Later, when he joined the sexual order of Ordo Templi Orientis, he renamed himself Baphomet and always kept with him numerous whores who indulged him with drugs and oral sex, through which he believed he could work invincible magiks, attaining new levels of consciousness and enabling him to contact Aiwass. Both his wives went insane. Years of heroin addiction followed, until Crowley died in 1947, nothing more than a shade pressed against the black wall of magus history
-he could tell Jazz that.
Instead Matthew said, “He was a writer of horror stories that A.G. and I used to read when we were kids. He used to host one of the Saturday-night Monster Features.”
“Oh, so that’s what you meant. Is he still alive?”
“No.”
“Jesus Christ, Mattie, he was talking about this guy like he hung out with him every day.” They turned onto the Avenue.
“Do you have a suit I can borrow?” Matthew asked.
“What?”
“A suit.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. You mean like a real suit, you’re talking about something nice, a three-piece?” Jazz warbled. “Me?”
“A blazer, a tie, anything.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, sure. Somewhere, I guess. How come?”
“For Bosco Bob’s party tonight.”
Frowning, Jazz went back to playing with the heater, turning it up notches, then down, then flicking it back up again, until the plastic grip of the knob came off in his hand. “You can’t be seriously considering going.”
“Of course I am.”
All the rest of the day fused with the past now, and he saw it as it had been, right here in his own car. “Because of Helen, sure, sorry. But with all of this happening, with A.G., and everybody knowing how tight you two were, and now you’re back …” And then, breaking through, as much of a non sequitur as possible, because they were just talking here a little bit, about horror movies and so forth, looking around at the town, just a short drive down the Avenue, with no transitions except the blood that came around and around again in his mind: “… oh God, she was only sixteen …”
Jazz blinked and took another breath, letting it out, and it felt like the first breath he’d had in his entire life. It sort of brought him back to normal. “We’re going to swing by my apartment and I’ll rummage through the closet for you. Never can tell what might have fallen off one of the hangers and started breeding new forms of life back there. If a battalion of slime creatures hasn’t been spontaneously generated by now I’m sure I can find something for you. I wore a tie for our communion, didn’t I? Did you?”
“I’ll pick it up later. Just take me home.” No, not home, Jazz thought, he couldn’t mean home.
“Ah, yes, to Emma and Eugene Carmichael’s boardinghouse, shelter from the elements, chateau of the wanderer, residence of one large-breasted Jodi, oh yes, ho, onwards …”
“No,” Matthew said, shutting off the heat and rolling down the window, letting the chill in where it ought to be. “Take the shortcut through the park.” The houses rushed by. “I want you to leave me at my parents’ house.”
A cat was on fire in the middle of the road.
Chapter Fourteen
In the exact center of the spinning wheel, there is no motion.
Wakowski dove.
He didn’t understand why, and didn’t stop long enough to think about it or ask questions of himself, unable to feel perplexity or embarrassment. Movement like this is instantaneous, the way moves must be when something dim and cold turned inside his skull, rotating him back into the comfortable state of Grunt.
Throwing himself on the floor, he kicked the door shut with his foot, dropped his shoulder, and rolled until he hit the bedpost. He crawled on his belly until he was in the tight nook between the bed and wall, a perfect vantage point to see the rest of the room. He didn’t wish for a gun since he didn’t have a gun, and merely hoping would be useless. Wakowski almost expected to feel sharp elephant grass tearing at his skin, and to hear mortar bursts and screams inside the silent hospital.
It didn’t matter that this appeared to be foolish—you left all thoughts of appearance way back in the bush, even before the first time you smeared cow shit on your neck to hide your human stink. He did not question his sanity as other veterans might have done; different men might fear flashback, or a loosening of rage or unhinged conscience. He’d only experienced one flashback in his life, coming out of the shower a long time ago, and it had felt less real than this.
