Black Mad Wheel

  And that they could get hurt along the way.

  “That was a heck of a mile,” Jerry, the shorter of the two, says.

  Then Francine emerges to remove the wires, the tape, the nodes. As she works, the general himself appears. Thinning black hair. Black mustache. Stout like a bull. Dressed like he’s in the war room.

  “Private Tonka,” he says. Caution and pride mingle in his eyes. “We have one more favor to ask of you . . .”

  40

  Amaze of immaculate wood, dirt floors, and occasional low-hanging bulbs, none of which are on. Philip turns on the flashlight, then turns it off. Stops to listen for hooves, then continues. He’s made so many blind decisions, taken so many turns that it would be impossible to trace his way out, but Philip isn’t thinking of out now. He’s thinking of Ross.

  Voices ahead?

  He stops.

  No. But there are whispers down here. Maybe it’s wind, trapped in the mad cellar, or maybe it’s Philip’s mind, hearing things, the echoes of his increasingly vague progress, if the word can be used to describe what he does, his uninformed travels, turns, hopes.

  He’s thinking of Ross in the pool. Ross in the mirage. He can hear Greer explaining it to him, as if he’d had the chance to:

  If we assume we’re right that the sound is capable of manifesting the ghosts of soldiers past, and if we assume also that the sound is capable of stopping the wheel of history from rolling, able to end the patterns and circles man makes . . . then why couldn’t it rattle our own histories as well? Why couldn’t the sound operate on a philosophical plane? You saw Ross swimming, you say? But did you? Or did the sound rattle your own ghosts into being . . .

  Dragging his right foot, hunched, sweating, limping, Philip turns on the flashlight, turns it off. More wood ahead, more dirt. A dead end? Maybe. Philip doesn’t think so.

  Do you get it? Greer might have said. You got ghosts inside you, too, Tonka. More than just your buddy Ross. You got enough residual hauntings inside you to fill a hotel. And maybe, by bringing forth all these dead soldiers, the sound is showing us, Man, the folly, the cycle, of war. And maybe, by rendering our guns impotent, the sound is showing us that it not only SHOWS, it can take ACTION. In a world with no weapons, are there wars? And maybe, by fooling you into seeing your missing friend, the sound is letting you know that you’re not impervious to it either, Tonka. Your cycle may not be on the same loop as war, but you’re spinning all the same.

  A gust of (wind? sound?) something behind him freezes Philip momentarily. He flattens himself to the wall.

  He holds his breath.

  Because the tunnels are purposely built to conduct an echo, Philip can’t be sure what any sound is supposed to be. There is no isolation, no singular noise that begins and ends. There are only waves, rising and falling, the ebb and flow of . . . what?

  History?

  Philip continues. Unarmed. He’s vulnerable, he knows, too close to what must be the source of the sound. And at this range, what damage might it to do to his ears, his head, his mind?

  Is it playing right now?

  Philip stops. Turns the light on.

  There’s a wooden door twenty feet ahead.

  A room?

  The source.

  The source?

  Ross.

  This time, Philip leaves the flashlight on as he approaches the door. The splintered wood looks blasphemous compared to the excellent craftsmanship of the walls. There is no knob on the door. No window. No framing. No mat.

  If he wasn’t already below the desert he’d say it looked like a cellar door.

  There is no resistance, either, as he places a flat palm against the old wood and pushes. The slow creaking blends into indistinguishable whispers, the sounds (memories?) of something being dragged, the quiet cacophony surrounding him.

  You got ghosts inside you, too, Tonka.

  Did Greer say that? Or did Philip imagine that’s what he would’ve said?

  The door swings all the way in. And Philip stands at the threshold of a small room. A second door is less than thirty feet away. It’s a room, yes, but there isn’t much to suggest what it’s used for. Dirt floor, dirt ceiling, dirt walls. Philip trains the beam up, trains the beam down, then across the length of one wall, until the light reflects harshly off something steel. He is momentarily blinded, squints, advances, until the details of the costume are revealed.

  A red jacket. Red pants. Horns the length of Philip’s arms.

