Hell and Gone

20

Imagine a thousand more such daily intrusions in your life, every hour and minute of every day, and you can grasp the source of paranoia, this anger that could consume me at any moment if I lost control.

—Jack Henry Abbott, In the Belly of the Beast

THE MASK.

It was much, much worse than Hardie could have imagined.

Picture your head removed from its body and imprisoned elsewhere, some cramped little metal box where the air stinks like sour breath and nothing can touch the skin of your face, not even your own fingertips.

This was a new low. Hardie’s new life was smaller and more pathetic than he ever thought possible.

The first itch was a novelty. Hardie thought it wasn’t so bad; okay, he could take it, it was just an itch. He could just will it away. But the itch refused to quit. You take for granted how easy it is to cure something like an itch. You do it almost unconsciously. Your nose itches, your hand flies up to your face, you take care of it. Not inside the mask. The itch was free to last as long as it wanted, because nobody could stop it. The itch continued, and grew more powerful, emboldened by the lawless space inside the stinking, hot, confining mask. Even though he knew it would do no good, Hardie’s fingers scratched at the outside of the mask. He tried working his fingers under his mask, but they couldn’t reach up high enough to scratch the itch.

Breathe, Hardie. Breathe.

Don’t lose it just a day into this thing.

(Was it a day?)

(Two days, maybe?)

(Please let it be at least two days.)

Sleep was no escape. The moment you calmed your brain down enough to drift away, the sirens were blaring again, and the bright lights were flashing so you couldn’t see anything, let alone the guards, who were forcing your back against the bars so they could take off the mask and photograph your squinty, tired, itchy face. And by the time you remembered to scratch your face they were making you put the mask back on again. Then the screaming sirens faded and the lights were cut and you’d go back to not falling asleep.

Twice a day the masks were temporarily removed for feeding. The first time, Hardie didn’t even eat. He scratched at his face furiously until he saw blood on the tips of his fingers. The second time, he noted that the same old breakfast was still being served, despite the Prisonmaster’s promise to do something about it. Dry, biscuitlike lumps and a thin, tasteless paste that was probably intended to be some sort of oatmeal substitute. Good to see his short tenure as warden had absolutely zero effect on prisoner conditions.

Then the mask went back on again, and you started counting down the time until the next head count or meal, because anything was better than wearing this heavy, choking, soul-killing mask…

And just when Hardie thought the situation couldn’t be any more insufferable, the mask started to play a little slide show.

* * *

When the image of the house appeared, Hardie thought he was hallucinating. No amount of blinking would erase it, though. He realized there was a screen inside the mask, like there was in the View-Master he had when he was a kid. A tiny personal movie screen floating a few inches in front of his eyeballs.

Showing him a house—a split-level, shrouded in darkness and vaguely familiar. But he couldn’t place it. Was this some home he’d guarded at some point? Why were they showing this to him?

Without warning the floating image disappeared…

…only to be replaced by an image of the same house shown from a different angle. The cement path leading up to the front door. Still night, but there was enough illumination to read the house number painted onto the black metal mailbox. It was the number that jarred Hardie’s memory.

This was Kendra’s house.

Specifically, the split-level he’d helped to purchase but had only seen once. The secret house, buried out there in an anonymous suburb of Philadelphia, where Kendra and Charlie, Jr., lived under her maiden name, on the off chance that the Albanian mob wouldn’t be satisfied with the innocent blood already on their hands and would come looking to punish Hardie’s family. The Albanians were the least of his worries now, because his new enemies—the Accident People, the Industry, a freakin’ cabal, whatever—they were saying to Hardie:

Yeah, we know where they are. Look, we’re standing on their front lawn in the middle of the night.

When did they take this? Was this live? Was this Mann taking these photos?

The image disappeared silently…

…and was replaced by an image from inside the house. The dim vestibule. Six stairs leading up to the living room, more stairs leading down to the den. God, please. Get them out of the house. Don’t do this…

Next image:

A living room Hardie had never seen, but familiar furniture, familiar clutter. His family’s possessions.

Next image, the images loading faster now…

A dark hallway, lined with framed photos. Hardie tried to see if Kendra had hung any of their old photos on the wall, but before he could make anything out—

The next image:

Farther down the hallway, headed toward the bedrooms…

Next image:

A gloved hand opening a door. Hardie burned the image of that hand into his brain. Because someday, when he found the owner of that hand, he was going to rip the appendage off the end of his arm and make him eat it…

And then:

Kendra, in bed, one bare leg draped over the covers, pillows in disarray, hair fanned out.

“NO!” Hardie shouted, but the sound was trapped inside the mask—it was like yelling inside a bank vault.

As awful as it was to watch those images—it was even more torturous when they stopped.

Because then Hardie’s brain went off and running, and he continued the slide show from hell on his own, wondering if it was Mann inside the house or one of her creepy-crawling henchmen…or somebody else, someone even more fearsome, and the only reason they didn’t load a new photo is because this was unfolding in real time, and now the gloved hand was pressed down over Kendra’s sleeping mouth, a needle sliding into her arm…

“STOP THIS, YOU MOTHERFUCKERS! GODDAMN IT, LISTEN TO ME, LEAVE THEM ALONE! THEY HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH ME!”

