From the rustle, she could tell that he was pulling on the soft cotton drawstring pajamas the hospital had issued him. She would tell him that she had absolutely no interest in his fledgling body, but she would simply embarrass him more. What did hold an interest for her was his psyche, wounded and malleable. His fragile ego, his trembling soul. Those she had designs upon. “Ready?” she inquired softly, before turning around.
He’d barely hissed, “All right,” before she was facing him.
He scrubbed a hand across his face defiantly, pushing the hair off his forehead.
“Good.”’ She checked her watch again, recording the time on her clipboard. “Ten minutes with the helmet, and then I go home, and you go back to your room, with control of the remote.”
Something sparked deep in Brandon’s eyes. “I don’t want the helmet.”
He couldn’t possibly suspect anything. He was merely being balky. Susan dropped her clipboard to her hip and reminded him, “We had an agreement about this.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Brandon, we’re here, working for you, but this is like trying to do a tango with a brick wall. You do want to go home, don’t you?”
The intensity in his eyes flickered. Susan realized then that she had struck at the core of him. He didn’t want to go home. Not really. Something there had been so hellish that it had driven him to this desperation in the first place. She softened her voice. “Let me put it this way— you don’t want to stay here, do you?”
“No.”
“Then you’re going to have to work the program. I can’t work for you if you don’t. Do you want me to leave a note for Dr. Whatley that you’re being uncooperative?”
Whatley was the physician who’d committed Brandon to the psychiatric ward.
Sulkily, “No.”
“Then let’s finish up with ten minutes in the helmet, and we’re both off the hook.”
She laid her arm gently across his shoulders as she walked him to his room. She could feel the tension in his body as she did.
Brandon had no way of realizing that he was coming along beautifully in her experimentations. No way at all. The ten minutes flew by as if it had wings. Then she secured the software from the helmet in her private safe and got ready to leave.
Humming, she shrugged out of her lab coat and locked her desk. She walked out of the psych ward, the orderly on the front desk smiling at her as she passed through the swinging doors, breaking into song, her voice floating behind her.
“Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me....”
Chapter 18
Brandon waited until he could hear the tuneless humming of the doctor as she left the ward. Then he threw himself out from under the covers of his bed. He ran to the bathroom where he threw up, once, retchingly, so painfully that he hugged his rib cage as his dinner came up. He watched it floating sourly in the toilet before he reached out a shaking hand and flushed it down.
When the water was clear, he kept staring down at it, dizzy and nauseated, afraid that he would have to barf again. If the guys could see me now, worshiping the porcelain god—Ole Brand X has tossed it again. What’d you lose down there, four eyes?
He leaned on his wrists and slowly became aware that they did not pain him anymore. They had itched maddeningly for the last few days. He wondered what kind of scars he would have. If he would have to hide them, face all kinds of dorky questions from jerks who should know better than to ask them anyway.
His stomach clenched again. Brand opened his mouth and his throat ached, but nothing came out but strings of drool.
He wiped his mouth and flushed the toilet again anyway. Then he put his head under the sink faucet and rinsed his mouth out, the vomit still bitter tasting. Hospital water wasn’t much better. He splashed some on his face and squinted into the bathroom mirror. Strange, to see his face without his glasses. They wouldn’t let him have them here. Something about breaking the lenses and using them. He’d told them and told them his lenses were plastic, lighter weight for the thickness, but nobody had paid any attention to him. His right hand balled into a fist and hit the rim of the sink in frustration.
Nobody paid any attention to him at all, except for Dr. Craig, and Brand thought, heck no, he knew she was spooky. Oh, she acted like all the other doctors, dressed nice, looked like she didn’t know how to sweat, but those eyes of hers. They were like high beams from one of the X-Men. They could see things that other people could only guess at. They sure saw through him.
That was one of the things about her that scared him. He got the feeling she knew everything about him that he knew, and more. All the stuff he didn’t know, all the stuff that swam round and round in his skull until he felt like bursting, because he’d never understood any of it, never, but knew it must be awful.
And she seemed to like him anyway, despite the bad stuff, and that bothered him, too, because he didn’t know if she liked him because she was a good person and thought he was all right. Or if she liked him because she was some kind of tweaked pervert like he was.
Brand made a face at himself in the mirror. He staggered back to the bed and lay down on top of the covers. He plucked at them nervously. Yeah, Dr. Craig seemed to know everything, even the stuff they never talked about. He’d tried to, once, and she’d just raised her chin and looked him in the eyes, and the words had gone all quiet in him. He not only couldn’t get them out anymore, he lost them. He hadn’t spoken for most of the rest of the day.
But then he’d realized it didn’t matter. She’d known, she must have. And if she didn’t, if she’d hadn’t, what would she think of him now?
