“Stop,” David said.
Larry turned and Miguel did, too. David had three bloody welts running down his cheek. He was bleeding badly from his forehead.
“Get me a towel,” he said to Larry.
Larry looked down at Miguel, then went to the bathroom for a hand towel. Miguel slipped the bloody pipe back into his backpack.
“You want ice?” Larry asked when he returned. “I’ll call room service.”
David shook his head. He looked at Miguel. He looked wounded—not just the blood, but his expression too. He looked sad and almost confused.
“You scratched me,” David said. “You hit me with a pipe.”
He pressed the white towel to his face, then his forehead. Miguel watched it quickly turn red.
Larry walked over, grabbed Miguel by his shirt, and hauled him to his feet. He dragged him over to the love seat and shoved him onto it, hard.
“What do you want me to do with him, David?”
Miguel waited, staring at David, who actually looked like he might have had a tear in his eye.
“I thought we were the same, Miguel,” he said. “I thought you needed me, too.” He let out a shaky breath. “I thought we could just be close for a little while, you know? Keep away each other’s loneliness for a little while.” He closed his eyes and shook his head sadly. “I think it would have been nice. I really do. Nice for both of us.” He sighed, then looked at Larry. “Give him the money.”
“What?” Larry said. “After this?”
“Just give him the goddamn money, Larry.”
“All twenty?”
“All of it.”
Miguel couldn’t believe his ears. Twenty bucks for doing nothing. In fact, he’d busted the guy’s head with a pipe.
David looked at Miguel. Blood dripped into one of his eyes and he blinked it away.
“You don’t have a home, am I right, Miguel?”
Miguel shook his head.
“Got a family somewhere?”
“Not that I can find.”
“You looked?”
Miguel nodded.
“Well, Larry’s going to give you an envelope with twenty thousand dollars in it.”
Miguel’s mouth dropped open. Twenty thousand? Holy shit. Twenty thousand?
“And he’s going to take you to the bus station and put you on a bus, anywhere you want to go. You take the money and you go start over somewhere, wherever you want. Find a place to live, some place with walls, and you go to school. Stay off the streets, don’t get into cars with strangers. Just start over.”
Miguel barely heard him. He was stuck on twenty thousand dollars.
“You understand, Miguel?”
Miguel nodded again. “Sí, but why?” he asked.
“It’s what I do,” David answered. “I can’t help it. I meet someone like you, someone who’s like me, and I want to help you. We share a connection for a little while, and then you get to start over.”
“But I didn’t…do anything good here. I hurt you.”
“Yeah, well, I admit, it usually ends better.”
David stood and walked past Miguel. Without another word he closed the bedroom door behind him. Miguel turned to see Larry waiting by the door to the apartment. He expected Larry to be really mad, maybe ready to beat the hell out of him, but the man’s face showed no emotion.
“You ready to go?” he asked.
Miguel lifted his backpack from the floor as he stood. “You got my money?” He didn’t know where he’d found the courage to ask.
Larry’s eyebrows rose a little, then he actually let out a chuckle. He walked over to an end table and took a big envelope from the drawer—not the kind a little letter came in, but a big one. He handed it to Miguel. It was thick. Miguel lifted the flap and saw bundles of bills inside. Hundreds. His hands grew sweaty. He put his backpack on a table, zipped it open, and stuffed the envelope inside. Then he saw a wallet and a set of keys on the table. On impulse, he grabbed the wallet and shoved it into the backpack before zipping it closed. He wasn’t sure if Larry had seen, but when Miguel turned the guy was standing by the open door.
“Ready now?”
Miguel nodded as he walked out into the hallway. Larry closed the door and started off down the hall, back toward the dingy elevator. Miguel followed.
“There’s really twenty thousand bucks in the envelope?”
“There really is.”
“Holy shit.”
“Looks like this was your lucky night, kid,” Larry said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
BOONE SAT IN a circle of freaks. Though he’d never call them that, it was how he thought of them. It wasn’t an insult; to him, it was a term of endearment. He was one of them, a freak, too. They were in Boone’s living room. New age music that sounded to Boone like wind chimes and rolling waves with an occasional musical note thrown in played softly in the background. He couldn’t stand this music, but the group had voted on the genre and Boone was in the minority. Boone’s four kitchen chairs, along with two folding chairs, were arranged in a circle in the middle of the room. Boone occupied one chair. The others were occupied by people with disabilities or deformities of varying degrees of severity.
“Stan, unless you brought enough for everyone, would you mind finishing that lo mein so we can start?”
Stan suffered from acromegaly, which left him with enlarged features, including a wide, thick nose and jaw, pronounced cheekbones, and a jutting, Neanderthal brow. He was struggling with his food, his big hands clumsily working the chopsticks.
“I was running late and didn’t get to have dinner.”
“Please?” Boone said.
Stan fumbled another bite into his mouth, then took the carton into the kitchen to throw it away. When he returned, Boone asked, “Okay, who wants to start?”
A harsh, mechanical voice said in a monotone, “I will, if no one else wants to.”
“Okay, Abe,” Boone said.
