“I don’t know, I haven’t checked.”
“Keep your vigil or those transmissions unravel inside your ears. You hear every phone conversation, talk show and radio jingle all at the same time and you can’t turn them off. It’s like being a god, omniscient and insane, both at once. That kind of love will drive you mad.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“Careful is for tourists. You’re trespassing on too late. You’ve already said you’re in love.”
“I’ll pick up some foil, make a beanie. Tell me your hat size and I’ll kick one your way. Will that help?”
“No, it will not. Nor will your sarcasm and lack of courtesy.”
“I need to get going.”
“I’m trying to help you, 621. Anything you haven’t remembered yet, you forgot for a reason. Cut her loose. The heartache will be nothing compared to the noise in your head, if you do it now.”
I’m out the door when he shouts, “I’m the only friend you’ve got.”
What they call a gown is a paper bib the color of toilet cleaner that hangs to my knees. The first nurse weighs me, the second takes my blood pressure and a third listens to my heart. The fourth asks about the medicines I’m supposed to be taking but haven’t been. I imagine they build igloos or chisel ice sculptures between patients, and they mark the same clipboard and say the doctor will be with me soon. Two minutes each, over two hours.
A girl lies opposite me, a tube in her arm and another in her nose. The bandages around her head dip to cover her left eye. A woman sits with her beside a small beeping box and holds her hand. Near a fire extinguisher lies a man on a gurney. He is either homeless or dead, or both. Blood from his face and chest soaks through the sheets, growing darker and duller as I watch. They’ll have to be torn from his skin.
We’re in full view of the hospital staff, our bandages, blood and paper bibs, yet we’re invisible. The great antidrama of life among the stucco hives in the hills above the Firebird unfolds while we wait. Someone got engaged or spent the weekend away at a wedding, or a funeral. Someone lost money on a game, colored her hair, got his car out of impound or got laid. Someone applied to graduate school or drank too much. The mundane details both impossible and unreal compared to my last forty-eight hours.
The Hotel Firebird stinks with the fumes of humanity packed into a brick box, churning out piss, sweat, cum and blood, the liquid of living things. Houses the color of prosthetic limbs, nestled within the calibrated green hills of Shady Pointe, filter and flush that cocktail of stench with extreme prejudice. The odorless nothing I smelled in those hills and at the mall was nothing, neither foul nor antiseptic, but nothing nonetheless. I know, because the smell of nothing is all around here. Every measure is taken to discharge and disguise the smells and secretions of the living struggling for life. Death waits, bobbing in a sealed jar of formaldehyde as half the life here is half naked and wholly alone, ignored by the other half wearing pale green scrubs and living in muted brown homes.
Dr. Stanley examines me without making eye contact. He speaks to the clipboard or to my bandages.
“I see you’re in much better shape than when I last saw you.” He’s four years older than me, at most. His Adam’s apple distends like a mop handle pushing through the back of his neck.
“How are you feeling?”
“I’m cold.”
There’s a curtain to my left, two men talking behind it. One uses his voice for the first time since Death sang him to sleep and a medic slapped him awake, exhuming his rusted throat from the mud and weeds. The voice asks to be discharged.
“It says here your temperature is normal.” Dr. Stanley reads from the communal clipboard. “Fever or chills could be a signal of complications. How long have you been feeling cold?”
“Since I’ve been sitting here in my underwear waiting for you.”
He doesn’t say anything. His Adam’s apple plunges the length of his neck when he swallows.
An orderly steps from behind the curtain. He’s enormous, his skin so dark it shines blue where the light hits it. He fills a paper cup from a drinking fountain and says to the voice, “You’ll be discharged following an interview with another doctor.” The voice says, “It was an accident, I don’t need to see another doctor.”
Dr. Stanley inspects my bandages.
“They itch,” I tell him, “and I’m coughing a lot.”
“There’s early signs of infection,” he says. “That’s not good. After we redress these, I’m putting you on a stronger antibiotic regimen.”
