by Brett Adams
I hitched my leg up and pushed. Seen from above it made my body lie east-west. Due north was a cubicle. I rolled toward it, collected my head on the doorpost, adjusted, and got my torso inside.
Two feet above me sat a big red button, and above it the word “Call”.
I poured my will into my right arm.
I became an arm. An arm with a nasty McIlwraith-looking growth. And I flung myself at that big red button. Heard it clack against the wall. And browned-out again.
It can’t have been more than a minute when I woke again and I was not an arm any more and all the sky was a face. The face belonged to the nurse who had found me on my last visit to the hospital, when my legs had still worked and all I’d wanted was a simple X-ray.
I said, “I’d use the men’s john if it had a bigger mirror.” But all I got out was a couple of words and a kind of hissy sound.
Her face, already crinkled with concern, grew alarmed.
A memory of the voice of Major Jackson P. Tunney suddenly blared in my ears: “Got someone to give you CPR for an hour, you’ll be right as rain.”
Time to focus McIlwraith. Just the essentials.
I dialed my voice back to whisper and said, “Dead unless CPR. Don’t stop.”
Then the world went brown-black.
Out again.
And I was dead.
So Ailsa had been right. The case had killed me after all.
Write it on my headstone: here lies Janus McIlwraith, cut down in his prime by Other. My friend the actuary to file it one over from Xenotropic Fauna / Unregistered in Xenotropic Fauna / Derivative / Artificial Synthesis. Maybe that was more than one folder over. Whatever. I’d been close.
But it troubled me I was able to recognize my own death. Dead men aren’t supposed to recognize anything.
Ouch. The pain of paradox.
Pain? Nope. I had until then no idea what pain was. Returning to life was not the flutter of fairy wings and the yearning for an eternity postponed that I hear about. Not for me anyway.
No. That lovely young nurse who I’d called a good kid taught me the meaning of pain when her lungs breathed for mine, and her fists beat for my heart, and she dragged me back into life.
Let me tell you ― it hurt like a bastard.
Breath. Must have been a poet made it rhyme with Death.
I lived a lifetime flat on my back, half in half out of that cubicle in the women’s toilet, smelling bleach and tasting on her breath the tannins of herbal tea.
I browned out again and then the air filled with electronic shrieks. Something was clamped over my mouth. It hissed and tugged. Made me part of it.
I became aware of voices.
One was talking about John Doe.
I wanted to tell them it was Janus, Janus Pain.
I wanted to tell them to turn off their stupid machine, because their stupid machine was marching uphill against a poison that wouldn’t be invented for centuries, and their machine was leaving tread marks on my brain.
Then I thought of Grace, and told myself to shut up.
An age later the machine stopped screaming. Someone settled the thing on my mouth better (a cat?) and it stopped hissing.
No one thought to remove the granite boulder from my chest. I got used to it, so much so that when it came time to remove it I’d probably think I was floating.
The voices in the room lost their stridency. The atmosphere became calmer.
I must have slept because I dreamed of watching my shadow on a wall move to its own beat.
Next thing I knew I was awake and it was morning.
I felt no transition from sleep. I simply found myself sitting propped up on pillows looking into a hospital room full of clear, warm sunlight. It was pouring through a gap in the curtains and reflecting off the white walls.
A machine was wired to round plasters stuck to my chest, and piped contentedly every few seconds or so from my left. Into that arm was plumbed an IV line that dripped clear liquid in measured time.
I heard a stirring on my right, and looked to find the young nurse slumped into a chair. She wore grey track pants, joggers, and a red sweater two sizes too large. Her hair was gathered into a ponytail. Her eyes were bloodshot, the skin beneath them looked bruised.
“You look like shit,” I said.
Her lips cracked in a smile and it transformed her face.
“You should take a look at yourself,” she said.
I declined. I couldn’t face another mirror right then.
“Where are my clothes?” I said.
Her smile was replaced by an expression of confusion.
“My clothes?” I said. “The streets are mean, but they don’t need my naked carcass on them.”
“You can’t― You’re not―” Her shoulders hitched as she took a deep breath and seemed to collect herself. “You can’t go. Don’t you want to know what happened to you?”
“I know what happened to me. And what do you mean I can’t go?”
The machine tut-tutted me and beeped apace. I ripped the sticky plasters off. Wrong thing to do, apparently. It started wailing.
The nurse leaned across me with a sigh and silenced it.
“You’re in no condition―”
“This is my condition,” I said, and gripped the IV line just above where it punctured my skin. I squinted, and drew it out. The sticky plaster tore away, and the line left a dribble of pink liquid along my wrist.
“You’re coming up from a blood sugar crash. Your kidneys nearly packed up. And the lab, after three days, still has no idea what hit you.”
“Wait,” I said, staring into nothing. I turned to her. “Is that a catheter?”
I took her silence to mean yes.
I hate catheters nearly as much as I hate underdone hashbrowns.
I sunk my hands beneath the sheet and pulled it free, feeling for a moment like the worm being threaded onto the fishhook.
“Now, where are my clothes―wait!” I said.
Her eyes flashed in exasperation.
