“Cassie got religion?” Barney asked carefully, playing that same dangerous game with Mazzo as he had with Cassie, not wanting to go too far and yet pressing on.
“She didn’t get religion, I guess. She had it all the time. My mother was Protestant, Papa Catholic. He insisted we go to religious classes every Saturday morning. Until we got confirmed when we were fourteen. I hated it. Sitting in the classroom with some old nun talking about the Holy Trinity, all that stuff. I hardly ever listened, and Cassie helped me with the tests. She didn’t seem to mind the classes. I used to call her Sister Superior. She didn’t seem to mind that, either. She was always a good kid. We got along, not like some other brothers and sisters I knew. Maybe because we were twins …” He shrugged deep into the sheets then, closing his eyes, and Barney sat there, in his own silence, thinking of Cassie as a little girl.
Later, another day, Mazzo awakened from a nap looking rested and at ease, his face empty of bitterness or resentment.
“What about that mountain climbing? That mountain in Maine? What’s it like on top of a mountain? I never climbed one,” Barney said. He didn’t really care about mountains, but he tried to be subtle in his questionings, leading up to the topic of Cassie in a roundabout way so that Mazzo would not become suspicious.
So Mazzo told him about mountain climbing and Barney barely listened, uninterested in all the gear that was necessary, although he perked up his ears when Mazzo told him about the time he slipped, fell from a cliff, and hung suspended by a thin rope until he was pulled to safety. “For five minutes, there, I thought I was a goner. If that rope had broken …” His eyes became hooded, his lips pressed together thinly. “Maybe it should have happened then. Or maybe that other time …”
“What other time?” Keep him talking.
“I got hit by a ball. Beaned. Two strikes on me, bases loaded. Top of the ninth. Everything always happens in the ninth inning. The bastard threw right at me. At my head. Guy named Cranston. Exeter. And I didn’t duck or pull back. Because I didn’t think anybody would do a thing like that. Jesus, I was stupid. So I stood there, thinking this guy must have put a hell of a curve or hook on the ball because it had to miss me at the last minute. And bang. Knocked me out. I woke up in the hospital. Concussion. Two black eyes. Had to stay there a few days. Worried as hell that my mother and Papa would find out what happened. But the school was covered by Blue Cross or something. And they never knew. Christ, they didn’t know half the stuff that happened to me.” He fell silent. “I had a headache for, like, two months afterward.”
“Did you quit playing?” Barney asked, wondering how he could get the topic around to Cassie.
“Had to keep playing.…” Silent again.
Barney saw his opening. Weak, lame, maybe, but an opening.
“Speaking of headaches, how long has Cassie had those migraines?”
Mazzo’s head snapped up, his eyes sharp and alert, and Barney immediately realized his blunder.
“How do you know about her migraines? I didn’t even know she has migraines.”
Blood rushed to Barney’s cheeks. His pulse throbbed in his temple. Damn it. He had made the fatal slip that had to be avoided at all costs. Mazzo didn’t know about Cassie’s visits.
“She … mentioned them that day she was here … visiting you,” Barney stammered, tripping over the words. He was again grateful for his ability to lie.
“I don’t remember that she talked about migraines,” Mazzo said, unconvinced. But not so much suspicious now as puzzled. “The damn medicine. It does all these strange things to you.…”
Barney waited, watching, not daring to move or say anything more.
Mazzo made his usual escape, shrinking himself into the bed sheets, drawing them up to his chin. “I wonder what else I can’t remember.…”
Barney got out of there as soon as possible, vowing to be more careful in the future. Mazzo might be sick and dying, but his brain was sharp and alert.
And then everything accelerated and the woozy times began. He was taken to the fourth floor again and strapped to the chair and endured the slice of pain in his arm that admitted the merchandise. Dr. Croft, inscrutable as before, hovered over him, and the Handyman lurked somewhere nearby. Barney submitted himself to the proceedings although everything inside of him shouted out in protest. He didn’t want to be deprived of memory, did not want to take the chance of having Cassie abolished from his life, risk having her vanish from his perceptions. Yet he knew that his presence in the Complex depended on the tests. If he didn’t participate, then he had no reason to be here and that would be even worse, being sent away and never seeing her again. So he let himself go limp in the chair as the merchandise invaded his veins, bringing that dizzying oblivion.
When he awakened, the woozy times began, the funny times when minutes disappeared and the walls shimmered and melted and the ceiling danced. Dazed and dazzled by lights and shadows, he wandered the corridors, swaying and tilting, and seemed to bounce off the walls as he walked. Or didn’t walk but seemed to float, filled with the need to see Cassie again, looking for her but not finding her. Feeling lonely and abandoned. Groping his way back finally to his room.
The wooziness diminished at last, and he was able to negotiate his way up and down the hallways without incident, in control again, although he was frequently lightheaded and his legs a bit unstable. Billy the Kidney remained in his room after his most recent experience with the merchandise, door closed, red light glowing, nurses whisking in and out like starched ghosts. They paid no attention to Barney, and he felt like a ghost himself.
