Black Mad Wheel

  “It’s not Ross. But it’s army.”

  “Oh, fuck,” Duane says. “The other platoons.”

  “No.” Philip is shaking his head. “Old army.” He hands the binoculars to Duane.

  “Old?” Larry asks.

  “Like it crawled out of a textbook. That’s a dead body, all right. But it’s dressed in a Civil War uniform.”

  26

  I wouldn’t do that if I were you . . .

  This phrase, these words . . . again. As Philip sleeps, they’re spoken. An old voice. A familiar voice. From where?

  I wouldn’t do that if I were you . . .

  But who said that?

  There’s an accent. There’s age. A warning. An admonition.

  Philip knows the voice, and it’s not just because he heard it repeated for the six months he was under.

  He hears it now, in his dreams, coursing over the smooth arc of dunes, flying low through their slacks. It, too, tracks the thing that took Ross, follows the same prints, until it reaches the same end.

  And there, at camp, that voice is used, that accent is hidden, on purpose, like the spiders that dig holes beneath the sand, like the miners who once looked for diamonds down there.

  It’s night at Macy Mercy.

  A sleeping body healing itself breeds nightmares.

  So Philip wakes.

  Or maybe it’s the sound that wakes him.

  Philip opens his eyes, sees moonlight where the ceiling meets the wall. The desert at night, too.

  Creaking wood? Maybe boots on stairs. Or maybe someone sitting down to play an old, red piano.

  Philip wants to sit up. He can’t. Instead, he cranes his neck, tries to see behind the cot, to the back of the unit.

  But the sound isn’t coming from inside this room. It’s coming from the hospital hall.

  He’s able to turn his head just far enough to see the beginning of the open door.

  A voice from the hall says, “Lights out!”

  “Duane?” Philip asks, as a cruel swirl of emotions accosts him.

  Duane used to call “lights out” at the end of every set. It was the title of their closer.

  “Lights Out.”

  Whispers in the hall? Something. A rhythm to it. Footsteps, creaking wood, a low hum.

  Szands?

  “Duane?”

  Philip says “Duane” but he’s thinking “the Danes.”

  “Guys! Are you out there?” His voice is shrill. Like someone he’d never thought he’d become.

  Desperate.

  The band is dead, Philip thinks.

  YOU DON’T KNOW THAT FOR SURE!

  More noise and it doesn’t sound like a band out there after all. No. Why did he think it did?

  It’s Dr. Szands, he thinks. And he’s coming to play God.

  “Nurse.”

  But Philip only partially calls for a nurse. He wants to hear this sound through, wants to see for himself what’s coming.

  Because something is coming.

  Less like music, more of a wave; a singular solid block of sound, unraveling from deep down the hall.

  Philip imagines his bandmates, dead upon that wave.

  Lights out!

  Duane floating beside a broken drum kit, a wobbly stool, his black skin peeling off cracked, broken bones. A ripple travels across the drummer’s body, a wave trapped inside the man, nowhere to go, nowhere to get out.

  Lights out.

  Larry. Larry’s out there, too. His blond hair is white with desert dust from a desert grave.

  “Nurse!” Philip calls again, and this time he means it.

  Lights out!

  Philip is sweating. Breathing too hard.

  Lights out, lights out, we’ve got one more for you, and then it’s lights out.

  The sound is getting closer, the spool unfolding, a desert blanket unrolled, coming down the hall, revealing his friends, dead, all of them, the whispers out there, boots on wooden stairs, a piano bench sliding, the hum of the hospital at night.

  “Ross!” Philip feels feverish, delirious. He’s calling out for his dead friends.

  NOT DEAD!

  But they might be. They might be.

  Philip hears a round of laughter . . . sounds like a television show, an audience:

  PLAY FOR US! PLAY FOR US! PLAY FOR US, LIGHTS OUT!

  “Nurse!”

  Philip wants out. Off the cot, out of this room, out of this battered body. He grips the sides of the cot and pulls, tries to turn himself, all of him, at once. Closes his eyes, sees a dead Duane.