His instincts had warned him the second he walked into Richie Hastings’s room, feeling the danger around him despite all appearances to the contrary. It happened like that on occasion, if you were lucky enough to learn the lessons. Memories of murder from deserts and forests sped by, and Wakowski was glad he’d never laid any of them to rest. The other wars and skirmishes proved less intrusive than Nam, though Nam hadn’t been the worst of them. It had simply been the first.
In some respects, the best.
He lifted his head high enough over the boy’s covers to see the rest of the room, and acknowledge what he already knew.
It was empty.
Richie Hastings continued sleeping in his odd catatonia.
Wakowski’s reflexes urged him into action. It was mind-boggling, and yet not altogether as bizarre as it may have appeared. Certainly not as strange as returning to the States and seeing the cheering throng with banners at the airport, his wife and two kids smiling and so beautiful, and his intense desire to stay on the plane.
There was a war going on. He crawled, making no sound.
He’d experienced this type of reaction before in the eighteen months he’d been employed at Panecraft. There had been several times over the past twenty years when he’d gotten that feeling Merryman and Anklehumper used to call the grab-your-balls-and-duck reflex. It was a sense that alerted you to the reaping, and told you to drop before you were dead. Maybe you even felt it after you were dead.
In Soc Trang, he’d felt the itch coming on while driving a jeep—the trail ahead looking too safe, the way it did when Merryman had been killed—and without hesitation, perhaps hearing his friend’s whisper beforehand, he’d flung himself sideways into the road just as the front tire ran over a mine.
The explosion picked him up like a molten fist and threw him thirty feet backward through the air. He managed not to break any bones when he came down and hit a mud hole, but while spinning ass over elbow in the grass, he touched off a fléchette blast. With his life still welded to him, the angle of the shrapnel from the small mine had hit him flush in the flak jacket. Another few inches and his face would have been torn off.
Anklehumper and Topcat were only a half a click behind him that day and got him the hell out of there, they nicknamed Wakowski “Rabbit’s Foot” after the incident, and used it for about a week. But tags like that didn’t last long in any platoon, considered signs of the bad juju, like you were tempting karma to get on the rag and fuck you up.
Now Wakowski’s chest and abdominal muscles tightened, veins in his neck and biceps bulging. His pulse instantly lowered and he could feel the prickling in his hair and under his arms as his sweat glands turned off—with training, some people could learn to do that so their scent wouldn’t give away the position, and you wouldn’t have to keep smearing cow shit all over you.
Another layer of calm descended over him. To call the reaction mechanical was to neglect emotion and thought, and the willpower it took for a man not to think, not to feel.
He scanned the room again. There was nothing to see.
The boy had fallen into a psychosomatic coma somehow induced by the prisoner A.G., Summerfell’s resident stalker and graveyard crasher, though they’d never found where he’d lifted the skeleton from. It was all illegal, keeping him here without charging him, but nobody seemed to mind. Drs. Charters, Patterford, and Willits had their own views of the situation, and with all their combined years of psychological study not one of them was smart enough to r
ealize there are some minds that cannot be understood, certain events that can’t be explained by either rational or irrational methodology.
Some eyes were death, plain and simple, meant for death, designed for death. Wakowski’s innate sense told him that the first time he saw A.G., and it was for that reason alone he wanted the guy in Stanfield Sanitarium or out at the Corzone hospital, or anywhere else so long as he was out of Summerfell. There was something inherently dangerous about A.G. and his friend Galen that prevented them from being fitted into the carefully cut peg-holes these analysts dropped humanity into. Dangerous in the sense of sitting in your car at a railroad crossing—all it took to drive you onto the tracks was some idiot coming up behind you too fast. Even at its most normal and convenient, life could grow more precarious than most could ever believe.
Beaucoup bad juju, Anklehumper would’ve said.
Wakowski had spent most of the morning rereading A.G.’s file; he held no false hopes that he might find answers to why the patient had been driven over the edge, but he still wanted to know how come the guy had decided to take the boy with him. That was the key. Find out what makes the boy insane and you discover what lies in the man’s insanity.
