He’s comparing, Philip believes. Reiterating his authority.
Philip does not speak.
But the doctor does.
“This is a healthy body,” he says, running his palms up the sides of his torso, the muscles of his belly. “Not battered with breaks. Uncluttered by drugs. Do you see, Philip? Do you see the difference?”
The voice is frightening in the half shadows. The slow drawl. The lesson he’s trying to teach.
Philip does not speak.
“I want you to remember this, Philip,” Szands says, running his hands from his neck to his waist. “I want you to remember who holds the power in this place.”
He stares into Philip’s eyes for a long time. Because no part of Philip is visible in the scant light, he hopes the doctor can’t see his fear.
Szands sighs. He remains still a minute longer, then leaves the unit as slowly as he approached down the hall.
The door closes quietly behind him.
Philip is left alone, but the image of the doctor remains.
You gotta leave this place, Philip thinks. And the words waver, the words are weak. Something bad is going to happen to you if you don’t.
He tries to recall the visions of rescuing the Danes, but the picture is flat. And in every scenario he imagines, he must return to this place.
For the drugs.
He does not turn his head to the ceiling. Despite the pain just blossoming in his neck, he stares to where the door is closed, unseen in the dark, thinking of the drugs, his own capabilities, his own knowledge, secrets, yes, and the fact that one of two things must happen, one of two things must give:
Either Philip heals enough to escape, or the doctor will retain that power until the end.
22
Ellen sits alone at a bar. The Corn Maze is less than thirty miles from Macy Mercy, but it’s not on the way home. She hadn’t planned on coming, didn’t make the decision outright, but now that she’s here, she understands that she wasn’t going anywhere else.
A drink.
Space.
To think.
About Philip and the hospital and, yes, the drawing she did for him today, too.
How badly was Philip hurt? Of course she knows that his bones were broken, and she’s noting the daily progress of his body healing . . . but how much does she or anybody else really know about head injuries? How much of what Philip tells her can be trusted? There’s endless literature on the subject, journals, essays, articles, books; but an injury to the skull must be different from an injury to the unseen mind within.
And not only is Ellen very worried about Philip, she worries that she’s too obvious in her caring for him.
But why?
“Whiskey on the rocks,” she tells the bartender. The woman, older, false blond, shows surprise, as if Ellen has ordered the one drink she hadn’t already imagined serving her.
The bar Ellen sits at is shaped like a big wooden L, and at the other end sits another woman, dark hair, pale, like Ellen. But not like Ellen. This woman is a regular. Ellen spins on her stool and faces the room at large. Sees two men in overalls sharing a pitcher at a round low-top. Sees a man in a suit, tie undone, slumped in the corner of a booth, as if crumpled and left there.
When her whiskey comes, Ellen sips; she does not take big gulps, though she feels like she should. These thoughts about Philip are confusing her. She’s never been one to shy away from how she feels, but she’s never felt exactly like this before.
She sips.
She thinks.
Philip is an extremely unsettling case, equal parts light and dark. A piano player, but momentarily disturbed by the piano in the unit. Devastatingly wounded, yet healing so fast.
Dammit, she thinks, what happened to him out there?
Ellen wants to know. But nurses aren’t supposed to ask.
And yet . . . there are places she could look.
“Another?” the bartender asks.
It’s dark in here. Bar dark. Ellen hadn’t noticed she was finished with the first drink. She’s chewing a piece of ice. Hadn’t noticed that, either.
“Yes. Thank you.”
This is a standard Iowa bar: wood-paneled walls, signs for Budweiser, Pabst, and Knickerbocker beer. A jukebox in the corner. Posters of famous Iowans: Marilyn Maxwell, Jean Seberg, and of course John Wayne, born in Winterset, thirty-seven miles southwest of Des Moines. These same faces decorate most dive bars within a hundred-mile radius, but there are others on these walls, too. Drawings, caricatures, men and women with big noses and ears, huge smiles and cleft chins.