  Lights out, Philip. I’m out of gas. Lights out. One more song. Then we can get out of here. One more song. Then it’s over. Tell ’em it’s over. Tell ’em we found the source of the sound. Tell ’em we found it and tell ’em it wasn’t any good.

  Philip grips the cot harder.

  In the folds of the swelling sound, Philip hears heavy slippers in the hall.

  Move.

  He’s trying. He’s sweating. His bruised arms and legs are pushing back.

  He rests.

  He tries again.

  He rests.

  I’m out of gas, Philip. One more song.

  . . . lights out . . .

  But not yet. Not lights out yet.

  Philip. Larry’s voice, in Philip’s head. Why didn’t you bring us with you? Why’d you leave us?

  NO!!!

  Philip is pulling himself up, pulling himself over. His arms feel strong enough to do it, a second, deeper strength well below the discolored surface, the bruises, the breaks that haven’t healed, couldn’t have healed, not all the way, not yet.

  “Duane,” Philip says, delirious with it. “One more. Let’s play one more.”

  And the talking, the speaking to nobody, is the final lift he needs.

  I wouldn’t do that if I were you . . .

  He’s rolling.

  Rolling over the edge of the cot.

  Rolling too fast.

  The ceiling blurs into the wall; the wall becomes the edge of the door; the door becomes the floor.

  Too fast.

  The door is open; light from the hall.

  Before he hits, Philip sees Nurse Francine in the doorway. Her eyes are buggish, magnified by her huge glasses. She’s reaching out, coming toward him.

  But the look on her face . . .

  Philip has a crazy thought as his nose connects with the solid floor, breaks for a second time:

  Another shot, another needle, and you’ll be fine, all over again, fine.

  Then he connects.

  A crash.

  The pain that erupts in his nose blinds him, bright white, and he sees, once again, his bandmates, dead, leering, flaking, reaching up and out of the sand, as though having dug themselves out of a hole in the desert . . .

  Philip has fallen.

  Off the cot.

  (off the Path)

  Nurse Francine is beside him.

  “Look what you’ve done!” she says, her voice betraying horror. “Oh, look what you’ve done! They’ll fire me for this! I’ll be fired!”

  But Philip is drifting. Hardly hears her. Thinks he hears,

  “. . . set us back a week!”

  Just words, just letters to Philip.

  “. . . need to heal . . .”

  He’s bleeding. Feels a needle in his arm.

  “. . . off schedule . . .”

  He has three last thoughts before dissipating into darkness:

  That sound in the hall. That was the sound from the desert . . .

  and

  Why is it here? How is it here?

  and

  It didn’t make me sick this time . . .

  Then he’s knocked out.

  He doesn’t hear the sound anymore.

  Nor does he see the light.

  Lights out.

  For how long . . .

  . . . he can’t know . . .

  . . . then . . .

  . . . some light. . . .

  . . . eno
ugh that Philip can see Dr. Szands eyeing him from across the room . . .

  . . . a new room . . .

  . . . a new cot . . . no cot at all . . . a metal slab . . . like a morgue . . . Szands standing with arms crossed . . . half in shadows . . .

  Get up.

  Philip attempts to sit up, can’t. Attempts to lift his arms, can’t.

  Straps, Philip thinks.

  Szands smiles.

  “Welcome,” the doctor says. “To rehab.”

  Philip focuses on the walls. He recognizes the pattern, the look of them.

  “Why am I strapped down, doctor?”

  Szands laughs; a rich, moneyed laugh; clipped and crisp.

  But there is no echo.

  Flat sound in here.

  The walls are covered with the same stuff the Danes use in Wonderland.

  “Convoluted foam,” he says. “Soundproof. You’ve used it before, I’m sure.” He stares. Studying. Then, “You heard the sound, no doubt. So . . . that means you know it’s here.”

  Philip doesn’t answer. Doesn’t ask, what do you mean it’s here?

  “You should see the orderly who listened to it. Being fired was not the worst that happened to him tonight.”

