The Hellion’s slingshot. My slingshot.
I dropped the bag of playing pieces and picked up the knotty, untrimmed handle of the weapon. Before I could change my mind I tucked it into the back pocket of my jeans, grabbed the comic box, and headed upstairs.
“Del!”
“Shit!” I bobbled the box, caught it.
Bertram stood at the top of the stairs like a low-rent Caesar: the top of his bald head gleaming, a fringe of wet hair stuck out all over like a laurel crown. He wore my mother’s green bathrobe, open at the chest to reveal tufts of gray hair.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“What am I . . . ? What are you doing in my mother’s robe?” A disturbing thought crossed my mind. “You didn’t . . . ?”
“Didn’t what?”
He had no idea what I was talking about. “Never mind.” He stepped aside to let me pass. “What are you doing in my mother’s house?”
“She invited me. And wait till she gets home—she’s been so worried about you. I’ve been worried about you! If there’s anything I can do to help you—”
“No. The last thing I need is more of your help.”
“I understand,” he said. His face cinched into a deep frown, and he nodded. “You have every right to be upset. What I did was inexcusable.”
I didn’t have the time to work through Bertram’s guilt with him.
“Listen, does my mother know what happened at the lake? What really happened?”
He suddenly looked apologetic. “Possibly . . .”
“Does she know why the Human League came after me?”
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“Have you ever tried to hide anything from that woman?” Bertram said. “It’s like she can smell when you’re not telling her something. Lew didn’t even ride with her—he stayed in the car with Amra—but me, I was trapped! The whole trip back she was pumping me for information, and half the time I didn’t even realize I’d said something I shouldn’t until she gave me that look.” He winced. “Del, you and I’ve both been through intense psychotherapy. We know from shrinks. But your mother, she’s good.”
The All-Seeing Eye of Agamoto, I thought.
“And now you’re living here?” I said.
“Just for a couple days. She said I could take some time to figure out my next step.”
Uh-huh. I wondered which step that would be: back to the hospital, or on to a brand-new cult. Outside the front window the street was clear. “One thing, Bertram—you can’t tell her I was here.”
“Are you crazy? I just told you I can’t keep anything from her!
What is that you’re taking?”
“Nothing, just some of my stuff. Childhood memorabilia.”
“Okay, but what if she—”
“She can’t read your mind,” I said, exasperated. “She’s not a slan.”
He looked like he’d been slapped.
I sighed. “Listen, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”
“No, I’m sorry,” Bertram said sincerely. “I almost got you killed, and for that I’ll be eternally in your debt.”
“I’ve got to get going.” I headed for the kitchen, and Bertram followed.
“I’m serious!” he said. “Anything you want me to do, I’ll do it. Anything.”
How about please don’t screw my mother, I thought. I went to the back door, turned back. “Listen, here’s what you do. Lew and I used this all the time. If she gets suspicious, you admit your guilt, but for something else.”
“Like what?”
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“You secretly ate two—no, four cookies.”
I scooped my loot from the cookie rack and made my escape. I inhaled the first cookie before we left the driveway, and I had the comic books out of the box before we got out of the neighborhood. I absentmindedly waved O’Connell through a few rights and lefts, sending her down Euclid.
“Damn, these are good cookies,” O’Connell said. I wiped my fingers on my shirt and turned pages. I didn’t find what I was looking for in the first comic, set it aside, and opened the next one.
O’Connell shook her head. “You’d better be right about this, Mr. Pierce.” All this way for a comic book. For a page in a comic book. I found it in the third issue. Olympia! “Pull over, now,” I said.
“Jesus Christ,” O’Connell said. She parked in back of the Steak n Shake. I handed her the comic, open to the page I’d found. “Look at that,” I said.
I hopped out of the truck, went around to the bed. My duffel was under the tarp, snug under the cab window. I unzipped it, took out the topmost binder, and carried it back inside.
