by Rowan Massey
They came back in. I searched their faces for signs of evil plans, but didn’t know what to think. London was grabbing pillows off the bed, and Avi was messing with the camera. I got a smile from London. I didn’t smile back.
After the pillows were put behind me, I tilted my head and couldn’t touch the back of the chair unless I really tried. My butt was scooted out to the edge of the seat.
“This sucks,” I complained, looking out the window at complete darkness. I wanted to go home so bad I didn’t think I would keep from crying much longer.
“I’m going to go into withdrawal,” I told them, feeling desperate. “Can I take it now?”
“No,” Avi said, and didn’t explain. London was quiet.
“Why not?”
“Because this part is important too, little man. We need to see what happens to you when you withdraw.”
My body, head to toe, went weak. I tasted puke. London’s hand touched mine. It was soft and light.
“I’ll be right here,” he said, his voice so quiet only we could hear.
“No.” My voice was shaking and my mouth pulled down. I started to cry. “No. Please don’t do this.” I jerked my arms, kicked my legs, but I’d already sat like an idiot letting them strap me in. I was stuck.
It had stopped raining, but I could still hear the screeching wind. I asked the empty sky to take me, like it had every day of my life for years. Only, this one time, I needed it to take me without the pill. Letting myself cry, I told Spitz I was sorry. That I should have listened.
London’s hand kept rubbing mine, but I didn’t want to look at him or Avi. I closed my eyes.
“You can do this,” London whispered.
“Stop coddling him,” Avi said, and London’s hand was gone. “If you don’t let him go through it, you’ll affect the results.”
“He’s not going through withdrawal, Avi. He’s panicking.”
I heard footsteps come close to me.
“Wally, open your eyes,” Avi said.
I did. He was leaning down to my level, looking me over with irritation.
“Are you withdrawing?” he asked.
“Not yet.”
“How about some TV? Get him a tablet, London.”
Ten minutes later, there was a tablet propped up in my lap, some stupid show playing. The two of them stayed away from me. London sat on the bed and stared into the darkness, now and then giving me sad looks. Avi paced and paced until he was making me nuts.
I tried to focus on the show. It was a comedy about cops who had to deal with the problems of silly rich people. I didn’t think it was funny, but I sat there watching two whole episodes, each half an hour long, because if I screamed or begged, I would only humiliate myself.
My hands were shaking. That was the beginning. They noticed and gave each other a look. London got up and tried to look at the monitor showing my brain activities, but Avi pushed him away from me and came to look at it himself.
Muscles in my face twisted. I didn’t know what I looked like, but I felt like a monster. They were turning me into something ugly. Something awful. I could feel it all over my skin; up in my guts and sore muscles.
“London?” I whined. “How long? Can I have the pill now?”
“No,” Avi said. “Just wait.”
“P-please. Please?”
I jumped when I happened to glance down into the blackness outside the glass beside me. It was looking at me because I was just like it. It was my twin, scary and horrible. I saw myself the way tourists saw me. I was a Halloween freak. My legs started to shake.
“I can’t…can’t do it, L-london. London!” I hated my voice. It was so high pitched I sounded like a girl. “I need…n-need it now. Now!”
“Hang in there, buddy,” London said, but didn’t come near me.
“Don’t speak to him,” Avi said, still at the computer screen.
Long minutes went by. Hours. Days. I’d been talking to myself. Or had I? My eyes were closed. I opened them and saw monsters just like me outside the window. Spitz, Fiona, and Veronica were there walking around on the darkness as if it were the ground. They were being covered in their own blood as it streamed down out of their scalps.
I screamed.
“Alright, give it to him,” London said over my noise. “Give it to him, Avi!”
There was a scuffle in front of me. Avi against London. But London stumbled into the window, then backed off. The fielder monsters reached for him through the glass, and I screamed again, trying to run away, my feet kicking at the straps that I kept forgetting were there.
“Mama!” I heard myself scream, beg. “Mama! Mama!”
