Collateral Damage finishes its set, relinquishing the stage to the next performers, Blecch Squad, and later, the headliners, Bad Haiku. Arjay basks in every decibel. Three bands in a shoe box club, one of dozens in the neighborhood, in a city of dozens of neighborhoods, one of dozens of cities where musicians hatch their strobe-lit dreams.
It’s after three a.m. when the Green Zone finally disgorges its sweaty and exhausted slam dancers onto Chrystie Street. All the clubs have let out around then, and nobody wants to go home just yet.
Arjay loiters among the loiterers along a construction fence plastered with bills. There are ads for concerts, political rallies, independent films, and—what’s this?
GUITARIST WANTED
ALL ORIGINAL MATERIAL/NO SKYNYRD COVERS
HAIR-METAL WANNABES AND OTHER LAMERS
NEED NOT APPLY
At the bottom hangs a series of strips bearing the contact phone number. Most are pasted under by a flyer decrying the cultivation of broccoflower. But one still dangles free. Hand shaking, he tears it off and stuffs it in his pocket.
“Arjay?”
Only the lisp from her tongue stud gives her away. Casey Wagner blends into the downtown crowd so well that it takes a moment to recognize her. But come to think of it, this is exactly the place for her—with the spiked hair and punk clothes and attitude from the black lagoon. She fits right in. She probably reads out her death lists between sets.
“Oh, hi, Casey.”
Her cheeks are flushed with excitement, which detracts somewhat from her complete lack of coloration. “Did you catch Drip Dry at the Puke Emporium? Man, they blew the roof off that dump!”
“I was at the Green Zone,” he tells her. “Bad Haiku and a couple of other bands.”
“You must have good ID. They’re big-time gestapo over there. I can’t believe it!”
“Nobody carded me.”
“No, I mean I never would have pegged you as the type.”
“What type?”
She shrugs. “You know—cool.”
“Thanks,” he says sarcastically.
“I love it down here,” she enthuses. “It’s so authentic.”
“Authentic what?”
“You know, not plastic. When Zee Shrapnel choked on his own vomit, it was on this corner. Only—” She frowns. “Are you allowed to be out like this?”
Arjay bristles. “Are you?”
“My mom’s sleeping pills are like nerve gas. I can come and go as I please. It’s not the same with you. Didn’t you, like, kill somebody?”
Most of the magic of the night evaporates with those words. “Listen, Casey. I’m breaking rules; you’re breaking rules. Let’s just leave it at that.”
Leaving it at that is not Casey’s strong suit. “But aren’t you guys in some kind of halfway house thingie?”
Arjay sizes up the punk rock girl. She’s probably harmless—good-looking even, if she’d lose some of the facial hardware. Yet there’s nothing harmless about what would happen if word gets around that he, Gecko, and Terence are on their own, unsupervised in New York City. A curfew violation is a minor infraction, but if it invites inspection, they might as well be caught robbing banks and garroting puppies.
The old wartime warning jumps to mind: Loose Lips Sink Ships. What lips could be looser than a pair pierced by half a dozen metal rings?
He has to close this subject permanently.
“No offense,” he says carefully. “I’ve got two other guys in this with me. I can’t talk about it.”
“It’ll be our secret,” she says with a conspiratorial smile.
Arjay swallows hard. The last thing he wants is to share a secret with Casey, who sees Dr. Avery, who, in turn, reports to Ms. Vaughn. But what choice does he have?
They shake on it.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
For John Doe, the world has become a strange and uncomfortable place.
How could it be otherwise? A grown man—between thirty-five and forty, the doctors estimate—waking up in a hospital bed with no idea who he is or what’s happened to him.
Concussion, they say. That’s not hard to believe. The former Douglas Healy feels like someone has taken a baseball bat to his head. And anyway, the diagnosis is right there on the chart. Acute retrograde amnesia resulting from blunt force trauma to the upper cranial region.
