Captain Quad

by Sean Costello

  He pressed his chin against the chin-control lever, eased the chair forward—then poured on the speed. Beneath his wheels bits of tarred gravel crunched and spat. The going was rough, the runty front wheels wanting to twist and pivot on the uneven surface, but Peter jockeyed his machine like a pro.

  C'mon, baby, he thought grimly. Let's do this right. And there was nothing in his mind but that, the simple desire to get it right, to finish the job the beer truck had begun. C'mon, babe. No sweet memory-lane flashbacks, no unexpected regrets, just a simple desire to die.

  Halfway to the low concrete edge, a discarded pint milk carton deflected his right front wheel and almost toppled him. He lost the bulk of his speed and, once stable again, considered turning back for another run.

  But a rearward glance changed his mind.

  The nurse and two workmen were advancing toward him at a run, the nurse waving her arms and shouting into the wind, the nearest workman sprinting like an Olympic athlete.

  Doubling his resolve, Peter propelled the chair forward, marking the yards in a furious inverted countdown. "One! Two! Three! Fo—"

  His front wheels struck the curb-high ledge dead on. The chair teetered forward, and Peter caught a dizzying glimpse of the parking lot before he slammed his eyes shut and released a banzai war cry, half triumphant and half filled with terror.

  The workman's gloved hand brushed a handgrip. . .

  And Peter went over. He fell exactly four feet, landing on a narrow ledge he'd been unable to see from the deck. Only someone able to stand and lean forward could have seen it. He scraped his chin, raised a nasty goose-egg on his head, and crushed the bones in his left baby finger. The finger didn't hurt. The chair took the brunt of the damage, and the hospital anted up for its repair. Dr. Lowe forbade him admittance to the rooftop sun patch for a month. By then the fence was intact, completing the circle of his despair.

  Of it all, though, nights were the worst. Oh, the nights. The demons came out at night, shambling beasts filled with murderous intent. . . and what was doubly terrifying was the discovery that these brutes resided within him, in his mind, the place he now dwelt almost exclusively. They came out at night, when the gulf of his isolation was widest, churning up mud and chewing up light. The tissue that bred these aberrations was the stump of his amputated mind, the stuff that remained after the part that had housed his dreams—and the machinery to see them realized—had been cruelly lopped away. Bit by insidious bit, the demons took over, swarming over his psyche in hordes of malignant thought, laying waste to his peace of mind, spawning anger and hatred wherever they roamed. For a time he fought them heroically, clinging to the remnants of his dreams, philosophies, and beliefs; but before long the door to his stewing subconscious blew open with an audible bang. And the offal began to ooze out.

  The subconscious.

  He had read about it, thought it a pretty appellation for a cerebral pool in which all men must bathe, and then ignored it. It did its own thing anyway. You could feed it, true, but it was a shadowy precinct perhaps best left to its own devices. Prior to the accident, his had been a gentle corner of that pool, a tepid bath in which good dreams grew and raw talent resided.

  But now, like his connections with the sentient world, the boundaries between his two minds had grown murky. In the profane jelly of that stump, evil things proliferated. The defensive checks the mind normally imposed—the selective memory of past events, trimming off the bad and embellishing the good, letting grudges die and nurturing love—these restrictions had been hacked away. Where initially he'd clung to his most cherished memories, playing them over and over like favorite movies, now he simply forgot them. In their stead, all the dirt of his past came spewing to the surface, becoming even more contaminated with its exposure to the light. The sunny days he'd spent on his grandparents' farm, the happiest days of his childhood, collapsed from memory into recurring flashes of his grandfather's face in his final agony, his limbs lashed to the bed rails in a chronic hospital while the cancer hollowed his bones. Revered images of his grandmother's mirthful face shattered into grisly replays of his daily visits to her bedside in that same last-stop hole of a hospital. Watching her flesh melt away and her cheeks cave in, seeing the clear light of recognition fade from her eyes into the cold black luster of oblivion. God, but she was pale.

  And the dream. Night after night, when at last sleep released him, there was the dream. The porcupine exploding in his face. His hands trying to guide that infernal bike. The beer truck rumbling over him, bearing a new and more hideous visage each time.