A hand slammed against my mouth. A knee kicked mine, and a pill was forced through my lips. Instinct made me chew and swallow, my mouth watering for the wonderful bitterness, helping me wash it down my throat.
“God damn it! You and Atul both! A lot of talk about science and no follow through!”
Avi went on swearing, I kept on screaming, and London pressed his hand against my forehead, saying nice things to me, until everything went perfectly still.
It was all blackness, but the blackness was me. It was just me. Why would I be afraid of myself?
A violin sounded in the distance, asking me to come closer. I did. It was out there through the window, just one sweet, high note. I passed through the glass like a ghost and walked on air. When I got a few yards closer to the sound, it played another note. The closer I got, the more melody I was given. It was a comforting tune. I followed it all the way home until I met my monster friends for a dance that lasted as long as the universe.
I’d never woken up so slowly. At some point, I knew I was no longer on my trip; no longer dancing. I was dreaming it instead. Whenever I heard voices trying to wake me, or hands moving my body around, I pulled back and tried to go back to that dance, that violin. I didn’t know what was going on around me, but I knew I didn’t want to know. Not knowing was safer.
Eventually, I couldn’t keep it up. Waking was coming for me. I kept my eyes closed, pretending to myself and the world that I was still gone, but I could feel the fluffiness of the big bed and smelled some kind of food.
My eyelids fought crust to open, and then I saw the room through a small slit. There was light outside. It was day.
“Wally? Buddy?”
London’s voice. I was still in the terrible tower. Blinking my eyes and trying to rub the crust out of them, I felt something stuck to the inside of my elbow, and saw that there was a tube coming out of my arm.
“It’s just an IV. You’ve been unconscious for thirteen hours. I worried you would get dehydrated. How do you feel?”
How was I supposed to answer that? My beautiful, eternal dance had been taken away from me, and I didn’t know why. Why couldn’t I have stayed? The world of being Wally was such a small, ugly thing, and I hated the memories. I hated Wally’s life start to finish. He’d been such an angry and hungry kid when he was little—when I was little. Then my mom had left me alone on the streets when I was only twelve. Fielders and Spitz had gotten me through it, but the drug threatened me and the people I loved with death every single day. I’d seen so many friends die. I’d spent so many long days starving so that I could buy my pills by selling the trash I picked out of dumpsters. I’d been sick, infected, worried, cold, treated like trash, and I’d been in denial because facing it was too hard. Doc was right in his note. I was like a cult member insisting that everything was wonderful when it wasn’t. It was all going to kill me.
I covered my eyes with one hand and my mouth with the other, trying to hold back the sickening sobs that tore out of me with a long cry that reminded me of the way people cried when someone they loved died. Those sounds couldn’t be held back. London’s comforting words and hands would never reach the sticky blackness coating me inside and out.
Look at what had happened to Spitz because of what fielders did to our brains. He’d been horribly abused, treated like an animal by men who did
n’t deserve anything but had so much more in life than we’d ever hope to have. And he’d only known how to take more drugs to make it easier. He had stayed there much longer than any normal person would have. Because of fielders.
And me. I’d known what had happened to him, and I’d still made such a stupid mistake leaving Emporium. Doc was right. I would die horribly and stupidly. I would.
I curled up in the bed, not caring how fluffy, or warm, or clean it was and let my mouth open wide to wail like a baby. My body rocked with it. I hugged myself and let the snot and tears soak into the bed sheets. London’s hand rubbed a circle into my back, but it made no difference.
I thought about Nando. His story was even worse. He’d been abused by the people who should have protected him, then later, sent into war like a human grenade. No wonder he was violent. No wonder Doc thought he would kill me one day and wanted me to get away from him. But I was just as damaged. Why shouldn’t I go ahead and be with Nando so that I could have little moments of comfort? My life wouldn’t go on much longer anyway, and that was because it was worthless. I was worthless. Born like a rat, I would die like one.
