The Bumblebee Flies Anyway

  “Cold, doctor,” he said.

  The doctor’s eyes glowed suddenly, their brilliance intensified. He had hit pay dirt, said something that had caused the doctor to react. He felt proud. He said it again: “Cold.” That had been the word the doctor had been waiting for. White hadn’t been right and neither had rain. But cold had done it.

  But now something disturbed him, something from inside him, and he was afraid he would have to go deeper inside to find out what it was. He didn’t know what it was. But it frightened him. Cold. He tosssed the word about in his mind like a ball he was juggling, and the picture amused him, the amusement holding off the other thing beneath the surface. And then, of course, he saw what it was: doctor. He had said Cold, doctor. The man on the screen was a doctor, although it was impossible to tell from looking at him. There were no clues. He did not know whether he wore a doctor’s uniform or not because he could see only the face. What did doctors wear anyway? In here the color was green, the surgical gowns were always green. In here …

  “The second word.”

  “Yes,” he said, grateful for the doctor’s voice. He’d been about to go inside but the voice had stopped him.

  “Car.”

  “Automobile.”

  The doctor merely looked at him, blank again, the eyes without any signal, any clue about whether automobile was right or wrong. But if he’d been right, then the eyes would have glowed again, and so he felt he was wrong and he tried for another word, but cautiously, as if his brain was tiptoeing.

  “Tires,” he said.

  The doctor waited.

  “Hill.”

  Blink. Saw a hill distinctly. Wet pavement. Motor roaring. Blink. Inside the car: him. At the wheel. Rain on the windshield. Blink. Blink again. Nothing.

  But something.

  The doctor stared at him from the monitor. He didn’t like the way the doctor stared at him. There was something in the stare that gave him the willies, the chills.

  “Am I doing all right, doctor?” he asked, his voice small in his ears, almost a whisper so that he wasn’t sure the doctor had heard him.

  “You are doing just fine,” the doctor said, his voice reassuring.

  “Was hill the right answer?” he asked.

  “There are no right answers or wrong answers, Barney,” the doctor said.

  Barney nodded, glad to hear that he could not possibly fail the test.

  “Close your eyes, Barney. Relax.”

  Barney did as the doctor asked. He closed his eyes, his eyelids fluttering a bit before they settled down. The eyelids were heavy now, pressing down on his eyes.

  “Try to sleep, Barney,” the doctor said, the words reaching Barney separately, apart from each other, try, and the pause in between as try lingered in the air and then to sounding big and hollow like a stone being dropped into a chasm from far above, echoing as it struck bottom deep below, sleep, booming in his ears, like a big drum struck by a huge hammer, and then Barney, the name like a shout from afar. Barney, Barney, somebody calling him to come outside and play after supper in the soft summer night in the school yard, Barney, Barney, the voice faraway, faraway, fading.

  But who is Barney?

  Barney who?

  The name raced in his mind, unattached to anything, like a word in a foreign language he didn’t know. Barney, Barney. Panic caused his flesh to quiver, the small hairs to raise on his arms and legs. He was afraid to open his eyes. Yet he wanted to open them in order to get outside, outside himself; otherwise he would be trapped here inside, inside where the terrible thing lurked, the thing he knew was there but could not put a name to, the question he was afraid of asking.

  Barney who?

  Not that question.

  What question?

  Who am I?

  Worse: What am I?

  His eyes flew open and he stared in horror at the room in which he found himself: the chairs against the walls, the closed door, the mirror reflecting the painting, the blank television screen in front of him. The room was like that painting: flat, two dimensional, as if he could reach out and touch the wall across the room from him by barely extending his hand. What am I doing here? Where do I belong? He looked down to check out his arms and his chest and stomach, lifted his hands to inspect them, looking for clues maybe. He wanted to look into the mirror but didn’t think he could rise from the couch without falling, his legs untrustworthy, certain to buckle and let him plunge to the floor, where he would stay forever.

  I am me … me … the word screaming inside him as if from eternity. He was out of context with the world—what was the world? What was this room? What was he here?—not who but what? What was he? This was the source of his terror, the horror that whistled in him like winds howling in a tunnel.