And then that strange time was over and he awoke one night, shot abruptly into here and now like a bullet out of a rifle. He raised himself on one elbow, heard the night sounds of the Complex—hum of a motor, sigh of a door closing somewhere, sudden rush of rubber-soled feet—and felt content. No dizziness, no crazy thoughts, no buckling walls and dancing ceilings. Cassie’s face floated before him in the darkness, and all his longing returned but filled now with sweetness.
Restless and unsettled, he threw off the sheet, climbed out of bed, nosed his feet into his slippers, and made his way out of the room. It was luxurious to be walking without dizziness threatening to tumble him down, the walls and floors behaving. The wall clock said 11:26.
He paused at Billy’s room, ignored the red light and peeked in, saw Billy’s form on the bed. Gratified to learn that Billy had returned from Isolation, Barney whispered, “Sleep tight, Billy.” Waited, no response, Billy sleeping nice and tight.
He went down the corridor to Mazzo’s room, again ignored the red light, and went in. A night light burned feebly on the wall. Mazzo twisted and turned on the bed, moaning, groaning, muttering. The machine to which he was attached blooped and bleeped. As Barney walked quietly to the bed, Mazzo stiffened under the sheet.
“Who’s there?” Mazzo asked, alert, alarmed.
“Barney.” A whisper.
“Where the hell have you been?” Mazzo asked, voice hoarse, phlegmed.
Barney was appalled at his condition. Just a few days ago he was sitting up, telling Barney about home runs and bean balls. Now he looked fevered again, wasted.
“The merchandise,” Barney said. “They gave me more stuff.”
“Was it bad?” Mazzo asked, grinding the words out through stiff lips, as if it cost him a lot to speak.
“Nothing to it,” Barney said. Then bent toward Mazzo to hear him better. “How’s it going? Tough?”
Mazzo began to cough, a hacking, rasping, violent cough that convulsed his body. His hand reached out like the hand of someone drowning, groping for rescue, and Barney grabbed it and held it firmly in his own, crushed it to his chest.
“Take it easy,” Barney said.
Mazzo’s hand was tightly in his, perspiration like glue fastening their hands together. Barney had bent over at an awkward angle, and his back began to hurt. But he didn’t move, remained standing that way because Mazzo wasn’t moaning or twisting
on the bed anymore. The room smelled terrible—did pain and hopelessness have odors? Barney didn’t mind the faint smell of vomit or even the farts that came out of Mazzo once in a while, but those other unidentified odors bothered him, seemed to sink into his pores and spread through his body.
“Christ, Mazzo, what are you doing in this lousy place?” Barney asked, his back killing him but not moving, Mazzo’s hand still pressed against his chest. “You could be someplace else, home, maybe.…”
Mazzo intensified his grip on Barney’s hand.
“I came here to die,” Mazzo muttered.
“Everybody comes here to die,” Barney said. “But you’re fighting all the time.”
Mazzo finally loosened his grip and withdrew his hand, and Barney, grateful, was able to unbend. He stood up straight, arching his back, waiting for the pain to subside.
A long sigh came from Mazzo, like a hollow whistle heard from far away. “I came here to die quicker,” he said, pronouncing the words carefully, as if he wanted to be certain Barney understood them. “I heard about this place. The experiments. I figured one of the drugs would get me. Kill me. I didn’t have the guts to do it myself, but I thought the drugs would do it for me.” He grimaced, face sour. “But it hasn’t happened,” he whispered.
Barney knew now why Mazzo was so different from Billy the Kidney and Allie Roon. What had the Handyman said? How can you know other people’s motives for what they do?
Mazzo beckoned him closer.
“Do me a favor,” Mazzo said, breath rancid. “Pull the plug, Barney.”
“What plug?”
“On the machine.” He gestured toward the unit near the bed, bleeping quietly in the half-light, the bleeping so customary here in the room that you barely heard it.
“I can’t do that,” Barney said, horrified. “That’s murder.”
“Not murder. You’d be doing me a favor.”
Barney turned away, not because of the terrible breath but because of the anger that churned through him, anger at whatever brings people to a point in their lives that they prefer dying to living, ask for it, beg for it.
“Ah, Barney, let me die,” Mazzo pleaded.
Barney wanted to lash out at something. But what? The whole world, maybe.
“I thought you wanted to go out in a blaze of glory, Mazzo,” he said. “One big wild ride.”
The harsh semblance of laughter from Mazzo, not really laughter but a cackle an old man might make, toothless and mirthless.
The vision Barney had seen on the fence, that glimmer from afar, winked at him again.
“Hey, Mazzo,” Barney said, suddenly excited. “You’re going to have that last ride. Go out in a blaze of glory.” A crazy promise, he knew. But he knew at this moment that he could make it come true. Maybe it was the merchandise talking or the wooziness that had warped his reasoning, but he saw it so clearly: Mazzo in the final ride, beautiful and dazzling.
Footsteps in the corridor. Coming close. Closer.
Barney glanced up to see the silhouette of a nurse standing at the doorway. She stepped into the room, eyes widening in surprise when she spotted Barney there.
“Get back to your room this instant,” she said, her voice crackling with anger.
A new nurse—he had never seen her before. And he couldn’t risk her anger and a possible report to the Handyman.
