Shift: A Novel

San Francisco, CA

November 8, 1963

Again the prick, again the swimming to consciousness. Chandler felt like a fish irresistibly drawn to a fisherman’s hook yet thrown back each time for being too small. When would he be big enough to keep? Which begged the question: when would he be big enough to kill?

Keller stood over him with the usual array of tools. His movements were slow but precise, and Chandler knew even without trying to push into the doctor’s brain that he’d dosed himself with Thorazine already. The drug turned Keller’s brain into something soft yet impenetrable. Chandler had pushed at it last night but had never been able to get inside. Now, with the LSD gone from his system, all he felt was a staticky void where Keller’s consciousness should have been, and, pulling once against his restraints, he closed his eyes and waited for the next shot. But this time Keller had something to say to him first.

“Mr. Melchior was nice enough to provide you with some company. I think you will find him very interesting.”

Chandler opened his eyes, looked around the little room again. All he saw was Keller, preparing the shot of LSD as he had yesterday, the empty bed where Melchior had lain, the dark window beyond. But at the edge of his perception he felt a tingling. Not Keller’s brain, but someone else’s. A friable consciousness that seemed to crumble when he pushed at it, glinting like dust motes in a beam of sunlight. It was like no other mind he’d ever felt before. He found himself wondering if it was an infant’s, or a monkey’s. He was almost eager for the shot, to find out what kind of brain this was.

Keller injected him and left the room. A moment later light erupted from the other side of the dark window. A disheveled—decrepit—man stood in the middle of a room about the size of the one Chandler was in, though in lieu of hospital accoutrement it was filled with stacks and stacks of sagging shoe boxes. The man was clearly itinerant—his clothes bedraggled and filthy, his hair unwashed in so long that it hung off his head in tangled ropes an inch thick. A beard as coarse and matted as a sheet of felt covered his mouth and fell halfway down his chest. His features were so lost inside filth and hair that he could have been twenty-five or fifty-five.

A crackle, and Keller’s voice came over a speaker mounted on the wall.

“This is Sidewalk Steve.”

Chandler felt a flush spreading over his skin, knew it was from the amphetamines Keller had used to wake him up. But the itch underneath the flush was the acid, working its way toward his brain.

“Sidewalk Steve is a literary man, like you. He is a great fan of Kenneth Kesey.”

The acid filled him with a nervous energy, and Chandler tried to fight the twitching in his arms. A pink slit had appeared in Sidewalk Steve’s beard: a smile. His grubby fingers were snatching at invisible shapes in the air.

“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a turgid example of solipsistic, nihilistic American romanti-romanti-romanticism,” Chandler managed to spit out, doing his best to resist the insane images beginning to flicker into his consciousness from Sidewalk Steve’s.

“He claims to have taken more than a thousand acid trips,” Keller continued. “He is also a diagnosed schizophrenic. The line between reality and fantasy ceased to exist for him long ago, so if you’re going to make an impression on him, you’re going to have to try harder than you have before. Nothing you can pull from his mind will scare him. You will have to supply something of your own.”

Chandler closed his eyes, which brought out Sidewalk Steve’s visions more clearly. Polychromatic bubbles floated in the air around him. When he touched them, they popped, revealing naked, shockingly nubile pixies, who flitted away from his fingers.

“What about … an image of … your face?”

“Sidewalk Steve is a bad man. He needs to be punished.”

Sidewalk Steve’s brain was like a cross between a magnet and quicksand. It seemed to suck Chandler in and down, into a soup of chicken broth and breasts and rainbows. Chandler opened his eyes and concentrated on the bare wall in front of him, tried to pull his brain from Steve’s.

“I—I don’t understand.”

“He has shirked his duty to class and country, just as you have. I want you to punish him the way you know you deserve to be punished. In return, Miss Haverman will not be harmed while she remains in custody.”

“Naz!” Chandler felt his heart beat faster, and in the other room Sidewalk Steve jumped backward, as who knew what apparition appeared in front of him. “Naz is alive?”

There was a pause, and Chandler could have sworn he heard Keller curse under his breath.

“Is she alive?” Chandler demanded again, jerking uselessly at his restraints. “Where is she? You have to tell me where she—”

“I want you to show Sidewalk Steve how bad you think he is,” Keller’s voice practically shrieked from the loudspeaker. “I want you to devise his punishment. Do you understand me, Orpheus? Don’t take something from Steve’s mind. Make it up yourself, and show it to him.”

“Where—is—Naz?” Chandler demanded, and in the other room Sidewalk Steve jumped again, whirled around, jumped back one more time, his hands batting at the air.

“The only way you will see Miss Haverman again is if you do as I tell you. Punish Steve, Chandler. Punish him as you deserve to be punished, and I will make arrangements for you to see Miss Haverman again.”

“Please,” Chandler hissed. “Don’t hurt her. I’ll do anything, just don’t hurt her.”

In the other room, Sidewalk Steve was swatting at the air, squinting and ducking as though a swarm of bees were buzzing out of the sky around him. He smacked at his skin, danced from one leg to the other as though snakes or crocs snapped at his legs.

“It’s your fault we have her,” Keller said implacably. “If you’d done what you were supposed to, you would’ve never ended up here. Never would have dragged Miss Haverman into it with you.”

Keller’s disembodied voice had acquired an echo, and an outline as well. Pink, puffy clouds came out of the speaker like particolored smoke. In the other room, Sidewalk Steve was tossing himself from one wall to another. The shoe boxes stacked in the room added their flimsy shape to whatever imagined terrors attacked him, and he grabbed them and ripped them to pieces, but whatever was attacking him wouldn’t be kept away. His mouth was open, but no sound penetrated the window.

“Please,” Chandler whispered, “don’t hurt her.”

“Oh, but she is hurting,” Keller hissed through the speaker, the pink smoke coiling out like a serpent, “and it’s all your fault. Now the only way for you to save her is to punish Steve. Create a hell for him and drop him in it. Do it, Chandler. Do it!”

“LET HER GO!” Chandler screamed, and from the other room came the faint echo of a reply.

“No.”

But there was no stopping it now. It walked through the door of Sidewalk Steve’s room like a flaming ghost. Chandler remembered it from Millbrook. From the cottage, right before Naz had been taken. The boy made of fire. But who was it, and why did it keep coming back? Was it friend or enemy?

But the apparition had no time for any of these questions. It swept Sidewalk Steve up in blazing arms and engulfed him in a corona of flames. Sidewalk Steve writhed in the inferno for two or three agonized seconds, then fell to the floor, his brain as blank as a freshly washed blackboard. Only his twitching fingers and feet gave any sign that he was alive.

But it wasn’t quite over yet. The flaming boy turned toward Chandler and stared at him through the window. Its eyes were empty, dark sockets, its mouth an open, questioning O, but what it was asking, what it offered, Chandler had no idea.

“Who are you?” he whispered.

But the boy just stared at him for another moment, and then, sputtering like a pilot light, he disappeared.