by Gerald Lynch
What emerged looked like hell’s own Olympic-size swimming pool. A huge open tank of chocolate sludge appeared to be lying still. Then it shifted where we stood, swelling, rising and rearing the width of the pool, cresting aloft to become an undulation that snaked towards the opposite end. From that far end a loud burping noise came intermittently, like monstrous gulping as the sludge was moved along to the next pool. While back of it all high-pitched machinery buzzed like a holocaust of insects.
Kevin raised his left arm and, already moving, pointed high into the distant corner. I widened my eyes — they stung worse — so squinted and made out the figure up on what looked like a catwalk near the ceiling. As I followed Kevin along the right side of the pool, he continued pointing across with a commanding arm.
“Do not move another step, Miss Pepper-Pottersfield. This is the police and you are under arrest. Stop now!”
He’d startled her out of a downward-peering reverie. As we rounded the far end of the pool, she sped up inching sideways along the catwalk that ended in right angle to a trestle-like structure extending out over the pool a ways. On that side of the room, the pool came right up to the wall. Kevin scurried and skidded to a stop on the slick floor.
I was right behind him on the iron-rung ladder up to the catwalk. My right foot slipped in the sludge that seemed to coat everything and my hands slid down — ploughing the stuff below them — before my grip braked me and I regained footing. I flung the goo from my hands, climbed and helped myself up onto the catwalk by its shaky wire guardrail.
And came up short yet again behind Kevin, who had paused near the end of the narrow catwalk. The six-inch sheet-metal tube it met reached some two metres out over the pool and was cradled in thin metal strips attached to the ceiling the same distance above; ventilation seemed non-existent, so the tube must have been for exhaust. Alice, in her smudged plaid slacks and once-white blouse, was already sliding along the juddering tube. She reached its end and lightly held the metal strips, leaned out and gazed down. The nape of her pale neck looked as frail as Shawn’s. I needed no other encouragement to talk to her gently.
Kevin had paused to breathe, which he did laboriously, like a climber in thinned oxygen. Except this air was toxin-thick. I felt my own dizziness.
But I sucked it up and spoke loudly: “Alice, it’s me, Lorne Thorpe. Bob Browne still loved you. With his dying words he asked me to tell you that.”
The magic name had its effect and she turned her head to the left, looking back at us from unblinking vacant eyes. She was only a short distance away on the diagonal, but there was no way for Kevin to reach her without turning at the end of the catwalk and going out along the thin tube, which could only be disastrous.
Alice smiled so weakly that it could well have been a passing shadow. She held up a black object and frowned at it, as if she too were seeing the old VHS cassette for the first time. Opening her hand, she let it fall from her fingertips and we all watched it drop. There was no splash, more a cushioning and swallow, then a darker smudge where it had momentarily parted the frothy ooze, which again closed over.
Kevin said, “Okay, Alice, that’s the worst of it, gone forever. You’ve done what you came here to do. Now come back to us.”
She was still staring after the cassette. She managed somehow to inch farther outward. The end of the metal tube would be overstepped with another such inching. Her bare feet made her look yet more childishly vulnerable.
Kevin said, “Don’t, Alice, please.” And when she didn’t respond, he looked intently back at me.
I said clearly, “Come back, Alice. We know what was done to you and Bob as children, how you suffered more than any child should ever suffer. But, please, Alice, don’t do this to yourself, you don’t deserve it. Alice? …”
With only one hand lightly holding a metal guy-strip, she again turned her head. She whispered in the clipped schoolmarmish tone I’d heard her use at the children’s history fair: “You do not know what you’re talking about, Dr. Thorpe. You don’t deserve them.” Then turned away and gazed downward again.
“Who, Alice? Who don’t I deserve? I don’t know what we’re talking about. Tell me, please.”
Seeing I had her attention, Kevin slid to the very tip of the catwalk. He waited.
Her head whipped up and she screeched at me, “The children! That’s who. None of you does! And you especially, Dr. Lorne Thorpe! You don’t deserve the children!… And neither do I.” She dropped her head and seemed to be sniffling into her chest. “That’s why I had to leave them back there.”