“In other words, you bonked your conk,” Dr. Radnor explains. “Incidentally, the fact that you can read your chart is important. In total amnesia, a patient might forget the English language. He might have to relearn how to reach up and scratch his nose when it itches. This proves you have some memory.”
“What good is that if I don’t even know my own name?”
“Don’t rush yourself,” the doctor advises. “You know you’re a human being. You know you’re an American. You know you’re in New York City—”
Healy is agitated. “Because you told me!”
“But you know what New York City is. Your mind hasn’t been wiped clean. You were in a coma for more than a week. That’s not a small thing. But I have every confidence that a good portion of your memory will return. You just have to be patient.”
That’s easy for Radnor to say. He isn’t the one who’s been plunked in the middle of a world that’s a complete mystery. It’s like walking into a movie halfway through, not recognizing the plot or any of the characters. Only that movie is your life.
He tries to reason through his predicament, but that leads him down even more upsetting lines of inquiry. For example, does he have a wife and family somewhere, devastated, wondering where he is?
Turns out, the police have already thought of that. “We’ve been combing missing person reports,” Detective Sergeant DaSilva informs him. “So far no luck.”
“What does that mean?” Healy demands. “Nobody’s looking for me?”
“Not necessarily. The world’s a big place. Lots of different databases to check. Or maybe you just haven’t been reported AWOL yet.”
“How could that be? I’ve been in this hospital for days.”
“Maybe you’re the kind of guy who likes to disappear for a while—the lost weekend type,” the cop suggests. “Or you could have been on a business trip when you got hurt. Happens all the time. Nobody misses you because they know you’re out of town.”
The sergeant’s all-business attitude only raises Healy’s level of agitation. “How can you be so calm about this? I could be anybody! What if I’m a criminal?”
DaSilva shrugs. “Then I’ll arrest you. But I doubt that’s it. Most of our lives aren’t that dramatic.”
Says who? For John Doe, it’s all drama, all the time. What if he has no health insurance? Does he have a bank account? A home? In New York or in Timbuktu? How will he know where to go when he’s discharged? What will he wear? These borrowed hospital scrubs are his only clothes. The emergency room staff threw out the bloodstained T-shirt and gym shorts they found him in.
When that pretty volunteer, Roxanne, asks how he takes his coffee, he can only stare at her blankly. He has no idea. For all he can remember, he might not even drink coffee.
Roxanne favors him with a dazzling smile as she fills his cup. “In that case, you’re our dream customer. You can’t say the coffee’s bad if you don’t know what it tastes like when it’s good.”
She’s a great kid, but all the forced cheeriness is starting to get on Healy’s nerves. Smiles from the doctors, the nurses, the orderlies, the volunteers. It’s one thing to stay positive, but it’s a little insulting to his intelligence. His life, whatever it was, is in shreds. Grinning isn’t going to change that.
The boy who calls himself Gecko leans over and whispers, “Try it black with one Sweet’N Low.”
Healy frowns. “What, you’ve got psychic powers?”
Gecko can be a bit of an oddball—friendly one minute, quiet and withdrawn the next, like he’s hiding a deep dark secret. “Something like that,” he mumbles evasively.
The kid has at
least one thing going for him: Roxanne. They don’t seem to be officially dating, but no one can miss the way they look at each other.
Not that the patient is minding their business. Still, when your entire life has been erased in the blink of an eye, on top of all your other problems, you’re bored out of your mind. You need something to think about. Around this place, the only entertainment is the soap opera of Gecko and Roxanne. He throws out a few feelers, but all the two teenagers will cop to is what great friends they are, and how much they respect each other’s volunteer work. True, they could be hiding something. Then again, maybe sweet kids like that are just too shy to make a move.
“Well, when I was your age,” Healy tells Gecko meaningfully, “I would have been madly in love with her.”
His brow clouds. The truth is, John Doe has absolutely no idea what he was like at Gecko’s age or any other. For all he can tell, he was disgorged from the Great Space Ark and teleported to earth, his mind a blank slate.