“Did you say ‘three’ days? Have I been out three days?”
She nodded.
That explained why my body only felt like snap-frozen laundry rather than burning brush.
“I have to get out of here,” I said, and threw the sheet back.
Finally a real spark leapt into her eyes. She stood, stood over me, and said, “No. I won’t let you.” She crossed her arms.
“I need to go,” I said.
“You need to rest.”
“Someone might die,” I said.
“My point exactly,” she said.
It was like arguing with a head cold.
I swiveled my legs around and put my feet on the floor. I tested their weight. Each leg gave me the thumbs up but I couldn’t help thinking they were exchanging concerned glances.
The nurse uncrossed her arms and laid one hand on my shoulder.
I gave her the eyeball.
“Really?” I said, gently mocking.
Her only response was to crook an eyebrow and jut her chin.
And suddenly it was the most funny thing in the world. I laughed hard. It hurt, brought tears to my eyes, but I couldn’t stop.
Here was this girl, giving away a hundred pounds and a foot, going to stop me with her little mitt, when all she had to do was step out of the room and call for security. Instead she’d opted for a feat of arms.
I collapsed back onto the pillows and waited for the laughter to stop wracking my body. I covered my eyes with my hand and rested for a moment in the sweet darkness.
“There now,” she said, when I was spent. “Now you’re being reasonable.”
“Lady―” I began. Then, “What’s your name?”
“Charlie,” she said.
“Charlie, I have to get out of here. With your help, if possible, or without it. Either way, I am leaving.”
She was silent. I could only guess what she was thinking from inside my cave.
I felt the mattress
tilt. I opened my eyes to find she’d sat next to me.
“You haven’t told me your name.”
“Janus,” I said.
“Janus,” she said, trying the word like the first mouthful of an unfamiliar dish. “That’s a nice name. Does it have a meaning?”
Entries and exits, I thought. He who looks both ways. Hedge-better. Symmetry. I wondered if my mother had known she was prescient.
Symmetry.
Symmetry...
I opened my eyes and found hers looking at me. They were pretty eyes despite the red marbling. Clear blue. Young eyes. Eyes that saw to a horizon not yet cluttered by an inkling there exist other kinds of endings than happy. At any rate, that is what I saw in them.
“Can I tell you a story,” I said.
“Sure,” she said, sounding the opposite.
“Once upon a time,” I began. Then, “Scratch that. It begins like this: It was a dark and stormy night...”
And I told her. About me. About Grace. About the hole in time that I slipped through most days like a coin through a torn pocket. About the Speighs dropping like flies. About all of it.
All of it I could be bothered telling. I gave her the skeleton from tip to tail. The bones of my story.
She sat beside me, silent and still. Her eyes on the carpet, her head cocked as if listening for a distant call. It was impossible to tell what she was thinking.
When I’d finished I tried telling myself it didn’t matter what she thought. Sure, it might be tougher breaking out of an insane asylum, but apart from that...
But I didn’t believe me. It did matter. On the other side of the mirror Nate knew I needed him. I don’t know why it had never occurred to me that I needed someone this side too.
“The man in the story,” she said, “is you.”
It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah,” I said. “And?”
“And what?” she said.
“Do you believe me?”
She shook her head gently.
I braced myself to stand, but she was talking again.
“Search me,” she said, still shaking her head, “but I do.” She looked at me. “I do believe you.”
“I knew you were a good kid,” I said. “Welcome to the madhouse. Don’t drink the water.”
She got me home. She wanted to fuss over me, stock the fridge, plump my pillows, pepper me with questions. She was full of advice. I ignored most of it, but she did convince me of one thing. I couldn’t wade straight back in. I was stiffer than I’d thought. I gave myself the day off.
She hung around, poking through the scant rooms of my apartment, making me feel like the exciting uncle. Every so often her gaze would linger on something of Grace’s―a necklace, a comb―and she’d turn to me and say, “Hers?” Perhaps I looked like the necklace-wearing type. I suppose I had just had my ass handed to me.
Later we sat around the dinette, drinking tea out of cups big as soup bowls. She was nestling hers in two hands, balanced on the top of her drawn-up knees. I was absorbed by the steam winding up off the liquid’s surface.
“I found your card the day after you were admitted,” she said.
“Oh?” I said.
“What’s a provenor?”
“Hmm?” I said. That streamer of steam was downright fascinating.
“Provenor,” she said. “Says that on your card.”
“It’s what they call a private investigator, after the Event,” I said. “In New York, at any rate. I haven’t travelled.”
“I thought you said you’d been all over the world?”
“I have,” I said, and smiled. “This side of the mirror.”
“For a company?”
“For clients.”
“Doing what?”
I shrugged. “Fixing things.”
“What sort of things?”
“Broken things,” I said.
She paused to adjust her grip on her cup, and said, “You must be very smart.”
“I had an expensive education,” I said, and watched her gaze become furtive. My guess was she was trying to work out which was more interesting—my past, or the future.
I slurped my tea, from habit not heat.