“Regulars,” the blond bartender says, noting Ellen looking at the walls. “You’ve gotta drink at the Maze for ten years ’fore you get a drawing done.”
A drawing.
A goat.
Ellen sips her drink.
“Maybe I’ll stay for ten years, then,” she says. This makes the blonde smile, but there’s a sadness there; the bartender knows all the people who have done just that.
Realizing she’s still wearing it, Ellen removes her coat and places it on the stool beside hers. It’s a good coat, black like her hair. She’s wearing a tan blouse and black slacks. A far cry from her white uniform, the uniform Philip sees her wearing every day. He knows her only as a nurse, nothing more. Is it strange that she should want him to see her as something more?
The front door opens and yellow light from the parking lot lamps gets in. Ellen squints at the form, the big form, of a man entering. She turns her attention to the bottles lined up behind the bar and the rectangle of dressing room lights framing them.
From her purse, Ellen removes the sketch she drew for Philip today.
She smiles because it looks like a child’s drawing. And yet, whatever it is, it made Philip cry, it rattled something buried inside him. She wonders if it has something directly to do with his injury, or maybe with his band. Or both.
Or maybe, she thinks, despite what he said about seeing it in the desert, it’s even older. A memory from childhood. Philip is missing home, wants to talk to his parents, wants to talk to his friends, his bandmates, tell them he’s alive, he’s in Iowa, he’s healing.
Where are they? Where are the rest of the Danes?
Ellen doesn’t know.
Her partial smile falls from her face. It wasn’t the funny kind to begin with.
“Another?” the bartender asks.
Ellen looks up from the drawing. She wonders what this woman might think of it.
What does it mean?
“Yes. Thank you.”
A crinkling beside her and at first Ellen thinks it’s the paper, thinks she’s mussed it up, then sees the big man take the stool two down from her own. When he looks at her, Ellen averts her eyes. The last thing she wants right now is the sloppy advance of a stranger, drinking.
“You got a kid?”
Ellen, staring ahead, thinks of Jean, her daughter. Thinks of her small body at the bottom of a fire escape. Broken in the alley below.
“No.”
She doesn’t look at the man, but recognizes the tone of voice: playful now, but angry, soon, when he doesn’t get his way. She begins to wonder if a bar, alone, was a bad idea.
“Looks like a kid’s drawing,” the man says.
“Yes.”
The bartender eyes the interaction. How many variations of this has she seen, Ellen wonders.
“May I?”
His fingers are already on the paper and Ellen pulls it away.
“Hey,” she says, facing him now. “Who told you it’s okay to grab something that isn’t yours?”
The man laughs. A black mustache frames his smiling upper lip. He’s bigger than he looked coming through the door. Wears a beige overcoat. Suit beneath. Brown hair, blue eyes. By the time he’s finished laughing, Ellen thinks maybe she recognizes his type.
“You sure sound like a mom,” he says. He snaps his fingers at the bartender. “Heidel-Brau.”
One elbow on the smooth dark bar, t
he man is facing Ellen completely.
“If you don’t want people asking after your artwork, you shouldn’t flash it around.”
“Okay, you know what?” Ellen says, anger rising. “You can—”
“And you should most certainly not flash any artwork you did at the hospital.”
Ellen’s mouth is still open, but no more words escape. She does recognize the type; this man is military.
“Who are you?” she asks, already sensing a loss of leverage. More surprisingly, she’s afraid.
The man smiles and knocks back the first third of his beer. He wipes the foam from his mustache with his coat sleeve.
“I’m me,” he says, shrugging. There’s a vitality to him, and a violence below the innocuous gesture.
“How do you know where I work?”
Now the blond bartender is watching the man, too. Small consolation, Ellen knows. No cavalry in here.
The man smiles.
“What matters now,” the man says, “is that he likes you.”
“What?”
But Ellen knows what.