O’Connell was looking at the full spread across the top of page four. The comic was done in only one color, blue mimeograph lines on white paper, but the picture was clear enough, to my eyes at least. The house was there, the barn, the big silo, the line of trees—and the faint smudge over the house. Then I handed her the binder, where the same farmhouse had been drawn by the Painter.
“See?” I said. “They’re the same.”
“I admit they’re similar,” she said. “But I don’t see what it tells us.”
“The smudge.” I pointed to the comic. The pages had been badly duplicated, but if you looked closely enough you could see lines that looked like outstretched hands, legs, the suggestion of a cape. Once you saw those features in the comic, they became more obvious in the Painter’s rendition.
“See?” I said. “It’s RADAR Man.”
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She looked back and forth between the comic book page and the plastic sheeted page from the binder. “Okay,” she said. “If you say so. But once again, so what? You’d already seen that the Painter drew some of your memories. This time he remembered your comic book.”
“No! Some of those pictures were drawn before I was born. He’s not drawing my comic book—we’re drawing the same place.”
“That could be any farm anywhere.”
“No. Not anywhere.” I pointed to the little text box above the drawing in the comic book: Meanwhile, over Olympia Kansas . . .
“RADAR Man’s hometown,” I said.
O’Connell looked at me, eyes narrowed. “Is that a real town?”
“Yes. I don’t know. Maybe.”
She sighed. “I suppose we have to buy a map.”
By eight that night we’d reached the Missouri side of Kansas City. O’Connell swung into the parking lot of a Motel 6, hit the brakes, and triggered a landslide of paper and plastic from the bench seat onto the floorboards: my comics, the binders I’d taken from the Waldheims, newspapers, two maps of the Midwest. The pickup looked like someone had emptied a file cabinet through the passenger window. O’Connell turned off the cassette—the pickup didn’t have a CD, and we’d been listening to her homemade mix-tapes since leaving Chicago—and said, “Do you have any cash?”
I opened my wallet. Inside were my last two twenties, a couple of ones, and the water-damaged Hyatt card where I’d written Tom and Selena’s phone number. She took the twenties.
“Hey!”
“I’ll see if this will pay for a room,” she said. I thought: A room?
I put my comics back in the box, inserted pages back in their binders. I folded the Missouri-Kansas map so that it was open to show a circled and recircled dot of a town. I still hadn’t gotten over the thrill: Olympia, Kansas, was real. All we had to do was follow the yellow brick road.
O’Connell came back with a key, drove us around the side of the
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building, and opened a door on the first floor. Double beds. The carpet crunched from old spills, and the air was thick with a sickeningly sweet scent—some perfumed cleanser. I expected at any moment to detect the horrible smell it was trying to mask.
“Oh my God,” I said.
O’Connell looked annoyed. �
��Sleep in the truck, then.”
“No, no, this is great. No fish on the door, but you can’t have everything.”
I dropped my duffel and the comic box onto the bed by the window, thinking I could channel a little fresh air across my face as I slept. I tried to open the window, but it was sealed. Then again, maybe keeping the window closed on the first floor of a shady motel wasn’t such a bad idea. Only one other car in the parking lot right now, but more people would arrive later.
“Checking to see if we were followed?” O’Connell said. “You spent the whole trip looking out the back window, when you weren’t buried in these comics.”
I turned around, and she had the box open. She picked up an issue of RADAR Man, flipped it open to a random page.
“Bertram thought the demons were performing for each other,” I said. “That they were watching each other. But maybe it’s worse than that. Maybe they help each other.”
O’Connell shook her head. “They’re too self-involved, wrapped up in their own stories. They don’t cooperate.”
“What if there was a threat to all of them? Like Dr. Ram—”
“Dr. Ram was killed because he was a threat to some fanatic’s worldview,” she said without looking up. “And this—” She shook the comic. “This makes no sense. ‘Yo, bozo boy’?”