  The dream was bad.

  For a time, after the truth of his condition struck home, Peter refused to eat, refused all treatment, refused even to talk. When they suspended his sedatives, hoping to draw him out, he scored his own drugs from a wild-man paraplegic named Zero, who drifted in and out of the chronic ward like a bad smell. Zero was a hippie throwback who'd shattered his spine in a fall from a forty-foot scaffold ten years before. He'd been a roadie for a band called Powerhouse and had been on acid at the time. "You wanna talk about flyin'?" he'd chortled one late night while he and Peter exchanged tales of battle. "That was flyin'!" Now he made a modest living designing heavy metal T-shirts for a local outlet. And he was pretty good. As a bonus for Peter's business—Zero supplied him with tranquilizers, analgesics, and the occasional joint, all of which Peter paid for with funds from his defunct college savings—the artist designed a T-shirt for him. The legend captain quad formed a bleeding arc over a psychedelic figure decked out in fighter-pilot gear and cutting through the clouds in a wheelchair with metal wings. For a year Peter wore it almost constantly.

  Within the grinding monotony of the hospital, Dr. Lowe became the target of Peter's loathing. Whenever he saw Dr. Lowe he thought of a fat, sweaty child hunkered in the shadows of a shabby back porch, gleefully plucking the legs off spiders. In Peter's estimation, there was something in Harrison Lowe that thrived on human suffering, a skillfully disguised contempt for helplessness that in some way stoked an ageless fire in Lowe's secret heart. Nothing seemed to please the quack more than to parade into Peter's room with a bunch of students in tow and expound on the torments of quadriplegia, making Peter feel about as human as a fetus in a formalin jar. His hate for Dr. Lowe grew like a choking vine.

  But it wasn't only the living that Peter hauled across the keel of his loathing. There was his father. Angus Edward Gardner. Lord of the manor, king of the trembling household. Alone in the late night pall of the hospital Peter would lie there and relive every moment of his life in that joyless house. He could hear his father's voice even now, as clearly as if the heartless bastard were right there beside him:

  "Peter! Get in here right now!"

  Nothing he did was ever good enough for his dad—though he'd tried, with the same mulish persistence that night after night compelled him to try to move his limbs—and the taste that had come to his mouth when his father belittled him, a sour, rotten-fruit taste that made him want to gag, came hot on the heels of these memories. The old man was outdoorsy, liked to hunt ducks and moose, but Peter didn't share this enthusiasm. "Sissy," the old man would rag him. "Doesn't want to hurt the poo' little duckies." Peter had gone with him only once—and had ended up taking a beating. Hunched in the duck blind, half frozen in a late autumn drizzle, he'd sneezed as his dad drew a bead on a flock, the sudden racket causing the ducks to scatter unharmed. Infuriated, the old man had brought the muzzle of his shotgun around in a smoking arc and thonked Peter on the forehead with it. The fists had come later. To his death, Angus had believed that sneeze was deliberate.

  No, nothing was ever good enough. Not even the music. His father had considered it a waste of time. Because of this—and he made no bones about letting his son know how he felt, usually in front of strangers—Peter took up sports with a vengeance, playing Little League baseball in grade school and then football in high school. But even this failed to impress his dad.