And the man knows she knows.
“He talks to you more . . . freely than he does the others. He’s . . .” the man waves his plump hands above the bar, as if searching for the word. “He’s inspired by you.”
Ellen feels hot. Cornered.
“You followed me here.”
The man shrugs again.
“Followed, knew, needed to talk . . . however you wanna put it.”
He sips his beer.
“I’m not working right now,” Ellen says.
“But you are. You’re working out in a very big way. He talks to you. And we need you to”—more hand gestures—“keep that up.”
“I don’t understand.”
But she does. She understands what the man is asking her to do.
“May I?”
He reaches politely for the drawing now. Ellen lets him take it.
The man places the drawing on the bar and shakes his head, whistles through wet lips.
“You think this one is weird, you should’ve seen the last one.”
Ellen breathes deep. She knows that asking the question she wants to ask will be like giving in to this man. But she can’t stop it from coming out. Maybe it’s the whiskeys. Maybe it’s the new feelings.
“How did he get hurt?”
For the first time since taking his stool, the man genuinely smiles.
“Now we’re talking,” he says. “Now we’re friends?” He holds out a hand. Ellen doesn’t shake it. He wipes his palms together. “I’ll answer your question because I think it’ll help you get him talking. Your patient was sent to Africa to find out what’s been driving the army radios crazy. He was asked to locate the source of a disturbing sound. He found it. That’s about all you need to know. What we’d like you to do . . . is get him to tell us where it is.”
“Why wouldn’t he tell you if he knew where it was? Philip’s a good—”
“Nuh-uh.” The man raises an open palm. “No names. Not here. Not anywhere outside. Do you understand?”
Ellen looks to the bartender, but the woman is at the other end of the long L, elbows on the bar, rags in hands, talking with the other lone brunette.
“He’s a good man,” Ellen finishes, sipping her third drink.
The man laughs.
“Just make sure you do your part in healing him back up. The faster the better for all of us. And get him to talk. Get him to do more . . .” He gestures, dramatically, at the drawing. “Get him to do more of these.”
Soft country music plays on the bar’s speakers and Ellen doesn’t know when it began. There is no humor, no kindness in the man’s eyes.
But she asks it again.
“What happened to him?” Thinking somehow that she does have leverage, that this man wants something from her. And she wants something in return.
A long, expressionless hesitation before the lower half of the man’s face erupts into a smile, exposing bad teeth.
“He broke every bone in his body. Remember?”
Ellen wants to leave this bar. Leave this state. Suddenly, very badly, she wants to get to her apartment, pack her things, leave Macy Mercy and Iowa far behind.
But Philip.
“Do your job,” the man says. “But do it even . . . more so. Get him to talk. Keep inspiring him.”
He snaps his fat fingers; they make a soft sandy sound.
“How do I know who you’re with?” Ellen asks, frightened by her own question.
The man nods.
From his pocket he removes a photo. He hands it to Ellen. In it, the man, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, is crouched beside a wounded body. There are other people, but none of their faces are visible. None except the one on the body on the floor of what must be a helicopter. Below the helicopter, through its open door, she sees sand.
“Philip,” she whispers.
The man swipes the photo back.
“No names.”
Ellen saw the bruises, the broken body, what should’ve been a corpse, but lives.
“I was one of the men who picked him up,” he says, getting up off the stool. He nods to the bartender and she comes. “I’ll get hers, too,” he tells her, then lays a bill on the counter. To Ellen he says, “Keep drinking if you wanna. Drink the night through. But do as I’ve said. And oh,” he raises the drawing. “May I?”
Ellen doesn’t speak. Doesn’t stop the man as he folds the drawing and slips it into his long coat.
He tips an imaginary hat Ellen’s way and leaves the bar.
“Was he bothering you?” the bartender asks as soon as he’s gone.
