Face Blind

by Lance Hawvermale

  “Hansel?”

  “Yep?”

  “Let’s do it.”

  “Let’s do what?”

  Mira didn’t elaborate. She jogged up the five steps and entered the apartment building, knowing that he would follow because that’s how it always was. Just once, she would have liked to follow him.

  Two flights of cracked tile later, they stood before a door that was buried in shadows, as the hallway lightbulb had apparently burned out. Luke put away his camera. He didn’t seem to sense what Mira felt on the skin of her arms, the anticipation of the unknown.

  Mira knocked.

  “It smells in here,” Luke said. “Don’t you think it smells in here?”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “Maybe a lot.”

  She tried again. He had to be home. She hadn’t waited so long and flown five thousand miles to face an unanswered door. She willed him to be home.

  “Maybe a lot lot.”

  She banged harder this time, using the butt of her hand, and then the door pulled open abruptly, startling her.

  “He’s home!” Luke sang.

  A middle-aged black man stood in the doorway. A flannel shirt clung to his bones.

  Mira collected herself, swallowed, and said it: “I’m looking for Mr. Benjamin Cable.”

  “So am I.” He closed the door softly in her face.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Gabe rode through a void.

  He’d never been this deep before, not out here, not where things were parched so exquisitely dry that cacti didn’t grow. They warned you about going out too far. Even Antarctica had microscopic little beasties flourishing in the glacial vaults. Parts of the Atacama were as lifeless as a realm carved from lead.

  Over the wind and the engines, Vicente shouted, “What the hell is it?”

  “I don’t know!” The sun dappled it again with a few pulses of light.

  “Take a guess!”

  “I’m thinking maybe Gigante.”

  Vicente didn’t reply, implying that he was taking the suggestion seriously. Gabe waited for some kind of quip, but the man said nothing, which only heightened Gabe’s growing sense of unease.

  When he was nine he’d gotten lost in a Los Angeles shopping mall. Standing in the middle of the promenade, gazing at thousands of faces that looked identically like nothing at all, he slipped into a panic so deep that it manifested as paralysis. He stood there for over two hours before his mother and a pair of relieved security guards finally swept him up.

  He ate a mouthful of hot air and eased up on the throttle.

  It lay only a few hundred meters away. Still it was indistinct, an irregular shape on the ground, partially concealed by the shadow of a car-sized rock. As Gabe watched, sunlight again blinked from some metallic part of the object, a senseless Morse code he couldn’t translate.

  “I don’t suppose you brought your binoculars,” he said.

  “Negative.” Vicente spit the dust from his mouth. “How about if you stay here and I go back and fetch them?”

  Gabe narrowed his eyes, trying to guess what was lying beside the stone. “Sorry, but something tells me you wouldn’t come back.”

  “Why would you think that? I love tracking the ghost of a dead man across the desert.”

  Gabe dropped his speed and closed in on the object. “Hey, Vic.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Is that a pinwheel?”

  As the ATVs rolled closer, the spinning toy defined itself. Its shaft was thrust into the soil, its foil blades turning sluggishly, like the hands of a clock in a Dalí landscape.

  Vicente leaned forward on the handlebars. “I don’t get it. Why?”

  Gabe had no answer. He licked the sweat from his upper lip and drove until he was nearly on top of it, but still it made no sense. Then he saw the backpack. He killed the engine, and when Vicente followed suit, only the sound of a soft wind remained.

  A head and an arm protruded from the faded canvas backpack. The boy’s eyes were closed, his hair buzzed close to his sunburned scalp. The hand on the end of that skinny arm rested near the pinwheel’s stem, as if reaching for it. A patina of dust covered the boy and the backpack in which he rode.

  Gabe dismounted, unable to look away.

  Vicente whispered a prayer as Gabe knelt nearby. Before last night, he’d never seen a corpse, and now here was his second in less than twelve hours, a crash course in forensic science, but this was so much worse: The boy’s mouth was open, his tongue and lips like things of wax. The backpack itself wasn’t unusually large, which meant the boy had to be crammed in there, his limbs folded around him so he’d fit. Someone had been transporting him.