  And hooves.

  All of it hanging from hooks.

  Cautious, slow, Philip steps closer yet, close enough to touch the fabric, close enough to see that the steel between the horns is an old coat of arms. And upon it is engraved

  ICH DIEN

  THE ROYAL WELSH

  The hooves, perhaps taken from the same animal as the horns, are high as the heels of cowboy boots. And Philip understands that a man could wear them, could wear all of this, and would look real somehow, could fool someone, anyone who saw him traveling through the world above.

  It was a man, Philip now knows. In a costume.

  The Thing in Red on the beach. The hoofprints in the sand.

  “This is no monster,” Philip whispers. “This is a madman.”

  A muffled cry from the other side of the second wooden door. Philip crosses the room and puts his ear to the wood.

  “HELP ME!”

  Is it Ross? Did that sound like Ross? Is it one of the others?

  He waits. He listens. He waits.

  Then he turns off his light and exits this room.

  In the hall outside, he waits again.

  When he turns on the light again he sees a face behind bars.

  A subterranean cell.

  Philip recoils, steps back against the wooden door.

  It’s not Ross. It’s not the others. It’s no face he knows.

  But it is a man. Wild eyed. Sweating. Scared.

  “Help me!” he pleads. “Help me out of here!”

  “Who are you?”

  “He’s experimenting on me!”

  The man brings an arm to the window. Philip recognizes a cast, as immaculately crafted as the wood in the halls.

  “Who else is down here?” Philip asks, desperate. “Are there other prisoners?”

  But Philip knows there are.

  Trembling, the man presses his face to the bars, tries to look farther down the hall. Philip sees scars at his ears, dry blood on his cheeks.

  From the direction of where the prisoner looks, Philip hears a sound as recognizable as a fork upon a dinner plate, a car passing Wonderland on Elizabeth Street.

  Philip turns off his flashlight.

  He hears it again.

  The creaking of wooden stairs.

  When the prisoner speaks, his voice materializes from darkness between them.

  “It’s him,” the prisoner hisses. “It’s him.”

  41

  Delores wheels a television set into Unit 1. Philip, sitting up on the bed, watches her without speaking. He guesses the television is a peace offering, Macy Mercy’s or the government’s way of saying, Hey, good work in the Testing Tank, but eventually you’re gonna have to tell us what the goat means. And until you do, we’ll pretend to be friends.

  “A soccer match,” Delores says. “England and Germany.”

  Her voice is without emotion and Philip wonders if he’s detected some shame in there. Perhaps Delores doesn’t feel quite right about all of this: the drugs, the way he’s healing, the fact that the army, General Andrews, told him he had twenty-four hours to decide whether or not he was willing to return to Africa.

  Philip knows there is no deciding here. They’re sending him back with or without his word.

  Delores plugs the set into the wall and static instantly occupies the screen. She crouches and changes the channel. Her blond hair glistens in the daylight coming through the unit’s one window. When she finds the game, she rises and flattens the front of her white uniform.

>   She looks at Philip.

  “It’s in color,” she says.

  To Philip it feels like she’s afraid of him. No longer immobile, no longer only able to wiggle a few of his fingers, Philip is sitting up and must look vital to her. He recalls his own image reflected in the Testing Tank walls: the bruises, the asymmetry, the deformity. If Delores ever dreamt of monsters, if she ever woke from a nightmare and raced to her parents’ bedroom, the monsters might have looked something like Philip.

  “Oh,” Delores says, “what timing.” Flat. Expressionless. “Looks like the game is about to begin.”

  On the screen, a band takes the field. Philip doesn’t care for soccer any more than he does baseball. But the red uniforms of the English band catch his eye.

  He rises from the cot.

  Delores inches back, as if she’s seen a spider instead of a soldier.

  Philip doesn’t hear her as she excuses herself and leaves the unit. He’s crouched so close to the set now he wouldn’t be able to see her if she were standing a foot to his left.

  On the screen, the English army marching band plays at midfield. The music is triumphant. The brass. The drums. The strings. Together with the manicured green grass, their red uniforms look like Christmas.

