It was a cute little Toyota with leather seats. Alison had been so spoiled in her lifetime. But honestly, if you’re going to die young, might as well have had the best of everything.
So Mags and Gyro drove Alison’s car and I drove my mother’s Buick back to my house. My house was the biggest, and my room was the furthest from the front door and the closest to two side doors. We would not be noticed by my parents at all, given that it was Saturday morning, which meant Country Club B.S. for both of them.
They laid Alison on my bed, keeping her bloodied head on Mags’ sweatshirt.
Gyro looked at me gravely. “I don’t know if I can believe all the stuff she told me in the car, but if you can do anything, it might help.”
I looked at Mags. My best friend in the whole world. Better than best. Best of the best. She seemed small and vulnerable now. The way I felt on the inside.
I looked down at poor Alison.
“It’s not working,” I said after a few minutes.
“How does it work?” Gyro asked.
“I need to get mad at her.”
“Stimulus, response,” Gyro nodded. “And between stimulus and response there’s a pause. In the pause, we decide what the response will be.”
“Huh?” Mags asked.
Gyro nodded again to herself. I could practically see the little wheels turning.
Hesitating only a moment, she walked over to me, leaned close, and whispered something in my ear.
The explosion from inside my head seemed to knock me back against the wall. The room began spinning, and I swear—I swear—I saw a fire burst across the wallpaper, ripping and devouring the flower print, until the walls were charred—
And I was there with Alison’s corpse, Alison’s bloodied corpse, but poison spewed from inside me, and then my vision blackened.
When I awoke, I was on the floor, fever in my head, and Mags kneeling beside me.
“What the fuck did she whisper?” she asked.
I looked at Mags, wondering for a moment where I was and what was going on.
Gyro stood beside the bed, looking down.
“What made you so mad at Alison again?” Mags asked, and then turned to Gyro. “What’d you say to her?”
My mind returned from blankness. “She said…she said…”
I could barely recall the words that Gyro had whispered to me.
“Please…help…oh god,” Alison’s voice came like a scratched up old cat from the thing on the bed.
How long we all stood in the room, waiting for what was to come, I’m not sure. My memory is spotty on this.
But Alison, her face still sliding off, eventually sat up, and all of us saw what my Fries With That? had brought back from the dead:
A bitch that looked like hell.
I don’t need to go into a lot of the rest.
I’m waiting for the Barbara Walters interview, and I want to give her an exclusive.
Suffice it to say that we had one week left of school, and Alison Gall was alive again.
No need to go into the surgery that Gyro did using some medical equipment we grabbed from her father’s office, or the fact that Alison was there inside her body but not on the surface yet, the way most of us are. Alison was down deep. Somehow I had rewired some circuits in her, while others had been permanently damaged.
She barely said more than squat anymore.
We made up a story for her mother about how we rescued her at the Prom, how she’d fallen down some stairs drunk after coming in with some boy from out of town.
Her now ex-boyfriend believed this, as did most everyone else. Thus the stitches, thus her slowness, thus the fact that while she still performed routine tasks, like getting up in the morning, showering, eating, dressing for school, even cheerleader practice,
Alison Gall was, for all intents and purposes, not all there. I wouldn’t exactly use the kind of words you might use for somebody who comes back from the dead and might actually still be somewhat brain dead and might shuffle along, hiding the rotting of their corpse…because Alison kind of was like that, but kind of not, and I don’t like name-calling anymore. Not since it happened.
She was hideous to see, too. Her face, with the tiny threads, her hair a bit lopsided. From the neck down she was still gorgeous, but the meaner boys started calling her a two-bagger hump, “in case the bag falls off her head, you wear one yourself.”
Now and then, in the last days of school that year, I would sit across from her, and a little shriek like a seagull makes would come from deep down in her throat.
Mags and Gyro and I didn’t talk much, but nodded to each other in the halls every now and then. I smoked in the girl’s bathroom sometimes, hoping Mags would come in, but she never did.
Then on the last day of school, Alison Gall — moving in a fumbly daze down the hallway — turned to her ex-boyfriend Joey Hoskins and I saw it coming.
I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before, but I should’ve.
We all should’ve wondered what would happen if Alison came back.
What she might be able to do if her brain got Fries With That? from death to life.
I saw her pupils go up under her eyelids. I watched in fascination as a strange rash spread across her face. She opened her mouth wider than a scream.
And I knew. I felt it.
She had it now, too. Whatever I had endowed her with, it had opened up something in her, too. Maybe we all have it within us, and only some of us have it at the surface.
She had Fries With That?
Shit, I thought. It’s contagious. Shit. Just like gramma said to me. “Stay away from the dead.”
And now, she did it to Joey. His body began twitching, and the blue of his eyes melted across his face like punctured egg yolks.
Like lightning, it passed around the hall, five other kids, some innocent of past association with Alison, some not so innocent. All shaking and shivering, foaming at the mouths, their eyes rolling up in their heads.
It was contagious. I had passed it on. I was the Typhoid Mary of Fries with That?
