"Dude, what's all the yelling about?"
"Charlie is the best!"
"Who?"
"Treat Charlie right!"
"I think this guy is seriously stoned," Dawn said.
"Hey," Chase said. "That's real fake leather. Get off there."
With a flourish, Jasper hopped down and made a grand gesture of helping the fey blonde over the coffee table. As if this was a ballet that had been performed many times before. Dawn played into it well, realizing she was on the verge of a new arena that would welcome, enthrall, and eventually engulf her. She couldn't wait.
The kid had no sensibility about him, couldn't discern that something might be wrong beyond his sphere of interest. That had always been Jasper's problem, his inability to reach beyond the confines of his fleecy domicile. Delighting in his youth, he maintained sensitivity but lacked empathy. He was still overjoyed with the pat on the back and wouldn't feel anything else for the rest of the night. It made Chase slightly jealous.
"He's a wonderful person," Jasper said, his sloppy pink tongue wavering in his mouth as he gave that wide-open gawk. "Mr. Barth. Without the Narrative Bone Palace I don't know what I would've done."
"You would've stayed at home and gotten it done there, Jasper. It's what a writer does. You need a pen and a page, that's it."
The kid considered and rejected the comment. "No, it's too lonely, too wearing."
"Of course it is. It has to be."
"That's how you do it?"
"Yes."
"God, I'm glad there was a choice. Someplace where I could go to find the words, you know."
Nodding, maybe even mooning, Dawn agreed. "The beauty of the words, and sharing them with people."
"That's right! Meeting others like me, who care about the same things I do."
"I've only been there once," Dawn said, "but I already feel the same."
"You do, right?"
"Yes!"
"It happens that quick. Once you walk in, then you never want to leave again."
"That's how it was for me. I didn't want to go."
Glimmering, with a real heat, Jasper's gaze began to boil, the bitterness finally leaking out. "It's home. The Palace is my real home, the one I've always wanted."
A better home than the one he shared with his mama, who fed him stew and clipped his mittens to his cuffs and watched him like an unyielding hawk ever since his father died. Who no longer fully understood real endearment but knew the ultimate loss, and who tried to protect her son from the storm raging out there.
Chase knew then what he should've known all along.
Jasper had knocked Isaac down and kicked hell out of him on the street.
It was his way in. Stalkers had to be close to those they loved, even if they were only out to crush them in a bear hug. Even if they eventually suffocated and murdered the source of their infatuation.
That's how it was, when you were alone. You had to make the effort to break down whatever barrier kept you from the all-consuming fantasy.
This, for love.
But Chase could never prove it and didn't really want to try because Isaac—not being a poet—would never believe it of the boy. Jasper probably didn't even remember attacking Isaac anymore.
When our desire devours us like that, from the inside out, there's no room for the memory of pain. He'd absorbed the incident into his bloodstream, submerged the moment where it would never bother him again.
You were always that close to the big edge.
"Come on, you two," Chase said, "let's get going. I've got a show tonight."
11
When you're under the icy water, you can really get in touch with your inner child.
Smack the little bastard around some and tell him what to look out for in the world. Which lefts to make, which dead-ends to steer clear of. Whether he listens, that's another matter.
You're learning to hold your breath pretty well at this point, but they're afraid of killing you. They keep you down in the tub longer than they did in the beginning, but not nearly as long as you can last now. You've got a moderate advantage here. The trick is not to have a heart seizure. It would really suck ass if they just decided to put electrodes on your nuts and juice you.
There was a girl on the ward named Jilliane who was a pyro, covered in thick thatchings of burn scars. She told everybody about how her brothers used to throw lit matches at her to drive her away from their treehouse. When you're five-years-old that's all it takes to foul up your widdle brainpan and have a girl make connections between a boy's interest and third degree charring that never should've been made.
Knots of dead skin still flaked from Jilliane as she wandered the halls trying to find somebody to set her on fire. She had an endless cache of matches and throwaway lighters that the nurses and attendants were always finding on her. Jilliane's arms and legs were so bad that there were sections where the flesh thinned out to pink taffy and showed bone.
So you're not surprised when the ward finally goes up.
Even under the water you can hear the fire alarm clanging away. Jez slides a leg aside and eases herself off your cock, rises until her perfectly shaped legs wedge your feet down against the drain. You were so close to orgasm that you let loose with a gargled cry. You watch her beautiful white ass recede as she moves across the hydrotherapy room and the blurred shadow of Arlo Barrack's face descends upon you again.
Barrack decides to ignore the noise, figuring it's a drill. His hands spasm before he regains control, tightening his fists and driving you back down.
So you roll at the bottom like the tenderized prey of a crocodile, swishing with the motion, the way you groove to your poetry. With your eyes shut you can drift, knowing that another minute or two of this will bring you up and lay you out at the high altar of St. Pete.
Stacy tugs at a lock of your hair. You look. Bubbles rise from the girl's mouth. Stacy is trying to tell you something, desperate to get you to listen.
