Nightjack

by Tom Piccirilli

  Pace said, How about if you handle this one, Jimmy?

  Jimmy said, I been jest waitin’ fer the chance, boyo.

  Jimmy Boyd rolled over, propped himself up with one hand, and jumped to his feet. His teeth were full of blood as he grinned and raised his fists. He looked at the clumsy orderly and said, “All right, son, would ye like to lay another one to this chin now? I’ll wager my dog’s ass ye won’t be able.”

  Brutus went, “Wha’?”

  Jimmy missed the days of slugging it toe to toe with Honey Melody and all the rest. He wanted to make this last for a while but thought it might just be better to get it over with quick and get on with his day.

  All he needed was three jabs and four right crosses before Brutus was unconscious with pulped lips and dislocated jaw.

  The nurse going, Yeee ahhh AHH.

  Pace opened his eyes. Jane whispered in his ear, Will, hold on, hold on. There’s still one more you need to finish.

  “You’re here because you’re ill,” Dr. Brandt said.

  “Well yeah,” Pace said, “I figured that much.”

  “And you’re considered dangerous.”

  “By you?”

  “Yes,” she admitted. “You’re a threat to yourself and others.”

  “But I can tell you’re not afraid.”

  “I am, but you’re my responsibility.”

  “What did you want to do before this?” he asked.

  “Do? What do you mean?”

  “When you were a child. No little girl wants to grow up to be a psychiatrist, right? What did you want to do?”

  “Be a veterinarian. I lived on a farm with my aunt and uncle for a short time when I was a child. It made a great impression on me at the time. What did you want to do?”

  He knew she’d turn it around, but even so, she’d given up a portion of herself. If he ever asked her a question, the question came back around to him. It limited his curiosity. “I don’t remember.”

  “You told me once you wanted to be a rodeo clown. You could make people laugh and also save lives. The danger also appealed to you.”

  “A kid doesn’t understand,” he said, thinking of her on a farm, feeding newborn calves with a baby bottle. Tossing handfuls of chicken feed, tending to wounded animals. It also rang some bells, struck a few deep chords. Why would she go live with her aunt and uncle? He wanted to ask more questions.

  If he actually had signed a voluntary committal then maybe he really did need help and had actually recognized the fact. But which him—which of the many hims—had done it? “You going to fix me up?”

  “That’s my intention.”

  “When?”

  “Soon, I hope.”

  “Fine,” Pace told her, smiling, his hands flat on the table in front of him. He reached down, grabbed the broken plastic cuffs he’d snapped with his leg muscles, and handed them to her. “Let’s get on with it. I still have someone I need to kill, and I’m sort of in a hurry here.”

  Dr. Brandt going pale, making notes, sweat on her brow, dripping.

  three

  Pia could barely handle the loose steering on the ‘78 Chevy she was driving. The bald tires squealed every time she shifted lanes or hit an exit ramp, the car shimmying wildly on the wet roads. Faust sat in the passenger seat, reading all the road signs out loud and muttering oddly phrased prayers. He glanced left and right because two angels, one fallen and one not, accompanied him everywhere.

  Pace sat in back between Hayden and Dr. Brandt. Hayden turned to him and said, “Jesus Christ, you’re breaking my heart. Aren’t you glad to see us?”

  He still couldn’t make out their faces yet, but the back of Pia’s head was in perfect focus. Everything was clear until she angled her chin aside, and then her features blurred. He reached out once and stroked her short black hair, noting how it curled slightly at her neck. She said nothing, did nothing. He looked in the rearview trying to make eye contact with her, but there wasn’t any reflection, just a watery haze that flowed and eddied.

  Dr. Brandt clutched his hand, but not in distress—he’d been mistaken about her being afraid of them. She’d not only been expecting them, but had actually been hoping for them, though she didn’t seem to want to admit it to herself. She had plenty of her own barriers. He thought, This lady here, she’s got some troubles of her own.

