On top of it all, Arjay gets suspicious when Terence spends the entire two-hour shift sweeping up around the yellow tape. “Tell me you don’t know anything about this.”
Terence turns furious eyes on him. “How could I know anything about anything? The only time I’m out of your sight is to go to the bathroom. Thanks for the privacy, by the way.”
The next morning at school, DeAndre is waiting by the front entrance. His eyes never meet Terence’s, and his lips never seem to move. But as he brushes by, he says very distinctly, “Got a present for yo.” And he stuffs something into Terence’s jacket.
Mystified, Terence inches a small flat item out of his pocket—a video iPod, brand new.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Gecko pushes the juice cart along the seventh floor hallway and stops to allow Roxanne to load up a tray of choices. She disappears into room 708, and he listens to her usual banter with the occupants.
“Hi, guys. Do you want the pheasant under glass or the beef Wellington? Oh, sorry. That’s for the good patients. You two get cookies and juice….”
Gecko smiles to himself. She’s the ultimate volunteer, and everybody loves her. He looks forward to the weekend because it saves him the mad dash from school and back on his lunch hour. Plus he knows Roxanne basically lives here on Saturday and Sunday, so he’ll be able to hang out with her. And he isn’t exactly longing for apartment 4B either, where Arjay is “helping” Terence with his book report on To Kill a Mockingbird. The only thing more agonizing than making Terence read is making Terence write. Each letter is formed as if someone is holding a blowtorch to his wrist. By now, the two of them are probably rolling around on the living room floor, beating each other’s head in.
Roxanne emerges. “Satisfied customers.”
They work their way to the end of the hall, conspicuously skipping room 704, where Healy lies in comatose solitude, taking all his nourishment through a drip in his arm.
When they’re done, Roxanne offers to take the cart back to the pantry. “Why don’t you go sit with your John Doe,” she suggests. “You’ve been eyeing that door all morning.”
Room 704 is the place where the pleasant glow of the day turns chill. The patient’s unmoving silence is such a stark contrast to the warm and vivacious atmosphere around Roxanne. It never fails to dampen his mood.
On Roxanne’s advice, Gecko has been talking to Healy, praying that the sound of a human voice will percolate down to wherever his consciousness is hiding. “If nothing else, it’ll make you feel better,” is her philosophy.
And it does, kind of. It’s a little less like he’s visiting a corpse. “I got a B-plus on my chemistry report. The labs go a lot smoother now that Diego isn’t so scared of me. All my grades are pretty good….”
Funny he should be turning into a student now, of all times. It’s almost as if school never really counted before. A bad grade was just a letter on a report card. But these days, a blown quiz or ditched homework could set in motion a disastrous domino effect—a teacher slaps you with an F; Ms. Vaughn sees it on the weekly report; she calls Healy; he doesn’t call back; she comes to the apartment to investigate….
Fear is making me smarter.
Or maybe he always had the brainpower. Fear is just his motivation to use it.
“…I’m doing better than I did in eighth grade, although that might have had a lot to do with my brother. He’d rip me out of bed at three a.m. and drag me off on some job. Next morning, I’d sleep through a test and take another zero. It gets to the point where you don’t bother studying.…”
These conversations are obviously one-sided, so Gecko has to work in some natural pauses. He walks to the window and opens the blind. The slats of the venetians are dusty, and he rattles off four sharp sneezes in quick succession.
“Gesundheit.”
He turns fast enough to pop all the disks in his neck. No doctor or orderly has entered the room. That’s when he realizes that Douglas Healy is watching him.
Gecko’s reaction is so electric that, in dashing over to Healy, he stubs his toe on the IV pole and very nearly winds up sprawled across the patient’s bed.
“It’s you! You’re awake! We’re so sorry! You know we didn’t do it on purpose! We’re okay! We’re still in the apartment, doing all the things you set up for us, just praying that you’ll get better and give us another chance!”