  Peter remembered the defeated
tears that had also come in the night, like these memories, while he lay on his back on the bottom bunk, listening to his kid brother's whistling breath and the drone of the TV in his father's den, wondering if the old man was going to burn them all down with a forgotten cigarette. From an early age he'd learned to read the emotional climate in the house, fearing his father for his hair-trigger temper and fearsome, bellowing voice, pitying his mother for her dumb acquiescence to his will. By the age of four, he'd learned to shun his father's attentions, scant as they were, and to lie as a means of survival. "Who did it, then?" he could hear his father raging. "Who broke the fucking thing if it wasn't you? Answer me!" His own name, when spoken by his father, became a kind of terrible accusation. He might be playing outside on a sunny Sunday morning, pushing his plastic cars along the paint-chipped surface of the porch, a small, healthy lad seeming lost in the racetracks of his imagination—but if his daddy was home, as he so often seemed to be when the day was fresh and somehow mocking, the boy kept one ear affrightedly cocked for the bellowed sound of his name: "Peter!" It would rise from the airless basement of their rented triplex like a shouted oath, and the boy would spring to his feet—mouth dry, short legs threatening to drop out from under him—sprint along the narrow hall runner to the basement door, and fearfully drag it open. "Yes, Dad?" he would call in a voice too small to hear. But his father would hear it—oh, yes, his daddy would hear it plain as day. "Get down here!" his voice would thunder. And the boy would start into the cobwebbed stairwell, small hands planted on the walls, fearing that at any minute his daddy's hand would dart out from between the risers and close around his ankle like a manacle. But he was never under the stairs, he was always back in his workshop, dressed in greasy coveralls over a checked flannel shirt, fishing around furiously on his cluttered workbench for some mislaid gadget or tool. And before his son had reached the bottom step he would stick out his head, an oily hank of hair dangling down to his chin, and he would roar, "Where is it?" his dark eyes shot through with red. "Where is what, Daddy?" the boy would squeak. "Where the fuck is it!" the old man would bawl. And Peter would fight to seal off his bladder.

  How he'd hated his father then. How he had wished him dead.

  That wish came true two weeks after Peter's fourteenth birthday, a bitter, sunless morning in March. Angus died in the middle of a screaming fit, his hateful heart finally giving up the ghost. He was pissed at Leona, who suffered his rage with a hangdog passiveness that always made Peter want to scream. Leona had wanted to drive to her parents' farm in the valley, as she did every Sunday, and Angus had been deliberately stalling, as he did every Sunday, hoping to spark a confrontation. In her quiet way, Leona had nagged him until finally Angus had rounded on her, screaming blue murder, his slab-muscled arms bunched and ready to strike. But this time, instead of just cowering and taking his abuse, Leona had run for the kitchen, where she grabbed a knickknack off a shelf and pitched it at him, catching him on the bridge of the nose and bringing an alarming spout of blood. Surprised more than hurt by this defiance, Angus had only stood there, cupping his nose and whining like a kicked dog, his beady eyes filling with tears—and then his hands had left his face and clutched his barrel chest, and he'd collapsed to his knees on the floor. A strangled curse had escaped him (Peter had been watching, crouched in the stairwell, peering down between the balusters, thanking God that Sam was still outside and wishing fiercely that his father would die die die!) and then Angus had vomited, a horrid yellow gout of half-digested breakfast and bile. In his night sweats Peter would see his father's face and remember thinking that his head had seemed about to explode. It appeared to swell on his shoulders like the cartoon head of some infuriated Disney character, neck bagging out like an inner tube, cheeks bloating up until the skin shone a flat, cadaverous plum color.

  Stunned, Leona had only stood there, a crazy blend of emotions in her eyes. A part of her thought she'd killed him, and that part was glad, oh, so very glad, he would never raise his voice or his hand to her again. But her eyes were full of fear, too. The fear that he was faking it in his cruel and cunning way, putting it all on so that she would rush to his aid, only to be met with the full force of his fury. And there was more. Dim flickerings of hope for a future without the constant yoke of her marriage. And fury—cold, untainted fury. Satisfaction. Pity. Sorrow. Joy unparalleled. It was all there and it paralyzed her and all she could do was watch.

  Angus pitched forward—his beefy palms spiking out to stop him, skidding in the repugnant splat of puke he'd spewed only seconds before—then he fell on his face and died.

  Life after that was different. Freed from Angus's tyranny, they all breathed easier. But with their breadwinner's unlamented demise the few creature comforts they'd enjoyed were rudely snatched away. Unskilled and unimaginative, Leona found work where she could, discouraging Peter's naive insistence that he quit school and seek employment. Even at fourteen he'd shown twice the courage of his dad. They would make do, she assured him. Her son's education was paramount.