  He was alone, cast adrift, lost, unrelated to anything. He shut his eyes again, pressed to keep them shut, raised his hands to his eyes to keep them shut, feeling his body trembling, staring into a vast emptiness that was as bad as this alien room he was in, trying to hold on, afraid he was being swept out to space, separated from earth, defying gravity, crashing through the orbit to limits past anything known …

  … and then he was in the car again, at the wheel, slanting down the street, the rain pounding on the windshield, glistening on the pavements, the motor roaring in his ears, a siren now sounding in the night, the hill slanting crazily, dizzyingly before him, his foot on the brake pedal but the car still rushing downhill until he saw her again stepping out from the curb, her face turned to him for the first time and he bent forward to see that face even as he screamed for her to Look out, look out until he crashed into a mirror that broke into a thousand fragments, sending pieces of himself, splintered and jagged, across the face of the night.

  9

  HE awakened as if from a long and restful sleep, stretching his arms and legs luxuriously, yawning mightily and lazily, a small part of him unwilling to leave that sweet dark haven.

  Opening his eyes, he saw Billy the Kidney in his wheelchair near the bed, bending forward, concern on his face.

  “You okay, Barney?” Billy asked.

  Barney grinned, filled with a sense of well-being. Most days he woke up from troubled sleep with memories of that car slanting down the hill or haunted by dreams he couldn’t quite remember but that left him uneasy and apprehensive.

  “Sure, I’m okay,” he said. Noticing the furrow of worry wrinkling Billy’s forehead, he said, “What’s the matter? You look like you’ve seen a ghost or something.”

  “I was worried, that’s all,” Billy said, rocking the wheelchair back and forth. “I mean, after what happened to Ronson. And then you with the new medicine. They kept you upstairs two whole days.”

  Now it was Barney’s turn to frown, as he pondered the lost days and hours. He closed his eyes and saw the masked face of Dr. Croft and those gray expressionless eyes looking down at him. And he remembered spinning off into dark terrifying depths. Out of the darkness came that strange restorative sleep.

  “Two days?” Barney said. “It was supposed to be only a few hours.” Had he slept for, like, forty-eight hours? No wonder he felt rested.

  “Bascam said everything was going along fine,” Billy said, “but you never can tell about her. You sure you’re okay, Barney?”

  “Fit as a fiddle,” he said, keeping his apprehension under control, not wanting Billy to become upset. “Tell me about Ronson.”

  “There’s not much to tell, Barney. He died and they took his body away. One minute he was here and the next gone.” Billy’s voice mournful, doleful.

  Barney was about to say Poor Ronson but didn’t. Maybe Ronson was better off now, wherever he was. Anyway, he was irritated by Billy’s sorrowful face and voice. He was tired of sadness, death, and dying.

  “Come on, Billy,” he said. “Cheer up. Maybe Ronson right this minute is boxing away someplace, winning the championship.” Ridiculous, of course, stupid, but Billy nodded in agreement, like a small child satisfied with a fairy t
ale at bedtime. “Tell me about the phone. Did you get to use it?”

  Billy nodded, eyes flashing, easily diverted.

  “Yesterday. Mazzo didn’t have his treatment the day before.”

  “Who did you call?”

  Billy turned shyly away. “Oh, a few people. I called the police department and told them I was a stranger in town and needed to look up some long-lost relatives. I gave them some names of streets, said I was parked on Main Street, and the cop told me how to find the streets Iwanted, starting from the center of town. I kept him talking, oh, about ten minutes, I guess, although he was interrupted once or twice when his other phone rang. I could hear the police radio in the background, voices and static and stuff. It was kind of nice.”

  He fell silent, still shy, and Barney waited patiently.

