Deceit

FIFTY-ONE

Snapshots.

My days passed like an album being flipped quickly to the back page, little pictures that were sometimes blurry, sometimes not. Sometimes I was even able to remember them.

“How did it happen?” I ASKED HERMAN WENTWORTH.

Stay in a hospital long enough and eventually you get to meet the head doctor. Okay, the retired head doctor.

The head doc emeritus.

“Human error,” Wentworth said. “A little problem with the cooling system. It was trial and error back then.”

A little problem… trial and error. Talking about a nuclear plant blowing sky-high as if they’d been building a volcano in science lab and the teacher ended up with some black on his face.

Just a little accident.

It happens.

“That’s what happened in Russia,” I said. “The same thing. The cooling system malfunctioned.”

“Yes.”

Wentworth was injecting me with something. I was staring up at the father of our country up on the ceiling.

Hello, George.

“The Aurora Dam plant was just a cover,” I said. “They needed the water to cool down the core.”

“They had their secret plants,” Wentworth said. “So did we. It was a different time. We lived under the shadow of nuclear Armageddon. Hard to imagine now. The pervasive fear.”

“And when the plant blew, it was just a dam bursting. A flood. Only the water wasn’t swimming with dead bodies and microbes-not just dead bodies. It was swimming with radioactivity. You covered it up. Took whoever survived that day and hid them away. American’s own little Karabolka.”

“What do you think? It was 1954. Tell the world we’d just had a twenty-two megaton nuclear accident? Tell the Russians? Tell the American people? Like I said, it was a very different time.”

“There were a lot of things you didn’t tell the American people about back then. That boys’ school in Rochester. The pregnant women in Vanderbilt. And this place. When it was Marymount Central. By the way, VA Hospital 138-was that an inside joke? Uranium 138-where mushroom clouds come from.”

He didn’t answer me; he was pulling out the syringe.

“You let one go,” I said. “One survivor. The little girl-Bailey Kindlon. Why?”

“Ahh… Bailey. So scared, so little. She’d mostly stayed out of the water. Radioactively and relatively speaking, she was clean. And she was only 3-that too. She maybe wouldn’t have seen things some of the older ones did-or understood them.”

“When you told me you were in the 499th, I should’ve known right then. The good old days in Hiroshima. What’s in that shot? It hurts.”

“Something new. Think of it as sodium Pentothal. Times ten.”

“All those mutations in Japan. Then in Karabolka. They scared the hell out of all of you.”

“They educated the hell out of us.”

“Not enough. You needed more.”

“Everything has its price. Lab rats will tell you only so much.”

“So you used human ones. In Rochester. And here. Then Littleton Flats happened and you knew what to do. You knew where to bring them. You castrated them-no baby gargoyles to offend your sensibilities, to give birth to other mutations down the line. You drugged them into oblivion. Benjamin. And the other vet who got away, who wandered back to Littleton like a homing pigeon. You never forget the way home, do you? — even with your brain fried, you still know. Wren found him sleeping in the gazebo. Later he found his name there on the black wall in Washington. People can’t die twice, can they?”

“Is that what you read in Wren’s article? The one he wrote about the Aurora flood?”

“There was no article about the Aurora flood. Wren never finished it. It never ran.”

“Of course. It never ran. But maybe it was written. Maybe he left it somewhere?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“We’ll see.”

On to the next page.

Rainey.

I didn’t know whether Rainey was in on it or not. Probably not. Just a soldier doing his job.

I asked him how I could be swallowed up. Legally. Not that anyone was playing by the rules. But just suppose they were.

“We are playing by the rules. People who are a danger to themselves or to others,” he recited. “I think you qualify.”

“I’m not a vet. This is a VA hospital.”

“ROTC. You qualify.”

“There was a psych who came to see me with the real Detective Wolfe. He thought I was perfectly sane. Maybe I can see him?”

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s a problem. But if I run into anyone who thinks you’re perfectly sane, I’ll let you know.”

“How’s Dennis doing?”

“Hard to tell. He doesn’t say much.”

“I didn’t do that to him. I brought him in. I saved his life.”

“I’ll tell him to write you a thank you note.”

“I’m telling the truth.”

“Sure thing, Pinocchio.”

A storm.

I could hear it raging outside the walls. Thunder. Like standing too close to a bass amplifier at a small club. The vibrations making my ribs rattle.

It’s a hard… it’s a hard… it’s a hard rain… gonna fallllll…

I sang.

I was my own iPod.

I stayed with the canon of Dylan.

You better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone.

Anna’s favorite quotation. Remember? Listed on AOL: Kkraab.

Maybe it had been another clue for the clueless.

The Aurora Dam Flood.

You better start swimming.

Benjy must’ve swum like a motherfucker that day.

And Eddie Bronson, whoever he really was.

And the plumber’s mom-her too. Swimming out of one kind of trouble and right into another. Right into the jaws of a shark.

Swallowed whole.

Who was Anna?

If she wasn’t Anna Graham, then who was she? Really?

Some of what everyone tells you is true. The first rule in the Liar’s Handbook. It’s what makes it believable. It’s what sells it.

I would have to ponder that one.

I really would.

The middle of the night.

A faint red glow seeped through the door like blood.

I heard footsteps-more like a soft shuffling.

Stopping and starting, like a mechanical toy that moves two steps before it stops and needs rewinding.