Abe was in his early fifties and had lost his voice box to cancer. He spoke with the aid of a mechanical larynx, a small box he held against his neck. When he spoke, the voice was something out of a science-fiction horror movie.
After his own disfiguring, life-shattering accident, Boone had floundered for a time. His broken bones healed but his vision was ruined, along with the right side of his face. Instead of meeting his misfortune with grace, as the people did in the videos they showed him in the hospital—people in far worse shape than he was in—Boone let himself wallow in self-pity for a short while. It was short only because, before long, he really indulged himself by dropping into full-blown despair. His world collapsed in on him. He pushed his girlfriend away—though, given the Halloween mask he now permanently wore, he wondered how hard he really had to push to get her to leave. He no longer wanted to travel. Why walk around in public, where people who’d never seen him before would stare at him, or make an obvious point of not staring? Sometimes they snickered. The polite ones waited until he was past to do so, or to say something about him to their companions. The less considerate ones didn’t bother to wait. The worst even insulted him directly to his tragic face. Why subject himself to that?
So Boone stayed home. For a few months, he’d stray a few blocks away. But after a while, he found himself unable even to cross the street. Every now and then he’d try. He’d stand at the curb with his head down, his face in shadow, and he’d raise a foot toward the crosswalk. But he could not bring himself to step into the street. He’d stand there, his foot hovering, and the panic would set in. His heart would feel like a rubber ball bouncing around inside his chest. He would start to feel numb. He’d hyperventilate. He’d feel faint. Then, and this was the worst, he’d go blind. Completely blind. He’d been told that panic attacks can cause tunnel vision as the blood flowed from the head to places the body considered more critical to protect. The problem for Boone was that, because of the giant blind spot in the middle of the only functioning eye he had, a case of tunnel vision left
him totally without sight. The next thing he’d know, he’d find himself well away from the curb, his back pressed against a building with people walking by, giving him a wide berth. Sometimes he lost only seconds, other times minutes would have elapsed. One time he spent half an hour with his fingers digging into the spaces between the bricks on the wall behind him.
Boone was certainly not fortunate, but there were actually some people who had it worse than he did. Level III agoraphobes couldn’t leave their homes at all. He read of one who refused to set foot outside of his bedroom. Level II agoraphobes, on the other hand, typically restricted themselves to the general confines of their neighborhoods. Boone considered himself a Level two-point-five—which was not an official category—as he was able to leave his building but couldn’t delude himself into believing that his neighborhood was one square block.
Certain prescription medications sometimes enabled him to face the idea of stepping beyond his self-imposed borders, but he was unwilling to pay the price they exacted. Unfortunately, he was allergic to benzodiazepines, the primary medication prescribed to sufferers of panic attacks. The only time he tried them, taking the lowest recommended dosage, he broke out in hives and, while checking them out in the mirror, watched in disgust as his face and lips got puffy, then experienced true horror as his tongue and throat swelled and he wondered if he would suffocate. He didn’t, but he wasn’t about to give benzodiazepines another shot. So he tried other recommended medications—real selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, beta blockers, antidepressants, and mild tranquilizers—but the best of them made him feel dizzy, nauseated, and confused, and the worst of them caused memory loss, decreased motor skills, and thoughts of suicide, among other fun and exciting side effects. No, drugs were out for him. Besides, even if the drugs somehow helped him cross the street, he’d still have to deal with the stares. No, he was better off where he was. He had most of what he needed, and anything he didn’t have he could get without having to step outside his comfort zone.
Of course, none of his clients knew anything about his agoraphobia. They came to him because they wanted help facing their own disabilities. After his career as a photojournalist came to a crashing halt—literally—Boone considered buying a handgun and a single bullet, but quickly discarded the idea. He may have been the wallowing-in-self-pity type, but he wasn’t the suicidal type. After that, he blew through most of his savings in a quest to plow through as many cases of beer and reruns of Gilligan’s Island as he could. Eventually realizing that there was no profit in that, he knew he had to find some way to make a living. He knew he couldn’t have a traditional job because he’d have to work outside of his home. Finally, he thought of a way to make use of both his psychology undergrad degree and his horror-show visage. He’d specialize in treating others like him, others with disfigurements or disabilities. Hell, they wouldn’t have to know that he was as depressed as they were. All he’d have to do is turn it on for a little while—paste a smile on his ugly mug and do a dog and pony show until their time was up. He figured he could pull that off. The problem for Boone was that he didn’t have the doctoral degree he’d need to actually practice psychology in Massachusetts. He also didn’t have the education or experience to practice as a mental-health counselor. So, instead, he spent several hundred dollars on carefully placed advertisements in which he called himself an “advisor” to those with all sorts of disabilities, disfigurements, and similar conditions. Soon enough, he began to meet with clients—it didn’t seem right, and might not even have been legal, to call them patients and, besides, the term “clients” seemed to make them feel less damaged. Some of his clients preferred one-on-one sessions, while others, like those in his living room at that moment, benefited more from group therapy.
