At that moment you wanted to know everything about her and her life, every detail no matter how extraneous or trivial. You did not want to walk away from her because she might be gone when you came back; they collected them fast around here.
A sound a few yards away startled you and you looked in its direction.
Someone had coughed.
“Don’t worry,” you said to Miss Acceleration. “I’ll come back for you. I promise.”
She continued chatting as you walked away: “I think a bunny would be nice, don’t you? A big, round, fluffy gray bunny with great floppy ears. Yes, I think a bunny would be so nice…”
You blinked back something in your eyes, swallowed against something vile roiling up from your stomach into the back of your throat, wiped some more blood from your hands onto the sides of your pants, and found the next occupied cage.
Behind these bars a little boy with massive facial deformities lay on a cot, his lower body covered by a sheet. From the ceiling there extended down a pencil-thick cable that spread out at the bottom like the wires inside an umbrella, each one attached to one of the matchbox-sized rectangles implanted in his skull. The skin of his exposed scalp was crusty and red where it fused with the metal. He jerked underneath the sheet as if in the midst of a seizure, arms and legs twitching as the silver matchboxes sparked and faded in a precisely-timed sequence. His eyes were held closed by two heavy strips of medical tape and fresh, glistening stitches formed a “W” across his face from temples to cheeks, meeting above the bridge of his nose. A clear plastic tube ran from one of his nostrils into a large glass jar set on a metal table beside the cot; with each jerk, dark viscous liquid crawled through the tube and oozed into the jar. With each sequence of sparks he bit down hard on his lower lip, breaking the skin and dribbling blood down the side of his face. His skin was red and glistened with sweat and every time he convulsed, he jerked back his head to expose the pinkish-white scar across his neck.
… when there are this many, they cut out their vocal cords…
You kept moving; movement was good, movement reinforced the illusion of an assured destination and a guaranteed way out once you reached it, and you needed to believe that you were going to get out of this.
You passed beaten, bandaged dogs of every shape and size, kittens and cats who had been kicked nearly into pulp or whose fur had been doused in gasoline and set aflame; they lay very still, taking shallow breaths as tubes fed them both oxygen and liquid protein.
The monitors in the wall showed happy pictures, happy families with their happy pets having happy times.
A deep aluminum bathtub sat in the center of the next cage. The steady drip-drip-drip of water from the faucet echoed like faraway gunshots. Something splashed around, pounded one reverberating boom of thunder against the side, then rose partway above the lip; it was a woman-or had been, once-with red hair, mottled and discolored skin, and a neck that had been slashed several times in different places with a straight-edge razor; she looked at you through bulbous piscine eyes and brushed a wet strand of hair from her forehead. Then the slashes on her neck opened moistly, blowing air bubbles before contracting again.
Gills. She had gills.
You made some kind of a sound, soft and pitiful and child-like, that crawled out of your throat as if it were afraid of the light, and then you backed away, hands pushed out as if holding closed some invisible door.
Your legs felt weighted down by iron boots. You did not so much walk as shuffle along, periodically looking down at the floor to make sure the earth wasn’t about to split open and swallow you.
Next was a teenaged boy with dozens of membranous man-of-war tentacles slobbering out all over his body in phosphorescent clusters; in the cage beside him was a shaven goat whose front legs were far too thick and ended in a clump of five toes; across from the goat was a plump Down’s syndrome girl of uncertain age with a jutting facial cleft whose body was sprouting thick green feathers; in the cage beside her, a bear was grooming its fur not with claws but a model’s thin, creamy-skinned, delicate hands; then came a little boy with an impossibly thin neck who smoothly rotated his head so his too-long and thin tongue could snap at the midges swarming around the light; and, finally, a middle-aged woman who might have once been pretty, before the split lip, broken nose, and two black eyes: she squatted on sludgy, misshapen legs that bent outward at incomprehensible angles. Most of her weight seemed to rest on her gelatinous, flat webbed feet. She looked at you first with confusion, then longing, and, at last, a resigned sort of pity.
You staggered backward, pressing yourself against the bars of the cage behind you in order to keep from collapsing to the floor. You closed your eyes, shuddering, then looked farther down the corridor to where a curved brass railing disappeared into a stairway under the floor.
“You don’t want to go down there. Trust me when I say this to you.”
You spun around and saw him standing- standing! -in the middle of the cage, half-hidden in shadows. You could see his face, part of his exposed chest, and a moist, leathery-looking towel wrapped around his waist. You’d never seen him fully upright before; he seemed so tall.
“Whitey!”
“Captain Spaulding,” he replied. “Decided to do some more exploring, did you? Hooray-hoorayhooray.”
You gripped the bars. “Jesus Christ, Whitey, what the hell is this place?”
