by Emma Bull
I meant to pay my debts, honorably, without protest. But I couldn’t stand against that last flicker of hope. I bolted for the shop and the front door.
He caught me there, slapped me up against the wall, pinned me to it with a hand around my neck. The fingers of his other hand trailed down the side of my face, traced my jaw, and caressed their way down my throat. “What’s this?” he asked. He lifted Sherrea’s pendant into my field of vision. “Present from your mom?”
I couldn’t breathe past his grip. I couldn’t answer. He twisted the cord around his fist and yanked, and the cord broke. I heard the pendant hit the floor.
He found out, eventually, that I was not like other people. It didn’t seem to trouble him much.
Card 8: Surroundings
The Devil Reversed
Gray: The dawn of spiritual understanding, loosening of the chains of slavery to material things, conquering of self-interest or pride.
Crowley: Renovating intelligence. His magical weapon is the secret force, the lamp. His magical powers are the Evil Eye and the witches’ sabbath. The Child of the Forces of Time. A secret plan about to be executed.
8.0: Where the serpents go to dance
I left Del Corazón on my feet, by the back door. It wasn’t pride; there was no one watching, besides me, and my interest in heroic gestures was at an all-time low. Beano had gone away somewhere, and the building was quiet. No, I would have preferred being taken out on a stretcher, but there was no one to do it. And I really wanted to leave.
It was as if my body were a parcel I was carrying for someone else. It was heavy and hard to hold on to, and worse on both counts with each passing minute. But I was obliged to carry it, I’d get in trouble if I dropped it. I made an honest effort for half the length of the alley, in the dark, holding myself up on the sides of buildings. There was noise from the streets all around — I was close to the Night Fair, after all — but the alley was empty.
I think I tripped over something, but my memory of the evening is blessedly imperfect. I might just have dropped the parcel.
A little later I was lying facedown and having trouble breathing. I don’t think I was in the same place. I turned my head and got more air, laden with the smell of garbage from nearby. I don’t remember any noise; someone must have turned the sound off.
After that — or before that; these are islands of awareness in a foggy voyage, and I’m not sure of the order in which I reached them, or whether they were really there — I remember being terrified that Beano would find me. Then I recalled that I was safe from Beano. He was paid off. It was the other people I owed who were dangerous. Like Cassidy. Of course he was dead; that was the heavy thing on his side of the scale, that I was having such trouble balancing. He didn’t seem angry about it. He looked sad, in fact, and I wondered if I’d told him about the apartment burning. I meant to ask him why he didn’t have a hole in his face, but I don’t know if I did, or if he answered.
Curiously, none of those islands had pain as part of its shoreline. The first one that did involved, again, not getting enough air, and being in darkness. But this time I was on my back on something level and hard, and the smell was of livestock and clean straw. I heard the rise and fall of voices at a distance, and suddenly a thump, something striking wood, very close to my face. Reflex made me flinch. That, in turn, started my nerve endings speaking to my brain. I’m fairly certain that the endpoint of that memory isn’t random, that I passed out.
Sherrea’s voice — Sherrea’s? — shouting, and a bang like a screen door, and a fresh breeze. I opened my eyes on a black satin sky full of stars and the dry-brush streak of the Milky Way. Somewhere under that sky was my body, which was as full of pain as an orange is of juice. But I didn’t have to live in it. I recognized the effect of some painkilling drug, and something else; a distant relative of the healing process, in that it relieved suffering that healing couldn’t handle. I closed my eyes again.
“… broken,” Sherrea was saying not far away. “Can you fix it, Josh?” There was a frantic edge on her casual words.
I was marginally aware of cloth being drawn back, of contact with one of my hands. “Oya Dances,” said a new voice, softly, as if there was a terrible thing described in it. “LeRoy, quick, get Mags out of bed and tell her to prep. I’ll meet her in the surgery. Sher, fingers here — that’s it — and monitor the pulse. Do you know CPR?”