“Sorry,” he said, giving Mazzo a last encouraging look over his shoulder. Mazzo merely turned away.
Back in his room, in his bed, Barney drifted into sleep, weary now, bones aching a bit, his back painful from that uncomfortable stance in Mazzo’s room. He would keep his promise somehow. Mazzo would go out in a blaze of glory, and Barney and Cassie and all of them would cheer him on.
13
BILLY,” he said. “We are going to steal a car.”
“We?” Billy asked, raising his hands in a helpless gesture. Meaning: me, this wheelchair, my legs all shot?
“Yes, we,” Barney said. “I’ll do the actual stealing, but you’ll be the expert on how to pull it off and also act as a lookout.”
Billy looked doubtful, but his expression also showed a bit of hope. In a place like the Complex, anything that broke the routine, fractured the hopelessness and boredom, was welcome. Even the impossible, like stealing a car.
“Where are we going to steal this car?” Billy asked, playing along, nothing to lose, what the hell.
“From the junkyard next door.”
Billy shook his head. “You’re crazy, Barney, know that? Why do you want to steal a car from a junkyard?”
“Not just any car,” Barney said. “A particular car. A very particular car.”
Billy’s eyes gleamed with interest now. Barney could always do that to him, capture his attention and interest.
“What are you going to do with it once you steal it?” Billy asked.
“Give somebody a ride in it,” Barney said, delighted with Billy’s curiosity. He was also delighted by something else: a new kind of aftermath. Not the frightening, dizzying aftermath he had dreaded so much but a new one. He’d awakened this morning feeling pleasantly light-headed and tipsy, his body loose and relaxed. He had never been drunk in his life, but he figured this was how being mildly drunk must be. Feeling willy-nilly and sort of woozy. But in control. Able to walk and talk and eat—the return of his taste had also brought back his appetite and food tasted good again, even the institutional kind of food he found on his plate every day. Anyway, anyway. He enjoyed the sensation of tipsiness, drifting down the corridor to find Billy sunning himself near a rear window.
“Who?” Billy asked. “Who’s going to ride in it?” A child again, hoping it might be him.
“That comes later,” Barney said, thinking that yes, maybe Billy could get to ride in it too. He’d hate to disappoint Billy. “First the car.”
“Okay, which car you going to steal?”
“We,” Barney said, “you and me, we’re going to steal it.” Slurring his words a bit, talking lazy but nice and slow, no hurry. “Like a partnership. Partners in crime.”
“Wow,” Billy said.“But which car?”
“Well, it’s not really a car.”
Billy’s face fell, disappointment draining the eagerness away. “Hell, Barney, you just said we were going to steal a car and now you say it’s not a car.”
“That’s right, Billy. It’s a car but it’s not a car. Remember that day I climbed the fence? I spotted it from the top of the fence. A red car, looked like an MG.”
“That was the day you froze on the fence. Like a statue and I was calling you to come down.”
“Right. Well, I went back up again. Went up the fence and over, and looked at the car real close. Know what I found out?” He felt light and bright and clever.
“What?”
“That it was made of wood. An imitation car some kids made in a school in woodworking class. The label said that.”
Billy was even more disappointed. “Aw, what good’s a phony car?”
“Remember those little cars they have in amusement parks? They weren’t real but they were fun to ride. Hell, you must have ridden in one of them. I did.” Barney wasn’t sure where or when he had driven one but knew he had, all right.
“Sure, I remember,” Billy said.
“Well, you had fun, didn’t you?”
“But it wasn’t made of wood, Barney.”
Barney sighed in exasperation. “What does it matter what it’s made of,” he said, “as long as it works.” But he wanted to say more. Needed to tell him how he felt about the car and what it meant.
“Billy,” he said, knowing he was breaking the rule and entering Billy’s compartment, “why did you come here? To this place?”
Billy looked quickly away, a pink flush invading his sallow complexion. His hands fiddled with the controls of his wheelchair. “I … I …” he stammered.
“To serve mankind?” Barney asked, knowing the words were high sounding and probably embarrassing to Bil
ly. But true all the same.
“I don’t know,” Billy said. “There was nothing else to do. I figured what they learned in the tests might help somebody, sometime. I don’t know about mankind, though.”
“Okay. In other words, you’re doing something, right?”
Billy looked at him again. Nodded. “Trying to.”
“Well, I’ve got to do something, too. Or try.” It was still difficult finding the words. “The worst thing, Billy, is not doing anything at all. So stealing a car that isn’t a car is better than doing nothing.”
Billy looked at him doubtfully, frowning.
“Trust me,” Barney said, thinking: The best thing is action, not words. Show Billy the Kidney what he meant. Steal the car and let Billy see what he meant. “I’m going to make that car work, Billy.…”
Billy still looked skeptical. But there was a hint of interest behind the skepticism.
“Tell me some more,” Billy said.
“Before I tell you more, we have to steal it,” Barney said. “We also need a plan. And some tools. That’s where you come in, Billy. You know all about this place. Where can I find some tools? Like a saw and a screwdriver. Stuff like that.”
“You going to build a car or steal one?” Billy said, eyes bright with interest now.