Hardie braced himself for the next image, trying to prepare himself for the worst yet hating himself for the images his own mind was inventing. He’d had plenty of experience seeing the things people did to each other. There was plenty of material to draw from.

But no other images appeared. Instead, a voice inside the mask, preceded by an audio crackle.

“You’re going to be a good prisoner, aren’t you, Five?”

The Prisonmaster.

“Oh, I have feeling you’re going to be an excellent prisoner. This is your destiny. All your life you were preparing yourself to be here, with us.”

Hardie swallowed the nuclear explosion of a scream that was forming in his throat, choking it back down into his chest, burying it.

In prison, the only place you can run is inside your own head. Eve Bell, for example, found her secret philosopher’s garden and had become very skilled at whisking herself away for short periods of time. If you could escape, truly escape, into your own mental landscape, you could almost deal with the screaming sirens and horrible food and coffinlike mask.

Hardie, however, didn’t like his own head.

His head was condemned space.

Unfit for human habitation.

Now and again, Charlie Hardie pictured his life as a hotel. He had spent most of his time there closing off the floors below him as he ascended higher and higher, never looking down, never wondering when he was finally going to run out of floors.

The lobby and the lower floors were his childhood—the foundation. The carpeting was shabby and almost no one was ever at the front desk, but it was a decent enough place to stay. The management did the best they could considering the neighborhood. There was a bed, four walls, food to eat. A few diversions, a few fellow travelers.

Then came the fractured, damaged floors of his adolescence, back when the idea that you could check out of the hotel held great appeal to him.

These were followed by the ten stories of his twenties, the military years, which he tried hard not to think about, ever, and by the time he’d reached the thirtieth floor the hotel was beginning to show its age, its limitations.

But that was okay, because that’s when Hardie met Kendra.

He’d been back in Philadelphia and she’d sent him a stupid birthday card with some cartoon joke on it—a Far Side gag depicting suffering souls in hell, and a horned devil telling them, “It’s not so much the heat, it’s the humidity.” They’d barely known each other back during his adolescence; she was a friend of a friend of his best friend, Nate Parish, and Hardie was stunned she still remembered his name, let alone cared enough to send a card.

These were the hopeful years, the time he thought he might be able to turn his hotel into something worthwhile again. At the time, he thought it would be simple: close off the bottom floors and concentrate on the floors you currently occupy. Kendra helped him with that. Her own hotel had a strange and tragic history. So they decorated the floors they were on and ignored the floors beneath them and had a boy and named him Charlie, Jr., much against Hardie’s wishes. Kendra insisted. She believed boys should go on to honor their fathers, even if those fathers were working too much, and seemed to disengage a little more with every passing day…

And then one day Hardie looked inside a room he wasn’t supposed to.

* * *

The last place Hardie wanted to be was inside his own head space.

He turned off the lights and continued his ascent.

This time, though, he’d run out of floors.

There was no penthouse.

There was no roof.

There was nothing up there but a cold hard empty.

And a traffic ticket, on the dining-room table.

Usually Kendra scooped up the bills, took care of them. Hardie worked with Nate day and night some weeks. He gave Kendra the checks. Kendra deposited the checks and paid for everything. So he never saw bills. Never bothered. Only reason he looked was because of the return address, Pennsylvania State Police, and he thought it was for him, some lingering piece of business. He opened it. Speeding ticket, the kind you pay by mail. He hadn’t been speeding, nor had he been pulled over, nor had he traveled the turnpike anytime in the past month. Then he saw the name: Kendra Hardie. She’d been speeding on such and such a date, such and such a time, headed west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and Hardie couldn’t figure out for the life of him what his wife was doing on the turnpike.

As much as he mocked himself for his utter lack of detective skills, Hardie had to admit that he put everything together fairly quickly. Checked their E-ZPass account, recorded the number of times Kendra had headed west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike (a lot, as it turned out, all when Charlie, Jr., was in school). Then he checked their cell phone bill for texts and calls—the standard jealous husband bullshit, stuff cops and detectives did all the time. Her text message account had gone over, way over, for three months now. About 90 percent of the texts going to the same guy.

what kind of undies

A guy Kendra knew back in high school.

how could I forget

The more Hardie dug around, the more aware he became of this whole parallel universe that Kendra seemed to be living in, and, well—

can you talk? husband around?

Hardie didn’t sleep for three days straight. He lay in bed next to her, staring at the ceiling. Already condemning a large number of floors in his hotel.

But he had to be sure.

Hardie told Nate he wasn’t feeling good, needed a day off. Nate praised Jesus—joked about how he could finally get some work done, and Hardie laughed along with it and then drove home and parked his car ten blocks from the house and fished out Kendra’s spare set of keys for the minivan and opened up the back and tucked himself into the space where she usually put grocery bags and relocked the car and curled up and waited. A while later Kendra unlocked the car, put on some soul music, and started driving, humming along to certain parts, singing to others. Joy in her voice. Did she ever sing in the car when it was just the two of them?

When was it ever just the two of you?