  He tightened his grip and said, “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  “I know that,” she told him.

  Pace kept flashing in and out, maybe going into a trance state, maybe just napping during the long drive. He awoke to himself once and his heart was hammering and he was clammy all over. His mind felt a little clearer, as if his body was trying to boil off the meds and force them out of his system. Somewhere inside himself there was a lama from Bhutan who could stick a spear through his arm and, without touching it, urge it free inch by inch without bleeding.

  Faust turned, leaned over the wide headrest, and asked, “Do you know who I am? Do you recognize me?”

  “Not really,” Pace said.

  “What’s that mean ‘not really’?”

  “I know it’s you, Faust, but I can’t see you very well. You’ve got no face.”

  “I don’t have a face?”

  “No.”

  Faust, perhaps smiling, a kind of quelled laughter coming from him.

  Hayden said, “So much for them curing him. We’re lucky. He’s still a wacky son of a bitch.”

  Dr. Brandt ground her back teeth together, the sound of bone grating on bone filling the car. “It’s a byproduct of his treatment.”

  “A coerced, discriminating hysterical blindness?” Faust said. “Wouldn’t that merely be another form of elicited hallucination?”

  “It was necessary,” she told him.

  Pace waited for further explanation but it didn’t come. She didn’t act aggressive in any way, as if afraid to behave like the family psychologists with their own daytime shows. They were popular on the ward, everybody gathering around the television and tossing empty plastic pill cups around the room. Watching the puffy doctors who’d bellow into crying women’s faces and grab abused wives by the shoulders, shaking them like they wanted to smack the shit out of them in front of thirty million viewers. The ward would go bananas, listening to these guys yelling, “You want to be a victim! He beats you because you subconsciously welcome the attacks! Take back your life! You’re allowing this tragedy to enter your home!”

  Like you could just put a sign on your window, No Trauma Allowed.

  Like you could ever control yourself.

  “It’s important we discuss this situation,” Dr. Brandt said.

  Pia’s hair shook back and forth, curls swirling down over unseen ears. “Not yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “Will isn’t here yet. Not all the way.”

  Pace faded out for a while. When he came back they were in the Bronx heading down into Manhattan. Faust was still reading the signs. “Henry Hudson Parkway South. George Washington Bridge, New Jersey, Bear Right. There’s an arrow going to the right. Tollbooth Ahead. Slow Down. Radar in Use.”

  ”Would you please stop that,” Pia told him. “Just sit there and be quiet.”

  “If I don’t help, you might drive us into a river.”

  “I’m not going to drive us into—”

  “Off a bridge. Our father who art insatiable. We could pile up on the parkway and kill entire families on vacation, don’t you realize that? Is that what you want? Children mutilated, infants—”

  “Hey,” Hayden said, “Mister Jolly, how about if you shut the hell up for now, huh?”

  Pace looked in the rearview again and saw the vague outline of Pia’s face in the wavering drift and swell of silver. She turned her head as she changed lanes and he saw a slight tinge of pink that might be her cheek. He reached out and touched it. Her skin was downy and cool. No one said anything, not even Pia.

  She made good time easing through the city, tires screeching on o
ccasion. She knew how to drive in bad weather and in city traffic, boxed in by taxis and delivery trucks. The rain tapered off.

  It took another forty-five minutes to ease down to the lower east side, an area of Alphabet City that hadn’t been hit by neighborhood revitalization efforts yet. She parked in front of the kind of block they’d be doing a Broadway musical about in a few years. The quick-witted, loveable pimp and the brazen, courageous methadone addict. The ventriloquist priest who sang about tax exemption and junk bonds with his look-alike puppet.

  Dr. Brandt grabbed him by the wrist. “Will?”

  “Yeah. I’m all right.”

  “You look pale.”

  “My head is sort of spinning.”

  “Take your medication.”

  “No!” Hayden shouted. “We need him back.”

  “Not like that. Not when he gets bad.”

  “That’s exactly what we need. You know that. It’s why you’re here.”

