Palindrome

by E. Z. Rinsky

  I stare at his form whimpering beneath his sheet.

  Courtney taps me on the knee, his eyes wide.

  “Frank,” he whispers and connotes urgency with his hands: we can’t stay for long. Then he points to the bag and pantomimes a stabbing motion: maybe threaten him with the knife?

  I shake my head at Courtney: no.

  Courtney points at him and makes a choking motion. It’s okay to hurt him. He strangled a girl.

  I shake my head again, more adamantly. The figure continues to writhe and moan beneath the green sheet. I exhale deeply, a possible approach for dealing with this creature starting to come to me. One thing we definitely know about him: He had issues with Mommy and Daddy, enough to bash their heads in.

  I stand up and rip the sheet off of him. “We don’t have time for this, Silas,” I say sternly, in the same voice I use to force Sadie to stop watching TV and do her homework. “Silas!” I repeat. He shrivels beneath me like a bug, looking up at me through glassy black eyes. “I don’t have time for these games. Please tell me where the tape is before I really lose my temper.”

  He wheezes like he’s having a panic attack, then startles me by suddenly sitting up straight and jabbing a finger at my nose.

  “I’ll never say a word,” he spits with a phlegmy laugh. “Do what you want to me, but you’ll never find it. Never.”

  Disgusted by his rancid scent—­like rotting onions and moldy fruit—­I put a gentle hand on his shoulder to try to put him at ease, but he recoils, tries to push me away. I’m shocked by how weak he is despite his height. He flails, trying to get away from me, backing into the corner and shrieking. “You’ll never find it! You can kill me, you’ll never find it!”

  Courtney’s looking on, scratching his cheeks. We lock eyes and I say, “Court. Could you check out that footlocker?”

  Courtney gets out of his chair, bends over Silas’s unlocked trunk—­the only place he could possibly hide anything in this room. But when Silas hears it click open, he suddenly leaps from the bed and lunges at Courtney with astounding speed, teeth bared, hands outstretched like claws. Before he can touch Courtney though I have his collar in a firm hold. The withered man twists and turns wildly in my grip, like a fish on a line, trying to keep Courtney from his secrets.

  I try to breathe through my mouth; his smell is absolutely devastating. The back of his bald head is right in front of my face. It’s covered in colorful faces; most appear to be moaning or crying out. And from this angle I can confirm that the black snake wraps its way all around his head before meeting to eat its own tail on his forehead.

  “Those are my things!” he cries as Courtney flips open the top. “My private things!”

  I glance out in the hallway, hoping this isn’t waking up any of the other Western Wing inmates.

  “Have something interesting in there, Silas?” I say in his ear.

  He shrieks as Courtney dumps the crate upside down and sifts through its contents. It is filled with paper.

  “No tape,” Courtney says, on his knees, combing through papers.

  “Stop! Stop!” Silas sobs, hardly even struggling anymore.

  “What are they?” I ask Courtney, dodging one of Silas’s pointy elbows.

  “Letters, I think,” he says, sorting through the torn envelopes and Hallmark cards on the cold floor.

  Silas whimpers like a puppy. If he hadn’t killed a girl a few years ago, I might even be moved to pity.

  “Nothing but letters,” Courtney says, standing up and kicking a few in frustration.

  “Letters from who?” I ask as Silas’s energy wanes and his unwashed body goes progressively limp in my arms. Courtney picks one up at random and reads it out loud:

  “ ‘My love, last night I dreamed you were here. We walked around a lake poured by moonlight’—­that doesn’t even make sense—­‘and you held my hand. When I awoke I touched myself thinking of you, as you asked. I will wait forever for you.’ ” He throws the letter down in disgust and picks up another one.

  “Same nonsense,” Courtney mutters.

  Courtney turns to Silas, still restrained by me.

  “Who sent these?” he asks.

  Silas perks up his head. “Women,” he hisses to Courtney. “Hundreds, thousands of them. They want to fuck me.”

  I crinkle my nose.

  “Trust me, nobody wants to fuck you,” I say, then toss him back onto his thin mattress, mostly because I can’t bear to smell the back of his bald head for another second. I sit down beside him and lean in close enough that I can make out the individual needle pricks of color on his face. Startling craftsmanship, I can’t help but notice. And the exact same designs I saw on the full glossies of Savannah’s corpse.