It was those thoughts that kept him awake, made him sick to his stomach, churned everything around worse than a Tornado ride. He’d never had thoughts like that before in his life, not before coming to the hospital, and he didn’t know what to do.
He’d never wanted to kill anything before in his life, except possibly for himself, and he’d never thought of what he’d done in that way anyhow. No, he’d done what he’d done because he couldn’t stand the pain and emptiness and guilt and hurt anymore. That he’d lived while Grammie and Dad had been taken. He couldn’t stand the numb way his mother had begun walking through life, taking care of him, feeding him breakfast, taking him to school, bringing him home, as though it were some kind of joyless life sentence she’d been condemned to.
No, he hadn’t tried to kill himself. He’d merely tried to cut away the pain. He wasn’t trying to hurt anyone. He was just trying to take the hurt away. No one seemed to understand.
What scared him more than anything was that they said they did. That they understood far more than he did, because that was their job. They’d spent years learning it in college and beyond. They understood, and they’d help him. At first, Brand had hoped they couldn’t.
Now he was scared stiff one of them could look into his skull and see what kind of monster lived in there. Woke up at night and stirred around. Something that lived in blood and splashed it all over, sloshed through it like he used to do when he was just a kid wading through rain puddles. Something like knives and barbed wire and doing things to soft flesh....
Women.
Brand plucked at the covers again and then yanked them from under him and wrapped them about him. He knew his body was getting older, changing. It was daunting to wake up in the morning with his penis all hard and stiff and hurtful, an ache that took forever to go away. He knew it could happen at school, though it hadn’t to him yet. And he knew it had to do with girls, with women, and sex, and fucking....
It was one thing to stare at the girls in his sixth grade class and watch them grow boobs, little buds of soft flesh poking through their T-shirts and blouses until they graduated, finally, to bras. It was always a relief when that happened. It was one thing to stare at the old copy of Playboy that he and Mike had picked out of the trash, but this thing that had taken root in his skull like one of the creatures from Alien , threatening to burst out....
His stomach roiled again. Brand put his hands to his face, as if he could hold onto everything that way.
All he could dream about was people laid out like so much road kill. It was all getting mixed up together, the throbbing of his growing needs, and the blood, and the violence and torture....
He couldn’t tell anyone. He knew they would be horrified. They would shove him away, lock him up for good in some nut hospital, worse than this one.
He grabbed up the remote and turned the TV on, even though the screen was blurry without his glasses. He couldn’t go back to sleep, he wouldn’t. He tuned in “Nick at Night” where every mom seemed born to the job.
His forearms itched. He scrubbed a hand over the bandages on first one and then the other, faint relief. One thing that he had learned here was that he’d cut wrong. He’d cut across. Next time he’d cut up and down, from the elbow to the palm. That was the way you did it. When you wanted to end the pain. When your head felt like it was going to explode and something terrible was going to come leaping out, when you weren’t you anymore.
After dinner hours at Silverado eased slowly from hectic into quietude. Joyce checked her watch and got ready to summarize the points she’d been making to the class of eight who sat and slouched around the living room, listening. They occupied worn-out recliners and sagging sofas and sprawled across pillows thrown on the floor. Their faces were of every color, shaped by every economic sector, and they were universal in that, when she had first begun speaking to them weeks ago, their sole expression had been compounded of fear and fatigue. She normally would not have been out this late without having been home first, but today, as her mama would have said, her plate was full. Full to overflowing.
She thought of blaming Carter Wyndall for her schedule, but she knew better. If not Carter’s friend, there would have been someone else for her to take on. There always was. That was the discouraging side of her vocation. There was always another battered spouse, another abused child. She’d like to take a piece of chalk, draw a line, and say, “All right. That’s enough. The shit stops here .” But she knew better.
Her mind working, her mouth on automatic, giving a lecture she gave weekly to five different shelters throughout the county, she finished up, then looked at her watch. “Okay, ladies, what’s next?”
“Bath time,” three young mothers said, and slunk out. The rest of her audience checked the wall clock.
“It’s Dr. Craig’s night.”
“Oh? Is it?” Joyce usually didn’t overlap with Susan Craig’s rounds. “Take a break, then. I don’t see her van yet.”
She watched the women go, thinking that she might take the opportunity to discuss McKenzie Smith with the doctor before she left. The resistance of the police to treating the case as that of a battered wife frustrated her, though she had to admit that the preliminary investigation gave them little choice. The neighbors had seen no one at the residence but the two of them, and there was a history of family domestic violence.
One of the residents, a lovely dark-haired girl with two small babies under the age of two, came back into the living room with an iced tea for Joyce. Joyce took it, murmuring, “Thank you.”
Drucilla would not look up. She shrugged her shoulders and walked away quickly. Joyce watched the young woman as she picked her way through the cluttered, comfortable rooms, never looking up, always looking down as if afraid to see what might be facing her. Joyce sighed and downed the iced tea.