I was glad I wasn’t there. It sounded scary.
For a while my mind kept working while my body was giving notice to quit, which is a sensation I don’t recommend to anyone. Memory, dream, and drugs collaborated to open doors that I wouldn’t have so much as walked past, had they been real doors, and had I been given a choice.
Behind one was a roomful of water, where I swam, badly, looking for an exit. It didn’t help that the water was full of people floating. They were naked and limp; their limbs waved like seaweed. Their eyes were open on nothing. Mick as I’d first met him, tall and athletic, with a bullet hole that went all the way through him. Dana, her pale hair clumped and writhing around her face, more alive than she was. Theo, his glasses on his nose despite the water, his head at a quizzical angle. Cassidy, a little blood trailing behind him like bright red thread and a half smile on his lips.
Another opened on the third room in my apartment, the archives, all the precious contents shelved and tidy. As I stepped in, I saw more clearly: CDs fused to their plastic boxes in strange half-liquid curves; amplifiers and cassette decks blackened and brittle, their chassis warped, their cases leprous; videocassettes oozing together; the books transformed into neatly ranked flaking bricks of charcoal. The smell of burnt things was nauseating. Then, item by item, each piece of hardware powered up by itself. LEDs and digital counters lit like opening eyes on all sides. Fans came on, and stuttered and shrieked, their lubricants cooked away. The color monitor was the last; it burst into life with the refinery gun battle from White Heat, made grotesque and technically impossible by the spiderweb of cracks on the face of the picture tube. Flames licked out of the vent panels of everything.
And there was the door that opened onto Frances — Frances? — sitting beside me, holding a glass to my lips and saying, “Eat your opium, dear; there are children sober in Africa.” That might even have been real.
But the strangest was the flat, white world, like a sheet of paper, with nothing on it but a motionless line of pictographs like the ones from native southwestern cultures, stylized silhouette figures in black. I seemed to see them all from above. I was the one on the left end of the row, I knew, the one that might have been a dog or a rabbit. I couldn’t see the other end; I don’t know why.
The second figure on the left was a woman, her arms and legs at lively angles, wearing a headdress. Or possibly a halo of fire. “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“I don’t know,” said the dog/rabbit/I.
“It’s a debased age,” she said. She sounded disgusted, and a little like Frances. “You’re not supposed to simply land on the doorstep like an unlucky relative. You’ll have to go back.”
“I don’t know how.”
She clicked her tongue. “I could do it, but we’d better begin as we mean to go on. It’s time you met him-her anyway. You’ll love this.”
She wasn’t the next pictograph in line anymore. Instead there was another, curved and capering, two projections like horns or feathers poking up from its head. It was holding a flute.
“Ah! Ah! Not now!” it said, dismayed and delighted. “Indeed, you are a cub of mine. Sorta. And your timing sucks! You’re welcome anytime, as long as you only come when you’re called. This is your head speaking. Now beat it!”
As the white surface broke up like a bad video signal, I thought, That probably is what my head sounds like.
A decent continuity finally reasserted itself. I became aware of that — the feeling that the things around me were real events, in chronological order — even before I began to receive comm
entary from my senses. Then I felt the passage of air over my hair and face and shoulders, and smelled, faintly, an unlikely combination of growing things and rubbing alcohol. I heard footsteps and stirring cloth and a clink of metal against glass, and voices far away.
Opening my eyes required deliberate effort. When I did, I knew the room was part of an old farmhouse. I’m not sure why, except that it reminded me powerfully of where Dorothy woke up at the end of The Wizard of Oz. It even had checked curtains, open to the sun.
I was lying in a narrow bed between smooth, thick sheets. I’d been undressed, washed, and bandaged; probably several times by now, I realized. That made me uncomfortable, but I was too exhausted even to twitch.