  But it’s the goat at the head of the band that Philip can’t stop watching.

  It’s a white goat. Long white hair that hangs almost to the field. A trainer crouches beside it, smiling.

  “Jesus Christ,” Philip says.

  The goat wears a metal piece where its horns meet. The sun is reflected there.

  ICH DIEN

  THE ROYAL WELSH

  Philip touches the screen.

  The realization is not a small one. In fact, it’s overwhelming enough to cause Philip to fall back, to go from crouching to sitting, pointing now at the screen.

  “Jesus Christ,” Philip repeats. “He was a member of the army band.”

  The goat that has haunted him, the costume he found in the room beneath the sand . . .

  “Their mascot . . .”

  “Not coming in well?”

  Delores is standing by the door. But Philip doesn’t see her. Doesn’t even know she’s there. The goat is enough to send his mind reeling, but it’s the red armbands of the musicians that boils his blood.

  The reception isn’t great. The camera work is shaky.

  But Philip saw one long enough to read it.

  EVERY GOOD BOY DOES FINE

  “Lovejoy,” he whispers, touching the screen with crooked, discolored fingers. “You knew him . . .”

  42

  Because there exists a sound that can bring forth the dead, dead soldiers, and because that same sound can render the weapons of all eras idle, thus breaking the pattern of history, the repeated wars, the same wheel of death ridden by all the dead soldiers, that sound must also be able to touch the histories of individual men, soldiers who have not yet faced death and who are, here, subjected to hallucinations of the past.

  Philip suspected as much when he fell through the mirage of Ross in a pool. But he is experiencing this, confirming this, now.

  Alone, limping toward the sound of the creaking stairs, toward the man (not monster!) who dressed as a monster (not man!), who robbed the Danes of Ross and must (must) keep him locked up, prisoner, down here, Philip is passing the street corners, movie theaters, concert halls, restaurants, intersections, stray dogs, music stores, bookstores, police, and people who make up, for him, Detroit.

  Though the corridor he walks cannot be more than six feet wide, Philip allowed a red Chevy Bel Air convertible to pass only minutes ago. Behind the wheel was nobody, nobody he could see, only the shadows cast from the beam of his own light, the reflection of the smooth wood walls in the windows. In the distance, now, one hundred yards up, Philip spots an aqua Corvette, this one occupied by blond girls, laughing boys, a tray of malts and burgers clipped to the driver’s-side window. “Be Here” plays on their radio.

  The sights, the lights, the smells, even the sense of a concrete sidewalk beneath his boots; Philip doesn’t know if it’s night or day, 1957 or ’58, ’27 or ’93.

  The sound has not ceased coming in waves, as though, this close, one can hear it breathing.

  Sometimes it sounds like voices, whispers, other students in Mrs. Calamut’s fifth grade class. Philip passed through that particular room less than an hour ago, as Tommy Morgan talked about the Red Wings and a dark-eyed child in the back row doodled a picture of a man trapped in a sandy cell below an infinite desert of death.

  A car horn.

  Philip leans up against the wall again, allows a black Cadillac Eldorado and a cherry Ranchero passage. Their wake mingles with the music, the sounds of Detroit midday, Detroit at night, Detroit at first light. But the wall Philip has pressed against is no longer wood. It’s orange brick, just like the wall of Perry’s Drugs, where the Danes shot the sleeve for their hit 45.

  “Look alive, Philip!”

  When Philip looks, he sees Private Stein pointing a camera his direction, and beyond him is the city, active, bustling. Dead soldiers pass ghostly through the crowds.

  “Come on, Philip,” Larry says. “This is for posterity.”

  Between himself and Larry, Duane stands with his arms crossed, his smile as genuine as Philip’s ever seen it.

  “We’ve only got this light for so long now,” Stein says. Just behind Stein is a shadowed figure. A near silhouette. But Philip recognizes him as Lovejoy.

