Nos4a2

by Joe Hill

  “Jinkies,” she said. “What’s the difference?”

  He surprised her by laughing—a rapid, helpless, panting sound.

  She had to ride to the hospital with him in the ambulance. He wouldn’t let go of her hand.

  Here, Iowa

  BY THE TIME VIC CAME OUT OF THE OTHER END OF THE BRIDGE, SHE had slowed to almost nothing and the bike was in neutral. She remembered acutely her last visit to the Here Public Library, how she had rushed headlong into a curb and been flung for a knee-scraping slide across a concrete path. She didn’t think she could take a crash in the state she was in now. The bike didn’t care for neutral, though, and as it thumped down onto the asphalt road that ran behind the library, the engine died with a thin, dispirited wheeze.

  When Vic had last been Here, the strip of park behind the library had been raked and clean and shady, a place to throw down a blanket and read a book. Now it was half an acre of mud, gouged with tread marks from loaders and dump trucks. The century-old oaks and birch had been plucked from the ground and bulldozed into a twelve-foot-high mound of dead wood, off to one side.

  A single park bench remained. Once it had been dark green, with wrought-iron arms and legs, but the paint had peeled and the wood beneath was splintery, sun-baked almost to colorlessness. Maggie dozed upright, chin on chest, in one corner of the bench, in the direct, unforgiving light of day. She held a carton of lemonade in one hand, a fly buzzing around its mouth. Her sleeveless T-shirt exposed scrawny, withered arms, spotted with the scars from dozens of cigarette burns. She had at some point blasted her hair with fluorescent orange dye, but the brown and gray roots were showing. Vic’s own mother had not looked so old when she died.

  The sight of Maggie—so worn, so emaciated, so ill used, and so alone—hurt Vic more sharply than the ache in her left knee. She forced herself to remember, in careful detail, how in a moment of anger and panic she had thrown papers in this woman’s face, had threatened her with police. Her sense of shame was exquisite, but she did not allow herself to shove it aside. She let it burn, the tip of a cigarette held firmly against skin.

  The front brake shrilled as Vic settled to a stop. Maggie lifted her head, pushed some of her brittle-looking sherbet hair back from her eyes, and smiled sleepily. Vic put the kickstand down.

  Maggie’s smile vanished as quickly as it had come. She rose unsteadily to her feet.

  “Oh, V-V-Vic. What did you do to yourself? You’ve got blood all over you.”

  “If it makes you feel better, most of it isn’t mine.”

  “It doesn’t. Makes me f-f-f-feel ffff-fffaint. Didn’t I have to put Band-Aids on you last time you were here?”

  “Yeah. I guess you did,” Vic said. She looked past Maggie at the library. The first-floor windows were covered over with plywood sheeting. The iron door at the rear was crisscrossed with yellow police tape. “What happened to your library, Maggie?”

  “S-s-seen better days. Like muhmuhmuh-mmm-mmme,” Maggie said, and grinned to show her missing teeth.

  “Oh, Maggie,” Vic said, and for an instant she felt very close to crying again. It was Maggie’s uneven grape-soda-colored lipstick. It was the dead trees in a pile. It was the sun, too hot and too bright. Maggie deserved some shade to sit in. “I don’t know which one of us needs a doctor more.”

  “Oh, gosh, I’m okay! Just m-muh-my s-stuh-stammer is worse.”

  “And your arms.”

  Maggie looked down at them, squinting in puzzlement at the constellation of burns, then looked back up. “It helps me talk normal. Helps me with other s-s-st-st-stuff, too.”

  “What helps you?”

  “P-p-p-puh-puh-pain. C’mon. Let’s go in. Mama Maggie will fffffffix you up.”

  “I need something besides fixing, Maggie. I have questions for your tiles.”

  “M-m-muh-might not have answers,” Maggie said, turning up the path. “They don’t work s-ss-so well anymore. They st-st-st-stammer, too, now. But I’ll try. After we get you cleaned up and I muh-muh-mother you some.”

  “I don’t know if I have time for mothering.”

  “Sure you do,” Maggie said. “He hasn’t muh-muh-muh-made it to Christmasland yet. We both know you can’t catch him before then. Be like trying to grab a handful of fffff-fffog.”