I turned my head a little, and met the inquiring gaze of another person. He was built like a block of red sandstone, not particularly tall but wonderfully square. His hair was black and white in equal measure, and his broad red-brown face was lined on the forehead, at the corners of his eyes, in two brackets around his wide mouth. He wore a faded cotton shirt rolled up to the elbows and faded trousers. “Are you really awake,” he said in a voice surprisingly light for the shape of him, “or are you still out walking?”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
“No, you’re back. Probably not for long, which you shouldn’t worry about. I’m Josh Marten, head people doctor around here. Sherrea said I should tell you right away that she’s here, and your friends Theo and Frances as well, and that they’re safe.”
I closed my eyes in relief, because I’d just begun to wonder, and didn’t think I had the strength to make the words.
He crossed the room and laid a hand on my forehead. But it was a cool, dry hand, and I was too tired to mind. He took my pulse at my throat. “I think you’re done making me work so hard. Answers to other questions I’ll bet you have: You’ve been here three days. None of the damage was permanent, thanks to me. And this is about the best you’ll feel for a while, because when your painkillers wear off, I’m going to stop giving them to you during the day. You’re going to hate that, but it’s better than making an opium fiend of you. Now, go back to sleep.”
I closed my eyes and slid out from under the burden of thought.
When I woke again, there was a battered upholstered chair pulled up to the foot of the bed, with Frances in it. Her feet were up on the seat cushion, jammed against one arm, and her knees were propped on the other. Her head tilted sideways against the chair back. She was sleeping. The crescent moons of her eyelashes, under her straight black brows, looked like obscure mathematical symbols. Her mouth was closed and severe even now. One hand was curled around her ankles; the other arm trailed over the side of the chair to brush the floor. I was willing to bet her feet had gone to sleep.
Her eyes opened, as if I’d made a noise. “Good afternoon,” she said, a little hoarse. “As you see, they didn’t throw me overboard and keep the bribe. Though you might be wishing they had.”
I cleared my throat. “No. Why?”
She unfolded her legs with a snap. “Then I take it you haven’t started to hurt yet.”
She was wrong; I’d had long enough to realize that that was what had made me wake up. “Waiting for the note was a formality. He would have done it anyway,” I said.
“Would he? What in the Devil’s name did he think you’d done to deserve it?”
“Behaved like an asshole about three times too many.”
“My, my. They have the death penalty for assholeism now?”
“I told you he wasn’t going to kill me.”
Frances leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, her chin propped on her laced fingers. “No? Then who was it who almost did? Doctor Brick Wall out there spent four hours over your unpromising-looking carcass saying things that will probably damn his soul to hell by whatever faith he subscribes to. Many of them he shouted at you. He seemed to think you weren’t helping.”
“I wish I’d been there. Sounds pretty funny.”
In measured cadence, she said, “It was not funny.”
I didn’t want to disagree with her. She seemed to have temporarily run out of things to say.
After a little while I ventured, “He said I couldn’t have any more dope, didn’t he?”
“He said that. And before you ask, I am not here to smuggle in a pipe of hash. But I’d be delighted to distract you with stories.”
I must have put the question mark on my face.
“What I had in mind,” she said, answering it, “is the tale in one part of The Rescue of the Protagonist from Durance Vile, a tragic omedy. Since I’m here and Sherrea isn’t, I claim dibs on first telling. Don’t you want to know how you were got out?”
I thought about it. I realized with a kind of gentle disappointment that I didn’t, really. I was out, and they had been exercised enough about it to get me out, which was nice. That seemed to be it. But it would be rude, I decided, not to let her tell me.
It may have taken longer than it seemed to work this out. Or some of it may have showed in my face. Whichever it was, it made Frances look at me strangely. “If you’re tired, I’ll go away.”
“It’s all right. Tell me.”