  “Then I tried a few wrong numbers. Tried to get a few conversations going but no soap. Then I hit pay dirt. I got an old lady on the phone. I asked to speak to Gladys. Gladys was the name of a lady in one of the foster homes who used to buy me candy. Anyway, this old lady’s name was Gladys, too. She said nobody ever calls her, she keeps the telephone for emergency purposes, in case she has to call a doctor or the police. She said she almost dropped when she heard someone calling for her, not calling for her exactly but using her name. We talked for ten or fifteen minutes at least. She was some talker. Told me her whole history. She was born in Iowa.…”

  Barney tuned him out, the way he did sometimes with the Handyman, because as Billy talked he began to get flashes, swift sudden images in his mind, the way pieces of dreams occur later in the day, long after you’ve awakened. Not only images—the disembodied face of the Handyman, an office with a dentist’s chair, a television screen that was blank but somehow threatening—but the aura of the dream or whatever it was, a feeling of being lost and alone, panic shouting through his veins and arteries, as if he had been abandoned by the rest of the world on a bleak, uninhabited planet out in space somewhere. The images passed quickly before his mind’s eye, like a series of doors being opened slightly and closed swiftly to allow only a glimpse of what was beyond and even that glimpse gone before he could tell what it was. Then the flashes stopped, the final door slammed shut for good, the panicky feeling gone, and he was here again with Billy, who was still talking about the old lady named Gladys.

  Billy’s face darkened now as he talked. “Then I asked her if I could call again because it was nice talking to her, like talking to my own grandmother and there was this long pause and when she spoke again she sounded suspicious and began to ask me questions about myself and what could I tell her? I mean, I’m a rotten liar and I couldn’t tell her the truth, so I kind of stammered and didn’t know what the hell to say and she yelled at me. Young man, she said, what are you after? Are you trying to put something over on an old lady? And she slammed the phone in my ear.”

  Christ, Barney thought, does everything have to turn out lousy all the time?

  “How about Dial-A-Prayer?” Barney asked. “Or Dial-A-Diet?”

  “They’re not in the book anymore,” Billy said, looking away from Barney and then back again and fooling with the wheels. “I wasn’t going to tell you about the old lady, Barney, and how it turned out that way. I mean, I appreciate the way you got the phone for me.” Pause, spin of wheels. Then: “I’m not going to use the phone anymore. I should have known better. That was okay when I was a kid, but not now.…”

  A shadow fell across the doorway. Barney looked up to see Bascam standing there. He was glad to see her, to have her interrupt Billy’s sad lament, and felt instantly guilty.

  “Dr. Lakendorp wants to see you,” she said. Face as blank as a mannequin’s in a store window.

  Barney got out of bed, eager to get away from Billy and also eager to see the Handyman, to find out about those fugitive hours. As he placed his feet on the floor, he remembered the Band-Aid he had attached to his foot. Wriggled his toes now. Discovered the Band-Aid was not there. He was a bit shaky as he stood up, and he felt Billy watching him warily. Bascam helped him with his slippers, kneeling stiffly before him, and then assisted him with his bathrobe. As he turned, a flash: The masked doctor bending over him, eyes as flat and emotionless as those of a fish in a tank in an aquarium. He blinked, flash gone, doctor’s face vanished.

  Bascam did not offer any further assistance and he was grateful. He followed her down the corridor to the elevator, gaining strength as he went along, tempo, rhythm, letting his blood flow free.

  The Handyman extended his hand in greeting and Barney realized immediately that it wasn’t merely a greeting. He looked down at what had been deposited in his hand in a swift deft movement: the Band-Aid and the crinkled piece of paper containing the notations of his identity.

  “Clever of you, Barney.”

  Barney looked away sheepishly, realizing he could never outwit the Handyman.

  “You are very resourceful.”

  Barney blossomed with the compliment, having detected a note of admiration in the Handyman’s voice. Which he had never heard before.

  He motioned Barney to seat himself. Barney shoved the Band-Aid and the piece of paper into the pocket of his robe. Settled himself in the chair and awaited the Handyman’s verdict.

  “How did I do?” Barney asked finally, breaking the silence, the Handyman having outwaited him.

  “You did fine, my boy,” the Handyman said. “It was we, perhaps, who were amiss.”

  Amiss. A strange, goose-bumpy word. What did he mean by it?

  “We miscalculated.”