“Be it ever so humble, there’s no place-goodness gracious me, what a mess you are. Been waltzing with fresh carcasses through a slaughterhouse? I trust it was a Strauss-one should never waltz to anything but.” He blinked, then made a disapproving tsk-tsk. “You are not at all presentable, dear boy-not that you were a breathtaking heartthrob to begin with, but the importance of good grooming and careful hygiene cannot be overrated. Soap and water are our friends. You may quote me on that.”
“Whitey, for chrissakes! What is this place? ”
“Hark-what’s this I see? My goodness, the programming schedule around here never gets boring, I’ll give ’em that. You ought to take a look at the screen there, Captain. Required viewing.”
The scene on the monitor changed from the home movies of before to a close-up of an asphalt alley floor. The camera seemed to be hand-held because the image jerked and shook but, after a moment, things settled down and the camera did a slow turn to the right. The face of a border collie filled the screen. The silver tag hanging from its collar caught a glint of sunlight and threw a bright spot into the lens, but then the camera turned forward once more, catching a fast glimpse of the top of a cat’s head, tilted upward a few degrees, and focused on something in the distance.
It took a second for you to realize what you were looking at.
A man with his back to the camera was running down the alley toward another man who looked as if he were doubled over in pain or looking for something because he was kneeling. Then the running man pulled back his leg, did a half-pirouette, and kicked the kneeling man in the ribs.
You stood there outside Whitey’s cage and watched a film of yourself attacking Drop-Kick that afternoon after Dad’s funeral.
“Didn’t think you had it in you to do a Bruce Lee like that,” said Whitey. “You have good form, by the way.”
The scene had been filmed from two different angles, one from each end of the alley. What struck you as odd about it-aside from its existing in the first place-was the angle from which it had all been filmed; it was very low to the ground, as if the camera operator had been lying on their stomach so as to – no.
You remembered how the face of the collie had filled the screen. You remembered how the animals had sat so unnaturally still that afternoon. How the sunlight glittered off the tags hanging from some of their collars.
This had been filmed with the cameras held at about collar height.
“Technology’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it?” said Whitey. “A camera no bigger than a tag on a collar. Been around for a while, from what I hear. I mean, just look at that.”
The alley scene was gone, but the camera remained just as jerky as it had been before. A shadow passed over the lens, leaving a smear in its trail. This kept happening for several seconds until, at last, the blurry image of a face could be seen forming. The face bounced up and down, as if it were looking down into the lens of the camera it was carrying while trying to clean something off the lens and – “Oh, no,” you said.
Your thumb passed over the lens one more time and you then were looking into the face of your fifteen-year-old self. You were crying like a baby, lips moving, forming words that could not be heard but you didn’t need to hear them, you knew damn well what you’d said to that poor cat as you stood there by the trash cans in back of Beckman’s Market.
The image of your bawling face was very clear, indeed; you’d wiped more blood from the tag on its collar than you’d thought.
You shook your head. “I never was able to make out its name.”
The image faded back into the home movies of before.
“You got a good heart, Captain,” said Whitey. “That counts for something in the end. Or so goes the rumor.” He jerked his head down and to the left once, twice, three times, then made a chuffing sound as he kicked at the thick layer of straw covering most of the floor. “They’ve been aware of you for a long time now, Captain. They’re very good at keeping track of folks who interest them.
“To answer your question about what this place is: It’s sort of their version of Ellis Island-and don’t ask me-” He chuffed once again, shaking his head. “-who ‘they’ are because you have to know at this point and, besides, a pro never wastes time repeating a gag that everyone in the peanut gallery has heard a dozen times. But I digress. Do me a favor-there’s a bag hanging on the wall to your right. Be a splendid fellow and get it for me, will you?”
You grabbed the canvas pouch by its strap and lifted it from the hook on the wall. “Who are they, Whitey?”
He laughed. “You might say they’re not from around here.”
You held the pouch through the bars. It must have weighed ten pounds. “What is this?”
“Dinner,” he said, moving forward into the light.
His arms were gone, that was the first thing that registered; in their place were two large clumps of ugly knotted scar tissue that protruded from his shoulders like the padding under a vaudevillian’s oversized coat.
Then you acknowledged the whole of him and went numb. All you could hear was the blood surging through your temples and the echo of Whitey’s voice from another time, another world.
I love horses. Hope to be one in my next life.
He was almost halfway there.
His head had been shaved except for a hand-sized, Mohawk-like patch directly in the middle; the rest of his exposed, scabrous scalp was implanted with the same silver matchboxes you’d seen on the others, only these weren’t hooked up to any electrical wires dangling from the ceiling. His now-massive torso was lacquered in thousands of short brittle hairs that grew more dense as they neared his waist. His neck was twice as long and twice as thick as it should have been, glistening with sweat and frothy streaks of lathered mucus.