  Vic gingerly descended from the bike. She was almost hopping to keep the weight off her left leg. Maggie put an arm around her waist. Vic wanted to tell her she didn’t need a crutch, but the truth was she did—she doubted she could make it to the back of the library without help—and her arm went automatically over Maggie’s shoulders. They walked a step or two, and then Maggie paused, twisting her head to look back at the Shorter Way, which once again spanned the Cedar River. The river seemed wider than Vic remembered, the water boiling right up to the edge of the narrow road that looped behind the library. The thicket-covered embankment that had once lined the water had been washed away.

  “What’s on the other end of the bridge this time?”

  “Couple of dead people.”

  “Will anyone ff-f-ffuh-ffollow you through?”

  “I don’t think so. There are police looking for me back there, but the bridge will pop out of existence before they find it.”

  “There were p-p-puh-police here.”

  “Looking for me?”

  “I don’t know! Muh-mm-mmmmmaybe! I was coming back from the drugstore and s-s-saw ’em parked out f-f-f-front. So I took off. I stuh-st-stay here s-s-s-sometimes, s-s-sometimes other puh-p-places.”

  “Where? I think the first time we met, you said something about living with relatives—an uncle or something?”

  Maggie shook her head. “He’s gone. Whole trailer p-puh-park is gone. Washed away.”

  The two women limped toward the back door.

  “They’re probably looking for you because I called you. They might be tracking your cell phone,” Vic said.

  “Thought of that. Dumped it after you called. I knew you wouldn’t need to call again to f-find m-m-mmme. No worries!”

  The yellow tape across the rusting iron door read DANGER. A sheet of paper, slipped inside a clear plastic envelope and stuck to the door, identified the structure as unsound. The door was not locked but held ajar by a chunk of concrete. Maggie ducked the tape and pushed it inward. Vic followed her into darkness and ruin.

  The stacks had once been a vast, cavernous vault that smelled fragrantly of ten thousand books, aging gently in the shadows. The shelves were still there, although banks of them had been toppled like twelve-foot-tall iron dominoes. Most of the books were gone, although some remained in rotting heaps scattered here and there, stinking of mildew and decay.

  “The big f-f-flood was in 2008, and the walls are st-st-still wet.”

  Vic brushed one hand against the cold, moist concrete and found that it was true.

  Maggie held her as they picked their way carefully through the debris. Vic kicked a pile of beer cans. As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she saw that the walls had been tagged with graffiti, the usual assortment of six-foot cocks and dinner-plate-proportioned tits. But there was also a grand message, scrawled in dripping red paint:

  PLEEZ BE QUITE IN THE LIBERY PEPLE R TRYING TO GET HI!

  “I’m sorry, Maggie,” Vic said. “I know you loved this place. Is anyone doing anything to help out? Were the books moved to a new location?”

  “You bet,” Maggie said.

  “Nearby?”

  “P-p-pretty close. The town dump is just a m-m-mm-mile downriver.”

  “Couldn’t someone do something for the old place?” Vic said. “What is it? A hundred years old? It must be a historical site.”

  “You got that right,” Maggie said, and for an instant there was no trace of a stammer in her voice at all. “It’s history, baby.”

  Vic caught a glimpse of her expression in the shadows. It was true: Pain really did help Maggie with her stammer.

  The Library

  MAGGIE LEIGH’S OFFICE BEHIND THE FISH TANK
WAS STILL there—in a manner of speaking. The tank was empty, with filthy Scrabble tiles heaped in the bottom, the cloudy glass walls giving a view of what had once been the children’s library. Maggie’s gunmetal desk remained, although the surface had been gouged and scratched and someone had spray-painted a gaping red vulva on one side. An unlit candle bent over a pool of violet wax. Maggie’s paperweight—Chekhov’s gun, and yes, Vic got the joke now—held her place in the hardcover she was reading, Ficciones by Borges. There was a tweed couch that Vic didn’t remember. It was a yard-sale number, some rents in it patched with duct tape and some holes not patched at all, but at least it wasn’t damp, didn’t stink of mildew.

  “What happened to your koi?” Vic asked.

  “I’m not sure. I think s-s-someone ate it,” Maggie said. “I hope it m-m-made sss-someone a good meal. No one sh-sh-should go hungry.”

  There were syringes and rubber tubing on the floor. Vic was careful not to step on any needles as she made her way to the couch and lowered herself upon it.