Healy’s eyes are bloodshot and barely focused. “Do I know you?” The eyes widen. He’s coming back, taking in his surroundings, working to dispel the fog. “What’s your name?” Suddenly, his expression changes from confusion to alarm. “What’s my name?”
Gecko is frozen to the spot.
“Gecko,” comes a singsong voice, “it’s time to take out the library cart.” Roxanne pokes her head into 704. The shriek that escapes her is barely human. “Gecko, you did it! You reached him! You brought him back! Nurse! Nurse!”
Healy tries to lift himself up, but falls back, exhausted. “Get me a mirror! Please!”
Roxanne steps forward and flips open the rolling tray caddy.
John Doe stares at his reflection on the underside of the lid. “My God, I don’t recognize my own face!”
It’s plain from the panic in his voice that this is no mere groggy confusion. The patient may have been dazed at first, but he’s wide-awake now.
The room fills with nurses and orderlies. Several interns come running, and finally a staff physician.
“I’m Doctor Radnor. Good to have you with us. What do you remember about what happened to you?”
Healy’s voice is rising. “You’re the doctor! You tell me! I don’t even know who I am!”
“All right, calm down, sir. Let’s take this one step at a time….”
The room and everyone in it fade out for Gecko as his thoughts whirl. He alone knows Healy’s true identity. The doctors should have it. Healy should have it.
But what would the result of that be? Gecko, Arjay, and Terence would be exposed, and Healy would be in no position to speak up for them. The halfway house would be closed, and its occupants issued a one-way ticket back into the juvenile justice system. All this with no assurance that the information would do anything to bring back the group leader’s lost memory.
It’s too much—too many twists and turns and surprises. Suddenly, Gecko can’t stay in the room another second. He slinks out into the hall and collapses into a wheelchair parked by the wall.
He can’t shake off the cold sweat that’s making him weak and dizzy. There he sits, rocking slightly, hugging his shoulders and trembling. There’s excited chaos in 704, but he hears only white noise.
Amnesia! After everything else that’s happened, amnesia too. It’s like all this is a bad movie, hatched from the twisted imagination of some sadistic screenwriter who specializes in worst-case scenarios.
Healy is the one person who has half a chance of setting things right—but the guy in there isn’t Healy anymore. And that’s not even the worst part!
This is our fault. We took the only person who cared about us and ruined his life.
Surely there’s nothing lower than that. This is absolute rock bottom.
A small hand appears on his hunched shoulder. He looks up to see Roxanne peering down at him, an intense expression on her face.
“I always figured it was just me,” she murmurs huskily. “I hang around here, and it’s more than a volunteer job. These patients are a part of my life. I thought I was the only one—until I met you. When I see you with John Doe—”
He shakes his head helplessly. “You were right—I have to get a grip.”
In answer, she slides her hands behind his neck.
He almost smiles. “Not that kind of grip.”
But she squeezes harder. Then his hands are on her arms, and he’s squeezing too—the way a drowning man hangs on to a life preserver. The wheelchair begins to roll slowly backward as their faces draw closer, the two of them in a trance. She stumbles forward as the motion pulls him aw
ay from her. He holds on tight—not out of romance, but because human contact is the only thing that makes sense just then. In fact, it makes more sense than anything has in a long time.
When her lips meet his, it seems like the most natural thing in the world—to be kissing on a moving wheelchair in a hospital head trauma unit. It’s a rush no Infiniti could match, not even one with a nuclear reactor under the hood.
There’s a crash as the chair upends a rolling tray, sending clamps and scissors clattering to the floor.
Gecko and Roxanne stare at each other blearily, as if waking after a long sleep.
An orderly stands over the scattering of metal instruments. “Roxanne, could you give me a hand with this stuff?”
“Coming.” Her eyes never leave Gecko.
He gets up from the wheelchair. “I should go.”
She nods. “See you tomorrow?”
The simple question appears dizzyingly complex. The way events have been going lately, making plans twenty-four hours into the future seems like an insanely reckless thing to do.