Barrack loosens his hold and moves off. You climb from the tub barely out of breath. You've got the lung capacity of deep sea diver after six weeks of this. When you think about it, you're almost glad to have run into this bastard. He's helped to keep the distractions to a minimum.
Your nose breaks the surface, and you smell the smoke. Stacy thrashes at the bottom of the bath, her tiny fingers grabbing at you, pleading. It's enough to make you glance down at her, but after that, you shrug free and sit up.
The room is engulfed in throbbing black cumulus, convulsing over the floor and undulating against the ceiling. It hangs like Grandma's ugly curtains against the walls.
"Oh cripes," you say, your voice heavy with agitation but not fear.
Barrack has a three pack a day habit and is always huffing around the hospital. He's been overtaken by smoke inhalation and lays on the tiled floor with his eyes rolling around in his head.
The fire is creeping closer to him, the flames pouring loose and slithering around the doorway now.
Look at this, you think.
Look at what we have here.
No one would ever know.
You could leave Barrack's unconscious sadistic ass right where it is and let him be broiled alive the way he wants to be. He prays to go out in a blaze. His rancor and spite given shape and life by the rapid combination of oxygen with fuel, his body becoming an incandescent gas sustaining his grudges, transforming into light and heat and ash. This guy's been begging for it, to go up in an atomic burst.
Now, really, when you get down to it, wouldn't that be a nice way to kick his sorry soul into hell?
You wish you could. The push and tug of your conscience is painful and makes you grunt and press the meat of your palm against your temple. You hate yourself for what you're doing.
Oh.
Mama. You bend down and grab him under the shoulders, prop him into a seated position, tug him upwards until you're able to struggle him across your shoulder.
The sprinkler system is complete garbage.
There's water dribbling from out of the heads jutting from the ceiling, but there's apparently no pressure. The drool patters into the flames, hissing.
Each of your footsteps splashes water in the hallway as the smoke billows into your face and the fire slobbers and snaps. Maybe he's saved your life, making sure you were drenched, so you'd have a chance as you made your way through the blaze. Coughing, choking, you break free from flames and into the communal living area, where the other consumers are pretty much flipping out and running in circles.
The staff is having trouble rounding up the loonies, but eventually the crowd is headed out the door.
There's a big black guy aiding some of the nurses off the ward, across the quad and out onto the front lawn. You can hear the traffic whirring past on the parkway.
As he kept circling town, driving back and forth between the community college and the library, heading out on the parkway to gun past Garden Falls, where the shadow of the buildings sliced down alongside the moon. He'd stop off at bars and have a few more, speaking to no one. He did that for a couple of years, biding time, feeling a slow movement and rise under his skin.
That was all right.
The black guy keeps his eyes on you. He's only been here for a few days. He writes a lot, this one, and peers around corners and checks out everybody's action. He fills his pads up with a stunted ballpoint scrawl that must sing to him because he's always bopping his chin side to side when he reads his own lines. You can just imagine what the guy is going to think when he peers in through the small, clouded plastic window at the top of the hydrotherapy room door. He'll be after Nurse Jez in no time, pulling the suave mocha mojo on her.
No more wild humpy love for you, pal.
You get out onto the wide brick walkway leading across the grounds, and the cool air of freedom floods your lungs. The breeze is tinged with bile. Barrack has vomited across your back and suddenly every muscle in your torso tightens and you carelessly toss him down.
Maybe he'll crack his skull.
You aren't that lucky.
Barrack opens his eyes and gapes in fear and pain, his bottom lip quivering.
"Go ahead," you say, "call for your mama."
Your nostrils flare, getting that good raging bull act going, as you tell him, "You owe me, you prick."
This is the end of it, and you both know he'll never lay another hand on you because then you'll have to kill him. He'll die with your teeth in his throat.
You scan for Jez and don't see her anywhere.
Slowly you make your way from nutjob by headcase, asking where's Nurse Jez? They hack and backhand soot across their grimy mouths. One lifts a hand and points, and then another, and more of them, all of them doing the same thing.
Pointing back onto the ward.
And after a time you realize you've left your lover to die in the fire while carrying your worst enemy to safety.
Spray-painted graffiti fouls the brick under Barrack's infected, unsound head, alerting you and everybody else to the fact that
GOD ISNT WATCHING OR LISTENING
SO SCREAM AS LOUD AS YOU WANT
Sure, you think, a little later.
12
After he'd dried out in the Falls and was taking his meds regularly—following all the therapy, near-drownings, sex romps, the blaze, and the clean-up afterwards—they discharged him.
He couldn't get into a shower for two months, and Jez's dead face and Arlo Barrack's sneer accompanied him into his blankets. He woke up every morning staring into Stacy's eyes. He blew off the required follow-up treatment in an outpatient program, which got him on the bad side of the courts, but when the criminally negligent homicide charge—what they used to call vehicular manslaughter—came down he left himself open to indictment.
It was the alcohol and drugs. The state had to squash him. You couldn't let a high school teacher get away with driving intoxicated, going off his prescription. Think of what he might do to the kids.