Gecko Fosse is on the couch in the staff lounge of Yorktown Medical Center, making out with Roxanne and not thinking. The not thinking part is crucial. He’s not thinking about the fact that Healy’s memory shows no sign of returning. He’s not thinking about the fact that his entire life sits on a foundation that doesn’t exist. And he’s especially not thinking about the fact that the blame for all this lies with him—and Arjay and Terence.
Just as he was able to edit “getaway” from “driver” when he was behind the wheel, he can separate his first experience of having a girlfriend from the disastrous events that made it possible. A few closed doors away, poor Healy is being wheeled in for yet another ultrasound, CT scan, or MRI. But all it takes is one taste of the strawberry flavor of Roxanne’s lip gloss, and he’s lost in the strange yet wonderful world of the two of them.
“Get a grip,” she murmurs into his lips.
“You get a grip.”
“No—you.”
“You!”
A grip on reality is impossible for Gecko, so he substitutes a physical grip on Roxanne. It works okay, so long as you’re good at not thinking.
Their relationship takes place entirely inside Yorkville Medical Center. Their moments together have to be stolen between the dozens of tasks the overworked nurses always seem to find for them. Gecko is amazed at Roxanne’s uncanny ability to come up with recreational uses for the ordinary things found in a hospital ward. Leaky IV bags, no longer usable, make excellent squirt guns; two wheelchairs in a secluded hallway virtually beg to be drag raced. She lets him into her secret game of nicknaming each patient after a historical figure. The man in 740 becomes Julius Caesar because his narrow fringe of hair resembles a laurel wreath. Nostradamus can always predict what kind of cookies will come with the tea cart. There are General Patton, Elvis, Mother Teresa, Peter the Great—the list goes on.
The one patient who is immune to all this is Healy. Roxanne catches on quickly that, for Gecko, John Doe is untouchable. There is something different about the way Gecko views the occupant of room 704, and her instincts tell her that she shouldn’t even ask about it.
Gecko knows that he’ll never “get a grip” on what’s happened to Douglas Healy. And no amount of strawberry lip gloss is ever going to change that.
Arjay squeezes the tube, carefully tracing a bead of caulk around the lip of the basin.
Mrs. Liebowitz peers over his shoulder. “When did you learn all this?”
The big boy shrugs. There are classes in juvie, but in adult prison, they teach you a trade. “You’ll have to use the bathroom sink for a day or so to give the silicone a chance to cure.”
Terence sticks his head into apartment 4A. “Telephone, dog. Guy says his name is Rat Somebody.”
Arjay caps the tube. “It won’t leak anymore, ma’am.”
Mrs. Liebowitz frowns at him. “Arjay—”
He stops at her door.
“How’s Mr. Healy making out with the three of you? I—” She hesitates. “I haven’t seen him around much.”
He swallows hard. “Social Services has him buried in paperwork. Just knock if you have any more problems with the sink.” He runs across the hall to 4B.
“You Arjay?” asks the voice on the phone.
“That’s me.” The guitarist ad! Who else would call this number and ask specifically for him?
“What are you, like, twelve?”
“I’m nineteen,” he lies. He may sound young, but at six foot five, he’ll have little trouble passing for older in person.
“Be here in twenty minutes. Five forty-one East Sixth.”
Arjay scribbles it down on the back of an envelope. “What apartment?”
“You’ll know.” Click.
When Mrs. Liebowitz looks out her window a few minutes later, she sees Arjay in full flight down Ninety-seventh Street, his guitar slung over his hulking shoulders.
Raw punk blares from the open windows, filling the street as if the row house is a three-story speaker. No wonder the caller didn’t bother to provide an apartment number. Find the source and you’ve found the band.
As Arjay climbs the broken stairs, the physical effect of the music on his body increases. The drumbeats are concussion bombs, the guitar chords a stomach-churning buzz. The thrum of the bass can be felt below the gum line. It’s even better than the Green Zone. Anyone can go to a show. This is inside.
The door is missing. In its place hangs a large grease-stained New York Rangers jersey, cinched curtain-style with electrical tape. Arjay pushes through for his first glimpse of the band. They stop playing at the sight of him, generating a pulse of sudden quiet that nearly knocks him over.
