by Alex Dolan
“A tiny sign. One-three-seven on it.”
Royce said, “Could be a mileage marker.” He exited through the hatch to tell Leland. Out in the gallery, I saw Leland starting to check maps.
“Is that what it is, Walter? A mileage marker?”
“Probably,” he said.
“Then what?”
“We carried her down the path. Only the beginning, where it was flat. Helena couldn’t take hills with the fake leg. We walked off the trail, just ninety-seven paces in. Then we went downhill. I put the girl on the sled, and she went down first. I dragged the sled back up and sent Helena down the slope on the sled because it was too steep for her. Then I went down the rope.” His eyes pinged right and left, and he whimpered at something hovering past my shoulder. He talked faster, as if he might be running out of time. “There was a dry riverbed at the bottom. Muddy with big rocks. We pulled the sled across. From there we carved the big trees to mark the trail. Simple scratches, knee-high. Then a special symbol when we reached the garden. Bigger than the rest.”
“What did the symbol look like?”
Walter fought for words. Initially my face had melted into something that horrified him, but whatever visions he was conjuring around me spooked him even worse. When he spoke, an innocence ushered into his voice. “Am I dead?”
We were so close, and I had to prod him. “You’re not dead, and you’re not alive.”
“Kill me,” he pleaded.
“The way you’re feeling now? It can go on forever. Never living. Never dead. Always like this.”
“Kill me.”
“What did the symbol look like, Walter?”
His right arm tried to rise off the table. The straps wouldn’t let him. When the arm wouldn’t budge, his finger rose like a dowsing rod and pointed toward the map. He insisted, “I’ll show you. I’ll show you. I’ll show you.” He repeated this phrase over and over, occasionally diverting into a screech when some hallucinated shadow leapt at him.
“Free his arm,” I instructed.
“No way,” said Kearns.
“He’ll show us.”
Royce seconded, “No fucking way.”
“This is why we’re here. Free his arm.” Neither of them responded. I had to break character, and shout at them in my best firehouse yelp, as Pamela Wonnacott. “It’s two of you versus a free arm. What the fuck are you afraid of?” Of all the things that happened in this room so far, this seemed to surprise the two guards the most. To get someone on my side, I looked through the hatch at Leland, and the guards followed my stare into the viewing gallery. Leland had heard all of this. He nodded to us, and they complied.
Kearns unleashed Walter’s right arm. It flailed wildly at first, but they easily controlled it. “Easy, Walter,” Royce warned. Eventually the flailing subsided.
They brought the map to Walter’s stomach, and Kearns handed him a pen. Walter scratched his symbol on the paper. It was a crudely rendered outline of a house, a simple box with a pitched roof. It only took him a few seconds to scrawl it, and he dropped his pen to the floor when he was done. “That’s where the garden is.”
Walter clammed up. His hallucinations seemed to intensify. His fear paralyzed him, and he breathed as if he were freezing to death. He fixed at a point somewhere below the ceiling at something in the air. His mouth quavered for the words that would express his purest fear. I suspect he was waiting to die.
Kearns asked, “What if everything he tells us is bullshit?”
Royce answered, “Then we do this again.”
“Kali,” Walter whispered. I ignored it the first few times, but he was persistent. “Kali.”
I leaned over him. “Yes, Walter.”
“You promised…”
I felt a pinch on the outside of my thigh. It didn’t register right away. Leland sprang out of his chair in the viewing gallery, but I didn’t understand why for a moment. The two guards wrestled Walter’s free arm, and strapped it down with effort. Leland came into the room and looked afraid.
My syringe dangled from my thigh. When I plucked it out, I could see Walter had depressed the plunger and injected the remainder of the pharmahuasca. It was probably red as a fresh mosquito bite under the blue paint. No curses could properly punctuate the moment. My hands flew to my mouth and I forgot to breathe.
It burned beneath the skin, but the drugs didn’t hit me right away. That meant I got to see everything that happened next.
