready to talk about it?”
It.
Freeman hated that word, at least when said by somebody who always capitalized It. And It only meant one thing in Freeman’s sessions: the long scar on his wrist.
And now, with depression sinking in and the shrink trying this new tack, Freeman almost told all about It.
About Dad and the blowtorch, or Dad and the ground glass, or Dad and the electricity, or Dad the evil Troll who fried Freeman’s brain until it worked like a cell phone and anybody could beep their stupid messages into it any time they wanted.
Yeah, goddammit, I got somebody to blame. Now that you mention it.
But before he could speak, as his lungs froze and his stomach clenched like a fist around the beige breakfast waffles, the voice was replaced by Bondurant’s.
“We’re waiting, Freeman.”
“No, I don’t want to talk about it.” Bad enough for one brain drainer to pick at your skull, but when you were double-teamed—
“Freeman, this is Robert Brooks. I’m a friend.”
Yet another voice. Another “friend.”
This was turning into a joke. Shrunken by committee. Did these clowns honestly think they were going to catch Freeman off-guard, grill him as if they were TV cops, keep hitting him with new lines of questioning until his spirit broke?
“How can you be a friend if I’ve never met you before?” he asked.
“We’re here to help,” said Brooks.
A brief argument flared in the background as Brooks forgot to switch off the microphone. Bondurant was telling somebody that Freeman was a kleptomaniac who should have his fingers held over the flames of hell. Freeman wanted to triptrap him again, to experience the weak and foggy misery of the man’s soul. Except depression was taking its toll, the elevator grounding, and his sarcasm and willpower failed.
The first voice to question him said, “Freeman, I’m Dr. Kracowski. We’ve arranged a little demonstration for a couple of our supporters. All you have to do is relax.”
Relax. Freeman took a breath that tasted of mint ice.
“What I’m going to do will only hurt for a moment, and then you’re going to feel better,” said the faceless Kracowski. “Your depression will fade and you’ll feel elated and energetic.”
“How did you know I was depressed?”
“Because I’m trained to observe, Freeman. Because I listen. Because I care.”
“What’s this business about it only hurting for a moment?”
If there was any answer, he didn’t hear, because—zzzzifff—his ears clanged and orange light streaked behind his eyes. The bones of his head tumbled like gravel in a clothes dryer. Hot wires jabbed into his spine and his intestines tangled into knots. A scream came from somewhere. Blood was sweet in his mouth.
This was as bad as anything Dad had ever done.
Freeman stared at his reflection, scarcely able to recognize the boy in the mirror: the pain had written ugly years on his face, peeled back his lips, caused his head to tremble and his jaws to clench. Worse, he found himself unable to read his own mind. He fought for breath and waited for the wave of agony to crest.