  “I’ve made a mistake,” she said.

  “Maybe so, but there’s nothing you can do about it now.” Hayden opened the Chevy door. “Let’s go.”

  The building stood flanked by shooting galleries, meth and heroin addicts leaning against brick walls and bumping into lampposts. Two blocks west were museums, art galleries, and apartments going for the mid-seven figures, but right here was squatters’ row.

  Walking slowly with determination, Dr. Brandt appeared set in her ways now, as if she’d thrown in with the losing team but wanted to see it through to the end. Pia led them up the front steps of a brownstone with most of its windows boarded.

  Dr. Brandt asked, “So is this where you’ve been staying the last four months?”

  “Most of the time,” Pia said. “Here or other places like it.” A note of pride chimed in her voice. This life had hardened her for a specific purpose. Pace wondered what it might be, and what role he was supposed to play toward fulfilling it.

  He stepped up against Dr. Brandt and felt the brush of her breasts, and something in his chest ignited once more. He wondered, Am I in love?

  Pia unlocked the front door and Pace saw the hint of pink once more. He couldn’t help himself and had to touch it again. Pia remained silent and Dr. Brandt let out a slightly mournful sigh.

  Here he was, stuck between two women—one utterly, perfectly beautiful, and the other without a face.

  Sometimes the symbols and metaphors of your life grew so large and wide that you couldn’t avoid them no matter how nutty you were.

  Pia hit the lights and the hideous sound of scurrying erupted all around them. Pace couldn’t tell if they were rats or roaches, but his stomach tightened. A cereal box on the kitchen table toppled over. Dr. Brandt let out a gasp and took a small step backward directly into Pace’s arms. He held her for a moment and she didn’t fight, didn’t respond. He let her go.

  The furnishings had been appropriated from gutters and alleys. A legless couch propped up on bricks, a scarred kitchen table, and hundreds of water-stained books which Faust must’ve ferreted out of trash bins. A gorgeous leather chair with a tear directly in the center of its back, as if the guy sitting there had been run through with a cutlass.

  On the table were Hayden’s pads and pens. For years he’d been composing one long letter to his mother, who’d died when he was three. His father had drank himself to death when Hayden was eight. There were no family members to take him in. He was misdiagnosed with an IQ of 62, considered a moron, became a ward of the state, and placed in a home with the mongoloids and mentally challenged.

  The day he turned eighteen he walked into the office of the executive director of the institution where he was living, found the IQ test in the filing cabinet, answered the questions on the spot, and even graded himself. One hundred thirty-five. Pretty frickin’ good. He told the director that he wasn’t stupid, he just had more important things to worry about when he was a kid.

  The executive director decided that pretending to be a simpleton in order to live with the mentally disabled proved he was nuts, and immediately shipped Hayden off to Garden Falls. He’d been there nearly five years when Pace met him.

  The compulsive letter-writing was a symptom of hypergraphia, the obsessive need to write extensive journal entries or missives. Hayden always left the ongoing letter out in the open so somebody, if not his mother, might read it. Pace never did. After Hayden filled up one pad he destroyed it and proceeded to the next.

  Pace sat in the leather chair but couldn’t get comfortable. He drew his bottles of medication out of his pockets and looked at them.

  Dr. Brandt said, “Do you want to take your meds, Will?”

  “I guess you’re not too worried about me becoming psychologically dependent on drugs.”

  “They help you.”

  “They weaken him, you mean,” Pia said.

  “Are you prepared for what might happen if he goes off them?”

  “No, but we have no choice. I thought it was already decided.”

  “You know he needs them.”

  Hayden let out a snicker, part distilled cynicism, part little boy fear. “Not as much as we need him.”

  So, that’s the way it was going to be.

  Faust circled the small room, once, twice. He brought a hand to the emptiness where a mouth might be, stroking a bottom lip that wasn’t there. “Let him decide.”