Kevin merely shifted forward and the iron catwalk made the metal tube whine.
Alice flinched, sucked air. Somehow she found space farther out, causing the flimsy cylinder to tip and vibrate and screech in its cradle of metal strips never intended to hold a body’s weight.
Kevin looked back at me again, eyebrows rising and eyeballs bugging.
I closed my eyes, searching inside for something of the spell or trance he’d earlier induced in me. I wanted so to speak to Alice from that imaginary place where I knew her best, instead of from my rational self to her mad self. But nothing came. All I could do was open my eyes and look at her standing there wanting to die. Who could blame her? I opened my mouth:
“Alice, listen, please.” She again looked back over her left shoulder, with the whole room rocking and crying. “You’re right about us and about me especially. But I’m trying, I’m learning, I hope. I can do better. We all can. We need to stop interfering with children, in every sense, and in every waking moment of their lives. We need some humility, love that isn’t only about us. Bob Browne helped me see that. And so have you. You have so much more to teach us.”
But she looked downwards and shook her head no. I think she smiled small, mouthed Bob.
I said, “Yes, Alice. Bob.”
She leered at that shit pool. “Bob, it’s a pun, dumb-dumb. Do you think Gary Lewis would slap a table for me, Dr. Thorpe? Poor Bob, poor silly old buoyant Bob had to…bob off!” She made a noise like a kid snorting up much mucus.
And I knew the powerful presence of crackling madness, of a child made mad, of a human being made evil by evil. It was the detention centre visiting room times a hundred, it was Michael transforming into the Market Slasher. I didn’t know what to do. Instead of speaking strategically I asked, “Why, Alice? Why did Bob have to die?”
“Don’t be dumb-dumb… The bleeding-heart runt was about to close my whole…show …”
“But why that way, why use the Market Slasher that way?”
When she spoke she continued staring downward, holding two guy-strips like a reluctant girl standing on a tree swing, or a doubtful trapeze artist. “Oh, almighty Dr. Lorne Thorpe, judge and jury. Poor Michael was raped every night of his life by his mother and stepfather.” She actually spat ahead of herself. “War was a vacation for him. Just another part of the same old show.”
My stomach turned like a rolled-over rotting corpse. A good soldier peering into a pit at Auschwitz might have felt as I felt: not wanting to know any more anymore, helpless, hopeless. It really was time to close the whole show.
Kevin stepped out onto the thin metal tube, it screeched and wobbled. Reaching behind to hold the slack wire of the catwalk with his right hand, he slid another step and extended his left arm toward Alice, stretching himself to the limit. There was only a couple of feet between them. He said with remarkable calm, “Alice?” She didn’t budge. “Alice, I agree too, we don’t deserve the children. You taught us grown-up dumb-dumbs a lesson. You were just trying to make it better for the children.”
No deal.
Then in a remarkable take on Auntie Alice he snapped, “Get back here this very instant, Little Pepper!”
At last she twisted her head to face him and with a small smile said, “Nice try, Mr. Police. But Little Pepper was never permitted to return, only pushed out
again and again and again.” She let go of the metal guy-strips and, with her back to the pool, was balancing on the front half of her feet like a diver on the end of that nothing metal tube.
“Don’t, please, Alice,” Kevin pleaded in his own voice. Barely in touch with the wire rail of the catwalk he risked a farther inch along the tube — reaching, stretching — it swung and screeched like some straining jaws of death. Alice instinctively grabbed one cradling metal strip, tilting toward us on her toes. Kevin miraculously found yet another inch forward.
Realizing how far ahead of me he’d got, I slid to the end of the catwalk, gripped its flimsy wire rail and leaned as far out along the metal tube as I could, flailing a bit to get hold of his shirt, fearful of dislodging his anchoring fingertips.
I shouted past him, “Think of the children, Alice! Bob would hate you for what you’re doing!”
She said, “I’ve lived my whole life in shit, I may as well die in shit.” She smiled peacefully, an Alice I’d never seen before, sweet, resigned. “At last, one thing’s worked out for me. I’m sorry.”