  “The Messenger was carrying him.”

  “Jesus, Gabe. I mean … Jesus.”

  Gabe wanted to look away, but his curiosity had a target lock and wasn’t letting go. Though the small body had been here for hours, no bugs had gathered. This stretch of the desert, like the shores of hell, was the bane of all life, even down to the scale of maggots and flies.

  Vicente’s voice came from far away. “Who is he?”

  Prosopagnosia had no answer for that. Though Gabe saw the open mouth and the pale tongue, and though he knew there’d be a nose and ears, none of it developed on the film of his mind. Who was this boy? He was as much a cipher as the Messenger himself.

  “Gabe?” Vicente cleared his throat. “Gabriel Traylin, do you hear me?”

  Gabe forced himself to nod. “Yeah.”

  “Let’s go. We have to tell somebody. We have to … to report this.”

  The pinwheel turned again as a breeze as light as a sigh touched its blades. Then the wind faded. The toy had no business being out here. It was as senseless in these surroundings as a fire hydrant or a Wurlitzer jukebox.

  He looked back at the boy. Since he couldn’t unpuzzle the riddle of his face, he tried the bag in which the body was mostly enclosed. It was a standard external-frame model, the kind with the aluminum poles providing its support.

  Gabe moved a bit closer.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Does this bag look small to you?”

  “Are you insane?” Vicente ripped off a long invective in Spanish. “Let’s get the hell back to the observatory, now.”

  But Gabe was certain that something wasn’t right. Judging by the size of the backpack, he didn’t know how this kid fit inside it. The boy would have to be a contortionist.

  He pinched the corner of the canvas.

  “Don’t do this, Gabe.”

  Was this the quest that the Messenger had failed? Had this child died on his back?

  He got a better grip and tugged. The pack barely moved.

  “Shit, here we go.” Vicente got off the quad and sank to his knees beside Gabe. He looked down at the boy. “He looks the same age as my son.”

  Gabe took hold with his other hand. He squared himself so that one sudden pull would skin the pack from the boy’s body.

  Vicente took off his hat. “I don’t think I want you to do this.”

  “Can’t help it.”

  “The hell you can’t. I don’t want to see.”

  “Me neither.” Gabe yanked the pack free.

  Vicente reacted first, recoiling, pitching backward and landing on his ass. Gabe spent that first moment unable to make sense of what he saw. His system lag ended a second later, and he covered his mouth and blinked against the sudden tears.

  The boy’s left arm and both of his legs had been removed. The stub of his left arm was bound in duct tape. That of his right leg was smooth and healed, while the other one was a jagged mess, recently sawed away, the flaps of skin sewn hastily together with thick stitches.

  Vicente gave an inarticulate cry and turned away. Gabe wanted nothing more than to follow his friend’s lead, but he was horribly transfixed, trapped in the awful undertow of the boy’s mutilated body. The child had fit in the backpack because he’d been truncated. For whatever reason, someone had removed vast hunks of hi
m, so that he was nothing more than a torso, an arm, and a face that Gabe couldn’t see.

  “Gabriel!” Vicente grabbed a handful of his shirt.

  The boy lay on the desert floor, clutching the pinwheel that was staked into the earth like a banner claiming this land for a foreign power. He had died of infection or dehydration or the simple lack of a will to live. Gigante didn’t do this. That mythic monster hadn’t torn the muscle and bone from the boy’s body. The black thread that laced his leg meat together was the work of a human hand.

  “Gabriel, please.”

  He allowed Vicente to drag him to his feet. As repulsed as he was by what he saw, he was afraid to leave. What if the boy’s body, like that of the Messenger, evaporated into the empty sky? What if they brought the cops back to this very spot and found only a pinwheel turning somberly in the breeze?

  Vicente started one of the quads, the sudden noise at last pulling Gabe free of the vision that held him in place. A greasy fluid surged in his stomach. He fell toward the handlebars and leaned against the machine, waiting either to be sick or to wake up sweating in his bed. Surely this couldn’t be real.