  “Silas,” I say, “we are in a very big hurry and are becoming very disappointed that you don’t want to help us. Could you please tell us where the tape is? And then we’ll be right on our way.”

  He stares at me defiantly. It takes all the willpower I have not to hit him, but I know it would do nothing but send him into convulsions of self-­pity.

  “Where’s the tape?” I ask again, looking straight into the black pits of his eyes. His face shares the same expression as many of the tattoos adorning it: wide mouth, high eyebrows; somewhere between unbridled terror and utter confusion.

  “Where’s the tape?” I ask again, gripping his emaciated shoulders firmly, ignoring the nauseous smell of his rotting breath. “Tell us and we’ll go, Silas. Is it still at the cabin? Did you bury it somewhere? Did you destroy it? Did you give it to Dr. Nancy?”

  He’s blubbering a bit, choking sobs.

  “Kill me,” he cries. “Kill me.”

  “What’s on the tape? What does it say?”

  I fixate briefly on a yellow, quarter-­sized tattoo of a face that rests on his chin. As Silas’s face contorts, the miniature one runs a gambit of emotions as its mouth, cheeks and eyes stretch in different directions.

  “I don’t know where it is,” he heaves.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? Don’t lie to me, Silas,” I say sternly. I see Courtney out the corner of my eye fidgeting helplessly.

  “I don’t know, I swear!” he pleads.

  “Why did you tattoo her, Silas?” I say.

  He smiles weakly through his tears.

  “They told me to do it. So they wouldn’t recognize her,” he says with a weird hint of pride.

  “Who?”

  “The angels.”

  I grip his shoulders even harder. My rising blood pressure is causing the wound in my ankle to pulse with pain, and each breath makes my chest feel like it’s going to burst.

  “Where’s the fucking tape!” I shout.

  He grins. “You think you frighten me? Nothing in this world can frighten me anymore.”

  I smack him across the cheek. Not particularly hard, but still I immediately curse myself for losing control. I exhale hard and wait for him to just withdraw into sobs, but instead the fact that I’ve resorted to physical violence seems to empower him.

  “You’re only hurting my body, demon,” he cackles. “I don’t care about this sack of skin anymore. Do what you want to it.”

  “Where is it?” I demand, heart pounding in my ears.

  “You’re fools. Both of you,” he gasps. “Leave the tape. It will only lead to madness. It’s cursed.”

  “What do you mean?” Courtney butts in as he sticks his head over my shoulder. “What do you mean it’s cursed?”

  “It can never be unheard,” he wheezes.

  “Then what does it say?” I ask.

  “I don’t know . . .” He suddenly breaks down into sobs again, tries to squirm out of my grasp. “Demons! Leave me, leave me be!”

  He’s limp as a rag doll in my hands, just sputtering. I try to picture this pathetic man murdering Savannah Kante
r, pulling the bag tight over her head until she stops moving.

  “Frank,” Courtney whispers in my ear. “They’re up.” He’s pointing outside the open cell door. Indeed, behind the other cells that I can see from this angle, the other Western Wing psychos are awake and pounding against the insides of their cells. They’re making a lot of noise. Fuck.

  I turn back to Silas, take a deep breath to try to compose myself, get in character. “Silas,” I say seriously, but he’s doubled over on the bed, body flabby, crying to himself, hardly listening. “Don’t you see how upset I am? How upset your dishonesty is making you? Think about how proud I’ll be—­and how happy you’ll be—­when you tell me what I want to know.”

  “I’m . . . ready, demon,” he says, then unfolds his form and lies stomach up on his cot like he’s surrendering. “I knew you’d come. Take me.”

  I stand up at Courtney and shake my head somberly. Behind him, the rising din of rapists and killers as they pound on their cell doors.

  “No chance.”

  Courtney looks down at Silas, thinking, I’m sure, that if we walk out of here without any new info, we’re pretty much sunk. “We have to try—­”

  “Try what?” I say. “Squeezing it out through his ears? It’s not like he’s even resisting me. He’s just totally fried.”