“After the Event the world went to hell in a handbasket for a while. When it returned―a little disheveled, a little thinner, and with eyes just that little bit crazy―nine out of ten police investigations were about property disputes. Certifying the provenance of a parcel of land, an artifact, occasionally a body, was vital to putting life back together. So much of it had been wiped from the face of the earth by the flick of a switch. There was a massive backlog, even after the switch from martial law. The cops handed a lot of the work to private dicks. An army of them sprang into existence to deal with that one problem―putting as many of the pieces back together as possible, restoring the image of old Liberty.”
I slurped more of the tea laced with honey and a whiskey stiffener.
“The name stuck, even though provenors now deal with the whole shtick, everything the police dicks touch and some more they don’t.”
“Sounds exciting,” she said, then shivered. Her gaze touched my face then flicked to her cup. “But not the torture.”
I said nothing.
“You were not always quiet when you slept,” she said.
I sculled the rest of my tea.
When I looked at Charlie again, I found her blue eyes still hunting through the room, questioning, speculating. I thought about my decision to tell her about me. Symmetry, I’d thought. Someone this side of the mirror to confide in.
But that’s about where the symmetry ended. In every other way, Charlie was the opposite to Nate. Female to male. She was the first page to his last. She was a sponge and he was a well. She was the ore, and he was metal thrice-worked.
It made me think about Grace. I suppose that made me Law, according to the apostle Paul.
Graceless, according to everyone else.
“I’m gunna hit the sack,” I said.
“Of course,” she said, and laid her cup down half-full.
I let her out onto the floor’s corridor and walked with her to the elevator.
“My next shift’s not till the weekend,” she said. “I’ll check on you tomorrow.”
“Not tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll be working. Try the day after. Then I might have something worth telling.”
She nodded, hesitated, then apparently thought better of whatever she’d been about to say.
“See you then.”
I was dead tired but not sleepy.
I sat in front of the Royal and typed up the stray case notes that had been nagging me to get out:
* The murder scene at the Landmark Hotel: the ice found in the ensuite had to be put there by Eutarch, before his demise, or else his killer. Which, given the melt, made it a big piece of ice to begin with. Or big pieces.
* Why such a blood bath for Eutarch? Different brother, different MO?
* A syndicate called Phlogiston Capital are paying big bills for Alltron projects.
On a whim, I took down Grace’s crusty, one-volume Webster dictionary and looked up phlogiston. It told me phlogiston was a combustive, fire-like element at the center of a defunct scientific theory. Didn’t mean anything to me.
I finished up:
* Why me?
I pulled the paper free of the typewriter and stowed it with the others.
Over on the wall parallel to the end of the bed was a bookshelf. It had a bench running waist high and on that was a Pioneer record player. Records were stowed in a rack in a cupboard beneath the player, and I hunted through the fuzzy-edged sleeves of my 78s for something pared down but heavy. I settled on Muddy Waters. (Which album? His ‘77 comeback, Hard Again.) I slipped the album from its cover and slotted it onto the spindle. The motor spun up and I placed the needle on the vinyl, and heard the hiss and pop of the lead-in.
I let him growl at me that, yeah, ooh yeah, everythin’ was gonna be alright.
&
nbsp; But a minute later I’d lifted the needle and was pacing the floor. Turned out I couldn’t sit still. I’d been too long doing nothing. My limbs felt charged with an unwanted energy. I was a dumped TV-tube with a killing charge. I needed earthing.
So I reached my acoustic down from its bracket by the end of the bookshelf and settled into the armchair. Sitting slantwise with one leg cocked over the arm I could get at the strings.
After a few false starts my fingers went hunting for the so-blue-you-can-eat-it rhythm of the Allman Brothers’ Not My Cross to Bear. There was a speckle of rust on the phosphor-bronze strings, but they were crisp enough.
When I got to the end I went back to the start and began again―teasing with the resolve then turning it around. When I got to the end of that I did it again. A serenade for sleep.
The rhythm wore a rut so deep in my head I hardly noticed when my fingers began to embellish it. They hung harmonics over it, like wind chimes on a locomotive. My left pinkie couldn’t stop poking middle-G like it was a bruise. I hunted for the high resolve.
I hunted a long time for the perfect resolution.
When I finally hung the guitar up, I was hard pressed shedding my clothes before falling into bed. Someone had switched all those tons of oxygen for a soporific.
The last thought to trouble my mind that night was the memory that most versions of Not My Cross to Bear run to just 4:48, when the song ends with a fade out.
But the original runs another twelve seconds to five minutes. Those seconds contain silence after the fade out, and are followed by a fade-in and a cold close.
I like the original better.
— 19 —
Next morning I beat the sun out of bed, dressed, gargled coffee, and paused in front of the mirror to check the score.
The bruise over my kidney felt wadded like a poultice. My neck was braced each side by a rod of iron.
I could’ve taken the parts that didn’t hurt to Disneyland, paid full fare, and had change left for a bender at Vegas. The rest were just a constant buzz of pain.
I reached inside myself and reset the thermostat. The pain receded into the background. My brain filed it in the everyday, along with a – for air; and g – for gravity. I dug in. Found a new level. The only spike in the signal was the job, the case―that was the only itch that needed scratching.
