Enemy Within

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  The session ended. Lucy slid from the maw of the device and replaced the metal articles she had removed, a gold cross and several sacred medals, and a couple of enamel pinks from a junk shop, and her belt. She spent a few minutes exchanging pleasantries with the technicians in charge of the MRI machines and with Kurt the German, then went in to see Dr. Shadkin, who ran the lab and who had seduced her, with an astute combination of money and friendship, into becoming an experimental subject.

  “Lucy! How did it go?” said Shadkin when Lucy rapped on the doorframe. He was rotund, bespectacled, bush-bearded, with thick, ear-length hair parted in the middle. He looked more like a medieval innkeeper than one of the world’s great lights on the acquisition of language by the human brain. Lucy answered, “Squeak, squeak-a, squeak squeak.”

  “No kidding? Would you like a food pellet? A sip of water? Access to sexual intercourse?”

  Lucy smiled. Shadkin was the only one of the scientists she had met who still treated her like a regular kid. The others all acted as if they regretted the silly ethical laws that prevented the vivisection of teenagers. No, unfair; but they did seem to look right through her, or maybe that was only, as Shadkin maintained, the general lack of social skills among scientists, especially, oddly enough, social scientists.

  “Not right now, thanks. Make any great discoveries today?”

  Shadkin looked sourly at his monitor, on which was an outline of a brain pieced with blotches of blue, yellow, and red. “Progress is slow, but don’t tell the NSF. The variations that seem to appear in your brain are real, but they don’t seem significant enough to explain what you do. And then there’s this damn delay. You use the noodle and then comes the blood. What we really need are recordings at the neuronal level. You wouldn’t reconsider having the top of your head sliced off?”

  “Squeak-a squeak squeak!”

  “Just kidding, ha-ha. Meanwhile, the linguistic geographers are pretty excited about the Indo-European project, though. Are you having fun with it?”

  “It’s just a job, Doc,” said Lucy morosely, but seeing the look of concern that appeared on his face, added, “No, I take that back. I kind of like the idea that languages evolved, and I wonder why. Why do they always diverge and never converge? Why don’t they ever improve, like everything else? Surely, by now there should be a language in which everything thinkable could be said without ambiguity.”

  “I thought that was French.”

  She laughed. “Yeah, right. Anyway, it is kind of interesting, except . . .” She let out a sigh. “I’m tired.”

  “I guess you are. Look, kiddo, you need a break, take some time off. Let the big-domes wait for their data.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Hey, I’m not kidding.” He tapped the monitor with a knuckle. “See this blue smear? Excessive seriousness. You need to loosen up. Go a little crazy. I say this as your personal physician.”

  “Okay, Doc. I’ll try, in my pathetically serious way. I shall buy a box of Cracker Jacks and, perhaps, if I feel up to it, ride the carousel.”

  She waved and left, before she had to absorb any more well-meaning advice. The subway was filling up. A ragged black man on crutches got on at Seventy-second Street and sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” as he shuffled through the car. Lucy put a wad of dollar bills in his cup as he went by. All the other passengers pretended not to see this, although several shot her dirty looks. She pulled out a German dictionary and memorized Bleibe through Boden for the rest of the trip to Thirty-fourth Street.

  At Holy Redeemer, people were starting to gather for the fiveo’clock mass. She sat in the rearmost pew, pulled out a kneeler, and got down, but her mind was too restless for common prayer. She did not, in any case, wish to pray. In the recent past, the spirit would have come to her, unbidden, filling her with uncanny joy, and she had imagined, despite all she had read, that this would be a constant thing, like her talent with languages, but it proved not to be so. Treats for beginners, one of the saints had called it, and like the spoiled baby she was, Lucy wanted more. The notion of actually doing spiritual work dismayed her: Was God yet another struggle like math? Oh, far, far harder than quadratic equations, as she knew in her bones. The worst was that she suspected that her mother had gone through the same crisis at about the same age—there had been hints enough—and had blown a big raspberry at deep religion and had gone off on her merry way, doing exactly what she pleased, while punching her card every week in the good old thoughtless devotional Catholic way. Lucy had no intention of going that route, no intention, but intention was not, apparently, good enough. Her mind wandered, as did her gaze, and she spotted David Grale in a side chapel. He was lighting candles, five of them, and then he sank down before an image of the Virgin and appeared deep in prayer. She watched him, examining as best she could in the dim light the curl of his hair and the tender, exposed nape of his neck as he bowed his head. She discovered her mind filling up brimful with what they used to call impulse thoughts; she became disgusted with herself entirely and stalked out.