Ellen looks her in the eye, but she’s not seeing this place right now. She’s hardly here. Rather, she’s in the hospital, Macy Mercy, tending to those same bruises, those same broken bones.
You inspire him. Do your job . . . only more so. Get him to talk.
Ellen knows she should leave Iowa. Either that or drive directly to Macy Mercy now, right now, tell Philip he’s in trouble; people are watching him, people believe he’s hiding something from them.
She gets up to go.
“You sure you don’t want one more?”
Ellen places her hands on the bar.
Just make sure you do your part in healing him back up. The faster the better for all of us.
She takes her seat again.
“Yes,” she says. “One more.”
23
I’m telling you I saw something, dammit. Not a man . . . I don’t know what it was. I saw it in the water and then I saw it on the beach.” Philip is yelling because he’s just as scared, just as worried as they are. “It was wearing red. It had . . . horns.”
“No man with horns,” Duane repeats. He can’t stop pacing.
Lovejoy is looking through binoculars, far out into the desert. Stein is doing the same with the zoom lens of his camera.
“Duane,” Philip stresses. “I’m telling you what I saw.”
“Nadoul,” Larry says. He’s searching the water. He searched the water for the hour Philip was knocked out, too.
“Who?” Duane half asks. He’s breathing hard.
“The local from the hut. The one Mull talked to,” Larry says. And his voice is tremor, his voice is fear.
“No,” Philip says. “This wasn’t a local . . . this was . . .”
“A white ram,” Duane chides.
Bandaged head and all, Philip rushes his friend, grips him by the sleeves of his shirt.
“I saw him!” he yells, his lips inches from Duane’s. “What did YOU see?!”
“Hey, whoa.” Larry steps between them, pries them apart. They’ve already talked about this. Nobody saw a horned figure. Nobody saw anything at all.
Larry looks out to the ocean, as if Ross might wash up now that he’s turned his back on him.
“We’re not leaving this spot until we find him,” Duane says, straightening his sleeves, wiping sweat from his forehead. “An
d we’re not looking for any sound anymore.”
Lovejoy doesn’t acknowledge this remark. Greer does.
“Hallucination,” he says, as if casting a final judgment. His glasses are fogged and hide his eyes. “Just like when you thought your hand was responsible for the sound. One hallucination . . . then another.”
But Philip can see in the historian’s eyes that he hasn’t cast final judgment quite yet. He’s still studying.
“Doesn’t matter,” Larry says. “Doesn’t matter what Philip saw. Duane’s right. We’re not moving until we know what happened to Ross, and once we do . . . we’re not moving until the plane gets back.”
Lovejoy lowers the binoculars.
“He took him,” he says.
“That’s what I’ve been saying,” Philip says. “Jesus Christ, guys. I saw—”
Lovejoy raises the binoculars for any of the platoon to take.
“Look.”
Larry takes them. As he squints into the eyeholes, Lovejoy guides the lenses.
“Those aren’t bootprints, Sergeant. They’re . . .”
“They’re what?” Duane asks, reaching for the binoculars.
As he sees for himself, Larry says, “Hooves.”
“Really?” Philip says, reaching for the binoculars. “I told you I fucking saw it!”
Duane doesn’t put up a fight. But he’s not convinced.
“Hey. Man, just because there are some goat prints in the sand doesn’t mean Ross rode off on the thing.”
“He carried him,” Lovejoy says.
They all imagine the same thing at once. An impossibility lifting Ross from the sand, carrying him into the desert.
Stein snaps a photo.
“No way,” Duane says. “We are not tracking Philip’s hallucination through the desert. We are not leaving this spot until we know what happened to Ross.”
Only the wind now, as if Ross were turned to air.
Lovejoy breaks the silence.
“Pack up, soldier.”
“We’re not soldiers.”
“Pack up.”
“We didn’t agree to this. We agreed—”
“You can stay behind, Private Noles. But night will come. And that sound may come with it. And I don’t think you want to be alone with either.”