I walked around the side of the bed, looked over her shoulder. It was the climactic fight scene, and my sixth-grade drawing skills had been taxed to their limits. I’d been trying out some of those Jack Kirby forced perspectives, and RADAR Man’s fists looked as big as cars.
“It’s simple,” I said. “RADAR Man, aka Robert Trebor, aka Bob, has tracked Doctor Awkward to his lair in Bob’s hometown.”
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“Doctor Awkward?”
“They’re palindromes,” I said. “Doctor Awkward is D-R-A-W—”
“Oh, I got it.”
“Anyway, the doctor’s kidnapped his girlfriend, Hannah, and made a clone of her, except that the polarity of her brain’s been reversed. The clone is evil and left-handed.”
“Of course.”
“So the evil Hannah says, ‘Yo, bozo boy! I’m alive; evil am I!’ And RADAR Man says, ‘Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live!’ ”
“Lovely dialogue,” she said.
“Hey, you try to write in all palindromes. Lew had this book, Big Book of Word Games or something, with pages of these things. We wanted to write the whole story that way, one big continuous palindrome. That would’ve been the ultimate, an entire book you could read forward or backward.”
“The ending is present in the beginning,” she said. “As always.”
“Is that like a theological insight or something?”
“The alpha and the omega,” she said. “I didn’t invent it.” She handed me the comic and walked to her suitcase. “I’m going to take a shower.”
“Oh, okay,” I said nonchalantly. “I’ll take one after you.”
She glanced back at me with an expression I couldn’t parse, then picked up a small nylon bag and carried it into the tiny room that held the shower and toilet. She closed the door behind her. After several long minutes, the water sputtered on.
I lay down on my bed and focused on the comic book page, trying to stare past the image of O’Connell, naked, face turned up to the shower head, water streaming down her neck . . . dr. awkward: Do Good’s deeds live on? No, Evil’s deeds do, O God. r a d a r m a n : Egad, an adage! Draw, O coward!
Which doesn’t make much sense, because the doctor doesn’t have a gun. RM’s own RADAR gun knocks both Dr. Awkward and the evil Hannah back into one of the big funhouse mirrors the doctor keeps in
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his lair, shattering it. The doctor lies on the floor, stunned, shards of glass around him.
r a d a r m a n : Now I won!
d r . aw k wa r d : Drat such custard!
Then the big revelation: Dr. Awkward pulls down his mask, and it’s Bob’s own face! (As much as I could make it look like the same face. I wasn’t good at faces, or consistency. My specialty was biceps and thigh muscles.)
r a d a r m a n : Is it . . . ? ’Tis I!
The truth finally revealed: Dr. Awkward is Bob’s evil clone. Or, is Bob Dr. Awkward’s good clone? Tune in next month, reader!
O’Connell stepped out of the bathroom, walked toward me. The white motel towel barely reached the tops of her thighs. She looked tiny, birdlike. Fuzzed scalp, nearly translucent ears. Her expression was grave.
I sat up. “What is it?” I said softly.
“I need to know something.” She stood in front of me without moving. Her pale shoulders, still glazed by wet, had pinked under the hot shower. I glanced at the white on white swell of her breasts against the frayed cotton towel, looked away.
I could smell her. Soap, and the danker scent that slipped from between her thighs. From that shadow beneath the hem of the towel.
“I need to know if the boy is watching.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so.” On the video he’d come awake as if he’d been jolted from a nightmare. He’d yelled for his mother like a five-year-old. “I don’t think time passes there.”
I lifted a hand, touched the back of her knee, still damp. She closed her eyes. I moved my hand up, fingertips drawing a line of moisture. She gripped my forearm, stopping me. Opened her eyes again. “Please. Does he know what happens to you? Will he remember?”
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“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know how it all works.”