The three young men are pale and death-camp skinny. I probably outweigh the whole group! he thinks. With the drum kit thrown in for good measure.
The singer scowls at Arjay’s guitar. “What the hell is that?”
“It’s what I learned on. In jail.” He has a sense that his stint in Remsenville, the greatest tragedy of his life, might somehow enhance his credibility with the skeptical band members.
The singer shrugs out of his electric and offers it to Arjay.
His fingers move experimentally over the frets. To his great relief, everything feels familiar to the school guitars he’s been practicing on with Mr. Cantor. He strums an air chord.
“Helps if you make contact,” the bassist offers.
He plucks a high E and is startled that the resulting note comes not from the instrument itself, but from the speakers. It bears little resemblance to the cheap, tinny amplifiers in the Walker music room. He tries a C chord and is rewarded by an authoritative blast, louder than he expected, distorted and powerful.
It sounds like rock and roll.
He can’t help grinning. “It’s great.”
The singer is losing patience. “We don’t give lessons. Can you play?”
“I can play.”
And now he believes it.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
One thirty a.m. Terence time.
The streets are quiet, but the avenues are still lively. New York City is all about choice. It’s your call whether or not you want to be in the middle of the action.
Tonight, Terence has a specific destination in mind—a high-rise apartment building on East 105th Street, close to the river.
He’s scoped the place out in daylight. Big—thirty stories, maybe thirty-five. Not the projects exactly, but definitely not the high-rent district. And as he suspected, dark and deserted at half past one in the morning.
Keeping to the shadows, he searches for the spot he scouted before. Jackpot. A row of quarter-circular iron bars block access to a narrow, street-level basement window. At some point, a car or truck must have backed into this protective cage. Three of the pieces have been torn free of the brick.
Terence pulls a crowbar from under his jacket and goes to work, prying the iron arches away from the wall. Then he smashes the glass and squeezes feetfirst through the window frame, dropping to the concrete flo
or.
It’s a laundry room, smelling faintly of motor oil, detergent, and lint. He navigates the maze of idle washers and dryers, smirking through an obstacle course of very large women’s underwear strewn on the cement. Finally, he’s in the main hallway. He passes the furnace, several storage closets, and a reeking trash compacter. At last, a heavy metal door. He tries the handle. Locked.
No problem. From his pocket he produces a small plastic card—Douglas Healy’s library card, to be precise—and deftly inserts it into the frame by the knob. There is a click, and the door swings wide. The elevator is directly in front of him.
Cake.
He rides to the twenty-seventh floor and follows the corridor, his sneakers barely touching the carpet. The Ninja Walk. That’s what his dogs back in Chicago called it. They had to give him props for that, even if they never appreciated anything else he had to offer. Soundless movement, like the wind.
Apartment 27B is locked with a dead bolt. No problem. He takes out a flathead screwdriver and a thin piece from a nutcracker set. Good picks, nutcrackers. Only dental instruments make better burglar tools. He’s inside in three minutes.
The apartment is a disappointment. It’s nice. Terence was expecting something a little more Boyz in the Hood. Oh well, doesn’t matter. This isn’t about the crib. He’s here to make a statement.
He advances cautiously, unfolding a small piece of paper from his pocket. Now to find the right bedroom…
The lights flash on, and he wheels to see varnished wood and the Louisville Slugger logo speeding toward him. In a burst of survival instinct, he ducks and feels a breeze as the home run swing passes half an inch over his head.
A middle-aged woman wrapped in a voluminous flowered nightgown has him cornered in the hallway.
“You picked the wrong house to rob, little man!” She seethes, her eyes wide and bulging. “You want my diamond necklace? My ruby slippers?”
“It’s not like that—” Terence tries to explain.
“Why? Because I’m the one holding the bat?” The woman shoulders the Slugger for another cut, and that’s when Terence makes his move. He springs forward and somersaults under the swing, rolling up onto his feet behind her.