  On cue, Silas stirs, half here, half somewhere else. Sobbing gently, “I’m ready, demons . . .”

  “Courtney”—­I put a hand on his shoulder—­“we gotta make sure we get out of here. I have a kid.”

  Courtney takes a second, then nods. “Yeah,” he says, then is on his knees shoving the letters back into the footlocker. “Just let me straighten up. Don’t want to give them any reason to review security tape of this area too.”

  I realize my ankle is bleeding again, the stain in my scrubs spreading like a low, dark cloud. There are a few bloodstains on the floor, and Courtney is wiping them up with the sleeve of his white smock.

  Silas is lying faceup with his hands across his chest like a corpse. He’s totally settled down, almost like he’s fallen back asleep.

  I limp back into the circular chamber. The other inmates’ shrieking and banging is rising in intensity, echoing around the circular room like we’re the middle of some primitive ritual. All this risk, and all we’re walking away with is a medical folder.

  I suddenly want to rush back in there and smack Silas, send his gangly body sprawling to the floor. Punish him for not talking. It’s not fair, that these secrets are gone forever, buried in his vault of insanity, and there’s no key on earth that will make him focus enough to release them. Instead I close my eyes and breathe. Try to think about Sadie, think about walking her to school, holding her hand. Think about Sadie reading a book or how happy the Bronx Zoo makes her.

  My pulse settles ever so slightly. I hear the door to Silas’s cell slam closed and then Courtney is beside me. He looks into my eyes. Why is he smirking?

  “What?” I say over the banging, though the inmates seem to be tiring themselves out. “C’mon, let’s get out of here.”

  I start toward the door that will take us back up to the employee lounge, then down to the hallway that will lead us out of here. But Courtney grabs my shoulder and turns me back around. He’s holding one of the torn envelopes from Silas’s footlocker.

  “Patience,” he says theatrically, shaking the envelope as if this paper itself embodies this virtue. “Can’t overlook patience and attention to detail.”

  “What?” I say, glancing down at it. “Half an empty envelope from some stripper named Candy. Great.”

  “Where did she live, Frank?” Courtney asks, grinning.

  I force my eyes to focus on the return address.

  “Beulah,” I read. “Beulah, Colorado.”

  PART THREE:

  Fast Forward

  MY BARE FEET are so cold. I carefully grope down the staircase in the darkness, until reaching the dirt floor. A chilly wind, like the cold breath of God.

  A metal table on which lies cold metal tools. Needles. A few Sony cassette tapes, still in their individual plastic wrapping.

  I sense something behind me. Swivel around, and there’s Savannah, sitting in a low wooden chair, her legs tied together and anchored to something in the damp earth.

  “Savannah,” I whisper and step toward her.

  She stares at me, face frozen in fear. Opens her mouth and warbles something I can’t understand.

  “I can’t understand you,” I say delicately. “I’m sorry.”

  Tears of frustration run down her soft cheeks. I’m at her side, hand on her shoulder to comfort her. She tries again, pleading with me, and I can only hug her. Feel her freezing tears against my cheek.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” I murmur.

  She suddenly shoves me away and tries more adamantly to make herself understood, gesturing wildly from her seat, pointing at me and shouting, her strange cries echoing in this low space.

  “Are you trying to tell me where the tape is?” I ask helplessly.

  She shakes her head furiously: no. Points at her face, which is not yet tattooed, as I’ve come to think of her thanks to the pictures in the folder, laid out on the slab.

  “Your tattoos went away?” I try. “That’s what you want to tell me?”

  Shakes her head. Crying in reverse now, droplets flying up from the dirt and lodging themselves in her watery eyes.

  A frigid wind whips through the cellar, prickling the hairs on my neck. For an instant, it picks up Savannah’s long blond hair and carries it into a glowing yellow crown. I suddenly understand.

  “Have I made a mistake?” I ask.

  Her face tightens and she nods, yes.

  “I’ve made a big mistake, haven’t I?”

  Her eyes start welling again, filling with cold tears, as she nods again.

  “What is it?” I say. “Tell me.”

  She opens her mouth and a stream of senseless, screaming syllables tumbles out, a river bursting through her lips.