Richie slept.
An hour before dawn, Wakowski had sneaked into Charters’s office and reviewed the video of Galen’s visit, only to find that the bad juju had struck there, too. He should have monitored the meeting on screen, but he’d held back, deciding to let the doctor run the show for the moment. He’d lied for Charters, and the fact that the lie had become truth reminded him just how closely fate listens, how it’s always waiting to jump into your chest.
Charters’s personal involvement with the case made him a poor choice to counsel the patient, though it was true no one could counsel a man who wouldn’t talk, who would not confess to either innocence or guilt. Unlike the doctors or the police, Wakowski held off from actual judgment, but that didn’t stop the agitation he felt in A.G.’s presence; a long time ago he would have called it fear. Back when he could still become afraid.
As he crawled on his belly under the bed, his guts prodded him farther.
Nerve endings fired. Wakowski rolled again and came up in a crouch-crawl with his back to the windows. Parting the cards and flower-stuffed vases that lined the sill, he glanced outside and saw the red glare of the sky, the shadowy forms of the five o’clock shift getting off work, sweeping across the parking lot as they headed for their cars. Some of them were laughing. Wakowski would never be able to completely comprehend how people could put so much behind them from hour to hour—like Merryman, who had turned the switch on and off, allowing him to separate one life from another.
After returning from Nam Wakowski had been filled with such an exhausting, consuming call to battle that it corrupted his entire life. His wife left him. He would sit in the park and watch men and women falling in love, realizing he was younger than they, and could not associate with it. The civilians and the hard hats and longhairs, the flag wavers and the flag burners—carefree, most of them, even the ones who were screaming in the parks, some of them filled with chic laughter, the women different and the men too unlike himself—imagining how those couples would raise children that would not be wired with C4 charges and sent into bars in Saigon. His own children called him for a few months, she let them do that, but when he didn’t visit they left him alone. After a while, a certain pressure built that bore down on him like hooch mud bricks caving in and burying the tunnel rats alive.
He realized his human evil had found a back door, moving in and out of his dreams worse than it had been in that particular green hell. He could not make peace with peace, and found redemption back in the center of other vague wars. The killing kept him sane until the days came when he learned to live with, and accept, what he had become.
Out in the hall there were a number of other guards, orderlies, and doctors. Wakowski could call to any of them now, but what could he possibly say, what good would it do? None of them understood what occurred here either. But to a man who trusted his instincts to such a degree that he didn’t question what he didn’t understand, it didn’t make a difference.
There was a war being fought.
He heard a click and hit the ground again.
The door opened and Henry Charters walked in, holding a coffee cup in one hand and charts and notes in the other. Puzzled, he looked over at Wakowski on the floor in the corner and said, “What the hell are you doing, Roger?”
Wakowski looked up and smiled a perfect smile.
The pause grew thick enough to hang from a noose.
Charters’s mustache quivered.
The doctor immediately realized the extent of the situation as he saw the feral, tormented, and yet extremely tranquil look in Wakowski’s eyes. He knew the man was in the middle of a severe encounter with Delayed Reaction Syndrome, reexperiencing his part in some long-past battlefield.
So serene and savage. Charters had never maneuvered his way through a mine field or wrestled with a starving animal, but he guessed an equal amount of caution would be required of him to survive this encounter.
The most frightening part of this moment was that Wakowski looked so perfectly in control of himself.
Without losing his pleasant grin, his coffee, his notes or rectal control, Charters carefully closed the door, taking it upon himself not to call anyone else. Wakowski could quite capably kill a great many people in his present state of mind.
When the door latched, he wondered if he’d made a great mistake.
Richie appeared untouched at the moment.
His footsteps resounded off the tile floor. Charters gave no outward signs of the vast fright he felt. His own self-control shocked him. Wakowski’s muscles remained corded, veins in his arms, hands, and neck raised like snakes. He looked strong enough to throttle a bull.