  Miscalculated. A word worse than amiss. Don’t tell me any more, Barney wanted to say, while knowing that he had to hear more, had to find out what the Handyman meant.

  “You mean by having me out for two days instead of a few hours?” Barney prompted. By out meaning lost, blank, a cipher.

  “Yes. That. Although I must admit that we decided to administer additional sedatives to keep you immobile for a while.”

  “Why was that necessary?” Barney asked.

  “At one point during the questioning you exhibited signs of anxiety.”

  More word games.

  “You mean I panicked?”

  “We did not realize we would be so successful. You are an admirable subject, Barney, with perfect responses. Because of this, we detained you perhaps too long. The neurons involved—”

  Barney stopped him. A word like neurons set off alarm bells in his body. “In plain English, doctor.”

  “Yes, of course,” the Handyman said apologetically. “We are seeking to determine whether memory control can be pinpointed, whether one facet of memory can be removed while others are not. In other words, a carefully selected erasure. In fact, think of this therapy as erasing part of a video tape.”

  “Were you successful, doctor?” Barney asked, feeling beads of perspiration gathering on his forehead and the back of his neck.

  “Eminently,” the Handyman said. “During questioning—which, of course, you cannot remember and are not meant to remember—the control was precise. To an astonishing degree, my boy.”

  “Why did I begin to panic?”

  “You became fatigued. We were so caught up in your responses that we extended the interrogation beyond our original schedule. We then made a judgment that you needed a transitional period before being restored to normalcy.”

  All these words gave Barney the chills, caused the sweat on his flesh to turn cold.

  “Am I normal now?”

  “Completely, Barney,” the Handyman said heartily. “I must point out, however, that there will be aftermaths.”

  As if the Handyman possessed some terrible power of suggestion, Barney was suddenly swept with dizziness, the desk between them shifting as sands shift in a windstorm. He grabbed the edge of the desk for support, afraid he might pitch forward.

  The Handyman moved quickly. Up from the chair and around the desk, quicker than Barney had thought it was possible for him to move. Barney felt strong hands grip
his shoulders.

  “Vertigo?”

  The Handyman’s voice boomed in his ear.

  “More than that,” Barney managed to gasp, gripping the desk tightly, seeing his knuckles turn bluish white.

  “What, my boy?”

  “I can’t remember all of a sudden,” Barney said.

  “Can’t remember what?” The Handyman’s voice low, almost intimate in Barney’s ear, but loud at the same time, reverberating in Barney’s mind like an echo growing in volume instead of diminishing.

  “Everything. Who I am.”

  He turned to the Handyman in sudden confrontation, saw his eyes like green moons, the pores of his flesh like mountain craters.

  “I’m Barney Snow. I know my name. But nothing else. I don’t know anything else.” Lost in a void, in an aching emptiness. Panic whistled through him. He wanted to run, get out of here, away from the Handyman and those eyes. “Where did I come from? How did I get here? Who am I?”

  “Think,” the Handyman commanded. “Concentrate.” His voice snapping against Barney’s ear, sharp and crackling. “Think of your mother. She …”

  His mother’s face blossomed in his mind’s eye, so beautiful, so lovely. And the tinkling bracelets that accompanied her wherever she went.

  The tinkling bracelets filled the emptiness in his mind: He could almost hear them. He also felt the hot sting of the needle in his arm and realized that Bascam had entered the room and had somehow rolled up his sleeve and given him a shot while the Handyman held him firmly on the other side. He let himself go limp, to flow with whatever was joining his blood from the needle—tempo, rhythm—clinging to the face of his mother, her tinkling bracelets, closing his eyes, letting his mind fill with her so that everything else could be obliterated, especially the panic.

  After a while he felt his heart beating normally. He looked lazily around for Bascam but she had departed, as silently as she had arrived. The Handyman was once more behind the desk. Barney sought his eyes, was glad to see the doctor regarding him in his usual manner. Emergency over, if it had been an emergency. Whatever it was, done with, for now anyway. The sense of well-being he had known this morning on awakening filled him again, a feeling of drift, letting go.