“I’m on one now?”
“That might be the problem. Are you getting enough liquids?”
“What’s enough?”
“Eric, you’re risking a rejection of the skin grafts. Lay off the alcohol, drink more water. Burns like this one disrupt the fluid balance in your tissue. Go easy on yourself. How are you otherwise? Is your memory improving?”
“Some. Hard to say.”
Big nurse says to the voice, “It’s not up to me. We have to report this sort of thing. Sit tight.”
The voice asks for coffee.
Dr. Stanley writes me a scrip for steroids, a fresh battery of antibiotics and painkillers.
Mirrored blisters swell from the ceiling where the cameras hide. I didn’t see them the other day. I stare too long at the overhead chrome, frozen midboil, and the room goes liquid. The gray bucket mop man’s roiling floor tiles throw my footing and I knock a display to the floor, a chaotic collage of naked women and tropical beaches, a fusion of a travel brochure and medical textbook.
“You need some help?”
I’ve disturbed the Token Man.
“I was here yesterday.”
“Let me punch your card. Your tenth show is free.”
I have no idea what he’s talking about.
“I didn’t get a card.”
The Token Man’s shirt could have come from a queen-sized bedsheet. He pauses in the split moment before giving me the business end of whatever problem solver he’s stashed beneath the counter. His eyes are on me like sniper dots and the chrome blisters log my every twitch. Antennae tickle my neck and ears. At first, I think it’s sweat until the bugs lose their grip and drop down my shirt and struggle to climb out the top of my jeans. I stoop to gather the video boxes, to keep from slapping myself in a frenzy.
“Don’t worry about ’em,” he says.
“It’s no problem.”
“Leave ’em alone.” He thinks I’m out of my head, but he won’t throw me out. He knows I’ve got money.
“Is Desiree working?”
“Must be, if you’re here.” He exchanges twenty dollars for four dollars in tokens. “Booth four.”
The pinpoint of green light from the pony ride coin box lights booth number four. I drop a token into the box and pull my cash as the looking glass slides open.
“You pull your piece, I pull mine.”
Anslinger stands framed and backlit in the pink window with his silver screen slicked-back hair and pinstripe orchid tie. His dress shirt is the same liquid amber of his eyes, his suit a deep green verging on black, with a camel hair coat draped over his arm.
“Come now,” he says. “I haven’t drawn my gun in two years. You pull anything out and I will shoot you in the belt buckle. Now, what are you doing here?”
The money is a soiled sock in my hand. I want to shrink down and crawl into a crack but not here, not these cracks.
“The doctor needs a sperm sample, but the magazines at the hospital weren’t doing it for me. When did you start working here?”
“When did you decide to stop cooperating?” he asks.
“The cockroaches tell you that? You shouldn’t listen to them. They’re pissed because I’m neat freak. I moved into that shit-hole room and swept up the crack pipes and bread crumbs. I killed one of them, so the whole colony’s got it in for me. It’s your colony, so you already know that.”
“Where you been, Eric? I’ve been hearing crickets on my
voice mail for two days.”
“You know exactly where I’ve been. Your spies are in my room and crawling through my clothes.”
“That’s not how I work,” says Anslinger. “I don’t come to you. You come to me.”
“What luck. I just wandered into your office. Or is this where your daughter works?”
Anslinger goes ice water on me, his warm eyes freezing to glass. He’s neither angry nor amused. He stares at the center of my forehead, and there’s nothing behind it that’s any good to him.
“Mention my daughter again.”
The pony box timer counts down with the temperature.
“Go on. Mention my daughter.”
Voices seep through the walls, moaning with pure pleasure but sounding like near death, obscenities serving as endearments.
“Get a magazine,” Anslinger shouts, and hammers the widow to his left.
I hear the door bolt open, the hasty departure of a frustrated patron.
“I spoke with your lawyer,” he says.
“So you know that I shouldn’t even be talking to you.”
