The Poison Sky

by John Shannon

  “It’s their stock-in-trade.”

  He handed her his napkin and she dabbed at her eye. “Whew. Wasn’t there something in 1984 about authoritarians using your one real terror against you?”

  “They called it Room 101, I think. Whatever it was you really hated and feared, they kept it waiting for you in Room 101.”

  “Well, these creeps took me to 101. But not my fears. My big disappointments in myself. When I came in reception, I could see a girl with long blond braids weeping. They led her out of one of the cubicles, where they took me. I should have left right then.”

  She sipped at the coffee pensively.

  “Did you find out anything useful?”

  “In due course,” she snapped. She looked at him, as if seeing him for the first time. “You’re an impatient man by nature, aren’t you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, keep your shirt on. Are my eyes red?”

  “Nothing that would get you thrown out of an AA meeting.”

  An old couple nearby had fallen silent and were trying to listen in. The woman tapped her husband on the arm and nodded in their direction, her chin fixed in a kind of righteous indignation. He wondered what they thought they were overhearing.

  “They set you down and a guy asks you a lot of questions about your life and doesn’t respond at all when you answer. He just takes notes. Then about forty-five minutes into it, he says he has to enter the information into their supercomputer, and he leaves for all of about a minute and a half. Then he comes back with a new clipboard and says there’s a good chance your soul’s a worthy one, ready for the climb, and it’s worth doing a few more tests.” The waitress was heading back and he waved her off.

  “Then two of them, a new man and a woman, come and take you into another room, where they strap you into a kind of lie detector. There’s this accordion hose around your chest and blood pressure cuffs on your arms. They say it’s a way of focusing on the soul’s truth, not just the mind’s truth. Before they start in, they have you breathe deeply for a minute or two, and I got a bit woozy. Then the questions. They start slow but before long they’re going at you good. ‘Tell us your greatest moment of shame.’ ‘Was there a time you thought you betrayed someone you loved?’ ”

  The old woman nearby swiveled a full head of gray whipped-cream curls to meet his eyes. She seemed disapproving, and he wondered if she was a Theodelphian acolyte, but that was just too paranoid.

  “Then they start tearing you down. Just a few suggestions, some reminders of little things you’ve revealed to them. All the friendliness is gone from their voices and it really hurts. This goes on for a while until you’re a bit weepy and then they skedaddle. They just leave you alone to think about it. That was the strangest thing, Jack. I knew what they were doing to me, or at least I knew they were messing with my head, but when they left me alone …” She shook her head, as if to clear it. “It was the worst sense of abandonment I’ve ever felt. I would have done almost anything to get those two creeps back in there to talk to me and be friendly again.”

  “The heavy breathing is probably the key,” Jack Liffey said. “About half the religions in the world use hyperventilation to change your mental state. They make you dance, or whirl around, or chant, or belt out psalms. That gets you suggestible and then they offer you a revelation or a vision or a demand for money. These guys weren’t the first to figure out what extra oxygen in the blood does to you.”

  “It damn well works.” She handed him a small card that said The Rising Course of Human Evolution Study Center, Ojai. “I’m sublime, okay. I’m the cat’s pajamas. I graduated or whatever it was. That’s where I’m supposed to go one day. Something about a ladder.”

  “Good work.” He chuckled. “But I had the ladder. By the way, what was in Room 101?”

  “I don’t know you well enough.”

  The old couple got their check and the woman glared at him as they walked past.

  “It was just child pornography,” Jack Liffey said to her.

  6

  THE PASSIONATE LIFE

  NORMALLY HE WOULD HAVE SLEPT RIGHT THROUGH THE phone, but Loco took the ringing as an excuse to hurl his muscular body against the bedroom door, and Jack Liffey woke up quick—a perfectly ordinary dream about not being able to find his parked car in a confusing city suddenly invaded by men with big guns and red marine haircuts. As long as he’d jangled himself awake, he went out to the living room and picked up the phone just as the machine kicked in.