  But when he glanced back, the boy remained, his secrets as impenetrable as the desert’s guarded heart.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Grumpy guy,” Luke said to the closed door.

  Mira took a step back. She’d never shut the door on anyone before, and to have it happen in reverse was so startling that she didn’t have a ready response. Though rudeness abounded everywhere, it still surprised her.

  “Like Scrooge McDuck,” Luke decided. He looked at his sister. “You lied.”

  “I what? When? What are you talking about?”

  “You said he wrote the book, Ben Cable, he wrote the book, and you said he’s here.”

  “He is here.”

  “Ben Cable is Scrooge McDuck?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “But he said he’s looking for Ben Cable. That’s what he said. I heard him, and I have good ears. He can’t be looking for Ben Cable if he’s being Ben Cable.” He frowned. “Can he?”

  “Just hold on a sec, okay?” She stepped toward the door and tried the knob.

  It was unlocked. The door opened.

  “Oops,” Luke said, “we are breaking and entering.”

  “Mr. Cable? Please, my name is Mira Westbrook, and I need just a few minutes of your time.”

  The knob jerked out of her hand, and the man again filled the doorway. His black hair was shot full of gray arrows. “Westbrook? I don’t know anyone by that name.”

  “We haven’t met. I tried to e-mail you, but the address I found online kept bouncing back, and your Web site’s been down for—”

  “Two years. Yes, I know.”

  “My brother and I have come a long way, sir, and I’ve spent way too much money to turn around and go home. I’m not some kind of crazy stalker person who chases their favorite writer around the world.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  “And to tell you the truth, I’m actually not a huge science-fiction fan. I’m more of a mushy-melodrama woman myself, so this has nothing at all to do with me.” She glanced at Luke. “It has to do with him.”

  Slowly, as if he doubted everything she’d told him, Cable swung his eyes from Mira to her brother.

  Mira wondered what he was thinking. She resisted the urge to say more, afraid that she’d only ramble and further indict herself as the nutcase she surely appeared to be. She studied his face while he studied Luke’s. The lines around his mouth indicated vintage laughter, and his teeth were the remarkable white attained only by dental procedure. His skin was a deep, lustrous brown.

  “I’m Luke.” He smiled and extended his hand.

  Cable stood very still.

  Luke possessed an insouciant patience that disarmed everyone, eventually. He just kept grinning and offering his hand until Cable reached out and accepted it.

  They shook.

  “I’m Luke.”

  “So I heard.”

  “And you are not Scrooge McDuck.”

  Cable paused only for a second before saying, “No, but I have been mistaken for Wile E. Coyote. Both of us have a tendency to blow ourselves to bits on most days of the week.”

  Though he might not have understood that Cable spoke figuratively, Luke laughed with spirit. “He buys dynamite from Acme.”

  “So he does. Some fools never learn.” Cable looked at Mira. “Assuming I believe that you’re not a crazy stalker person, Mrs. Westbrook, what is it that I can do for you?”

  “It’s Miss, and you can let me come in and talk to you about my brother’s ability to read your book.”

  “Glad he enjoyed it. You two come all this way for an autograph?”

  “Luke doesn’t read, Mr. Cable. In addition to Down syndrome, he’s severely dyslexic. Except when it comes to your writing.”

  “Forgive a middle-aged man his lapses, but I’m not sure I’m following you.”

  Mira backed up and tried again. “My brother not only has a serious reading impairment, but he doesn’t really even want to learn to overcome it. Books just aren’t his thing. But for some reason, he can read your novel perfectly, quickly, and flawlessly. Your novel, and nothing else.”

  * * *

  Mira accepted the coffee and summoned to mind the speech she’d been rehearsing for fourteen months. Cable’s apartment had the look of something temporary parlayed into something permanent. Suitcases served as dresser drawers. The pots and skillets in the tiny kitchenette were stored in a cardboard box covered in international mailing labels. A lone window provided a stunning view of the brick wall of the adjacent building. A small geranium stood defiantly on the sill.

  “I don’t usually entertain,” Cable said.