Five kids, and Mags came down the hall and watched it, too. Others came out, but ran when they saw the jolts and smelled the burning.
Mags turns to me, shaking her head. Not at me, I guess, but at our bad decision. At our bad cover up of Gyro’s killing of Alison and us as accomplices in murder.
There was a lot of love in her gaze as she looked at me.
It was either-or, I could tell.
Either it ended right there, or it goes on, and who knows how many brains would fry because I have this little talent inherited from my gramma’s side, a little talent that no doctor has figured out yet though god knows they probed and poked inside my head enough these past couple months.
I know what she’s going to do, and I’m wondering why she still has it on her.
Why she carries it.
And that’s when Mags pulled out the Glock from the inside pocket on her black denim jacket and started firing at all the kids who were fizzling into the Fryer that Alison is beaming at them.
I guess she just didn’t want to take it anymore.
Later on, when Mags was taken in, I went to visit her.
“Don’t tell them what happened,” she told me. “I’ll be out in a couple of years anyway. I’m a teenager. How much can they do?”
“But it’s not your fault,” I said.
“Look,” Mags said. “I’m from the trailers. You and Gyro are Country Club Acres girls. Like Alison. You wouldn’t survive what I’m going through right now.”
Then, the tears welled in her eyes. “You are my best friend. It’s no big deal for me to be here.”
We both had a good cry that afternoon. I felt like I did when my gramma had been alive. That kind of warmth. There were times when I wanted to hug Mags tight and never let her go. I could watch her face, the way her eyes sink into it, the way her dark hair hangs like a canopy over and around it, I could watch her face for hours. She has this p
erfect way of being. Even when she’s going through hell.
Then I asked her why she had done it. I mean, I knew why, really. I knew that we had started something that wouldn’t stop on its own.
But Mags surprised me.
She said, “Because I have wanted to shoot those kids since the third grade when I first met any of them. Fried brains or no.”
Mags is probably the boldest person I know.
Bold as they come.
But her boldness is losing its edge. I think jail did that to her.
Later, all the talk shows started, and then Mags was let off because Alison had recovered from her wounds. You can’t kill the dead twice, I guess. Alison was living on some machines and spilled a fake story about someone other than Mags doing the shooting. Even though it was an obvious lie I was happy to know that Alison had regained her speech a bit more, and I was happy that Mags was no longer the prime suspect.
Then, of course, we all found out that Alison somehow escaped the hospital, pulling out all her wires. There’s a rumor that she wrote something in blood on the hospital wall, about coming after each of us, me, Mags and Gyro, but I’m not going to sit around getting scared over this. Life is too short. Alison’s probably doing some zombie strip show up in Duluth or something by now.
Gyro has stayed out of the limelight, but occasionally she calls after midnight. Crying, whispering, full of fear of things that might happen. She’s afraid of Alison, but I think Alison probably did what she should’ve done before we even had decided to abduct her.
Got the hell out of town.
Dead or alive, it’s all any of us wants to do.
Of course, that’s the true story.
Mags is covering for Gyro when she tells it her way. Her way has me as an insaniac and Gyro as an innocent and Alison Gall as the bitch goddess. Mags says the truth is that she and I went nuts one day in school. That she had stolen Gyro’s brother’s gun. That I laughed while she fired the shots at Alison and the others.
Sometimes, she tells me on the phone that she doesn’t really believe the truth anymore.
She told me, “It couldn’t happen the way we saw it. It just couldn’t. It had to be us, Nora. You and me. Maybe we just got too fucked up in life to know what was really happening around us. I don’t know. I’m not smart enough.”
Mags lost her courage sometime after all the TV shows and newspapers and People magazine. She’s still my best friend, and I admire the hell out of her, I really do.
But I wish she’d face the truth.
Yeah, there’s more, like what Alison did to humiliate Gyro. And what Gyro whispered in my ear to make me so mad I could focus my Fries With That? on poor dead Alison.
I mean, even thinking it again makes me mad enough to spit, but I’m saving it for when Barbara Walters’ people call me.
The Machinery of Night
1
He thinks: it is our thoughts that make us solid. And daylight. Daylight affects our vision so we believe in solids, in mass, in the religion of material and weight. But when the night washes over us like a flood, it draws back the veil. Pagans knew this; Buddhists knew this; maybe even some Christians know it, which is why they fear the devil and all his works so much. The devil is night. The devil is low definition. The devil is where one ends another begins and all of it a great stream. The devil is darkness. It’s a mechanism for seeing without seeing. Starlight reveals how fluid we are. How there is no beginning and end. Christ said I am the Alpha and the Omega, but the darkness says there is no beginning and end, there is only world without end, world without definition, world without boundary. How to erase the lines between the boundaries is the thing.
Then he stops thinking. Light, somewhere, light spitting out of the hole in the sky.
The night recedes again, the world hardens. Walls arise, windows, doors, beds, restraints.
2
“Who did this?”
“The ones who come in the night.”
“Stop that. Who did this? Tell me right now. I mean now. Come on. One of you did this.”
“I told you. It doesn’t surprise me you don’t believe us. You don’t believe in much, do you?”