  “Jack Liffey can’t come to the phone right now. Please leave your name and number …”

  “Shit. Hold it.” Loco got between his legs, trying to trip him up, as he fumbled the plug out of the wall. One day he’d make a fortune designing an answering machine that did what people wanted it to do.

  “Okay.”

  “Jack, this is Faye.” She sounded distraught and he glanced at the digital clock on his VCR. It said 3:25. It was a moment before those numbers made sense to him: A.M. “Milo’s in the hospital. Some sort of industrial accident while he was doing his rounds at the plant. I’m sorry to ask, but could you come out here?”

  Why me? he thought. But she was his only paying client. “Where’s here?”

  “I’ll be at St. Agnes. He’s on a respirator in the ER.”

  He left dry food for Loco and grabbed some coffee at a twenty-four-hour gas station. It was still warm and breezy. He couldn’t remember another time he’d been on the road at four A.M. and it was astonishing how many cars there were, going to work, or going home, or just going, one cheerless moon face per vehicle.

  On the way to the freeway he saw a big square bed of ivy in front of a mini-mall where a group of bleary-looking kids were bump-grinding Hula Hoops frantically to a couple of boom boxes. It looked like a scene from Laugh-in. When he got closer a skinny girl looked up with a smirk, as if inviting him to share in the joke. He grinned back and gave them a little Groucho multiple elevation of the eyebrows and toasted them with the Styrofoam coffee cup before driving off. It was a city that didn’t always offer a reason, and that was okay if you weren’t feeling pressured.

  The freeway was very fast and polite, full of people who were used to the hour and to one another like a secret fraternity, the Lodge of Night Drivers. He felt a peculiar kind of woozy ease settle onto him as he drove over the pass, as if he’d been out of sync with things for a long time and now he was dropping into the groove. It was a dope kind of feeling, probably something to do with dream deprivation.

  The main hospital building was tall and modern and nondescript and could have been anything. A lit red sign pointed toward the emergency driveway, where two heavyset women in white coats were hauling a folding gurney out of an ambulance.

  A signboard by the main door nearby announced a lecture series by Raju Iyer: IDENTITY TODAY: ELEVEN WAYS OF BEING YOURSELF. Jack Liffey smiled as he walked past: he’d always figured the one was enough.

  Faye was sitting on a long bench in a hallway outside the ER. She’d been crying, but there was something else in her manner that he couldn’t quite work out. Her eyes were puffy and he found being a little out of kilter suited her. She tried so hard to be tough and solid most of the time that she didn’t leave you much to get hold of.

  “Thanks for coming, Jack.”

  “How’s Milo?”

  “He’ll make it but he won’t be smoking his pipe for a while. He won’t be talking, either. They’ve got him intubated. I had it once and it really messes up your throat.”

  He sat beside her and she relaxed visibly and set aside the old People she hadn’t been reading.

  “I’m glad you came.” She seemed about to say something but ran down.

  “Do you know what happened?”

  She blanched when a piercing scream skirled out of the ER and banged around in the hallway a bit. A man in sweats burst out through the double door and then stood with his face to the wall. Beside him was a poster for Allergy Awareness with a big shaky-looking car
toon man sneezing.

  “He was temporarily on graveyard shift up at Green-World Chemicals. There’s two guards, but only a skeleton crew of workers on grave. Apparently some chemical processes have to go on twenty-four hours a day and they can’t shut the whole place down. The guards take turns with one roving and one staying at the gate. Milo was roving, inspecting one of the areas that was as good as shut down for the night and he didn’t come back on time. The other guard found him unconscious between two buildings, where there was a terrible smell in the air. He said it was like old gym socks, but he’s not a chemist. There’s a hazmat team from the fire department out there now trying to find out what it was.”

  A woman leaned out the double doors and called to the man in sweats, “Elden, don’t you dare!”

  “It’s just the same old hustle.”

  “I know, baby.”

  He turned around wearily and went back inside, chugging a little with his fists like a man warming up to dance.