Before you could snap out of your stupor, Whitey cantered forward, dipped down, craned his neck, and slipped the handle of the pouch around the back of his head, all the time singing the words to the Mr. Ed theme.
“Oh, a horse is a horse, of course of course…”
From somewhere nearby a low, thrumming groan began to take form, rolling across the floor, slowly growing in volume and power.
“Nothing like room service,” said Whitey, then shoved his face deep into the pouch and spun around as the thrum grew louder and stronger.
The heavy white mane flowed from the center of his head all the way down his dense, ashen, solid back. His spine was thick as a forearm; with every move its powerful muscles stretched and quaked and rippled. His gaskins and hocks were mostly concealed by the leather towel-which wasn’t a towel at all but something organic, something sentient, a living mass that pulsed and breathed as it made itself a part of his flesh-but the rest of his legs were clearly visible; the hard cannons, the steel-like tendons, the pasterns and fetlocks and, worst of all, the burnished, astonishing, impossible hooves. Moving in stops and starts as he fed, hooves scraping through the straw and clopping loudly against the cement floor, his mane fanning out like a column of bleached flames, Whitey continued to shake his head and chuff.
“… an no one can talk to a horse, of course…”
The thrum whip-cracked like the snap of a bone and became an eruption, bouncing off the walls, resonating up and down the corridor, spiraling overhead, within and without, a ripped-raw, berserk, frenzied, lunatic siren of a sound with enough power behind it to throttle you to the floor, legs scrabbling to push yourself backward, far back, away from the harrowing shriek, and you began to cover your ears but each time the sound tripled in volume and force, there was no stopping it, no blocking it out, it engulfed everything but you couldn’t think of anything else to do so you ground the heels of your hands against your ears and held them there, throwing yourself totally into the rattling cacophony as something shredded deep in your throat and you realized the sound was even closer than before because it was coming out of you, had been coming from you this whole time, but you didn’t care, couldn’t move, and wouldn’t stop screaming, screaming, screaming.
Whitey pulled his face from the bag and clopped forward to kick a hoof against the bars.
“ Will you stop that irksome racket? Stop it right now! Stop it! ”
You pressed the knuckles of your fist into your mouth and bit down, choking off the noise; whether the blood you tasted was your own or Mabel’s, you couldn’t tell.
“That’s better,” said Whitey, cantering around the cage. “Hysterics are so unbecoming. Downright distasteful, if you ask me. I personally feel diminished by your behavior and think you should”-he shook his head and chuffed, spraying gummy globs of oatflaked spit-“apologize at once.”
You pulled your fist away and whispered, “I’m sorry.”
“You damned well ought to be. Is that any way to behave when you visit a sick friend? I think not. Sincerely.”
“Please, please tell me what’s happening.”
“No begging, if you please. Hey-would you like to see a trick? Ask me what two plus two equals, go on-oh, never mind, you’re a terrible audience. I’ll do it myself.” He cleared his throat and said, “Whitey Weis, the renowned Double-Dubya, here’s your question-quiet in the studio, please. For a handful of sugar cubes, tell us… What’s two plus two?” He extended his left leg and scraped his hoof against the cement four times. “Listen to that applause, folks, isn’t he amazing?” He trotted forward, pressing his face against the bars and looking down at you. “Did you like that? Please say you did, it’s my best one.”
You could only nod your head.
If the heart makes no sound when it shatters, then the mind is even quieter when it begins to collapse.
Whitey’s head jerked down and to the right once, twice, three times; he held it like that for a moment, then a shudder ran down his sides and he stamped a hoof down against the floor; when he turned his face toward you again his eyes were still and his expression pensive. “Look at me, kiddo.”
“What?”
“Watch that tone. Mind telling me why you had to come here?”
You pulled in a ragged, snot-filled breath and wiped your eyes. “I’m trying to find Beth.”
“Your fair lady-love? Stands about yea-high with one of the ten greatest smiles in the history of history itself? The gal you’ve been in love with your whole life but who doesn’t really share your feelings? Or if she does, she’s too scared to act on them. That Beth?
“She was here earlier. She told me about Mabel, the poor old girl. Not that you’ll understand or even believe me, but I wept when I heard the news. Mabel was one of the good ones, and there are so very few of them left in the world as the day
s go by.”
You stumbled to your feet. “Where did she go?” You pointed to the right. “Did she go down there? Down those stairs? Is that why I can’t find her?”
Whitey stretched one leg forward, bent the other back at the knee, and leaned low. “If I say ‘yes,’ you’re going to go down there, aren’t you?” He shook his head in the slight, subtle, human manner, then gave a disapproving whistle. “I don’t know, kiddo. I was serious when I said you don’t want to do that. You have to be pretty desperate to get this far, but down there… once you hit the bottom of those stairs, there’s no coming back as you once were.”
Keepers ch-2 Page 22