Someone was working their way down the hall. Stopping at each cell before moving on.

It wasn’t Rainey, or the Samoan, or one of the other orderlies. I knew their footsteps by now. They had distinctive walks-jaunty, heavy, purposeful.

This was different.

I heard someone’s breath just outside my door.

The grill was moved to the side-the red poured in, turning my cell into a darkroom.

A strange sound.

Part speech and part moaning and part something else.

I sat up and stared at a single eye peering into my room.

That sound again.

Half-human.

Or maybe the opposite.

Too human.

“Dennis,” I whispered. “It’s me, Tom.”

The eye nodded.

I tiptoed to the door, put my face up against the open grill. “Look. They’ve locked me up, Dennis. They’re gonna throw away the key. Understand?”

Dennis stared at me without answering one way or another. It was possible that understanding and Dennis were mutually exclusive now.

“Your friend Benjy. That’s what they did to him. Then they killed him. There’s something they don’t want to get out.”

I couldn’t tell whether Dennis was digesting any of this. Whether I was as indecipherable to him as he was to me.

“Dennis, I need to get out of here. Help me.”

He made that sound again. A deaf person who’s never heard human speech. Like that. He could’ve been saying yes. Or no. Or maybe. He could’ve been asking for his meds.

“Dennis, you understand what I’m saying? They’re burying me.”

The eye moved. The grill closed shut. I heard that soft shuffling moving off down the hall.

I was allowed a shower.

The shower stall was open so they could watch you. It had metal hand-grips attached to the wall to keep doped-up vets from falling down and killing themselves.

On the way in, I passed someone on the way out.

Sluggish, heavy-lidded, and twitchy. He had Semper Fi tattooed on his arm.

Maybe this was the marine fucker Dennis had spoken of.

The one who’d gone AWOL searching for his kids’ bodies on Route 80.

I said hello.

The marine stared through me as if I wasn’t there. As if I’d turned invisible. I had.

No one could see me.

I was the invisible man.

I asked Seth how he did on bowling night.

Who’d replaced my irreplaceable 132 average?

If he’d gotten his revenge on the Judas Priest-tattooed A-hole who’d sucker-punched him in the alley?

If Sam had successfully peddled any insurance policies lately?

Seth wasn’t really there, of course.

Which was kind of scary.

Seth answered me anyway.

Which was scarier.

One night I dreamed I was back in Queens.

The night of the blizzard.

When my mom put away an entire bottle of Jack Daniel’s. When I heard her muttering to herself about the toys Jimmy had left scattered around the living room. When I herded Jimmy into the bedroom and tried to shut the door, because I knew what was coming.

So did he.

Jimmy, who was smaller than me and therefore more vulnerable and much easier to fling around like a rag doll. Who looked more like my father, the father who’d deserted us for a younger and prettier woman who always brought us extra pancakes in the Acropolis Diner. Jimmy, who always took it from her with a stoic look of what… defiance maybe, even at 6, somehow finding that grown-up emotion within him-which enraged her even more. Of course it did. Made her do things to him with scalding bathwater, the bedroom radiator, my dad’s old belt buckle.

Things that eventually made Jimmy scream and wail and whimper, and me cover my ears in the false sanctuary of my bedroom, because defiance will get you only so far.

I herded him into the bedroom that night and shut the door. Thinking, this time, I will not let her in. I won’t. She’ll huff and puff but I will not let her blow the door down. I tried, tried as much as a 9-year-old can. Not enough. She pushed her way in and grabbed him by the arm, dragged him kicking and screaming out of the room.

And I could hear it.

I could hear all of it.

Even with my head in a vise of my own making, down on the ground, ears covered up.

The wind howling outside but an even worse howling coming from the next room. A blizzard outside and a blizzard inside, Jimmy being slammed against things. The whop of belt against skin.

That awful shrieking.

Which finally, oddly, and suddenly stopped. Just stopped.

In my dream, I do not walk out of the room, believing that it’s all over, that Jimmy will be sitting there, bruised of course, even bleeding, but still Jimmy, still alive.

I do not walk out and see him lying there on the floor, stock-still and strangely blue.

My mother does not order me to go back into my room and write down what happened. The story of clumsy Jimmy, of a 6-year-old who just could not get out of his own way. The story I will dutifully recount to the police and the caseworker from Children’s Protective Services and my own father, in all its awful and meticulous detail.

My brother Jimmy slipped on the ice and he hit his head.

He is always falling down and stuff like that.

He is really clumsy.

No.

In my dream, my father returns to save us. He comes back to his family.

I hear him shuffling up our front stoop.

Sloshing through the wet snow.

Banging on the front door.

He’s going to walk in and shake the snow off his slicker, and run to Jimmy and make him wake up.

The door opens.

Dad, I say. Dad.

But he can’t speak. The frigid cold, the swirling snow. He can’t speak.

He motions me to come closer.

I run to him in my Batman PJs, but they’ve somehow changed color. They’re drab and gray.

And my dad. Something’s wrong with him. He can’t speak. He’s talking but nothing’s coming out of his mouth.

He grabs me by my PJs and pulls me out into the snow.

But there is no snow.

Just an empty hall tinged in red.

Shhh…

He can’t speak, but he’s still able to whisper.

Dennis motions for me to follow him.

There’s a key glinting in his hand.

Maybe I should’ve asked myself how he got it.

The key.

You could drive yourself crazy with that stuff.