  But for all her apparent sacrifice, she had trapped him in a web of guilt. He understood that now. She had spun it slowly and skillfully, meaning to tie him to her forever. It was in the way she stood hunched over the stove at night, in her long-suffering glances as she plunked his supper down in front of him. The bitch had been trying to hold him, to own him. And why? Because she was nothing, a vacant shell, a soulless fucking humanoid who sucked at his soul like a leech. It became clear during these long nights of loathing why the old man had sometimes resorted to using his fists. She was a cheat, a low, infuriating cheat, and if there were some way he could even the score, feel his dead fingers close around her pale and scrawny neck, why. . .

  But then there was Sam. Dear, faithful Sam, like a mutt who remains with a cruel master in spite of the whippings and the withheld feedings. Like the proverbial bad penny, Sam kept turning up. Some days he just sat there in the freighted silence of that room, waiting for Peter to say something. . . and Peter never did. Other days he served as a willing punching bag; still others he blotted his brother's tears. But he always came back.

  He was the one. The only one.

  Not even Kelly had bothered to return. Some great-fucking-love. In some dim way he remembered having told her to leave, having ordered her to. . . but if the shoe had been on the other foot, he would at least have tried to come back. Truth was, the bitch had been glad. Glad to be rid of him, just like all the rest. All his sweet memories of Kelly were spoiled in the endless blank of that room, like picked fruit left exposed to a sweltering sun. She must have taken lessons from his mom. Parasites, that's what women were, bloodsucking parasites whose only intention was to gaff you by the heart and then slowly suck you dry.

  But for all his ill-thinking of Kelly, the plain truth was that he couldn't shake her out of his heart. In the night's dark eye, after the worst of the pus had been lanced, Peter longed for Kelly Wheeler in a way that was perhaps more punishing than his desire for a return to wholeness. In turning her away, another, terrified voice reproached him, he had acted rashly. Maybe they could have worked things out between them. There were specialized apartments in the city, with government-employed caretakers whose job it was to assist their handicapped tenants in every way possible. Kelly could have gotten her teaching degree, gone to her job in the daytime, and then looked after him at night.

  Right, asshole. And how long before she got sick and tired of changing your diapers and picking up after you and having nothing to look forward to but more of the same? How long before she started making up thin-sounding excuses for coming home late while in reality she was getting the long lean hard one from one of her colleagues or from some grinning dipshit she picked up in a singles bar? How long before she just pointed at the shrunken scrap of flesh between your legs and fell to the rug in hysterics?

  The images that came on these nights were as brutal as they were cruelly vivid. He imagined her with another man—but was another a fair distinction? Didn
't that presuppose that he, Peter, was also a man?—the two of them sipping wine and giggling, their harmless touching turning quickly into groping, hard-core foreplay. Despite his frantic efforts to obliterate these images, he saw Kelly open her mouth to receive the bastard's tongue, heard her moan with a passion the heat of which he had never come close to kindling. And he imagined her thinking of him as this heart thief stripped off her clothes, laughing inside, freed at last of the childish notion that her love for him had been real. Only puppy love, he heard her taunt in a dreadful singsong voice. And then he saw the real man's tongue work its way down the curve of her belly and bury itself in that place she had promised was only for him. In tacky, blue-movie close-ups, he saw the man work her with a cock the size of his forearm, saw him ram her and jam her and heard her scream in raptures unimagined. . .

  Of it all, this drove him closest to madness.

  He still loved her. He would always love her. And trying to kill that love was like trying to kill something that had no life. It simply could not be done.

  Months stretched into years.

  Sam came.

  Night came.

  The dream came.

  Peter's rage and resentment flourished inside him until it blazed like the coiled filament of some huge, unimaginable searchlight, burning brighter and brighter until one starlit night it simply winked out, taking the last of his sanity with it. For a period of time that was black and homogenous, he lay in a state of emotionless incubation, surfacing only long enough to acknowledge his brother's visits and to see that nothing had changed.

  Until death came, and that changed everything.

  TWO

  AIRBORNE

  TWELVE

  September 23, 1989

  It was coming out of the ditch, as it had each nightmare-ridden night for the past six years, slowly ascending the heat-baked slope to the road.