He stammers, “Uh—right,” because he wants it to be true. But that doesn’t change the fact that he really needs to get out of there.
He sprints for the security door, shrugging out of his lab coat and tossing it into a laundry bin as he passes. Then down six flights of stairs, never pausing to catch his breath.
Roxanne! Talk about a bolt out of the blue. Of course he noticed her good looks before. But here at the hospital, he’s got a lot more on his mind than hooking up—like devastating guilt and the terrifying uncertainty of the future.
Besides, who could have guessed that a totally hot girl would be into me?
The incredible fact that she is only mixes him up even more. A guy could get the bends from the highs and lows of this ride. The relief of Healy awake, the despair of his amnesia, Roxanne’s lips—and now what? Home to tell Arjay and Terence their dilemma just got worse?
Gecko runs out of the building into the honking horns and other street sounds of the city. The chaos of New York seems simple and well ordered compared with the runaway train that is his life.
A UPS truck screeches to a halt beside him. The driver, obviously behind schedule, jumps down and races into the hospital carrying several small packages.
Gecko is in the van and behind the wheel faster than you could say What can Brown do for you? In that instant, he doesn’t see a delivery truck, but a time machine. It can take him back before Healy, before Atchison, before the world got so complicated. Back to a day when all Gecko Fosse needed was a wheel in his hands and a motor roaring underneath him.
He shifts into drive and feels the transmission pull forward. His foot is half an inch from the pedal—he’s visualizing himself wheeling into traffic—when it finds the brake again. He slams back into park and slumps in the seat.
No. That’s the old Gecko, the one who could tell himself he’s just driving and ignore the fact that the car is filled with stolen goods and Reuben’s gang of crooks.
Yes, things are crazy and getting crazier. But life has to be faced.
“Hey, you!” bawls a voice beside him. “Get out of there before I call a cop!”
Gecko steps down to the pavement. “There was a kid here who wanted to steal your truck,” he tells the angry driver. “I chased him away.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Sometimes being totally screwed can set you free.
Strange but true, Arjay reflects as he walks down Lexington Avenue. When Gecko brought home the news that Healy’s memory was gone, it seemed like the end of the world.
It was Terence who said, “Look at the bright side. When we thought he was coming back, we were slaves to that. Not anymore.”
They’re still going to school, and community service, and attending group therapy. The only difference is that it’s no longer temporary.
Welcome to the new normal.
True, sooner or later, someone is going to check on them. The big question is when. It could be tomorrow; it could be months from now. As long as the school reports to Social Services stay positive; as long as there are no complaints from people like Jerry or Dr. Avery; as long as Ms. Vaughn’s heavy caseload keeps her away from East Ninety-seventh Street, they just might be able to keep this going.
And as long as they stay afloat, there’s a chance that something might save them. Arjay can’t imagine what that could be. But it definitely won’t happen if they’re sitting in jail.
It reminds him of a story he studied in middle school. A condemned man staves off his execution by promising that, in a single year, he can teach the king’s favorite horse to talk. Someone asks why he would make such a ridiculous bargain.
He replies, “A year is a long time. I may die. Or the king may die. Or the horse may die. Or the horse may talk.”
Freedom equals possibility. The horse may talk.
Arjay has been locked up for so long, he barely remembers having a choice about what to do with his time. He has to get a life—literally. He walks with Gecko as far as Yorkville Medical Center, where the kid starts babbling about someone named Roxanne.
“Hold up.” Arjay grabs him by the sleeve. “Who’s Roxanne?”
Gecko hems and haws, but the embarrassed flush in his cheeks is as good as a lie detector test.
“You’ve been going to the hospital to keep an eye on Healy, and you wound up with a girlfriend?” Arjay demands.