Walter was breathing too fast. At first I thought he was exhilarated from the burst of violence, but his body began to vibrate. Unaware of what to do, Kearns and Royce secured all the bindings. Leland stood over Walter’s head and slapped his face to bring him back. The whole table shook and rattled the floor bolts. Unsure of how to help him, the two guards tried to hold him down. Kearns pressed on the man’s shoulders, Royce his legs. Leland held his face between his hands and called Walter’s name several times.
“You…promised,” Walter grunted. He said this again several times until he began to gag.
I’d gone on a fair amount of medical calls that involved overdoses, but never for this drug. I felt for a pulse, smudging paint on his wrist and neck. His heartbeat raced. Sweat beaded up everywhere from the neck up. “Give him some water,” I said. This was a guess.
Royce obliged, but Walter wouldn’t take the straw into his mouth. His eyes rolled into his skull, and he couldn’t even see the straw. Royce tried to pour water into his mouth, but most of it ran over his lips and cheeks. The trickle that got to his throat rolled down his windpipe until he coughed it up. His body had forgotten how to swallow.
“This is going wrong,” I warned.
“We can’t get him to a clinic,” Royce said. “We can’t take him out right now.” Walter’s face was tumid with blood. “What do you have in your bag?”
I’d packed light today. “Nothing that can help him.” Walter’s shoulders hunched up toward his ears. “We need to move him,” I insisted.
Royce shook his head. Leland spoke to the prisoner. “Stay with us, Walter.” Walter was not with us. He had drifted into his hallucinations, trembling.
“We need to move him,” I repeated.
“A doctor will perform tests. They’ll know what we did,” Royce said, addressing Leland more than me.
“Let them,” I said.
I looked to Leland, who remained impassive. He agreed with Royce. “We can’t move him.”
I panicked, as much for myself as for Walter Gretsch. Minutes from now I’d feel the same drug in my blood. If my body couldn’t handle it, these three might hold me down the same way, praying my seizure would pass. With their refusal to help Walter, I understood they wouldn’t help me either.
After the tight coiling of his muscles, Walter’s body went slack. His jaw unclenched. Walter seemed to have a moment of clarity, and whispered to the air, “Girls.” The next moment his body stiffened as if an electrical current ran through it. His back bowed as much as the straps would allow. I could have run my arm under his shoulder blades. “Girls,” he gasped. He shook fiercely, and I could feel the floor tremor.
I’d seen this before. “This man’s going into arrest.” Moments later, he did just that. “No, no, no,” I stammered. Walter’s body seized then went limp. I felt his neck and found no heartbeat. I began CPR, and his rubber barrel of ribs gave only slightly. Royce knew CPR and breathed into Walter’s mouth at intervals. Kearns undid the restraints. I pumped the man’s chest for about ten minutes, until my arms were hot. Until I felt some of the first swells in my brain that told me the drug was taking hold.
When I stopped, Walter Gretsch didn’t twitch a pinky.
Chapter 15
I knew that chemicals were behind the illusion in my head. But I couldn’t deny that Gordon Ostrowski was sitting right there across the kitchen table, real as anything.
I was mute at first. I didn’t have the brass I had in the real world. Dream or not, seeing Gordon Ostrowski made me regress to the level of con
fidence I had as a teen.
Gordon wore his red jumpsuit; the same one Walter Gretsch wore. He was handsome, pink-cheeked, and healthy. I never visited him in prison, so he might have looked like a scarecrow now. The drugs were showing me the Gordon I knew, top of the world again, teeth white as crushed seashells. His preppy hair was slicked back and clear lacquer coated his fingernails.
My palms felt the wood grain on the tabletop, even the familiar scratches I made from playing “surgeon” with potatoes and a paring knife. Our kitchen was spacious, white cabinets and granite countertops. There was a rack over the kitchen island where all the pots hung. The windows looked out onto a long, rolling lawn that ended at a wall of trees. My dad had bought and planted maples out there, so in the fall we’d get a hint of New England foliage. On that day, the leaves had turned orange and red. I could smell a hint of smoke from someone’s fireplace.