  “Philip,” Ross says. And Philip is almost afraid to look, to see this cherubic facsimile of his friend, still alive, posing for a photo, already a veteran, never to don army green again. “Give them the sly smile. You know the one.”

  The other Danes are laughing because they know the one. The smile Philip delivers to a girl at the far side of the bar. Half interest, half not. It’s enough to drive them crazy.

  Philip tries.

  But the flash of Stein’s camera remains bright long after the photo has been taken, and Philip sees another vehicle is coming. It’s the headlights of a military jeep.

  Philip recalls the admonishment of the prisoner he found in the cell.

  Don’t leave me here, he said. You won’t find your way back. He won’t let you.

  Who are you? Philip asked.

  I came for the sound. Just like you.

  Are there other cells?

  I hear the moaning of others, yes.

  Where?

  I don’t know.

  WHERE?!

  I DON’T KNOW!

  I’ll be back.

  No! You won’t!

  I’ll be back.

  Don’t leave me here! He’s testing it on me! HE’S TESTING IT ON US ALL!

  The light washes over Philip completely, makes a blindingly bright silhouette of him, then vanishes, rendering the corridor dark as a mean mind once again.

  Philip turns the flashlight on, turns it off.

  Another decision to make, another turn. Right or left. The sound does not draw him. The sound comes from everywhere and always at once.

  And yet, it’s so quiet Philip can’t be sure it’s playing at all.

  He continues.

  For Ross.

  For Detroit.

  For the Danes.

  The past is present and the present is mad and Philip turns the light on, turns it off, takes a right, makes a left, continues, closes his eyes, opens them, breathes deep, ignores, absorbs, turns the light off.

  And when he turns it on again, he screams.

  The face of a dead soldier, its wrinkles filled with dirt, is inches from his own.

  “Go no further.”

  Beyond the ghost is a set of stairs. Much like the one Philip took, years ago, to the cellar where he taught himself the unparalleled satisfaction of creation.

  Despite the fear, the fatigue, and the fog, Philip grasps, yes, that the source of the sound can be found at the bottom of those stairs.

  “Help me,” Philip says, fixing t
he beam to the old soldier’s eyes. “Tell me everything you know about him.”

  43

  Ellen sits in her car, a green and dented 1949 New Yorker, the white interior torn in many places. She could sell this thing, make enough money to bus it to California, maybe even fly to Hawaii, begin anew. She could sell everything she owns, leave town with a single suitcase, a single change of clothes. What does she really need? In order to survive, what does she need other than to . . . go?

  Her lights are off but the engine idles. It’s one thing the New Yorker has going for it: a quiet engine, after all these years. Sometimes it sounds like nothing at all, like Ellen is simply hovering above the road, toward her destination, so often the hospital, so often back home. She’s parked far from Macy Mercy now, far from the road, too, having left that behind a half mile ago. The trees act as half her cover, night takes care of the rest. She’s sitting with both hands on the wheel, though she doesn’t plan on driving any closer. Maybe it’s habit, hands upon the steering wheel of a car she’s in, or maybe it’s because, despite being here, she’s still somehow undecided. Inside Macy Mercy is a man who she believes doesn’t know the truth about his situation. The doctors are using experimental drugs with a mind to heal him fast, to send him back to the very place he got injured to begin with. The idea of this information being passed to Philip (because eventually it must), without anybody there to support him, is too much for Ellen to bear. She thinks of her ex-husband, Al, and how he fought his personal war demons on his own, often shut up in the bathroom, ignoring, yes, even the calls from their toddler daughter, Jean, who eventually took to the open kitchen window on her own. Ellen can see it, the scene inside the hospital, can see the moment Philip is told he’s going back, must face whatever he found, must lead the U.S. government to the source of that sound, so they can use it as a weapon of their own.

  She removes her hands from the wheel and exits the car. The way she feels inside, the sky above should be starless, black, but of course it’s not. Macy Mercy is situated far from the bright lights of Des Moines and there’s little out here to obscure the celestial sheen. It doesn’t feel right, though; stars above, Philip below, in there, beyond the one door, in and out, being lied to, tested on, sent back.