  Lucy sat on the steps, hunched under her cloak in the late-afternoon chill. In her bag were scattered packs of the cigarettes she gave away, and she found some Marlboros, twitched one out, and smoked it, without much pleasure, to get back at her body via that small pollution. She watched people: old Latinas in black, people from the varied races of Asia, mostly poor, a few old white Catholics in shabby, unfashionable clothes—the small daily mass crowd, the pathetic remnants of her mother’s church.

  He came out and sat next to her. They sat in silence for a while, for which she was grateful. He always had this calming effect on her, stilling the boil of language in her head.

  Then he asked, “Anything wrong?”

  “No!” instinctively; then, “Yes. I find that the world is not perfect.”

  “Then the world must be changed.” He laughed. She laughed, too. The line was from Pasolini’s The Hawks and the Sparrows, St. Francis’s comeback to the friars sent to preach the Gospel to the birds. The hawks still killed the sparrows; what can we do? cried the friars, it is the way of the world. Then the world must be changed. David had a tape of it, and they had watched it together in a church basement.

  “I’m going over to the yards. I heard someone say they saw Canman today. I thought I’d check it out.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  They walked over. She made amusing conversation, with mimicry. She was, of course, a perfect mimic. Sometimes when he laughed, he clutched her around the shoulder, and she felt blood flush into her face, and not just her face either.

  They went through the fence and down the rutted, trash-strewn path to the walkway. There they heard the sounds: shouts and a shrill keening. Lila Sue.

  David broke into a run and Lucy followed him, her bag slamming against her hip, her cloak flying behind. When they got to the settlement, they found Real Ali attempting to get between Doug Drug and Benz, who were apparently trying to kill each other. They were in the center of a circle made up of inhabitants, watching the fight with fear on their faces, or avidity or insanity, depending on the twists of their particular psyches. Benz clutched a forty-ounce beer bottle with the bottom smashed off; Doug held a long chunk of dark pallet wood like a ball bat. Someone had kicked the fire barrel over. Smoke and sparks and cinders filled the air, the red glow from the fire lighting the faces of the combatants from below: Doug’s dark skin like a furnace coal, his eyes red-lit, Benz’s big teeth glittering demonically, the large black warts on her sweaty face throwing little moving shadows. The two fighters, the man and the woman, shouted curses at one another, not very imaginatively but with feeling and much spit. Ali was dancing between them, arms out, palms flattened, making soothing noises, “Come on, man, you don’t wanna hurt nobody”; but they did. Lila Sue stood off to one side, in front of the hut she shared with Benz, howling, seemingly without taking a breath, her knuckles screwed into her eye sockets like spark plugs.

  Grale moved instantly to stand be
fore Doug and started to talk in his sweet voice, the meaningless, calming nonsense spoken to mad dogs or crazies. The poised stick wavered. Benz screamed and tried a dash around Ali. She was a great heavy sack of a woman, swaddled like l’homme Michelin in many layers, and she drove him backward several steps. Doug swung his stake at David. The blow whistled by his ear and landed on his shoulder. He staggered almost to his knees. Still, he did not try to protect himself. He spread his arms outward, martyrlike, offering himself.

  “Hit me again, Doug!” he cried. “Does that make you feel better? Go ahead, hit me!”