She sat and made notes in her casebook, then looked up and saw the time. She had her own family to think of, Joyce chided herself. Susan Craig was late. A phone call in the morning would have to suffice. She packed her briefcase, drank the last sugary sips of her cold drink, said good-bye to the resident adviser, and left.
As her battered Hyundai pulled around the corner, she did not see the van easing out of a shadowed driveway from the other end of the block.
Susan Craig waited until the advocate’s car had rattled out of sight before easing the van into a stop at the curb. Joyce had a lot of savvy. It had been a long day, and Susan did not feel like encountering her. She sat at the curb five long minutes, heat building up inside the van, before opening the door to step out.
At the panel doors, she opened both wide, revealing five computer stations, padded chairs, and equipment. At the sound of the panel doors sliding open, there came an echoing whoop of excitement from the house, and the front yard filled with children.
Susan found a smile. The children were not well-dressed, the clothes were hand-me-downs, usually too big and well-worn. WORLD CUP 1994 soccer shirts seemed to be in favor here, the silk-screened letters and designs nearly faded clean away. The biggest boy, with flashing dark eyes and hair pulled back in a slicked-up ponytail, had the Lion King shirt, even though it pulled tightly about his armpits and shoulders.
She put a hand up for stillness. The children bustled about, the impacts of their bodies noisy, but their mouths shut.
“Your mothers are first,” she said. “I know I’m late, so I can’t take too many of you today. But I’ll be back. You know I’ll be back.”
To a chorus of “awwws,” she added, “Next time we’ll have a kids only day. Okay?”
They screamed approval. Susan reached out, tousled a few heads, slapped palms with the Lion King r and turned her attention toward the modest house which bore the ridiculous name of Silverado. She had once asked the resident supervisor, Tricia Gardener, why the name. “If every cloud has a silver lining,” the answer had come, “why this place must be a mother lode.”
Susan dealt with her clients briskly and efficiently, believing neither in patronizing them nor coddling them. They had made the decision to strike out on their own, changing forever the downward spiral which had been consuming them. She placed each woman at a computer and started the biofeedback program designed to help them combat stress as well as reinforce self-esteem. The lone computer in the corner belonged to the children, and they waited, big eyed, for her to choose the one who would get to play today.
It would be Lion King , of course, Donaldo of the flashing eyes, ten years of defiance and sly intelligence, eyes too old inside that cranium. He jumped into the van, avoided the women who were already sinking into beta wave activity, and went straight to his station. He sank into the captain’s chair and swiveled it around, waiting for her.
She leaned over, making sure that the station had a full battery pack, and above, her hand brushing across it casually, that the camera was fully focused on the boy. Donnie leaned over the keyboard and picked up the joystick. His shirt bound him.
“Wouldn’t you like to take that off? I must have another shirt around here somewhere.”
“ Lion King ?” he asked.
“Maybe. Maybe The Shadow . Maybe something newer.”
He considered it, head tilted, bright eyed like a mockingbird in the garden considering a grub in the grass. The head went from side to side. “Okay,” he said, and shrugged out of the shirt.
He had a beautiful body, scarred in only two or three places. The cigarette burns, she recognized, she was uncertain of the cause of the third scar. Still, they did not matter. The computer which would record and interpret the data would airbrush those blemishes out. As the camera scanned his body for later translation into digitization, she took her time rummaging in a handled shopping bag of old clothing and finally came up with a BATMAN FOREVER promo shirt which had never even been worn.
“Wow!” Donnie snatched the bête noire shirt away from her and pulled it over his head. “This is cool.”
“You bet it is. Okay, want to play today?”
His answer was muffled as he strapped on his helmet and slid his hands into the virtual reality gloves.
Susan smiled widely. “Good.” She reached forward and initiated the program. Frame by frame, layer by layer, she was constructing a new person from the foundation named Donaldo. When she was done, she hoped to have learned something extremely important. Then, she would deconstruct
him. Like an onion, she would peel him back down to his original psyche. Like Brandon at the hospital ward, this boy was hers, hers as clearly as if she’d birthed him. And no one, not at Silverado, not at Mount Mercy, had the slightest inkling of what she was doing, or could do, with the computer terminal, software, and subliminal programming.
She sat back and watched as the boy submerged into his fantasy world. Children were so important. They were the hidden resource of the future.
His mother would never enter the van. She leaned inside it now, her hair a thick burnished brunette, French-braided down her back. She had done it herself, no doubt, for Susan had often seen her braiding her hair and that of the others, fingers flashing in intricate patterns. Graciela had high, delicate cheekbones and wide, dark eyes. Her lips were not particularly pretty, and she was somewhat chinless, but her dusky skin had stayed unblemished despite her youth. She did not look old enough to be Donnie’s mother, but Susan knew that she’d carried him at fourteen, had him at fifteen.
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