The look didn’t quite disappear, but she began. “So. After sitting quietly for two hours in the dark on the sweet soft throne of a tar barrel and breathing in lungfuls of dead fish smell, I’d figured out my plan. I would have my methanol pirates take me straight to China Black’s safe place, where I would extort an irresistible amount of ransom money from the locals, and send it back in lieu of my note, to Beano. I meant to count out five thousand pounds or make some blood flow — do you know that song? The pirates, unfortunately, refused to accept changes in the script. They would boot me off just past the checkpoints, and they had to have a note to send back. I think they were afraid that if I stuck around, I’d talk them out of the trike.”
She sat a moment, her hands clasped lightly before her. “Do you know how hard it was to write that note?” she said in a new voice.
“It was very good,” I told her. “I knew it really was from you.”
“That’s not what I mean. The arrival of that note would start something I didn’t want started. I knew that. In the end, I couldn’t do anything about it. But I wanted you to know I tried.”
“I told you, he would have—”
“Done it anyway. If true, it still doesn’t change the way it seemed at the time.” She raked her hands through her hair. “So I made the damned cross-country trek here, where I found Sherrea and told her where you were. She coupled your name with a few choice bits of verbiage. She knew better than I did what you’d called down on your head. Then she worked out the Great Escape.
“You ought to try to appreciate it properly,” Frances added with a sigh. “Maybe you will later. I thought it was the stuff that caper movies were made of, but what do I know?”
“I can’t try until you tell me about it.”
“That’s better — it almost sounded like you. The plan was a variant of the plague trick. Sherrea and a fellow named LeRoy put three rather startled calves in a livestock trailer, hitched up the pickup, and headed in on I-94. No particular attention paid to them, since they were going in. They went to Del Corazón, found you, and hid you under the false floor in the trailer. Then they put the shockingly realistic latex sores on the calves and headed for the Cedar Avenue checkpoint.”
At that she stopped and looked expectantly at me.
“Sores?” I asked.
“Anthrax,” she said, savoring the syllables. “Spreads like wildfire, fatal, communicable to humans. Nobody searched the trailer. The only problem was that when LeRoy finally pulled off the latex, all the hair underneath came off, too. The calves are out in the pasture shooting accusing looks at anyone who comes near.”
“You’re right,” I said. “It would have been good in a movie.”
Frances leaned forward again and gave me the strange look; then she stood up. “Go back to sleep,” she said.
/> This time it didn’t work. For one thing, I hurt almost everywhere. And I was nagged by the feeling that Frances had wanted entirely different responses from the ones she’d gotten. I couldn’t think what they would have been — I’d been polite and attentive and cheerful, if not very emphatic — but that didn’t keep me from trying.
The next week seemed like one long series of disabilities and allowances made for them. I couldn’t remember ever having been bedridden before, or even very sick, so they all came as a surprise. Going to the bathroom was the most unpleasant; I insisted on hobbling across the room to the water closet long before I was really able, even if it meant having to lean on someone as far as the door. The alternative, after all, was much worse.
Eating was a trial; I had a loose tooth and stitches inside my mouth on the left side. Being bathed by someone else, as it turned out, was simply impossible once I was conscious. I was able to let Josh change dressings at first, while I was still too weak to get all the way through the process by myself. After that, I took care of it. I’d never realized how close to the full range of motion getting dressed required, until I did it when it seemed that none of my muscles would move through their full range of motion without pain. But I did it.
Josh insisted I call him that. He said since the only thing he had to call me was “Sparrow,” he was forced to give up on proper doctor-patient formality, but he would feel better if I would return the insult. He told me he learned his craft by apprenticing himself to a woman who had gone to med school and had a pre-Bang practice as a surgeon. He told me his wife had died two years ago and that he still missed her; that he had three children, ages sixteen, nineteen, and twenty-one; that he preferred vegetable gardening to flowers; that the accomplishment he was proudest of was learning to play the guitar at the age of forty-six…
In short, he flung his life open in front of me without even seeming to notice he’d done it. I sat numb, patient, and politely silent under the fall of information, intending to forget it all as soon as the words stopped sounding in the room. I needed to do with his life story what he had done with the names: equalize us, achieve parity, balance debit and credit in the accounts of the Deal.