Charters walked to his chair beside the bed and sat, gently placing his papers and coffee cup on the table beside him. Those confident eyes of Wakowski’s made the doctor more uncomfortable than any convicted killer’s stare—that smile, what did that smile mean? And what did it mean in context, when you tried to place it all together with the scene of Wakowski, crouching on the floor?
He ran his fingers over his mustache and fought to remain calm, thinking about what he might say to sound reassuring. He didn’t want to fracture the silence in the room, as if afraid to wake the boy. Charters did not want to mutter anything that might make Wakowski punch his jawbone through his brain.
Outside, rubber-soled feet tramped in the corridor.
His coffee mug didn’t tremble in his hand, and for that Charters was inordinately thankful. “Roger,” he said, taking a swig, the cup in front of his mouth as if to protect his chin from the one well-placed punch that would kill, “this is your day off.”
Richie’s mouth moved, a slight sigh escaping him, and both men reacted violently. No, there were no days off, for any of them.
Wakowski heard Charters and yet didn’t hear; what he heard would not help him to fight or escape. His mantra had shifted many times before—think like the jungle had changed to think like the desert, think like the swamp. And now, now he had no name for what enveloped them, but he was attempting to think like it.
It was clear that the doctor thought he was having a bout with delayed stress; after a clinical analysis DRS would be the only supposition Charters’s limited point of view would allow him to see.
The irony was that Wakowski never delayed at anything.
Topcat would have appreciated the moment; the Cat liked this kind of stink, he would have moaned with pleasure at the heavy scent of fear drifting off the doctor.
Wakowski knew he wouldn’t be able to persuade Charters into believing anything different—there could be no way to understand how much discipline and pain and dedication it took for a soldier to crouch on his belly in the corner of an empty room.
Wakowski realized he should say something to break through to Charters, but didn�
��t know what would have the right kind of effect. So, after several more seconds passed and Richie Hastings’s bottom lip trembled again, he said, “We’re in danger here. Especially the boy.” His heartbeat was loud and slow, his words not doing the job he’d hoped they’d do, as Charters looked down, always down, always on the floor wondering how to supplicate this loose cannon. So obvious in his intent and foolhardy in his haughty sense of emotional balance and lordly mental superiority. You found them everywhere you went.
It no longer bothered Wakowski that the doctor did not understand, and so he didn’t have to listen to Charters’s reply, knowing what it would have to be. “Let me help you, Roger.”
Wakowski would use all his training to plan another way to fight an unseen, untouchable enemy, as the enemy was invisible in the jungle, the desert, the swamp, and he could no longer touch Topcat and Anklehumper and Merryman when they pressed their faces down from the ceiling, calling and thrusting their hands out for him.
He would improvise, as he must, and now it would begin. Crouching in the corner did no good. The time for this type of action was past.
In the exact center of the spinning wheel, there is no motion.
He stood.
Startled, Charters leaped out of his seat and dodged to the left, frightened and uncertain, but making a move to the boy. Wakowski straightened the cards and vases he’d disturbed on the windowsill. He had a great deal of respect for Charters, more than the doctor would ever know. “I apologize, Dr. Charters. I didn’t mean to alarm you. I assure you I’m fine.” The words had a mechanical cadence to them, but at least there was a semblance of meaning. Stilted but reasonably honest, though they held no truth. Still, it would probably be enough.
Charters stared at Wakowski, and down at Richie, and wondered if the three of them were actually going to get out of this room alive. He did not feel particularly reassured. “What happened, Roger? Tell me.”
“Nothing to be worried about.”
“I …” Questions would be useless. Those eyes. Controlled and uncontrollable, wounds opening wider inside the man even as the doctor watched him so casually rearranging the flowers and cards. He’d put a call in to the VA immediately, and see if he could get some people here more experienced in these matters. He backed up and opened the door. “The shift change is over, Roger. Come on. The halls are empty now.”
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