by James Siegel
“No?”
He put his hand by his ear and pantomimed something. We were playing charades.
Okay. Of course.
“My cell,” I said. “You used my cell phone.”
“I can’t comment. I mean, is this off the record? I wouldn’t want to be quoted or anything.”
“You triangulated my signal.”
They could do that now-satellites able to pinpoint your location to within six inches. You don’t have to be using your phone, either-it just has to be on. That’s how he was able to be right there. To follow us on the highway, then creep up to the gas station where we’d fallen asleep.
“You killed the clerk,” I said. “You cut out Dennis’s tongue.”
“Wow. When you put it like that, it sounds kind of mean.”
“Why? I was asleep. Why didn’t you just kill me?”
He giggled, said nothing.
“What do you want? What are you going to do with me?”
“I’m a plumber. Not a psych.”
“I’m not crazy.”
“Of course not.”
“I know about Kara Bolka. I know about the 499th medical battalion. I know what happened to Littleton Flats.”
“Hell of a story, ain’t it?”
“If I know, if I figured it out, someone else will. Don’t you people get that? It won’t be just me. You can’t put the water back in the bottle. It’s spilled. It’s all over the fucking floor.”
“That’s what plumbers do. We fix leaks.”
“I’m the leak,” I said. Needles and pins. There were needles and pins in my legs. “You’re fixing me.”
“Don’t worry. No bill for my services,” he said.
“What happened to your face?” I asked.
“My face? Why? What’s wrong with my face?”
“It isn’t there.”
“Oh, that. Took too many left hooks.”
“That’s not from boxing.”
“Okay, you got me. That’s what I tell women in bars.”
“Do they believe you?”
“Never.”
“What happened to your face?”
“I was in an accident.”
“There aren’t any scars.”
“It was an accident of birth.”
“Where? Where did the accident take place?”
“In a hospital.”
“Which hospital?” I asked, knowing what the answer would be even with my brain swimming in drugs, knowing the answer.
“This one. It wasn’t always a VA hospital.”
“No. It was a research hospital,” I said. “For the DOE. I know what kind of research, too. You were here. Another resident of Kara Bolka.”
“Kara Bolka,” he repeated. “Ahhh. That was just their nickname for it. The docs. A kind of a joke, really. We weren’t residents of Kara Bolka. We were its refugees. We lived like rats in its shadow. It was our bogey-place. It’s the story they told us to keep us scared.”
“Yes. But who was the bogeyman? Bogey-places have bogeymen.”
He smiled. “I think you met him.”
“Yeah. Someone else did too. Only she didn’t know it at the time. She was 3.”
“The little girl,” he whispered. “Bailey.”
Believe in fairy tales? Ever read one as an adult? Maybe you should. Even when you stop believing in goblins, they can scare the shit out of you.
Fairy tales can be read two ways.
“Bailey saw things the way a little girl would,” I said.
My voice sounded like radio static.
“Rescue workers in white hazard suits looked like something else. They looked like robots with no faces. The noise their radiation detectors made sounded like a language-clicking away at one another like dolphins. Doctors with surgical masks became aliens without mouths. Their MASH unit looked like a spaceship. She remembered a bright blue light-he had the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen.”
“Thank God for the we are not alone crowd, huh?”
“Why?”
“Why? Why what?”
“Why didn’t Bailey become another refugee? Why wasn’t she carted off like the others-like Benjy? Why wasn’t she locked away in Kara Bolka?”
“I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t born yet.”
“You were born after it happened. Here.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Your mother-what happened to her?”
“What do you think happened to her?” he said. “Neutrons and gamma rays happened to her. She was microwaved. I’m what came out of the oven.” He laughed again, but this time, it sounded thin and bitter.
“But you…?”
“What?”
“You’re doing their dirty work.”
“I am their dirty work. Besides, my job opportunities were kind of limited. Call me an honorary trustee who graduated to bigger and better things. And listen, you can’t beat government pensions.”
“Which part of the government? The DOE?”
“Let’s just say a part that doesn’t appear in their directory.”
“You became their hired killer. Their plumber. Even after what they did?”
“Learn your history. You know who the worst guards in the Nazi camps were? The most brutal? Not the Nazis. The kapos-the Jews given their very own rubber truncheons.”
“You weren’t being threatened with the gas chamber.”
“No, just with the top floor of this hospital. That was enough. Besides, they didn’t destroy Littleton Flats. The ghost in the machine did.”
“I’m not talking about Littleton Flats. I’m talking about what they did to Benjamin. What they did to you.”
That eerie falsetto. The Italians called it something else, of course.
Castrato.
“They mutilated you. When you were a baby. Just like they did to Benjamin. They castrated both of you.”
That smile again-you could see it for what it was now. Sneer first, and it won’t hurt as much when they sneer back.
“See this?” He pointed to his face. “Sure you do. Take a good look at it. They thought one of these was enough. They were protecting the gene pool. Hard to blame them.”