  “Those aren’t m-m-m-mine,” Maggie said, nodding to the syringes, and she went for the broom that was leaning in a corner where once there had been a coatrack. The broom itself doubled as the coatrack now; Maggie’s filthy old fedora hung upon it. “I haven’t sh-sh-shot up ss-ss-since last year. Too expensive. I don’t know how anyone can afford to get high in this economy.”

  Maggie set her hat on her sherbet-colored hair with the dignity and care of a drunk dandy about to sway out of the absinthe hall and into the rainy Paris night. She took up her broom and swept. The syringes clattered in a glassy sort of way across the cement.

  “I can wrap your leg and give you some Oxy,” Maggie said. “Way cheaper than heroin.”

  She bent to her desk, found a key, unlocked the bottom drawer. She reached in and removed an orange pill bottle, a carton of cigarettes, and a rotting purple Scrabble bag.

  “Sobriety is even cheaper than OxyContin,” Vic said.

  Maggie shrugged and said, “I only take as needed.” She poked a cigarette into the corner of her mouth, lit a match with her thumbnail: a good trick.

  “When is it needed?”

  “It’s a painkiller. I take it to kill pain.” She drew smoke, put the lighter down. “That’s all. What happened to you, Vuh-V-V-Vic?”

  Vic settled back into the couch, head on the armrest. She could not bend her left knee all the way or unbend it, could hardly bear to move it. She could hardly bear to look at it; it was twice the size of the other knee, a purple-and-brown map of bruises.

  She began to talk, telling about the last two days as best as she could remember, getting things out of order, providing explanations that seemed more confusing than the things they were meant to explain. Maggie did not interrupt or ask for clarification. A faucet ran for half a minute, then stopped. Vic let out a sharp, pained breath when Maggie put a cold, damp washcloth against her left knee and gently held it there.

  Maggie opened her medicine bottle and shook out a little white pill. Fragrant blue smoke unspooled from her cigarette, draped her like the ghost of a scarf.

  “I can’t take that,” Vic said.

  “Sh-sh-sure you can. You don’t have to d-d-dry-swallow ’em. I’ve got lemonade. It’s a little warm but pretty tasty!”

  “No, I mean, it’ll put me to sleep. I’ve slept too much already.”

  “On a concrete f-f-f-floor? After you were gassed? That isn’t s-suh-sleep.” She gave Vic the tablet of OxyContin. “That’s unconsciousness.”

  “Maybe after we talk.”

  “If I try to help you ff-ff-find out what you want to know, do you pruh-p-promise you won’t r-ride off till you rest?”

  Vic reached for the other woman’s hand and squeezed it. “I do.” Maggie smiled and patted Vic’s knuckles, but Vic did not let go of her. She said, “Thank you, Maggie. For everything. For trying to warn me. For helping me. I’d give anything to take back the way I acted when I saw you in Haverhill. I was scared of you. That’s not an excuse. There isn’t any excuse. There’s a lot of things I wish I could redo. You can’t imagine. I wish there was something I could do to show you how sorry I am. Something I could give you besides words.”

  Maggie’s whole face lit up: a child seeing a kite lift into the blue, blue sky.

  “Oh, darn, V-V-V-Vic. You’re gonna muh-m-make me cry! What’s better in the whole world than words? Besides, you’re already doing s-s-something,” Maggie said. “You’re here. It’s so nice to have someone to talk to! Not that it’s m-m-m-much fun to talk to m-muh-mmme!”

  “Shhh. You shush with that. Your stammer doesn’t bother me half as much as it bothers you,” Vic said. “The first time we met, you told me that your Scrabble tiles and my bike were both knives for cutting through the stitches between reality and thought. You had that right. That’s not the only thing they can cut. They wound up cutting both of us good. I know that my bridge—the Shorter Way—damaged me. In here.” She reached up and tapped her left temple. “I traveled across it a few times too many, and it put my mind out of joint. I’ve never been right. I burned down my home. I burned down my life. I ran away from both of the boys I love because I was scared of damaging them or not being enough for them. That’s what my knife did to me. And you’ve got this thing with your speech—”

  “’S like I mmm-mm-managed to cut out my own tongue with my knife.”

  “Seems like the only one who never winds up bleeding from using his psychic knife is Manx.”