Human feces spread like a post-modern landscape across the green wall.
The words: I FORGIVE YOU SON in curlicue shit paint.
Layton glanced at the three of them, knowing that not one man among them would confess. All it meant was more work for him. More cleaning, more scrubbing, all the things he hated about his job.
Meanwhile, the world spun — outside the window, he could see the river as it ran beside the spindly trees, the flooding having subsided three days earlier; the sun through morning mist; the gray doves like a child’s paper airplanes floating on the breeze, finally landing on the outer wall, beyond the razor-wired fence.
He wanted to be out there.
He wanted to quit his job that day, but he was still waiting for things to happen — he waited for the other offer from a better hospital, or even a nice administrative position at the cancer society.
Anywhere but here, this place where no one ever seemed to get better, where the depressed remained bleary-eyed, their blood nearly all Thorazine and Prozac at this point; or the criminals, the ones who had done terrible things out there in the world and now were with him, with Layton Conner, behind these walls; and who, after all, were any of them? It was said that even one of the nurses had ended up in a bed down on Ward Six, her mind scrambled because she let them in, she let the patients’ world engulf her own until she didn’t know there was an Outside.
Look outside when they get to you. Just for a second. You need to do this to keep yourself safe. When they are getting inside you, look out the nearest window for a second, look at your shoes, look at anything that will take your mind away from them for a moment so they won’t own you.
He wished he’d had a cigarette on his break. He felt the addiction kicking in, and even with the patch on his arm, it wasn’t enough drug to keep him sane in this environment. He glanced from the window to the three men — Nix, Hopper, and Dreiling, each with his secret history, secret insanity, secret darkness.
He looked beyond the three patients to the far wall where one of them had taken their excrement and had written the words.
Dreiling, who had prettier hair than any of the others in the ward, shook his locks out and grinned. “It’s music,” he said, and the interminable humming began; Nix clapped his hands in the air, catching imaginary flies, or perhaps keeping time with Dreiling’s annoying tune.
Hopper, who was rather nice in Layton’s opinion, gave an ‘aw, shucks,’ look, shook his head, and whispered something to himself.
“You can’t do this anymore,” Layton said, easing away from his own frustration. “It’s not going to help when Dr. Glover comes in and sees this.”
At the mention of the psych director’s name, all three shivered slightly as if a ghost had kissed them on the neck right at that moment.
Layton felt a little powerful invoking the name of the dreaded man.
Nix’s face broke out in sweaty beads, and he put his hand up to his throat. “I…I can’t swallow…”
“Of course you can, now, Nix, come on, take a deep breath,” Layton stepped forward, pulling Nix’s hand away. “Let go. You can swallow just fine.”
“I can’t,” Nix said somewhat despondently, but in fact, he could. “I hate Dr. Glover. And Dr. Harper. And you nurses.”
“Do you ever think she’ll stop?” Hopper asked later while Layton guided him back to his own room for the daily dose of meds.
“What’s that?”
“She dreams all of it, her and the baby, and the old man, all of them.” Hopper whispered, a secret, and Layton nodded as if he knew what the hell the tattooed man was babbling about, and then he gave him the little pink drink from the little white cups, and eventually, Hopper fell asleep on the cot while Layton fastened the restraints to his arms.
“This is not everything I’m abou
t,” Layton said to the girl in the bar later, a mug moving swiftly to his lips. He had bored her with his day.
She was cute. She laughed at his jokes; she smiled at the stories of Nix, Hopper, Dr. Glover, Shea, Shaw, and Rogers and the Night Nurse.
It was getting on towards evening, and he had stopped in for a quick drink or two before heading back to his place on Chrome Street. The day had been long, with two major eruptions (as Hansen called them) between inmates.
First — in the showers — what had begun as a fist fight between two very violent individuals escalated to a riot with a dozen patients.
Then, as Layton finished up his shift, he’d heard the screams from Room 47.
He ran down the hall to intervene with Daisy, the Flower girl, when she didn’t want to get her sponge bath.
Daisy was sweet, and Layton hated seeing her get hurt, particularly from the techs and nurses on the floor, all of whom seemed to loathe the woman for no apparent reason.
Once he’d calmed her down, she’d gone to her bath fairly easily; he watched while they held her and then he had taken the sponge himself, frothy with soap, and had spread it across her neck and arms and along her back before the female nurse took over.
He felt bad for poor Daisy, but still, she had made him stay an extra two hours — for which he got no pay.
And now, the bar, the beer, and the pretty girl who could not be more than twenty-two; even so she worked hard to exude girlishness.
Her skirt too short, her laugh too tinkly, her eyes much too shadowed. “But the insane, that’s who you work with?”
He shrugged. “That’s one way of looking at them. They’re ordinary people who have had something go wrong. Sometimes, what went wrong is small and nearly unimportant, but it’s enough to make them want to attempt suicide. Sometimes, it’s a big wrong, and a few of them have murdered or harmed others. Sad thing is, bottom line, they’re there to be protected from themselves more than anything.”
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