I thought his expression was saying something else. Look what they did to me. Look.
“How many survived?” I asked him. “Benjamin, your mom. How many made it out that day?”
“Sorry. I told you. I wasn’t born yet.”
“When the hospital turned VA, they gave them legends,” I said. “The children that survived. The names of MIA vets around the same age. They needed to account for them being wards of the VA-to absorb them into the system. Benjamin Washington became Benjamin Briscoe. He was lucky-he got to keep his first name. And there was one other survivor, wasn’t there? At least one. The one who wandered into Littleton three years ago and went to sleep in the town gazebo. That’s what Wren found out when he went to Washington-why he came back and began to ask questions about the flood.”
“That’s on a need-to-know basis,” he said. “Let me check the list and see if you’re on it. I’ll get back to you.”
“I made copies of everything I have. Everything I know. It’s with the right people.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, looking almost bored. “I don’t think the right people answer your calls.”
“A story’s a story.”
“And you’re a real storyteller. Only your stories aren’t real. They come with grain of salt included. Pound of salt, if we’re being honest. Of course, we’re not. Being honest, I mean. You didn’t make copies of anything. The right people? Even the National Enquirer won’t take your calls.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I didn’t make copies of anything. No one will believe me. So you can let me go.”
He didn’t bother answering me.
“My legs are going numb. Can you loosen the straps?”
“You have a note from your doctor?”
“Please.”
“Practicing medicine without a license is a crime.
”
My dentist once went a little overboard with the gas. Not that pleasant floating sensation-more like I was floating right out of the stratosphere, where the air’s too thin to breathe. It felt like that. The plumber would say something, but it took a while for the words to actually appear. They needed to travel all the way to Mars.
They’d pumped Benjy with the same stuff.
All that mumbling around the psych ward. Maybe he’d mumbled about explosions and floods and doctors wielding scalpels. About his real last name being Washington and him never setting foot in Vietnam. It didn’t matter. It was all sound and fury, a tale told by an idiot.
Get used to it.
When I tried to ask the plumber what was going to happen now-would I live or die or maybe live a kind of walking death like Benjy-I couldn’t form the words. They came out garbled. I felt like giggling.
I was in the same room I’d been in before. I noticed that now.
There was a place on the wall reserved for me. I could post my own letter from Kara Bolka. I am MIA from the world. Call God collect.
This was the worst part of the psych ward.
The place they put the hopeless ones, the ones who don’t even get plastic spoons.
Don’t listen to anything he says-that’s what they’d tell the orderlies. He lies. He’ll say anything. He’ll tell you he’s a reporter; he’ll babble about nuclear reactors and eight hundred dead and horrible coverups and Kara Bolka. What’s Kara Bolka, you say? Who knows? The ravings of a paranoid schizophrenic with homicidal tendencies. They say he killed a gas-station clerk. That he shot a 19-year-old kid in Littleton, California. He cut out poor Dennis’s tongue.
It sounded like a good story. If someone told me a story like that, I would pitch it to Hinch. I’d write it up.
I would.
FORTY-NINE
An isolation cell.
That’s where I was.
No comingling. At least, not yet.
They came in twice a day to give me shots. To dumb me down, send me floating back up to Mars where little blue men can strap you down and put weird thoughts into your head.
There was no window. I stared at the wall a lot. The ceiling had water stains on it that began to resemble things if I looked at them long enough. Like clouds in a dishwater sky. One stain looked like a barber pole with those funny alternating swirls. There was a profile of George Washington up there. Scout’s honor. A ’58 Chevy with cool back fins.
This is what you do when you are locked up and shut away.
When your brain is being slow-cooked.
They were using first-rate narcotics, too; psychotropics must’ve come a long way over the years. Every day, they performed a frontal lobotomy on me. No ice pick needed.
Still.
I learned to concentrate, even though it was like peering through fog. I learned to squint, mentally speaking. To herd those little neurons together and say come on guys, one, two, three.…
I chiseled things into the wall to see if it was actual English. If it was remotely intelligible.
If it made sense, then I did. If it was crazy, then I was. It was a test.
I wrote down names. A kind of mental exercise.
My bowling team. My coworkers. Sam, Seth, Marv, Nate, and Hinch. A folk band, a law firm of disreputable ambulance-chasers.
I spelled them backward and forward and inside out.
I connected them like train cars and took them out for a spin.
I made Belinda and Benjamin the passengers.
I took the train apart, added the names of everyone I knew, mixed the cars up, sent it back down the line. I smashed it to smithereens.
I alphabetized the wreckage.
A before B, which precedes C, which rhymes with D, which sounds suspiciously like E.
I started with Anna.
Okay, you’re probably way ahead of me.
You figured it all out when she first told me her name in the bowling alley parking lot. When she leaned over the fuselage and showed me what a real chassis looks like.
You’ve been trying to scream it at me ever since.
You’ve been wondering when it would penetrate this thick skull, dawn on me with one big resounding duh.