  “That’s okay. I’m sorry we just burst in on you like this—”

  “You’re unlisted,” Luke said. He nodded twice. “Unlisted means the phone-book people don’t write your name down.”

  “I contacted your publisher,” Mira explained, “but all they said was that they’d be happy to forward written correspondence to you, but they couldn’t give out your contact information.”

  Cable blew the steam from his cup and took a long drink. Mira sensed his unease. In his eyes she saw guarded curiosity and a good helping of suspicion. She was ready for suspicion; she’d been planning this monologue for over a year.

  “Do you mind if I start at the beginning?” she asked. “It’s kind of a long story.”

  “She’s a good storyteller,” Luke assured him. “Gretel’s the A-one, best-there-is-and-ever-was storyteller. That’s how I fall asleep sometimes when I can’t.”

  “That would be fine,” Cable said. “God knows I’ve got nothing else to do but that damned Sudoku all day.”

  “Okay, well…” She slid forward an inch in her chair. Her own pulse surprised her. Was she really here, after all this time? Had all the planning and all the saving actually gotten her here? “Luke and I are—”

  “Dizygotic!”

  Mira smiled at her brother. “Yes.” She looked back at Cable. “He likes that word. It’s a fancy way of saying fraternal.”

  Cable slowly cranked up an eyebrow and studied them with renewed interest. “Twins?”

  “He’s one minute older.”

  Luke shot up a hand. “Big brother!”

  “Our mother was a little surprised by the challenges Luke presented. She was one of those people who got trapped in cycles, and when you’re in one of those bad places, it’s hard to make time for anyone but yourself.” Mira was impressed by her own distance when she said this. Normally she kept those feelings close, and though Cathy Westbrook had been gone for over a decade, sometimes the tears sprang from ambush. “Needless to say, I had to grow up pretty quickly and do what needed doing.”

  “Like tell stories,” Luke said. “And clean the fish tank. It gets gross.”

  “I’m sure it does.” Cable seemed to have lost interest in hi
s coffee. “For what it’s worth, you two certainly have my attention. Normally at this hour I’m napping with the morning’s Diario Oficial on my chest.”

  “I’m sorry. We had to come.”

  “Don’t be sorry, sugar. I had to come down here myself.”

  Mira intended to ask him that—why on earth had he written one book and then secluded himself in a South American city?—but she wasn’t ready yet. First: dyslexia. “Luke actually did pretty well in school, all things considered, except when it came to reading.”

  At this, Luke made a choking sound and grabbed his throat. “Going … to … barf.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Mira rolled her eyes. “Anyway, as you can see, he wasn’t a big fan of school in general and reading in particular. We saw a lot of literacy specialists, but between his severe dyslexia and his overall dislike of the act of sitting on his caboose and trying to read, he never got very far. Both phonological and surface dyslexics can overcome their disabilities, but it takes work. Sometimes hard work, especially when they’re already faced with other, more serious challenges. To tell you the truth, Mr. Cable, we had enough hard work on our plates already.”

  “We choose our battles,” Cable said.

  “Exactly.”

  Luke glanced back and forth, first at her and then at Cable. Mira wondered what he was thinking. Usually she could guess—call it a twin’s telepathy or a sister’s intuition. At the moment, though, she was too anxious. Maybe she wasn’t the storyteller that Luke made her out to be, but she had a tale waiting to be told, and the time for the telling was finally here. “I work as a credit analysis manager at a bank in Omaha. It’s a good, stable, boring job. Luke works three blocks away—”

  “I roll tires.”

  Cable looked at him. “Come again?”

  “Tire shop. I roll tires. Showroom needs new rubber.”

  “He also keeps the shop picked up,” Mira added.

  “And wash with Lava soap!” He held up his hands, both of which were very clean.

  “We live together in the same house we grew up in.” She didn’t bother telling him that the house almost caught fire one night when their mother dropped her Betty Boop Zippo while trying to put a flame to the underside of a spoon. “A year and a half ago I was a dating a guy who turned out to be more interested in Star Wars conventions than he was in remembering my birthday. It didn’t last.”