Abe was talking and Boone nodded a few times. Boone didn’t usually zone out like he just had. It turned out, to his surprise, that he was actually quite good at what he did. Many of his clients credited him with changing their lives dramatically for the better. Several who had admitted to contemplating suicide claimed that he had actually saved their lives. Boone felt good about that. While his words might ring hollow in his own head, they seemed to resonate with others and he was thankful for that.
Abe finished a story about a harrowing trip to the supermarket where a gaggle of teenagers followed him through the aisles, entreating him to sing “Mr. Roboto,” a song from the 1980s featuring a robotic voice.
“And how did you handle the situation, Abe?” Boone asked.
“Well,” Abe said in his mechanical monotone, “I ignored them like you say we should do if possible.” He smiled, then said, “But when they wouldn’t stop I finally grabbed one of the kids by the shirt, pulled him really close to my face, and told him that what I had was catching and that he and his buddies would sound like me in six months.”
Everyone chuckled.
“I bet that ended that,” Boone said.
Abe shrugged.
“Anyone else?” Boone asked.
One by one they told their stories of the week. They talked a lot about loss—loss of one of their senses, or of a wife or husband, or their self-esteem. And they talked about their interactions with insensitive people, from strangers to coworkers to friends and even family. They talked about their limitations and their fears and their goals. There was Abe, of course, with his robot voice. And Stan, with his acromegaly. And there was severely anorexic Jordan. And Jason with his bilateral cleft lip, which meant that he had virtually no upper lip, just an inch-wide gap directly under his nose. Because of a nearly deadly experience with anesthesia, Jason was unwilling to consider another attempt at surgery. And, finally, there was Emily, who simply had the worst acne Boone had ever “seen.” He couldn’t really see it, of course, but he’d asked her if she’d mind if he touched her face, and she allowed it. Boone regretted it immediately, though he thought hid his reaction well.
At the end of the ninety-minute session, as the others were slipping on coats and gathering purses, Stan placed an oversized hand on Boone’s shoulder.
“What’s with all the old people?” he asked.
“What old people?”
“In the pictures. You take these?” He waved his huge hand, taking in the framed photos on the wall.
“I did.”
“They’re good.”
“Thanks.”
“What’s with all the old people, though?”
Boone laughed. Some of the best photographs he’d taken were of elderly people. South American natives, North Carolina fishermen, a Tibetan monk, an ancient housewife on a porch swing in Florida, a New England lobsterman. The character in their faces seemed to arc across the space between them and his lens and etch itself onto the image he took. Among the many photos adorning his walls, at least a dozen were of older people.
“You worried I have an elderly fetish?”
Stan shook his head. “I just wondered why you did that to their faces.”
The others filed out of the apartment with waves and good nights. It was just Boone and Stan now.
Boone frowned. “Did what?”
“Scratched off their faces like that.”
Boone didn’t know how to reply. He had no idea what Stan was talking about.
“What do you mean?”
Stan stepped over to a photo on the wall just outside the bathroom. Though Boone couldn’t see it well, he knew it was a black-and-white photo of a craggy-faced Iowan farmer, leaning on a pitchfork and wiping his brow with a sleeve.
“See?”
“Actually,” Boone said, “I can’t really see it. What do you see?”
“Oh, sorry, Doc,” Stan said. “Well, the picture’s good and everything, but it looks like you scratched the face away with a nail or something. Like the others.”
“Others?”
Stan hesitated. “Uh…yeah…the others. All the old people. Their faces are gone.”
Boone reached up and felt the glass in the picture frame. It was intact. He
looked to his right to try to see the picture in his peripheral vision but couldn’t see the damage to the photo. But the glass wasn’t broken.
“And you say they’re all like this?” Boone asked.
“All the ones with old people in them. Wait…no, not old people. Just old men. It looks like…yeah, the old women still have their faces.”
This didn’t make sense. Why would someone break into his place, remove photos from their frames, scratch away the faces of the old men—only the old men—then reassemble the picture frames and hang them back where they belonged?
“You didn’t do this yourself?” Stan asked. “This isn’t some artistic statement or something? Like maybe…I don’t know…because of your own face…”
Boone shook his head.
“This is pretty screwed up,” Stan said.
“It sure as hell is.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“THE DREAM FEELS so real,” Nathan said.
“But why would you wear house slippers into the woods?” Burt asked.
“Why do you keep coming back to that, Burt? That’s not the important thing here.”
“Just wondering.”
Nathan shook his head. Burt Connors was a good enough guy but he wasn’t going to win a Nobel Prize for smarts. They were playing chess in Nathan’s living room, Burt making one stunningly bad move after another, sipping iced tea. The iced tea was probably a bad idea. It was getting late and Nathan would be going to bed soon, and the tea would likely wake him up to pee several more times than usual during the night.
“It’s your move,” Burt said.
“Actually, Burt, I just took your rook. It’s your move.”
Burt frowned down at the board, looking for all the world as if he’d never seen it before. “So you did. Okay, give me a second here.”
He frowned at the board some more and Nathan wondered if he was truly thinking about his best play or was simply waiting for what he considered an appropriate length of time before making a random move.
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