  “Something else is bugging you,” Jack Liffey said.

  “Does it show?”

  “Only when you laugh.”

  She handed him a folded sheet of paper she’d been keeping in the People. Childish capitals were scrawled across the paper: SEE WHAT HAPPENS!

  “If I worked out the time right, this was stuck under our front door about a half hour after the accident. It takes about fifteen minutes to drive to our place from GreenWorld.”

  He looked close, turned it over, sniffed the paper, held it up to the light to look for watermarks and secret ink, and in the end didn’t know any more than when he first glanced at it. The writer made his capital Es like backward “3s,” and the W was a “3” on its back. The way things were going, he thought, with witchcraft and Theodelphians and God-knows-what in the air, he could start looking for a crazed numerologist.

  “It scares me,” she said.

  “Um-hmm.” He handed it back. He just couldn’t tie it to the balding guru in the office full of pillows. It was overkill, even if Hedrick/Baba Ambu was still pissed off. It was way overboard for somebody trying to locate one new acolyte.

  She turned the threat over in her palm a few times. “I’d like to give this back in spades,” she said angrily. “To wherever it emanates from.”

  “It doesn’t emanate, Faye. It was delivered very pointedly. Whatever they’re up to, you can count on them being meaner than you and me. Give it to the police.”

  “Maybe. I feel so heavy and stupid. Milo’s sedated in there and I just can’t sit in this horrible corridor the rest of the night, but I’m scared to go home. Can I stay at your place, Jack?”

  He thought of his apartment. There was probably a good strong aroma of Marlena on the bed and the sofa, too, after the last time they’d thrashed their way about the place in heat. And the condo was a real mess anyway. “It’s too small really.”

  “Would you stay at my place, then? Just till the sun comes up.”

  “I’ve got to pick up my daughter in the morning. But I’ll watch over you until you can get a friend in.”

  HER home was a whole lot tidier than when he’d last seen it, as if she’d set out to normalize things. The tape was off the rug and all the items set around as markers were gone. There was a gold Navaho rug that he hadn’t been able to see before and a giant coffee-table book about the ballet and a coffee table for it to sit on. A magazine rack held Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Review of Books, as if somebody were in practice to be a junior-college English instructor.

  She got herself a stiff drink and he refused the same. He leaned back on the sofa and closed his eyes. Three hours’ sleep. It was not going to be a very pleasant father’s day with Maeve.

  She put on Judy Collins softly, which was a little too soothing, and he jolted once, one of those little presleep spasms of nervous energy, like the top of you dropping through to the bottom.

  “Sure you won’t have a drink?” He felt the sofa give and eventually opened his eyes to see her at the far end clutching a big brown photo album.

  “I don’t drink.”

  “You have trouble with it?”

  “Not the way you mean. My life’s going through an abstemious phase.”

  “Does that mean temperate?”

  “Uh-huh. Do you have any idea who’d be threatening you or your husband?”

  “I’m president of the Friends of the Library. Maybe somebody got mad at a big overdue fine.”

  The joke seemed so out of character, or out of the moment, that he rolled his neck to look at her taking a big swig. “Sorry,” she said. “This kind of thing is so far outside my experience, I can’t even guess. You said the Theodelphians can be vicious.”

  “Can you see them sneaking up on your husband and loosing poison gas on him? I can’t.”

  “That religious freak in Japan set off nerve gas in the subway, didn’t he?”

  “I guess anything is possible. But we ought to start with the plausible. Do you know what your husband’s really up to? I can’t believe an aerospace engineer is adrift in French critical theory.”

  “You’re welcome to look in his study, Jack.” She was quiet a moment and he nearly fell asleep again. Maybe he did. “How come your life took its abstemious turn?”

  “Probably just vanity,” he mumbled.

  “How do you mean?” She finished off her drink and looked like she wanted more.