  They all stared at Pace. Terrific. He couldn’t figure out if the meds would let him to see their faces or blank them out totally—body, voice, and memory. He thought of Ernie slapping him. He thought of Brutus punching him. He thought of Jane, burning, reaching out. Her ghost telling him not to die. He thought of the thing inside him that even now was snickering, thinking about blood and kidney pie made with human kidneys.

  It was crazy allowing a crazy person to decide whether he should take his pills or not. He wasn’t dealing with stable people.

  Pace walked to the window and looked out. The street was full of activity. Men seated on the steps of the building, drinking beer, passing a joint back and forth. The meth-heads lay out across the sidewalk. A Chinese delivery boy riding by on a bicycle. Two whores laughing, two others arguing. Cars rolled past slowly. Someone shouting in Spanish.

  Remember Cassandra and Kaltzas and Pythos.

  The dead will follow.

  He took out his pills. You had to give it to science, packing so much dread and possibility into something so small. 200 mgs of magic that slapped foam across your searing brain.

  “What do these damn things do?” he asked.

  “They help control your dissociative identity disorder.”

  It certainly sounded like serious fun. Something inside of him was being willfully obtuse, making him ignorant. It didn’t want him to remember. “What the hell is that?”

  “A condition in which two or more distinctive identities or personality states alternate in controlling your consciousness and behavior.”

  “Oh. Multiple personality. Yeah.”

  “That’s an outdated term. MPD has been re-designated DID. Dissociative Identity Disorder. Many doctors think it may be a variation of PTSD. Post traumatic Stress Disorder. There are other causes and conditions as well. These include head injuries and brain disease. AIDS dementia complex. Epilepsy or other seizure disorders. Identity disturbances in DID result from the patients having split off entire personality traits or characteristics, as well as memories. When a stressful or traumatic experience triggers the reemergence of these dissociated parts, the patient switches—usually within seconds—into an alternate personality.”

  Pace liked listening to her. “Oh?”

  “Some patients have histories of erratic performance in school or in their jobs caused by the emergence of alternate personalities during examinations or other stressful situations. Patients vary with regard to their alternates’ awareness of one another.”

  It was good to know what you had, and what had you. He wondered if he could keep all the anagrams straight, if they had some ki
nd of trick to help you memorize it Doe-Ray-Me style. “I wondered about all the people inside me.”

  “You still feel them?”

  “Yes.”

  “All of us suffer from it,” Faust said.

  Dr. Brandt nodded and looked around, like she was fielding questions from an audience. “Many DID patients sometimes have setbacks in mixed therapy groups because other patients are bothered or frightened by their personality switches. But you four—”

  Again, she stopped. Never just giving him the answers he wanted, always forcing him to beg for more. And the thing inside him not wanting to hear.

  “Us four what?” Pace asked.

  “You four accommodate one another.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  “It is. You make each other sicker.”

  The name on the prescription bottles was WILLIAM PACELLA. Pace felt heat rising on the back of his neck and he saw Big Joe Ganucci’s elderly face, the Ganooch just sitting in his wheelchair in the middle of the room with the sacred heart of Jesus picture on the wall, overlooking the gutted bodies of his bodyguards.

  The guy who was giggling inside Pace started toying with a knife.

  four

  Tell me again, please, what do these pills do?” he asked.

  “They keep you from killing people,” Dr. Brandt said.

  There it was, finally. The truth laid out, raw and bleeding. “Who would I kill? Who did I kill?”

  “I’d prefer not to go into that right now.”

  Just like a shrink to fuck with you when you were down. He shook his head. “I’d be in jail, not a psych ward. And if I was found not guilty by reason of insanity, which almost nobody ever is, then I couldn’t have gone in voluntarily, and I wouldn’t have ever gotten out of the Falls.”

  “The police didn’t have enough evidence to indict you.”

  “Then maybe I didn’t do it.”

  Hayden, letting out a wild burst of laughter that sounded more animal than human, said, “Oh, believe us, you did it.”