London gave up on comforting me and his hand left my back. But it made absolutely no difference.
I thought my unbearable crying was starting to slow down, but I opened my eyes again to see the camera set up at the end of the bed. I was still being experimented on. A ripping wave of emotional pain went through me, and I cried harder, harder, and harder. My head pounded and my body ached and shuddered.
I felt someone handling my IV, and something chilly went into my veins. Maybe they would just kill me with lethal injection. Failed experiment. That would be for the best. I hoped to god they would kill me.
I didn’t die. Instead, I cried a few more minutes, drooling now, snot covering my cheeks and running into my open mouth. But I started to calm, blackness sliding away until there was nothing. I didn’t think about the sad things in life, or the good things. I didn’t think about what I wanted or didn’t want. I was hungry, but didn’t care if I ate.
Tired of the filth on my face, I sat up and weakly looked around. To my right was the city outside the window, the gray sky above. The camera watched me, and so did London, whose hair was pulled back in a bun. His braids had gotten messy, and his eyes were red. He handed me a wet cloth. I cleaned my face up.
“What happened?” he asked me, his voice quiet and sweet. “Why did you cry, sweetie?”
I didn’t have it in me to give him the whole answer, and it didn’t matter anyway. He sighed and picked up a plastic container of food from the bedside table.
“I figured every kid loves pizza,” he said, and put it on the sheets beside me.
It made zero difference to me if I had pizza or not, no matter how many times I’d smelled it while passing by pizza restaurants and pretended to myself I didn’t have a stomach. Spitz would have gone crazy for pizza. I didn’t want to eat any more good food without him.
With effort, I rolled to the other side of the bed, away from London, the food, and the messy snot spot I’d left on the sheets. I curled up again. It would be nice if I could stay there until I died.
Chapter Sixteen
Hours of the day slid by with nothing in them but the view outside the window, which didn’t interest me, even though I could see most of the big park through the haze of gray.
When London found a remote that made a huge TV come down from the ceiling, I piled two pillows over my head so I wouldn’t have to hear it. He turned it off.
I heard people moving around the room. Avi’s voice came and went, and London spoke to someone on the phone. Nothing caught my focus until London came and sat on the bed beside me, a tiny black dog in his arms.
“This is Turtle,” London told me, putting the dog on the bed beside me. “He’s just an old mutt, but he’s my mutt.”
Turtle came up to my face and sniffed at my nose and mouth. Maybe dogs could smell endless sadness. I managed to lift a hand and rub his head, which he loved. His little black eyes closed, and he rested the side of his face on my chest.
“He likes me,” I said, my voice croaking.
“Well, he called and told me he wants to spend the day with you, so I asked a friend to bring him over.” London smiled and looked at the dog like it was his baby.
I remembered the few stray dogs Spitz and I had tried to take in years back. We couldn’t feed them, so they always wandered off. Later, we’d learn that they died of starvation or sickness. In the beginning of being fielders, Spitz had kept track of the wild packs of cats that thrived on the mice and rats, naming all of them. Sometimes we’d take in a kitten, but it would grow up to run wild and forget about us.
London petted Turtle’s back while I scratched his furry ears. I noticed the shiny fingernails again.
“Do you like my nails?” London asked, holding them up for me to see. “I just started indulging myself recently. I could give you a manicure if you like.”
I snorted, almost laughing because I couldn’t imagine how Spitz and Fiona would react to that.
“Come on, it might be fun.” He squeezed my arm, probably glad I’d smiled at least a tiny bit. “I’ll get some things sent up from my office. I practically live here, so I keep a lot of stuff around.”
While I snuggled with Turtle, London called someone on his cell and asked for his things. I thought about my cell phone not working the night before and wondered if Avi had broken it. Calling Doc or Nando didn’t seem important anymore. It didn’t really matter what Avi did to me. If I didn’t go home, Doc would call Avi about me and decide for me if I was a lab rat or a street rat. I’d make sure Spitz got a message, but it could wait.