“No!” Gecko defends himself. “At least, I don’t think so. But you should see this girl, Arjay. You can’t not like her. She’s just a volunteer, but when she’s on the ward, the whole place practically revolves around her. I mean, the seventh floor might as well just shut down if she ever stops going.…”
Arjay tunes him out. Well, that explains why Gecko hasn’t been complaining about his countless jaunts to visit John Doe. A girlfriend! Even if it’s an innocent crush, it’s still dangerous. The more people who get to know them, the greater the chance that unwanted attention might fall upon their lives. In the scrutiny department, they can withstand exactly none.
He sighs. The increased risk is another part of their new reality. This isn’t a couple-of-days kind of thing anymore. They can’t stay locked in the apartment 24/7. God knows Terence isn’t letting their situation cramp his style. He’s already off on his own, looking for trouble. Arjay has no doubt he’ll find it.
“Listen, Terence,” Arjay told him, “I know what you consider a big night, and I’m not going to try to talk you out of it. But be careful! It’s all our butts on the line, not just yours! And remember, if you get arrested, it means you read To Kill a Mockingbird for nothing!” He grins, recalling the look of horror on Terence’s face.
He sends Gecko off with a similar warning, yet it’s hard to be specific. Disaster is never far away, but the truth is they have no idea what to look for. It could be an inspection by Ms. Vaughn; it could begin as innocuously as this girl Roxanne saying “Let’s go over to your house.” Will Gecko have the brains to put her off? He’s a fourteen-year-old kid. Who knows how smitten he is?
It’s out of your control, Arjay reminds himself. Still, with memories of Remsenville permanently loaded in his cerebral hopper, it isn’t easy to let the chips fall where they may.
He gets on the subway at Eighty-sixth Street and rides downtown to Spring Street, where he heads east on foot. Nightlife begins to sprout around him. Snippets of live music escape from unmarked storefronts.
He’s read about this area, but he never expected to have the freedom to experience it firsthand—not as a convicted felon in a halfway house.
A few more blocks and he’s in the middle of it all. On the surface, it’s a neighborhood of run-down tenements. Yet with the opening of every door, the pounding of drums, the thrum of bass, a few syllables of wailing vocals mingle in the street—a cacophonous mixture of rock, jazz, blues, funk, hip-hop, reggae, punk, and ska.
The club names are bizarre: Lucifer’s Basement, Uber-freaky, Bottomless, This Ai
n’t Kansas. After much deliberation, he selects the Green Zone, mostly because the words no cover have been acid-burned into the steel door. Zero is precisely the amount of money he has to invest in this expedition. Even with Social Services paying their rent and utilities, cash is becoming a problem. The hundred eighty bucks in Healy’s wallet won’t last long. Terence has managed to get his hands on another hundred by “unloading a couple pieces of consumer electronics.” Arjay didn’t ask for the details.
Inside the club, the air moves with the blast of sound that greets him. The bouncer thinks better of asking for ID—the newcomer doesn’t seem very bounce-able. Arjay nods his thanks and pushes through a makeshift divider of hanging weather strips into the club proper, which is barely the size of the apartment on Ninety-seventh Street.
The band is called Collateral Damage—either slow punk or fast metal, and very loud. A mass of about forty die-hard fans are pressed to the claustrophobic stage, hopping with the beat, because horizontal movement is impractical. The only comfortable place to stand is at the back, by the bar, amid a late-teens/early-twenties assortment of piercings, tattoos, and black leather.
“Get you a beer, pal?” shouts the bartender over the roar of the music.
Arjay shakes his head no. He can’t afford drinks; he’s barely able to part with subway fare to get here. But the music is in the air, and poverty can’t prevent him from listening.
Collateral Damage is pretty mediocre, yet Arjay inhales the experience, loving it as only a newbie can. He pays special attention to the guitarist, mentally translating the electric wail onstage to his ongoing lessons with Mr. Cantor. The relentless punk chords bear little resemblance to the music teacher’s jazz/soft rock stylings, but he watches and learns, the fingers of his left hand running up and down imaginary frets. It’s a night of wonder and discovery. As a caged animal in Remsenville, he forgot how it feels to want something. Why bother, when you have no chance of getting it?
I want to be that guy on the stage, I want to make music.
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