“I know you’re supposed to be cooperating. But he hasn’t heard from you, either. In a few days, he’s getting a set of binders, all of them thicker than the Old Testament. Every speck of glass we found within a hundred miles of the burn will be listed. We’ve run toxicity reports on the soil and groundwater. Everything. It’s on you. The registration for your car listed the burn site as your address. But guess who owns the place? Guess who’s legally responsible for what went down there?”
Maybe White, maybe not.
“We don’t know, either,” he says. “The deed is held by a limited liability company, represented by a law firm with a private mailbox address in Nevada. The paper trail fades out somewhere in the Cayman Islands.”
“I’m not hiding. I’m trying to remember. I need time.”
“Once the Grand Jury reaches a decision, it’s too late to make an offer. Tell me something useful. Or tell Morell.”
“What if my former employers don’t want me to talk?”
“So you do have employers?”
Shit.
“You’ve been threatened?” Like he’s asking about my paper cut.
“I’m saying what if.”
“If you tell us who threatened you, we know who you work for.” Anslinger slips into his camel hair coat. “And since you told us that, it means you’re cooperating. We’ll want to protect you.”
“You got a card?”
“No.”
The pony box counts beeps and booth number four goes dark. My heart slows down, my hands cease their cricket twitching. I can’t leave, yet.
I drop another token into the box and the Glass Stripper is back, a blow-up sex doll, carnival prize dancing as though the window never opened. Had Anslinger shot me through the face, she’d dance for my bleeding corpse just the same. I slip her the money and she presses her palm against the glass like she’s visiting me in prison. She holds her splayed fingers against the window while the numbers tick down. I press my palm in return to her jailhouse greeting and swallow the burning in my throat. It’s when I know she sees me I want her the most. The lights go out.
The Glass Stripper waves, tickling the air with her fingertips. The slow guillotine descent of the window ends with a bindle in the tip slot. She remembers me.
Please don’t be mad at me, Desiree.
ten
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE MAN ON PAROLE AND THE MAN ON DEATH ROW is sometimes two inches of locked bathroom door or a single moment’s hesitation. The difference between those men and a chimpanzee is 2 percent of their genes and the difference between a man’s healthy tissue and his tumor is even less. Every man and every insect are made from the same six molecules of DNA, the same five atoms. One of these atoms makes the difference between speed and cold medicine, between paint thinner and TNT. Every identical act is distinguished by its intent and every intent is judged by its action. The difference between consent and rape can be a single drink or a single word.
Everything in the universe is everything else. A man is a killer is a saint is a monkey is a cockroach is a goldfish is a whale, and the Devil is just the angel who asked for More.
Doomed but destined to forever want the closest thing beyond our grasp, we fled the trees, stood on our hind legs and reached with our new hands. We learned to sharpen sticks, then rocks, to scream, then grunt, then speak. We were hardwired for desire, and our wanting drove us to evolve, so we evolved wanting. More food, more fire and more offspring. More gods. Gods for harvest, fire and fertility. One day, one god said, No more. No more other gods, no more of More. A million years of More were flushed away, cesspooling nine circles below the earth, a million years too late. Man’s nature has been set to be unsatisfied.
Everyone craves the same grand version of every fortune-teller’s surefire, shotgun guess list—money or love, and there’s never enough. The richest men in the world scheme to become richer. Anyone serving time in a beige office cubicle knows this. Anyone paying mortgage on a beige house, spending what they don’t have at beige strip malls on amusements for their beige children with beige futures, knows this. Every drink, roll of the dice or second glance at a woman whispers More into a man’s ear when he’s not listening to that one god, when he’s looking where, or thinking what, he should not.
I’ve spent my life giving people their More. I’m a chemist.
A woman carries a torch for a lost love and her husband never knows. A man loses a child, a wife or a brother. Maybe it’s his fault or maybe it isn’t. People carry losses their whole lives, loss of a job, a friendship, a marriage, a reputation, a fortune or the life of a loved one. Some have regrets they feel every waking second, and some they feel in their sleep.