  If he hadn’t been so drowsy, he probably would have fobbed her off and left it. “The first real thing you learn when you hit middle age is that things might just not work out for you. It’s a shock. Then they actually don’t work out. At that point you start thinking about mortality, you’re part of the human condition after all, not some exceptional case. Death is really waiting up the road for you. I get that feeling on every long car trip now.” He wondered what on earth he was yammering about, but he was too weary to listen closely to himself. “When you get in that state, every car coming toward you is a danger. Your kitchen knives are too sharp. The airliner overhead might fall on you. You get the feeling you’ve been surrounded all your life by deadly stuff that’s been watching you with a kind of testy patience, and all you’ve got left to keep that stuff at bay is doing your job the best you can, trying to measure up. So you clean up your act.” He broke off, feeling foolish.

  “Wow,” she said. “You have one demanding guardian angel.”

  “That must be it.”

  She went to the kitchen and got herself another drink. From the depth of color, he wondered if it was straight booze.

  “I think I know you well enough now.” She opened the big photo album and slid it toward him on the coffee table. It was an old-style album, musty smelling, with the items held in place by little stick-on corners. He saw a hokey posed photograph of a line of a little girls in tights doing their best to take up some ballet posture on one raised toe as they clung to the barre in front of a mirror wall. PITIKOVSKY DANCE STUDIO, MARCH 1962 was picked out with stick-on white letters on a changeable board propped against the wall. The camera was at enough of an angle so it didn’t show itself in the wall of glass. One little girl, smaller and skinnier than the others, had her face circled in red ink and a mashed string of red yarn ran off the photo to the caption, Faye Trani, age 9.

  The next page was a clipping from a local newspaper about a junior ballet performance. Faye’s name was circled halfway down the story. There was another dance-studio portrait, then a sole portrait of the little girl in a tutu in front of a painted backdrop of a Swiss mountain. The book of memorabilia went on like that, except Faye’s name started featuring in the headlines, and the groups of girls that seemed to be flocking here and there like quail became centered on her. There were a lot of pink ribbons clipped off ballet slippers, mash notes from people praising her work, an amateur photograph of her on stage taken from the audience, then, all by itself, a letter offering her an apprenticeship with the Western Metropolitan Ballet Theater.

  “I lived dance,”
she said. “The way moving your body with grace can make you feel. It’s more satisfying than an orgasm.”

  “And all that applause.”

  “That doesn’t hurt, but the real reasons are inside yourself. Feeling the movements. Hitting exactly the right pitch, I mean exactly, like an archer splitting the previous arrow.” She made a small clutching gesture with two fists like a golfer who’d just nailed a long putt.

  “I know the punch line is coming,” he said, “but this time I’ll keep my shirt on.”

  She acknowledged his patience with a little nod. “I would never have been the prima ballerina in New York, but maybe in a regional ballet. I was very good and it’s enough to excel. That’s what I grew up wanting. I wanted to excel. That’s vanity, Jack.”

  “Maybe not, if you’re good.”

  She went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “I was sixteen. It started as a little crack in a bone called the navicular, up in the arch of my left foot. The ligaments of your foot are so strong that sometimes, under a sharp stress, the bones will break before the ligaments even strain. I felt something and I iced it, but of course that didn’t help. Then I danced on it. The pain was excruciating. I guess they call it playing hurt in football, but it’s really stupid. Three operations later they told me I should never go up on pointe again or I’d end up crippled. For a long time after, even when something that important to you is gone, it’s still all you have. I even considered going to Vegas as a chorine.” She shook her head. “I married Milo and let my body go. That’s what those little Theodelphian bastards found out about me by banging on my religious reflexes. I didn’t even know it still hurt so bad, but they hurt me with it.”

  All of a sudden he realized she was sitting right next to him, and she turned one more page to display an X ray of a foot. She tugged it out of the corners and held it against the light to show him a hairline crack. “God, I hate that little white line. Nothing has ever been right since.” Her voice was slurring, and she rested her head against his shoulder. “Just substitutes. You wonder if it’s God’s vengeance for being so vain, for wanting the passion so badly.”