“Made you breakfast.” He slid a bowl of dry Cheerios across the table, which he had done many times. Gordon’s generosity was always an opportunity for petty torment. Cereal without milk was his way of getting me to eat dog kibble.
“You never eat anymore,” said my mother. Mom must have been next to him all along, but I only noticed her now. She didn’t look like my mom. She was naked, burned head to toe. With her hair singed off, her head was a charcoal orb laced with a network of cracks, and the cracks glowed like embers. Like a human volcano in mideruption. This wasn’t how I remember her after the arson, but my imagination haunted me with the worst possible vision of my mother, assembled from stray memories of people I’d pulled out of houses and into the back of the ambulance. Part of me understood that this was my brain short-circuiting, but it didn’t matter. My mother smelled like smoked meat. Faulty brain or not, it smelled real, sounded and felt real.
“That’s right, Skinny. Eat up,” Gordon said. Suddenly, I wondered if I was naked like my mom. It was some relief that I wasn’t. I had on jeans and a Radiohead T-shirt, things I would have worn when I was sixteen. Specifically, the clothing I had worn the day I fled my home. The body inhabiting those clothes was bigger, bulkier from the muscle—my adult body. But my mother and Gordon saw me as a sixteen-year-old.
“I don’t have a spoon.”
“Use this.” Gordon produced a fork instead of a spoon. One of the forks Leland Moon kept in his desk drawer. Too fast for me to react, he plunged it into the back of my hand, pinning it to the table. The prongs sank into the table as a knife would into a butcher block’s sugar maple. The pain was excruciating, and I screamed soundlessly. Gordon’s mouth lifted into his sinister smile as he watched me pluck the fork out of my own hand.
My mother wrapped her black arm around him and leaned her head on his shoulder. “It’s just a pinch, sweetie. You’ll shake it off.” Gordon kissed her on the forehead. Slowly, I wrenched the prongs from between my metatarsals. The fork clattered on the table.
My ankle hit something under the table, and I saw the stuffed gym bag I packed when I ran away. My eyes teared at the evidence of my disloyalty. I was ashamed of myself, and also grateful to see my mother, even this horrible vision of her. “I wasn’t gone long.”
Gordon flashed his eyebrows and answered, “Long enough though.”
I implored her, “Why didn’t you leave with me?”
“Because he’s my husband.” She’d given me that excuse the night before I left.
I said, “You never saw it, did you?” My mom didn’t answer. She smiled at me, and Gordon protectively clung to her burnt arm.
The smell of smoke in the air grew strong, and the room warmed. Around us, flames suddenly crawled up the kitchen walls. The orange foliage through the windows was now obscured by a vibrant curtain of fire. My heart pounded. The fire covered the cabinets, even the hanging pots and pans. My skin roasted, but the fire didn’t touch us. A circle around the kitchen table protected us from the flames, if not the heat. I touched my forehead to wipe off sweat and only succeeded in smearing blood on my face.
I waited for my mother to give me an answer, but she kept her head nestled against her husband’s arm. She finally said, “He didn’t leave me.”
“That much is true, Skinny,” said Gordon. “I didn’t go anywhere, did I?”
“Where did you go?” my mother asked.
“To a friend’s.” This is what I told other people.
“Don’t lie. You know I can tell,” said Gordon.
“To the Y,” I corrected.
“When did you make it back?”
“The place had already burned.”
“You knew I was alive.”
My eyes watered more, and I nodded. “I knew you were at the hospital.”
“But you didn’t come.”
“I was waiting for you to get better.” This was partly true. I didn’t think she would actually die on me. Gordon’s crime was still fresh, and I was mad and confused. But the real truth, and I choked on every word of it, was, “I was ashamed.”
“I was alone.”
I had never spoken this thought, or heard it spoken from my mother. She passed in her hospital bed by herself, without a visit from me. She’d been drifting in and out for a few days. She might have been awake when she died, but the doctors didn’t know for sure. The police hadn’t arrested Gordon yet, and wouldn’t for another week. I was afraid of him. I’d been too afraid of him to stay and protect my mother, and then I was too afraid of him to risk running into him at my mother’s bedside.