And after a long drive, much of which, Hardie knew, was turnpike—he knew it in his mind, and he knew it by the feel of the road—she turned and lurched forward, turned again, lurched forward, then stopped. Turned off the car.

Hardie tried to imagine what the guy’s house looked like. Was he rich, or did he rent some shithole town house on the outskirts of Philadelphia?

Instead it turned out to be a restaurant in a strip mall.

Hardie watched them through the window. The restaurant did a brisk trade. They sat near the back wall (smart, Kendra, away from the windows, just on the off off off chance someone you know wanders by). They were already deep in conversation. Kendra reached across the table, squeezed his hand. The guy smiled. She leaned forward. They—

The next few hours were a blur. Hardie took his set of the keys to his wife’s car, cranked the ignition, and headed back east on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried. Well, he bawled now. By the time he reached Route 1 he had calmed down. His eyes stung. He drove down Route 1 to Rhawn Street, then over to the river, where he knew a place he could dump the car and nobody would bother checking for weeks. He wiped the wheel clean, even though it was his wife’s car and it wouldn’t be unusual for him to drive it now and again. Then he walked home. Which was an insanely long trek from all the way down by the river. His cell phone went off about twenty minutes into his walk—Kendra, probably having worked up the nerve to call him and admit the truth. Hardie ignored it, kept walking. She tried two more times before giving up. Ten minutes later, Nate called him.

“How’s it going?”

“Okay.”

“You feeling better?”

“Not particularly.”

Then, in that classic Nate Parish fashion, he proceeded to detail Hardie’s movements for the past two hours.

“I’m guessing you’re around Rhawn and Castor, right? Would take you about forty minutes to go from the restaurant down to your favorite car-dumping spot on the river, then another five, ten minutes to wipe everything down. You’re too stubborn to call a cab and too pissed off to take a bus, so you’re walking. How am I doing? Where y’at?”

“How did you know about the restaurant? Did she tell you?”

After a moment’s hesitation, Nate said, “No. I figured that out. She said the car was stolen near Charlie’s school, but there were too many holes in her story. I figure she’ll give you the same story.”

“So you know.”

“I don’t know any details, but I have an idea what’s going on. I’m sorry, man. Shit gets fucked up sometimes.”

“Yeah.”

“Hey, you and I are going to meet up. Definitely over some beer. I’m buying.”

“No, I just want to go home.”

“Come on. Rhawnhurst Café. I can be there in fifteen minutes, okay?”

“What if I’m nowhere near the Rhawnhurst Café?”

“Whatever. See you then.”

At that moment, Hardie had been standing at the corner of Rhawn and Castor, about six paces from the front door of the Rhawnhurst Café. Nate had it down to the block.

Nate showed up, Hardie got drunk, came home, went to bed, again he couldn’t sleep. Kendra said nothing, pretending to be furious about Hardie not calling her back all day. They started talking in the morning, after Charlie went to school, circling around each other like two street fighters with stilettos, wondering who was going to draw first blood. Hardie lashed out. Kendra maintained her innocence, claimed that she did not break her vows, that Hardie was being paranoid as usual. Hardie kept pressing, presenting the evidence he’d gathered, insisting that it would be better to have it all out in the open. Kendra swore she was innocent.

The conversation lasted for days, literally, pausing only for Charlie’s daily return home from school. Hardie thought a lot about finding this guy, beating a confession out of him. Instead he got tired of asking, tired of Kendra’s obvious lies. Of course she was screwing him. Why couldn’t she just admit it and put him out of his misery?

Because some stubborn part of his brain clung to her story, absurd as it was, that she did not sleep with him.

That this was all one big misunderstanding.

That he was overreacting.

That nothing had changed.

That…

Hardie couldn’t solve this case so he threw himself headfirst into ones he could solve. This was around the time the situation with the Albanian gangs was heating up, and Hardie attacked them with a zeal that surprised even Nate. “They ain’t fucking Kendra,” Nate said at one point. “You know that, right?” Hardie told him to shut up. They hit the Albanians hard; Deke Clark told Nate he’d better watch his boy. Deke was right. Hardie got sloppy. The sloppiness got Nate and his family killed, and Hardie almost killed and sent to purgatory for his trouble.

More floors being sealed off…

But don’t worry.

You can just climb higher, higher, higher.

Hardie told himself he left his family to keep them safe. He was still a moving target. People looking to hurt Hardie might choose to hurt his family instead. So his family was better off without him. Kendra didn’t want him around anyway, so it was the right decision no matter how you looked at it. He packed a bag, choosing only the things that couldn’t ever be re-created, reprinted, reproduced, or repurchased. It filled a small duffel.

The day he left, his boy, Charlie, Jr., watched from the couch, video-game controller in his little eleven-year-old hands.

“Where are you going, Dad?”

Hardie couldn’t lie to him. But he couldn’t bring himself to tell his son the truth, either.

“I’ll be back, tough guy.”

Another door slammed shut in his mind, the sound of invisible workmen hammering nails into wood, starting to seal the room off, his boy crying behind it, Hardie walking away, trying to drown it out, lying to himself the whole time.

I’ll be back, tough guy.