I shouted, “Bob’s life was shit too, Alice, and he never gave up! Children have to grow up in this shitty world. You can still help them!”
She spoke calmly: “I only ever belonged with Bob, once upon a time, and that’s where I’m returning now.”
She let go, raised both arms straight out from the shoulders, and went over backwards, whispering upwards, “What’s that smell, my love?”
Kevin lunged and the metal tube gave way with a noise like a garbage truck compacting a metal swing set. But I was ahead of him for once. I caught his collar and yanked him back just as the tube fell away at its open end and, with that sudden strength in crises, lifted him with one hand to perch on the end of the catwalk; his feet dangled above the tube which, holding at its wall connection, screeched to a stop. It slanted like a playground slide into that massive vat of human waste.
In that same instant we looked downward after the slapping splat, only to see Alice disappear. Her body left a dark star-splayed outline. I thought of a snow angel. Then a shit angel. Holy shit. Another perfectly paradoxical caduceus. Then it too was gone.
Kevin twisted to get up, his ass slipped off the catwalk and he caught the iron walkway with his hands behind, his body bowing and his feet pedalling the air for purchase. Again I caught his shirt collar and hoisted him back. I turned sideways to hurry down after Alice, slipped on the slick catwalk and plunged backwards feet first, taking an iron uppercut on the chin and passing into unconsciousness.
Chapter 21
In high school I was a fair distance runner. But always just when my modest talent was beginning to make me friends, my diplomat father would be reassigned. I remember best a school in Dublin that had only a cinder track. No team, including our own, would run anymore on the ankle-twisting surface. My ankles were killing me. But I loved that old cinder track, its textured blackness, its heavy cellophane sound, its wet-ashes odour in the daily misty rain. So I ran my laps alone, lap after lap, under occasional blazing sun and in downpour, even in the rare Irish snow, while at home my parents prepared our next move. Lap after lap, going nowhere, the track sliding under me like black diamonds, I would run like this forever, alone and doing something I was good at. For whole days and long after sunset I ran. I’d never done anything else but run like this… And then I noticed someone in the centre of the infield, or not so much somebody as just a lighter spot in the green field, out the corner of my eye, and I plodded on, hoping it would leave me alone and go away. Leave me alone! But it — or he rather — seemed to come closer to me, or I was somehow spiralling nearer my god to him, that white-clad man, or the track was shrinking, day by day, hour by hour, then lap by lap, till I was running tight Jake circles around that squatting figure, on a cinder track the size of a kids’ wading pool. The rain was a downpour and night had fallen, yet I was dying of thirst, and the darkness had thickened so that he was all I could see. He persisted holding out his filthy red tumbler of water, mumbling something, a somehow familiar phrase, over and over. I always knew it would come to this. I forced my gaze downward and saw he was shitting, a brown snake of a turd extruding like some living thing, curling underneath him forever, world without end, amen. Dying of embarrassment, I shouted, Get away from me, you fucking loser! Then quietly, What? What are you saying? He raised his face to me, the Tanzanian Marathoner, but gap-toothed and haggard as an old Bedouin now, and said insistently, Can you see us? Can you see us?… I clued in: Caduceus! Caduceus! Jesus Christ! I accepted his offer, put the filthy glass to my lips and as it cracked and shattered straight away the world was drenched in light…
My eyes hurt like hell, so I kept them closed. I swallowed and my throat hurt like hell. My chest hurt like hell. I tried to move my mouth and my jaw hurt like hell. In the painful haze there were faces I believed I recognized but couldn’t put names to. My brain hurt like hell. Then the faces of Veronica — Owen — Shawn, more composite than individual. I tried to smile, which hurt like hell, and fell asleep, which etc. etc.
I came clear at last, with my whole hell hurting like hell. I flopped my head sideways to find Kevin Beldon sitting beside me and smiling weakly. I squinted.
He said, “Where are you, Lorne?”
I mouthed more than whispered, “Hell.”