  “Oh, no! Oh, no, V-V-V-Vic! Muh-Muh-Manx has had it worst! He’s been bled completely dry!” Maggie lowered her eyelids, drawing a deep, luxurious lungful of smoke. The tip of her cigarette throbbed in the darkness. She removed the cigarette from her mouth, looked at it thoughtfully for a moment, and then stabbed it into her own bare thigh, through one of the tears in her jeans.

  “Jesus!” Vic shouted. She sat up so quickly that the room lurched hard in one direction and her stomach lurched hard in the other. She fell back against the armrest, overcome by dizziness.

  “For the best,” Maggie said through clenched teeth. “I want to be able to talk to you. Not just sp-spray you with spit.” The breath spurted out of her in short, pained exhalations. “’S only way I can get my tiles to say anything anyhow, and sometimes even that isn’t enough. Was necessary. What were we saying?”

  “Oh, Maggie,” Vic said.

  “Don’t make a big deal. Let’s get to it, or I’ll have to do that again. And the m-m-more I do it, the less well it works.”

  “You said Manx is bled dry.”

  “That’s right. The Wraith makes him young and strong. It p-preserves him. But it’s cost him his ability to feel regret or empathy. That’s what his knife cut out of him: his humanity.”

  “Yeah. Except it’s going to cut the same thing out of my son, too. The car changes the children Manx takes with him on his trips to Christmasland. It turns ’em into fuckin’ vampires or something. Doesn’t it?”

  “Close enough,” Maggie said. She rocked back and forth, eyes shut against the pain in her leg. “Christmasland is an inscape, right? A place Manx invented out of thought.”

  “A make-believe place.”

  “Oh, it’s a real place. Ideas are as real as rocks. Your bridge is real, too, you know. It isn’t actually a covered bridge, of course. The rafters, the roof, the boards under your tires—they’re stage dressing for s-s-something more basic. When you left the Gasmask Man’s house and came here, you didn’t cross a bridge. You crossed an idea that looked like a bridge. And when M-Muh-Manx gets to Christmasland, he’ll be arriving at an idea of happiness that looks like . . . I don’t know . . . Santa Claus’s workshop?”

  “I think it’s an amusement park.”

  “Amusement p-park. That sounds about right. Manx doesn’t have happiness anymore. Only amusement. It’s an idea of endless fun, endless youth, dressed up in a form his dumb little mind can understand. His vehicle is the instrument that opens the way. S-s-suffering and unha
ppiness provide the energy to run the car and open his p-passage to that puh-p-place. This is also why he has to take the kids with him. The car needs something he no longer has. He drains unhappiness from the children just like a B-movie v-v-vampire sucking blood.”

  “And when he uses them up, they’re monsters.”

  “They’re still children, I think. They’re just children who can’t understand anything except fun. They’ve been remade into Manx’s idea of childhood perfection. He wants kids to be f-f-ffforever innocent. Innocence ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, you know. Innocent little kids rip the wings off flies, because they don’t know any better. That’s innocence. The car takes what Manx needs and changes his passengers so they can live in his world of thought. It sharpens their teeth and robs them of their need for warmth. A world of pure thought would be pretty cold, I bet. Now, take your pill, Vic. You need to rest and get your strength back before you ride out of here to f-f-face him again.” She held out her palm with the tablet in it.

  “Maybe I could use something. Not just for my knee. For my head,” Vic told her, and then winced at a fresh stab of pain in her left eyeball. “I wonder why I always feel it behind my left eye, whenever I use my bridge. Been like that since childhood.” She laughed shakily. “I wept blood once, you know.”

  Maggie said, “Creative ideas form in the right side of the brain. But did you know the right side of your brain sees out from your left eye? And it must take a lot of energy to shove a thought out of your head and into the real world. All that energy zapping you right”—she pointed at Vic’s left eye—“there.”

  Vic looked longingly at the pill. Still she hesitated.

  “You are going to answer my questions, yes? With your tiles.”

  “You haven’t asked anything I need them for yet.”

  “I need to know how to kill him. He died in prison, but it didn’t stick.”

  “You already know the answer to that one, I think.”

  Vic took the OxyContin from Maggie’s hand and accepted the carton of lemonade when she offered it. The juice was warm and sticky and sweet and good. She knocked the Oxy down on the first swallow. The pill left a faint, bitter aftertaste.