  An orderly listened to the sound . . . they have the sound here . . . on tape . . . where?

  Szands crosses the padded room; his figure and the color of his pink short-sleeve shirt are cut, strong, in relief against the gray foam behind him.

  “This is where little boys go when they can’t take care of themselves, Philip.”

  “What?”

  “Do you not remember leaving your bed last night?”

  As if cued, the pain in Philip’s nose increases. Yes, he took a fall. A bad one.

  “I was trying to get up.”

  “That’s right. Trying to get up. And is that what good boys do?”

  “What?”

  The sky in Szands’s eyes is too bright.

  “We’re more than just a hospital, Philip. Certainly, you’re aware of how special a place this is. Surely, by now, you’re able to recognize how rapidly your body is recovering. One might say . . . you’re our creation.”

  “Come on.”

  “Oh no, no, no.” Szands wags a slim, clean finger. “There will be no come on in here. You and I are not compeers, Philip. We are doctor and patient. Specialist and sufferer.” Szands lifts a pair of gloves from a tray table. “You broke your nose. The very nose we’ve spent so much time mending. An eye socket as well. A cheekbone. But let me be clear, Philip. You rebroke these bones. And you’ve set us back quite a spell.”

  Szands slips a hand into one of the gloves.

  “What are you going to do, doctor?”

  “What all fathers do to good boys who misbehave. I’m going to teach you a lesson.” He slips on the second glove. “We can’t have you hurting yourself. If you hurt yourself then you mock all the work we’re doing for you. Please, don’t pretend you don’t understand what I mean.”

  “Doctor . . . I was just trying to—”

  “You’re off-center,” Szands says.

  A rubbered hand upon Philip’s mouth.

  Without anesthetic, but with a snap, Szands resets Philip’s broken nose.

  Philip screams.

  And the sound does not carry. Not in here.

  Szands holds his hands tight to the nose. He twists it again, breaking it once more.

  He sets it.

  He breaks it.

  He sets it.

  He breaks it.

  And he sets it once more.

  By the time he removes his hands from Philip’s face, Philip is half under. Through a terrible swirl of bright lights and dark shadows, he sees Szands’s face as it must look when nobody is watching.

  Then the doctor is leaving his side.

  The soft click of a door and he is gone.

  Philip fades further.

  But a second clicking, the door opening again, and Philip sees a pale face, dark hair, a white uniform.

  “Ellen,” Philip says. But the word is half dreamed.

  And when the face comes closer, into focus, Philip sees the wrinkles, the glasses, Francine.

  He feels the point of the needle, too, as it enters his shoulder, as the pain in his face subsides and the dark dreams of the unconscious rush up to greet him.

  27

  Lovejoy was right.

  It’s not just a uniform, discarded clothes, unwanted weight in the desert heat.

  It’s a dead body.

  “Jesus Christ,” Stein says, the way people say it when they mean to say this is terrible, this is unexplainable, this is bad. Hesitating, he lifts the camera to his eye and snaps a quick photo. As if some deeper part of him has taken over, the part that knows he must do his job despite what he’s seeing.

  It’s not Ross. And it’s for this reason, and only this, that Philip can maintain a grip on his own reality. But the rest of the facts are mad.

  It’s a man, they agree on that much; dressed in gray cotton pants, an unbuttoned gray shirt, and tall brown boots. But his chest and bearded face are twice the width they should be; as though flattened, caught in a press. Like putty, like clay, the body looks molded, as though a distracted child left him this way.

  His nose lies flat against his cheek like a Picasso.

  “Fuck, man,” Larry says, crouching by the body. He reaches to touch the face, but Lovejoy grabs his wrist hard and pulls him back to a standing position.

  “Careful.”

  “What? You think it’s . . . contagious?”

  The platoon stands in a line beside what Larry rightfully describes as a flattened man. Nearly two dimensional, as though wholly run over by a tank. Even his fingers are unnaturally stretched, a man made of wax, melting under the Namib sun; bent digits, reaching for his ears.