“Close. You’re in your own hospital. The only adult patient ever in CHEO. You’re safe here.”
He watched me. After what seemed forever, I nodded, which etc.
He continued: “You’ve been in a coma, Lorne. But deeply only for the first night, Thursday night. Mostly just unconscious these past two days, Friday and Saturday. You’ve been coming out of it slowly. It’s early Sunday morning. They say you’re going to be all right.”
He paused and looked at me closely. “Take it easy, though. You’ve had a pumping tube down your throat.” He nodded at the far side of the bed. “Those other tubes in your arms, one’s for antibiotics and the other’s just a solution of stuff. But I’m sure you know all that.”
I dozed. I woke painfully. He was still there.
I touched my swollen throat, my tender chin, swallowed saliva that was shards of shell. I thought I was saying something but only a moan came out. Water sluiced my throat and I coughed and sputtered onto my chest.
“Easy does it, big guy. I’ll call Veronica.”
“Wait,” I managed hoarsely.
He sluiced me again and left the plastic bottle on my chest.
“What …” I moved and reached and used my hand as if for the first time ever, squeezed off some water, amazed that I’d ever taken this miracle drink for granted. If anyone tried to take it away, I would start a world war.
“What…happened?”
He placed his hand on the bottle on my chest, rested it there briefly. “You don’t remember anything?”
I didn’t have to think for long, painful though it was. “I remember everything, right up to…falling.”
“I saw your chin hit that iron catwalk and you go straight down like a body buried at sea. The doctors believe you were knocked cold. In fact, they think that may have saved your life. But a quantity of the crap got into your lungs. They say you’ve been in toxic shock as much as a coma. How do you feel?”
I held the long spout in my mouth and squeezed the bottle. The water was lukewarm, perfect. I took a deeper breath. It felt normal. I clenched my fists and wiggled my toes. My ankles hurt like hell. I winced and let my head sink back on the pillow. I’d come out alive after all. His chair scraped.
“Wait. I’m okay. You saved my life, Kevin, didn’t you?”
He stood by the bed. “Buddy, you saved mine twice up there. It was the least I could do.”
“Alice?”
He pinched his mouth and dropped his chin, shook his head once. “I got you out first. You looked dead. I cleared your airways and did some quick mout
h-to-mouth. Not to worry though, we won’t be running off to Niagara Falls any time soon.”
Laughing was like spiked fists on my head and chest.
“Sorry,” he said. “For a while I thought I was about to pass out. It took too long to fight off the disgust. But miraculously my cell still worked after the shit bath and I called the emergency unit that was with the kids at the bus. That was done in nothing flat. But it was only then that I went back in after Alice. I’ve also been told by your colleagues that she was long gone after the first seconds anyway. They say it looks like she just gulped the stuff when she hit the pool.”
After a while he said, “I should call Veronica. Shawn wouldn’t leave this morning unless her mom went home with her.” But he made no motion to go.
I looked out the window: slate-grey sky, lowering, beautiful.
“You saved my life, Kevin. You went out on that flimsy tube then back into that pool of shit to save Alice. You’re the real thing, Kevin. Thank you.”
“Like I said, you’d already saved me —”
“I’m a born coward. Thank you. Why me?”
“What?… Well, like I said, it was sort of a mini-triage situ —”
“Why me?”
When he didn’t answer after a while, I turned from the window to check if he was still there. His ginger knob was bowed and it made me think again of a small earth-trapped sun. He was contemplating his steepled fingertips, which were doing a springing little dance for him. He was the real thing, all right. Like many men, I suspect, I’d often wished I was, but I’m definitely not, and I’m not so sure anymore that I’d want to be. It must get awfully lonely out there.
I said, “Putting yourself in a trance, Detective Mesmer?”
He squinted a smile at me: “You’re your old self again all right, Thorpe.”
“I hope not.”
He looked puzzled, then broke his steepled hands and performed all his tics: pinching the bridge of his nose and sliding his fingers down, rubbing his ginger dome from forehead to crown, then back from nape to brow. He pursed his mouth and nodded his head once at me.