She stepped back. My fingers slipped from her skin. She turned and walked to her bed. She pulled a handful of clothes from the case and stepped back into the bathroom. I lifted my hand, touched dewy fingers to my lips. I could smell nothing, taste nothing, but the subtle scent of her was still in my mind.
“Shit,” I said quietly.
After ten or fifteen minutes she came back out, dressed in a long T-shirt and nylon running shorts. She brushed her teeth at the sink without looking in the mirror. She straightened the clothes in her suitcase, shut the lid, and set it carefully on the dresser. Then she pulled back the heavy polyester bedcover and slipped under the sheets. She lay faceup, eyes closed.
I picked up my shaving kit and a pair of gym shorts. I turned out the light by my bed, then the overhead light, leaving only the fluorescent above the sink and the light from the bath. As I passed the foot of her bed, she said, “Don’t worry about the lights.”
I stopped. “Are we going to talk about this?”
“I’ve taken a vow of celibacy, Del.” Her voice was flat. Her eyes stayed closed. “I’m your pastor. I shouldn’t have done that to you. I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t do anything.”
She didn’t answer.
After my shower, I turned out all the lights, and in the dark stuffed my dirty clothes into a corner of the duffel, next to the bike chains. I left the slingshot in the back pocket of my jeans. I hadn’t shown that to her, maybe afraid she’d throw it away like my father’s pistol. I lay in the dark between the scratchy sheets, listening for O’Connell’s breathing. All I could hear was the thrum of trucks on the overpass. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move my legs.
A moment before, I’d been dreaming of water, and cold. Paralyzed, I sank through the icy dark. The Black Well filled my vision,
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above me and below me at the same time, a bottomless corkscrewing pit, a tunnel into space. I could sense something or someone waiting for me in the tunnel—no, thousands of presences. A vast congregation. The next moment the water vanished. My eyes were closed, or else open but blind in the dark. My lips were covered by a hot weight, my legs still trapped. I knew then that the water had been a memory, a dream, but I couldn’t tell if I’d woken up.
Heat against my cock. I was hard, aching. I thru
st into that heat, and my eyes opened a second time. Fully awake now. Electrically awake.
O’Connell sat astride my hips, her lips on mine, her hands pinning my shoulders. She was naked, the muscles of her neck limned in a sliver of lamplight.
I tried to sit up. Her mouth released me, but she didn’t look at my face. She put a hand on my sternum and pushed me onto my back with surprising force. I opened my mouth to speak, and she pressed a hand against my jaw, forcing the side of my head into the mattress, forcing me to look away from her. Her strength was fierce. She began to grind against me. My shorts were still on, but the bedclothes had been pushed down, trapping my ankles.
“O’Connell.” I could hardly speak with her weight on my jaw. She rocked against me and made a sound between a grunt and a sigh.
“O’Connell—”
She didn’t answer. She moved again and the grunt became something like a laugh. I screamed through gritted teeth, twisted my arm out of her grip. Pushed her away from me, sending her tumbling off the bed. She yelped as she hit the floor. I scrambled off the bed and turned to face her, my back pressed against the cold door.
“What the fuck!” O’Connell yelled.
“Who are you?” I said.
She stared up at me—looking me in the face for the first time since I’d woken up. In the dim light I couldn’t make out her eyes. 2 3 2
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A long moment, then she said, “Del, it’s me.” She scooted back until she was sitting up against the other bed, one knee drawn up.
“O’Connell. Siobhan.” Her voice sounded the same.
“How do I know?” I said.
“You already know.”
I felt for the light switch, flicked it on. She squinted against the light.
I’d known with the Shug. And I’d known that the Piper at the Hyatt was an imposter. I realized I could always tell, from the Painter possession at the airport, to the handful of other possessed people I’d seen in my life—even Valis. But O’Connell was definitely no demon. I exhaled. Slumped to the floor. The dirty carpet crunched against my butt. “I’m sorry,” I said. I ran a hand through my hair. “I thought . . . I just . . .”
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