  “Crushed,” Stein says. He snaps a second photo. The sound of the camera is like a small bone breaking.

  Duane holds out one of his own hands, possibly to remind himself of the reality of them, what normal hands look like.

  “We need to find Ross,” Philip says. Because everyone’s thinking it. Thinking about the same fate coming to Ross.

  Greer is silently staring, a look of deep concern and wonder on his face.

  Despite the grotesquery, the impossible face, it’s the ears, and the fingers extended toward them, that each of them comes back to.

  Nadoul’s wife’s ears were found on her mattress in the hut.

  “Christ,” Larry says, and Philip knows that if they found this body in the street in Detroit, Larry would have already run from it.

  The man could be young, could be old. It’s difficult to tell. But his uniform speaks of another age, another time, another era.

  Now Stein is taking many photos. As if the first couple broke an internal moral seal.

  “Look at the holes in his face,” Greer says. “The eyes, the nose, the mouth. The ears.” Greer bends at the waist for a closer inspection. “Because of how he was . . . flattened, whatever’s inside of him should’ve come out. Like roadkill. But . . . there’s nothing here. No bloodstains in the sand.”

  “Scavengers?” Stein suggests.

  “No,” Greer says. “He hasn’t lost a thing. I’d bet he’s still got all his parts inside.”

  Stein photographs.

  In the distance, very close to being out of earshot, Philip hears a ripple, a wave.

  “Listen,” he says, turning to face the desert. Then Philip is on his knees, powering up the Ampex, connecting a single microphone cord. He puts on the headphones and adjusts the input volume.

  It makes music, so they’re sending musicians.

  The others instinctively cover their ears.

  Another ripple, faint. With it, Philip feels a trace of illness.

  The red light on the Ampex is blinking, the reel is rotating, the machine is recording.

  “Be careful—” Larry begins.

  Philip holds up an open flat palm.

>   The sound diminishes. A distant bulge, then gone.

  Philip waits forty seconds. Then he immediately rewinds the reel.

  “I’m gonna blast it,” he says. “I’m gonna get sick.”

  “Philip,” Larry says. “What are you doing?”

  Philip presses play.

  He heard something. Something inside the sound.

  Through the legs of the platoon he sees the body in the sand. He thinks of old photographs, the kind he’d seen on his grandparents’ mantel as a kid.

  But this body is not old in age. It’s old in time.

  The playback begins. At this volume the static is loud; Philip can hear the platoon breathing, wind across the microphone head, his own movements in the sand.

  Then . . . the sound . . . developing . . . like a cry . . . a call . . .

  As the sun lowers another notch, Philip gets sick.

  He looks to the body, the flattened man, the crooked, long fingers still reaching, the leathery desert skin; an unwrapped mummy in cotton clothes. The elongated chin, distended, the open oblong hole of the mouth.

  The scrambled egg eyes.

  The sound is loud now. What begins as a headache builds to a rattling. He hears a fluttering, the sound of a ripple, a possible uniform break in the signal; he thinks, It’s a series . . . a series of noises . . . not just one . . .

  Philip reaches for the pitch knob and, with difficulty, slows the tape down, to half speed, then a quarter.

  The unnatural distension, the sluggish resolve of changing speeds, brings Philip to gag.

  Sonic curtains parting, a fresh sound is revealed.

  And Philip recognizes it, knows this new sound.

  He could end this sickness by removing the headphones. Turning off the machine. For Christ’s sake, his finger is on the button.

  But he doesn’t. He wants to hear more.

  This new sound . . . is there a clue to what happened to Ross in there?

  He looks to the body as if the body might tell him.

  And the body moves.

  “Hey!” Philip throws the headphones from his ears and crab-walks backward. He’s pointing to the body. “He moved! His fingers moved!”

  Lovejoy pulls a pistol from his belt. Fires at the body.

  But no. Doesn’t fire.

  The gun only clicks.

  The body isn’t moving, but Lovejoy fires again.

  Nothing.

  He looks to Stein.

  “Give me your gun.”

  “What, Sarge?”