The prosecutors didn't want to bring up his background because they hoped for a criminal conviction. None of this slap on the wrist, go sit in the hospital for a year until you're cured. Ellis dropped the fact that he was a functioning paranoid schizophrenic but the state played up the fact that he was a drunk driver who'd gotten into the middle of a high speed pursuit. Made the implication that maybe he was in cahoots with Joe Singleton.
A hell of a word, that cahoots.
So after the Falls they kicked him into the Fortwell State Pen. He spent a year and a half in the joint with murderers, rapists, and furious, fucked-up men, and no one ever bothered him.
Jasper and Dawn draped themselves about one another as they followed him up the block, not quite lovey-dovey but on their way. The excitement bled off them into an almost static charge, and another twinge of resentment corkscrewed through Chase.
"What are you going to read tonight?" Jasper asked.
"I don't know."
"You don't decide beforehand?"
"No."
"So you don't practice at all?"
"No, I don't. I just read what's on the page. When I figure out what page I want to read."
"That's not the way I'd do it."
Dawn was picking up on the kid's need to release, to get it out of his soul, and asked, "How would you perform if you were on stage, Jasper?"
With Jasper smiling again, putting his arm around her waist and hugging her to him, her hair came alive in the breeze. He walked a little faster, started to brush Chase aside with his shoulder, press him into oncoming pedestrians. The kid wasn't even aware of how the darkness inside him pressed up to the surface through the thickening shield of his happiness.
"I've been practicing my poetry for years!" he laughed. "I wouldn't need to read it aloud, I know it by heart. Every line. I've got moves I can pull. I've got voices I use."
"Voices?"
"Yeah, like there's one for my father and another for my Mom. My high school principal. Lots of people. Versions of them, you know? What they've imprinted on me."
Chase understood. Maybe Jasper was a little schizo himself, hallucinating. Usually they take the form of voices heard only by the afflicted person. Such voices may describe the person's actions, warn him of danger or tell him what to do. They leaked into the stanzas even when you didn't mean for them to do it. The girls that wouldn't date you, the muscle-bound menaces in gym, the cop who gave you your first speeding ticket. The removed, the weak, the dead.
At times the individual may hear several voices carrying on a conversation. Less obvious than the 'positive symptoms' but equally serious are the 'negative symptoms' that represent the absence of normal behavior. These include flat or blunted affect, such as a lack of emotional expression, apathy, and social withdrawal.
"How about me?" Chase asked.
"What?"
"My voice. Do you do mine? Would you, up on the stage? Me and Shake?"
Of course he would.
"Yeah," Jasper said, "all of you. And Mr. Barth too."
Chase understood that Isaac had a guardian angel now. Full-time protection and endless admiration. Jasper would fluff his pillows and feed him chicken soup for the rest of his life. Isaac would finally have an artist around that he could ask all his questions, hoping to find out what made somebody write or bring a porta-potty on stage instead of going into accounting.
If only he ever learned how close Jasper had come to taking him out, for the arcane power of the page.
They walked into the Narrative Bone Palace and the place was already thrumming.
Shake had started early. He must've wanted some free time to wow the crowd without Chase screwing up the reading. He stood at the microphone, grooving and doing some of the old soft-shuffle as he worked the stage. The ladies bopped in their seats, the husbands already coming unhinged. Everybody squirming for different reasons. He hadn't even gotten to the suck it down part yet.
It was enough to see his chocolate brown bad self strutting, holding his arm out now, down t
o some woman in the first row, expecting her to toss up her panties so he could mop his brow. Better than throwing them on the sidewalk.
Those tremendous black hands opened, his shining bald head alive with light. He did another shuffle, tripping a little as he went, the ladies letting out oohs like he was on a trapeze.
His rhythmless glide stuck and wavered, the crowd leaning over in their seats as though waiting for him to hit the ground. He clawed at the air, the darkness deepening around him, colors being siphoned away from the weak track lighting.
Jasper whispered, "What would you both like to drink? I'll get it."
Chase watched Dawn and saw that she had reverted back to the fey blonde girl stranger. She blinked at him, dimples as deep as gouges. Her deadpan eyes changed color again as he watched, blue to green and back again.
He felt the reality of Dawn and Jasper fading from him, or him from them. They had entered his story and made just enough of an impression to alter his course, however slightly, and now that he had come around to this new direction, they had grown unnecessary.
But there's no need to be rude. Chase said, "No thanks, Jasper," and drifted over to the bar.
Timmy Wiggs' threw back a double shot of JD. The short sleeves of his black silk shirt tightened around his biceps. Well, Chase thought, look at this. Timmy's arms were perfect, with fine hair growing over a series of black flame tattoos on the left, a name on his right. Chase cocked his head trying to read it.
ISABELLE
He'd never seen it before. The gods were giving him another message. Chase tried putting it together. Break it apart if he could. Is a belle? His trick brain pointing him towards a woman? The belle of the ball. Who would it be? Dawn? She was out of the picture. Goth Chick #1? #2? #43? They were skulking in the corners too. Some of the other schizophrenics, they had interesting voices telling them what to do, how to formulate designs and plans, where to look for their purpose. Chase always had to figure it out himself.
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