  Without knowing exactly how she had come by it, Lucy found she had a piece of fractured concrete in her hand, about the size of a softball, with a protruding sharp edge, and she found herself running toward Doug, around the struggling Ali and Benz, toward his blind side.

  “Lucy! No!” David shouted. What she heard, though, was only the breath rushing through her mouth and the drum of her mother’s blood in her ears. She wound up like an outfielder and slugged the man as hard as she could behind his ear, and when he went down, she was kneeling on his chest with the rock raised high above her head for the death blow when David swept her into his arms and smothered with his body the demon she had somehow become.

  “What, um, what happened?” Candlelight on faces, David’s and Ali’s. She looked around. They were in Ali’s hovel of cardboard, pallet wood, and plastic, familiar ground, but something was wrong. She was lying on his mattress, and there should have been a table with the Qur’an on it, and a straight chair and the neatly stacked orange crates that held Ali’s paperback library. But everything had been smashed and broken and pushed into piles. “Did he hit me?”

  “No, girl,” said Ali, “you hit him. Like to busted his head.”

  A shock of fear. She looked at David, who had an awful red scrape down one side of his neck. “I didn’t hurt him, did I?”

  Ali said, “Nah, he got a hard head, Doug.”

  She rubbed her face. “God! This is weird—I can’t remember hitting him. I remember the fight, Doug and Benz and you trying to break it up, you and David, and then Doug hit David. I thought he was going to kill you. And then I . . .” She shook her head energetically. “No, it’s . . . wait a second . . . now it’s coming back. I had a rock. I hit him in the head with a rock.”

  “Yes, you did,” said David gently. “That was a different Lucy than the one we usually see around church.” She felt herself blushing and was glad of the dark.

  Ali chuckled and said, “Good thing, too. The boy needed a rock upside his head. Fool been smoking sherms all morning. I hate that angel dust.”

  “Was that what the fight was about?” Lucy asked.

  “Nah, I don’t know what in hell that was about. I think Benz thought he was messing with Lila Sue. You know how she gets.”

  “I calmed her down,” said David. “She’s really a very loving person.” He sighed. “I guess if we were going to get all social worky, we would try to find someplace for that girl, but somehow I can’t bring myself to do it. They make each other so happy.” He looked around and seemed to see the wreckage for the first time.

  “What happened in here? Not Doug?”

  “Nah, the damn cops,” said Ali. He started picking up items, examining them for damage, and tossing those few that failed to meet his generous standards of usefulness out the door.

  “Cops?” asked Lucy. “Cops can’t do that. They can’t even come in here without a warrant.”

  Ali laughed and said, “Uh-uh, sugar, warrant’s for when they bust into a home. Me being a homeless man, I don’t have no home, so I guess they don’t need no warrant.”

  “I don’t think that’s true, but anyway, they had no right to break up your stuff. Why did they do it?”

  Ali set an orange crate on end and placed a couple of books carefully on its shelf. “Well, you know they don’t need no reason, but these particular cops that did it was looking for Canman. I told them I didn’t know where he was staying. They said, I mean the white one, they said I do know, I was his running buddy, and he starts pushing me around, like they do, and I go, ‘Officer, only thing I know is there is no God but God, and Mohammed is the messenger of God.’ And my own name. Everything else is speculation, and did they want me to speculate. And I told them that if they wanted to know every damn thing I knew about Canman, they should go talk to the other cop who came around last night. That’s when the white guy went nuts and started busting up my stuff. The black fella, he wasn’t too enthusiastic about it, I could tell, but I guess he had to back up his partner’s play.”

  David started to help Ali pick up, but the older man waved him away, saying he had his own way of doing things, and he didn’t want anything good to be mistakenly tossed out. He set up his rickety table, and after wiping off and kissing his Qur’an, he placed it in the center. “The funny thing was I did see Canman this morning, early, just after I done my morning prayers. I’m always the first one up around here anyway. He was skulking around the paper house with his dog, just like a dog his own self, to look at him. I asked him was he coming back to live here, and he snarled at me, just like a damn dog. Pulled a knife on me, too. Boy was scared, I tell you that.”