Maybe I just needed a Haldol cocktail and four soft walls to write on.
And time on my hands.
I needed to be relieved of reporting on the latest mall opening and the price of two-headed alpacas. I needed time to muse.
I scratched her name into the plaster, number one on Tom’s Alphabetized List of People who didn’t know I was here and wouldn’t have cared less anyway.
Anna Graham.
I had to stare at it long enough for the letters to blur, for two words to merge and become one.
AnnaGraham.
I had to sound it out like that.
AnnaGraham… AnnaGraham… AnnaGraham… whispering it out loud before I finally understand that I was whispering something else.
Anagram.
Anagram.
Anagram.
I stopped whispering.
I was struck dumb by what I’d refused to see.
Anagrams.
I knew all about anagrams, didn’t I?
My bomb-throwing anti-abortion pediatrician-or was it obstetrician, I forget-had fed me plenty of anagrams in his pathetic attempt to throw me off the scent.
They weren’t any match for this intrepid reporter.
I’d cracked them all.
Except, oh yeah, he wasn’t actually real.
After certain inconsistencies were discovered in a recent story this paper ran about a pediatrician and anti-abortion terrorist, we conducted an exhaustive investigation. We must regretfully inform our readers that Mr. Valle, the author of this story and a reporter for this newspaper for a period of more than five years, was found to have fabricated significant particulars of this article. In addition, he is now suspected to have fabricated all or parts of fifty-five other stories. When this became known to us, Mr. Valle was immediately terminated, subject to future penalties and possible prosecution. We have also announced the resignation of our long-time senior editor, and have instituted some significant changes within our system that we hope will prevent this kind of journalistic fraud from ever happening again. We apologize to all of our readers who put so much faith in our integrity.
Fifty-six stories.
Including one about a group of struggling actors in L.A. who rented themselves out for con jobs.
And one about a crazy fad called Auto Tag.
And one about a doctor I met in the ruins of a destroyed town.
Where the doctor fed me anagrams.
Okay, Anna.
I’ll go where you want me to go.
Anna Graham.
Hamnaagran.
Gramahanna.
Man. Gram. Ana. H.
I furiously worked at it. It consumed the entire afternoon-or was it the morning? It was hard to tell without a window.
I couldn’t unravel it. The letters stuck together, clammed up, and refused to speak to me.
Then.
Anna had two names.
Of course.
It took me less than ten minutes to take that second name apart and put it back together again. In psychotropic time, the blink of an eye.
AOL: Kkraab.
The anagram that Anna had wanted me to see.
Rearrange the letters of AOL: Kkraab and you suddenly have it right there in front of you.
I’d already gotten there first. When I’d found Benjy’s primer. It was in case I didn’t get there first.
Karabolka.
That night I’d went and found a computer in the nurse’s station.
I’d tooled around the Net. I’d found all the appropriate sites.
Half of them were in Russian.
Karabolka, after all, was a Russian name.
It’s time you heard the story.
Why not?
It’s past due.
The s
tory Benjy must’ve heard.
And the plumber.
And the man who’d wandered dazed and disoriented into Littleton three years ago, and whoever else had popped to the surface that day, rescued from one kind of oblivion only to be thrust into another.
Not exactly a bedtime story, not unless you want to scare someone half to death.
The kind you tell only over campfires in a pitch-black wood.
A true Brothers Grim.
The epilogue the 499th had been waiting for.
Hiroshima Redux.
Except no one knew.
No one.
It was a big, fat secret.
Shhhhhh…
FIFTY
First off, it was Karabolka.
Just one word-Benjy had no talent for syntax. It must’ve sounded like someone’s name to him.
The name for hell on earth. For purgatory. For whoops.
The name of a Russian town.
A Russian town situated just upwind from a Russian city that had no name.
A city that never appeared on any map.
Never.
Not one.
You could search and search and you would never, ever find it. It was invisible to the mapmakers of the world. McMillans would’ve never heard of it.
No one dared breathe a word.
It was built in the Ural Mountains by walking skeletons from the gulag. They were its very first casualties, thrown into open pits after they died from malnutrition and TB and general beatings, then sprinkled over with lime. Just like the Nazi Einz gruppen had done to the Russians at Babi Yar and Stalingrad and Minsk in the Great Patriotic War.
This nameless city would serve one purpose and serve one god.
The great God of Plutonium.
That’s it.
It was one note, one track-a one-trick pony ridden into oblivion.
Mother Russia’s illegitimate child.
It had no name; it was Secret with a capital S.
Its secret nuclear lab churned out secret plutonium.
Its secret nuclear workforce dumped secret radioactive waste into secret storage tanks.
Its secret police watched over 80,000 secret citizens.
What was the very first whisper of this secret?
The smoke.
Lots and lots of it.
Long, thick, twisting plumes of it, like braids of a babushka’s hair.
That’s what it looked like to the people in the town of Karabolka.