  But suddenly it’s not Savannah sitting in the chair. It’s her sister, Greta. Sharp eyes the color of bitter melon, tender, wet lips. She stands up, unencumbered by the chains that bound her sister to the dirt floor. She approaches me, breathing deeply, leans into me and lets her body snake around mine. Her hand finds the small of my back, her breasts push up against my chest. As her thigh starts grinding into my crotch, she whispers in my ear:

  “Find it, and you will have me.”

  COURTNEY GRABS MY arm and shakes. It takes me a second to internalize my surroundings. Airplane. Strapped into an economy-­class seat between Courtney and a septuagenarian nun. Cold, recycled air blasts my face from a nozzle in the ceiling. I’ve been sleeping on the shoulder of Courtney’s raggedy shearling coat, and now my face smells like mothballs and his weird all-­natural lavender deodorant. I rub some sleep out of my eyes.

  “Frank,” he says urgently, “we’re landing in twenty minutes.”

  I glare at him. “Then why the fuck did you wake me up?”

  It’s been three days since Sachar. Escaping was as easy as flashing our ID cards to the guy at the front gate and showing him my ankle wound, explaining urgently that one of the prisoners got at me with a rake. Security guard was too baffled, too worried about fucking up, to ask any more questions. Just opened the gate, and we were out.

  They’ll probably review the security footage that shows us breaking into Dr. Nancy’s office and Silas’s cell. But even if they do, chance of them IDing us based on that footage is approximately nil. First, they’ll assume it was one of their own and work through all hundred actual orderlies to see if any fit the grainy video. But even on the off chance they spot us shimmying down the wall on closed circuit, what are they gonna do? Once they do a prisoner count and nobody is missing, and they find there’s no property damage save
a ruined keyhole, hopefully it won’t even be worth their time to follow up.

  I feel my ankle. Nicely cleaned and bandaged. Courtney gave me a hydrogen peroxide bath back in the motel that stung with the fury of a thousand raging suns, but now the pain isn’t too bad. My ribs are still hurting, but there’s nothing to do about that but wait for them to heal.

  I called Sadie from the motel bed as the peroxide worked its bubbly magic on my ankle wound, Nick at Nite on mute on the twenty-­year-­old motel TV.

  And then I collapsed and slept for days while Courtney booked tickets to Denver International and delved into Silas’s psychiatric file, plus anything he could find about the Beulah Twelve.

  The old nun in the airplane seat on my right is staring at me. Her face is like a rotting peach, wrinkled and pink beneath her wimple. She’s not mad. Her expression is closer to pity. Why?

  “I apologize for my friend’s coarse language,” Courtney says.

  Oh.

  “Sorry,” I mutter.

  Slowly, her face melts into a smile. She leans in a little. Her voice is brittle and croaky.

  “If that’s the worst thing you do today, you’re doing alright.” She laughs a little.

  I force a smile, thinking that’s the end of our exchange. But then something occurs to me, and I turn back to her.

  “May I ask you something, Sister?” I say. “About your faith?”

  She shrugs. “Alright.”

  Courtney looks aghast, already starting to apologize to the nun for what he assumes will be something brusque and offensive. I lean forward in my seat to kind of box him out.

  “You’re Catholic, right?”

  She glances down and inspects her outfit, then looks back up and nods. “Looks like it.”

  I smirk. Old bird has a sense of humor. Good thing she’s saving herself for Jesus; they’re gonna have a hoot together.

  “What do you believe happens when we die?”

  She looks momentarily taken aback.

  “Sister, I’m so sorry—­” Courtney starts in. I smack him softly on the thigh.

  “That’s quite alright,” she responds, then looks me square in the eyes. “When we pass, the soul departs our body. The body remains behind, and having served its function, it withers away and is reclaimed by the earth. The soul, however, ascends and is judged by the Lord. It is then sent to either eternal damnation or eternal salvation. There is also a third option, for those who may not deserve eternal damnation but still have some marks on their record”—­she smiles ever so slightly, as if to imply that I probably fall into this category—­“and that’s what we call purgatory. A temporary punishment that cleanses you of your sins, after which you are admitted to heaven.” She eyes me suspiciously. “But it’s never too late for anyone. You can always repent and confess.”