My mind wandered, and I buried my nose in Turtle’s fur, enjoying the dog smell. I’d always loved that smell.
London came back to the bed, sitting down next to me again, and asked me to sit up so he could put a tray over my knees. Turtle found a new place for himself under my elbow. London took one of my hands in his. He had a metal thing that he used to clean underneath my nails. Time kept sliding by easily while he cleaned, clipped, buffed, and then painted glossy, smelly stuff on my nails. When he was done, I didn’t recognize my own hands, and my nails felt weird and heavy.
“Does it come off?” I asked.
London laughed. “You don’t like it? I can take it off if you want.”
I shrugged and pushed the tray away so I could lay down again, careful not to get the wet nail polish everywhere.
London pulled the blanket over me, Turtle kept me company, and nothing mattered at all.
After London gave me another dose of what he said was a sedative through my IV, I took a long nap and woke up in the dark. It was night, and I was dying of hunger. Turtle was asleep against my leg.
Searching my feelings, I discovered that I felt normal. I wasn’t horribly sad or completely numb anymore. My brain was telling me it was almost time to dance, so I wasn’t especially at a ten, but I was fine. Thinking back on the past couple days made the world feel like a stranger. I couldn’t believe the way I had behaved and thought. I was an alien to myself.
I got up slowly, my muscles stiff, and went to the bathroom. When I came out, the uniformed lady was there with food, setting it out on the bedside table.
“Hi,” I said awkwardly. “I’m Wally.”
“Hello, Wally,” she said with a smile. “I’m Avi’s housekeeper. Do you need anything?”
“Is that food for me?”
“Of course. London said you should eat slowly and drink all your liquids. He’s only in the living room by the way. He needed to be on the phone and didn’t want to wake you.”
“Okay, thanks.”
She smiled again and left the room. I stood there awkwardly, hardly believing that people had housekeepers.
The soup in a big cup was kind of like vitamin stew because it had vegetables and potatoes in it, but it also had little bits of red pepper, the broth was thin and salty, and there was no g
ross taste. I picked out the corn one kernel at a time for a few minutes while Turtle stared at me and inched closer until his nose was almost in my bowl. I elbowed him away and took a sip of the broth. It was tempting to eat it fast, but I had been through a lot, and my stomach felt gross.
I looked out at the lights of the city and wondered why I hadn’t seen any light out there the night before. Maybe the storm really had been bad and the cell tower had broken like Avi said. I didn’t know what to believe.
The door opened behind me, and I turned around half expecting Avi, but it was London.
“Good soup?” he asked.
“Can Turtle have some?”
“Just give him a pea or something. It only takes a taste to make him happy.”
I fished out a pea with my spoon, picked it up with my fingers, and fed it into his greedy mouth. London came over and stood over me, saying nothing. When I looked up, he was smiling down at me, his blond hair falling over the sides of his face. He hadn’t braided it or anything, but it looked like he’d gotten a shower and some sleep.
“I have something for you,” he said, and took something out of his lab coat pocket. I stared at the bottle, not sure if I could believe it had the right pills in it; the fielders Doc and I had made together. I put the soup down and took it from him, opening it and looking in. It was fielders, and the bottle looked right.
“I convinced Avi there was no more data to get from you when it comes to the experimental fielders from last night and the business with putting you through withdrawal. He agreed to observe you on the ordinary stuff that Atul gave you. I’m hoping the whole ordeal was too much even for him. He’s been avoiding you.”
I put the cap back on the bottle and went back to my soup, eating a few spoonfuls before saying anything. He sat beside me and rubbed Turtle’s tummy.
“Did Doc know you were going to experiment on me?” I asked.
London put a hand to his cheek. “No, sweetie. He’s going to be extremely angry about this. He wanted us to give him our opinion on those pills, not use them on anyone. At most, we would have discussed it at length and then put only a little bit of it with a volunteer’s usual dose of fielders.”