  “Of what?” asked Lucy. “Of the cops?”

  “Maybe. The first cop kind of hinted that they had him in their sights for the slasher since Fake Ali got it. That would scare me. But, look, that Canman, he been scared for a long time, scared of stuff that go way past the cops. Stuff nobody but him can see. A sad cat, that Canman.”

  David asked, “Ali, do you think he’s the one?”

  “He could be. He got enough hate in his soul to cut people up. But it’s not like I got any what you call evidence for it?”

  “Where do you think he is?”

  Ali gave David a long apprising look and answered, “Well, like I told them all, I don’t know, which is God’s honest truth. But if I was going to look for Canman, which I am not, I guess I’d start under Penn. I hung out there five, seven years, back before they cleaned us all out of there, before they cleaned us out and all. And when I got there, he’d been there longer than any of us. Not that there ain’t some been there longer than him. Some people been down there so long they ain’t hardly people anymore. Live on rats and garbage.” Ali lowered his voice. “And other stuff. Human flesh. Someone goes down a station at three in the morning and never comes back up. What they say, anyway. I guess he’s gone back under. No cops down there.”

  “But there are,” said David. “There are regular patrols. I’ve been on some of them.”

  “Uh-huh, son,” said Ali, stooping to pick up a broken chair. He shifted it in his big hands, trying to see how it could be fitted together again. “I mean under. Under under. Them tunnels is deep. Nobody down there but the rats and the mole people.”

  Lucy and David left a little while later. When they were back on the street, Lucy turned to him and said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry? About what?”

  “You know . . . losing it. Getting violent. It never happened to me before. I feel sick.”

  He stopped walking, faced her, and put both hands on her shoulders. “Stop it! You do this all the time. Stop eating at yourself! You did something wrong, but you did it for good reasons.”

  “Why should that make a difference?”

  “It does. The intent of the act counts. You didn’t do it out of some secret pleasure or to go along with what someone else was doing, or out of fear. You thought Doug was going to hurt me, and you acted without thought. It was a failure of attention.” He grinned at her. “That seems to be your particular fault, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

  After a moment, she smiled back. “ Mea maxima culpa. I guess I was upset because, well, I was thinking of my mother and how I would rather not turn out the way she has, and when I do things like . . . oh, just things in general that remind me, yin shui si yuan, it drives me up the wall.”

  “Your mother seems very nice,�
�� he said diplomatically.

  “In her saner moments,” she snapped, and then sighed. “Oh, she is very nice. She’s a great woman, and I admire the hell out of her, but I don’t want to be her. We drive each other crazy. I guess all kids do.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I never had a family.” Then, to cover her embarrassment, he added quickly, “What was that thing you said? Was it Chinese?”

  “Oh, yeah, a four-character idiom. It’s a habit I picked up when I was living a lot with this family, the Chens. Chinese speakers are always slipping them into their speech, practically without thinking, like we do with ‘anyway’ and ‘whatever’ and ‘like.’ It means ‘When you drink water, think of the source.’ Anyway”—they both laughed—“what are we going to do about Canman?”

  “I don’t know. Finding him would be a good start.”

  “Down in the tunnels.”

  “I guess, if that’s where he is. You’re dying to come, aren’t you?”

  She nodded. “Do you think the mole people really live on human flesh?”

  “I have no idea. But people do, if they’re desperate enough. In the Sudan, where I was, there were famines all the time. In the camps you would see some people eating meat, sheep they said, but you never saw any sheep around.” They were at a light, the evening traffic rushing up by Tenth Avenue. He looked out at the river of steel, and she saw that his face had lost the brightness that ordinarily shone from it, replaced by the sort of expression they put up on crucifixes in rural Spain. “But God forgives all,” he said. And then suddenly the brightness turned on again, like the light that just then turned from red to green. “Even you, Lucy, you horrible old sinner. Even me, if you can believe it.”