What a crushing feeling it must be to die alone. I was terrified of it then and now. I hope my mother wasn’t awake, but I always imagined her waiting for me in a blanched room, suffering until her heart finally gave out.
I wept. “I’m sorry.”
“Must feel good to admit that,” Gordon said. He picked a Cheerio and popped it in his mouth.
“I wanted to kill you so badly,” I told him.
“Then do it.” He pushed something across the table. I expected another utensil, specifically a knife. Instead, it was a hypodermic. “You know what’s in there, don’t you?” I knew, because my brain conjured it. This needle had a steep dose of thiopental. Put enough of that in someone and they don’t need the pancuronium bromide. They would go straight and deep into a coma.
Gordon rolled up a sleeve and gave me a bare forearm to work with. His arm was miraculously hairless, except for some blond wisps along the back.
“It’ll make you feel good.”
“No it won’t.”
My mother said, “It will make you feel like you’re taking back some control over your life.”
“No it won’t.” I protested. “I thought it would, but it won’t.” The fire around us remained outside a perimeter about the diameter of a sumo’s dohyō, but my skin cooked. All the times I’d been surrounded by fire, none of it felt this dangerous. The flames crackled even louder, and leapt off the walls, almost licking us. Smoke thickened and coughed and pulled my shoulders tight to my body. Gordon and my mother remained unconcerned, but rhythmic swells of blood surged through my fingers against the cool barrel of the syringe.
Gordon’s arm was a phantom, but I believed it was real. His skin was warm. Once I touched him, he unlaced his arm from my mother’s so I could focus on him alone. My mother tried to coach me through it. “Go ahead,” she said. She stroked my hand with hers, and it was the first time I’d felt my mother in years. Her charred skin flaked like phyllo dough, but the structure of her fingers was still so familiar. I took her hand, careful not to crush it. The needle hovered over Gordon’s arm. He was ready for it and pumped his fist to give me a good vein.
I took a breath and moved quickly.
I pushed away Gordon’s arm, and, holding my mother’s hand, inserted the needle into her forearm instead.
As the chemicals fed into my mother, the flames around us died down to hibachi height, and then extinguished. Within seconds, Gordon’s skin browned and blackened deeper than my mom’s. His body withered, as if the contents under his skin were
siphoned out, and he wilted off the chair, the husk of his skin dark and shapeless as a rotten banana peel.
My mother and I remained at our quiet kitchen table, alone but together. The room was cool, although I sweated from the heat. The fire had blackened the room, but the windows still offered an unmarred view of the yard and the trees. She gazed out and admired the nature, patting my hand while her eyes drowsily fluttered. After my dad and before Gordon, we had plenty of mornings like this, quiet breakfasts with the two of us, where she closed her eyes and basked in the sunlight. Smiling blissfully, she’d savored those moments with a few deep inhales through her nostrils. As the sun gently toasted our skin, she would reach out and hold my hand the way she was now, and say, “I could take a moment like this forever.”
Both of her hands wrapped around mine now, and as the serum took hold, she gradually lowered her head to the table. My mother nestled her face against my hands, breathed deeply into her nose, and fluttered her eyes as she rested.
Chapter 16
I didn’t wake up so much as I came to an awareness that I was lucid again. I stretched out on the bed in Leland’s office, back in Berkeley. Cobwebs clustered above me in the eaves.
The room was dark, and the house quiet. With the streetlamps glowing outside, it wasn’t even close to dawn. Several bottles of water had been left for me at the bedside with a note reading: “Drink.” I drained them. My throat was so dry it felt sore.
A stack of clean clothes, taken from my apartment in Bernal, had been left on a chair next to the bed. On a pile of folded towels, another note read: “You’ll need these. We’ll throw them away.”
If the previous night were New Year’s Eve, the vision of my mother would have been the celebratory midnight toast. The rest of my night felt more like the remainder of a debauched holiday evening, especially the bathroom sickness. I remembered hugging a commode, maybe the one downstairs. My ass ached from the runs, and my stomach felt tender from incessant purging. After I drank the water, I drifted off again from exhaustion.