Imagine the one god himself has reversed his clock and reversed your regrets. Imagine knowing the bone-deep truth that whatever impossibility would make you truly happy has been granted. Imagine knowing you can once again hold your lost lover or your newborn child. Imagine what you feel during those first seconds of knowing. Now, imagine those first seconds last for days on end.
If you could buy that seventy-two-hour moment for the price of a tank of gas, would you? Go on, give it a try. God said it was okay.
Like I said, I’m a chemist. It’s all coming back to me.
eleven
THE RIDGE OF YOUR SPINE BRUSHES THE TIP OF MY NOSE, THE SKIN SLOPING from your shoulder blades grazes my lips, but my arms pass through a hole in the air when I try to wrap them around you. My heart collapses under its own sudden weight and falls into the bottomless black well of my chest. I hold still and feel you again, a warm surge from that bottomless well sets my heart right and you’re once more here beside me.
The blanket fell from my window and now streetlights shine from the mirror. Room 621 glows like the surface of the moon. Another room replaces mine when I close my eyes. Open, close, open, close. One room swaps places with another, my field of vision changes like flipping channels. I’m in your bedroom.
I met you, and now I’m standing in your room, the memories spliced together with the connecting events nowhere to be found. I met you, was abducted by aliens or brainwashed by the CIA, and now I’m standing in your room. That missing stretch of time is in a syringe or on microfilm, trapped in a bell jar within an underground vault guarded by motion sensors and electric fences, but it’s not in my head.
My reflection meets my fingertip with his own, Michelangelo’s God and Adam. The mirror bows like a sheet of taut plastic. I trace figure eights and random glyphs in the glass and my finger leaves a warped trail in its wake, like I’m six years old and playing with a puddle of pancake syrup. The miniature Red Sea converges, each new stickman, teepee or rocket ship fills in and fades in slow succession. We press palms, my reflection and I distorting each other from opposite sides of the liquid mirror. I’m flying on something, more acid of my own design. I’ve become better and bolder during that hole of haze I’
ve leapfrogged between doses from the Glass Stripper.
My reflection says, “She still out there?” I hadn’t seen his lips move in the twisting of the mirror, so I can’t be certain.
“I need to lay low in here.” My reflection didn’t say anything, but Otto did. Blond, wearing jeans, a rugby shirt and glasses as thick as aquarium glass, he sat on a pillow in the corner. He’s staring at his fingers and moving his hands slowly in front of his face, but once he starts talking, he doesn’t stop.
“Chick’s scary,” he says. “The short-haired brunette friend of Desiree’s out there. Hooked up with her and she got space freaky. Cuffed me with these chains held together with a chunk of ice. I’m thinking, ‘Cool, I’ll go with this,’ and everything’s great until she jams a finger up my ass, which I’m absolutely not cool with but I can’t do shit. I want to stop her but, let me tell you, Finnish street names make terrible safe words. Pills she gave me, I couldn’t feel my lips, much less form consonants. And she’s been matching me two for one, so she drops out cold and I’m stuck for two and a half hours waiting for the ice to melt so I can get loose. Finally, I’m rolling her wheezing, naked body off my jeans and looking for my wallet, I see she’s broken a goddamned nail off her examination finger. I’m freaked, like I want to run but don’t want to slice myself up on the inside. Three days of yogurt, prunes and death threats screamed onto my answering machine. We haven’t been properly introduced. I’m Otto.”
“I know who you are.”
“And you’re Eric.” He stands and offers his hand. I think he’s reaching through the glass. I’m startled at first, but he’s standing to one side of the mirror, beside my reflection. We shake hands, his flesh and bone.
He smacked the mirror with his middle finger. The surface quivered like a rubber sheet, our reflections bursting into moonlit confetti.
“Watch this.” Otto pounded his fist against the wall. Concentric ripples spread across the pictures, window frame and the other walls. They undulated like the surface of a water bed, lapping at the corners.