The Canal (18 page)

Things began to happen quickly.

Something grabbed her pant leg, the fabric
pulling taught. Susan looked down -- her pants had snagged near the
ankle on some kind of metal hook. At least she thought it was a
hook. It wasn't a fingernail, was it? Flashing quicksilver,
sticking from a limp hand, right? She yanked her foot forward,
hard.

The tremors unbalanced something in the hills
of garbage. A large box fell to the floor, dropping all of its
soggy contents onto her sneakers, unleashing an angry,
fly-shimmering cloud.

This time she screamed. She pulled
frantically to break loose, her feet...her shoes in a pile
of...something. Bones. Bones, the ends still capped in rotted meat
and cartilage. And something else. Something that moved, crawled
out, snarling and bulge-eyed, that scrabbled up her ankle,
scratching her with claws like pins.

It was him.

Mr. Zarella.

His long, skeletal fingers encircled her leg.
He was underneath the bones, his face emerging from them, leering
up at her from the floor. With a surge Susan reared backward, the
cuff of her pants finally tearing free. She slammed against the
bookcase. Sheaves of papers began showering onto her, a radio
tumbled out, just missing her head, landing on the floor with a
punch. She opened her mouth to scream again but coughed on the air.
The fetor was too huge.

She kicked. She kicked because she could
still feel the old man's hand. Only now she was realizing it wasn't
a hand at all. No, it wasn't Mr. Zarella, wasn't him. It was a rat,
oh god, or a hissing opossum, its tail constricting around her
calf.

And the rest of the hallway was starting to
come awake now, becoming louder as the debris rearranged itself and
more deeper lying creatures kicked their way to the surface. Small
pairs of eyes began to alight from the laps of rotted heaps.

Again Susan tried to scream and again her
lungs failed her. Was she imagining the arching spatter that
painted the walls near the sofa? The carnival reds and blacks? Or
old man Zarella, stumbling out from the kitchen, festering with
mice and moths, roaring after her, shouting blood?

She ran toward the open back door, hugging
Eugene tightly to her chest, a low moan building from inside her.
Outside she collided with a chair and went staggering into the yard
where she slipped and fell. Eugene began to wail, an ear-grinding
cry. She found she couldn't breathe, she couldn't inhale, the
corruption was here too, it was all around her. The grass was slick
with it. She kept slipping and she began to feel the damp coming
through her clothes where she'd touched the ground.

She frantically regained her feet. She saw
the ring of black slop surrounding her, the metal stake at its
center, as if the skin of the Earth had been punctured. She saw the
ragged pieces of torn flesh, the shredded clothing, the gobs of
hair.

She ran. Escaping through the falling fence.
She dropped the leftovers, cradling Eugene in both arms now, arms
that were unrecognizable to her, drenched with rot. She stumbled
along the unsteady bank of the canal, in the direction of the
bridge.

The things she imagined while she ran. The
nightmares she had while awake. The rats pouring after her through
the back door. And the very hallway itself following too, wriggling
out into the waning light. Smashing through the broken remains of
fence like a charging animal, right behind her. And Mr. Zarella.
Mr. Paul Zarella. She imagined him also. Green skinned, with poison
squeezing from his pores. He was at the head of the pack, a place
of dubious honor, his face beaked and horrendous, carrying aloft
her limp and dead chicken filets.

>> CHAPTER THIRTEEN <<

You had to look closely to even see her.
Rose's skin was the same hue as the sheets and pillows, an
institutional off-white. She was mostly an impression, an outline,
a shape in retrograde. The ganglia of monitoring tubes and feeding
needles looked to be inserted into the mattress, as if it were the
true patient here. She wasn't conscious, too tranquil, but wasn't
unconscious either, too tense. Drugged probably, squirted full of
Haldol and penicillin. At least she seemed improved, the EKG
monitor aside, which was yipping at a heavy metal clip, the cough
aside, a great gonging thing, and the shakes, glitches, and tics
aside. Or, if not improved, then at the least bathed.

"Rose. We're getting serious now," said
Alan.

He sat rigidly in a bedside chair. He wasn't
as comforted by the hospital as he'd hoped. Which was unfortunate
because the place gleamed of cleanser and surgical steel. It
vibrated with banished boo-boos, white and strict. They had
penicillin by the barrels full, and blood in tidy plastic
packages.

The philosophy of the place, the idea that
treatment was contingent on submission, voluntary or otherwise, was
in itself so pure. Because it wasn't medicine that got you healthy,
it was the submitting. It was entrusting your life to those who
knew better, giving yourself wholly to regulation and schedule. No
guesswork whatsoever...

But this was little solace to him now. Now it
only made things worse. Because to be here was to realize how far
he'd come, how far he'd fallen. Yesterday's clothes may have come
off, the shower may have been made, but still the stain had stayed.
The stain had stayed. He was free of physical dirt, physical scud,
but he'd been contaminated. It wasn't on him but in him, in his
frame of mind, where it couldn't be washed.

It was The Problems, of course. Again and
always. First, there was a new cadaver and no new leads. Second,
Alan's God had become a vengeful one -- Bleecker had stopped with
words, content now to let his eyes pile on the pressure. And those
eyes were deadly, polished to a ferocious gleam. All night Bleecker
had monitored Alan from the cockpit of his cruiser -- those two
unblinking globes had been on him always, simmering in the dark.
And today, Alan was early to work, the late shift hadn't even
finished, but Bleecker was already there, waiting at Alan's desk,
staring at him with hands folded, hair coifed. He'd known Alan was
coming. He'd been watching him through the walls. And third, Joe.
That guy. Womack had driven by Joe's apartment and saw the lights
on. He rang and the place went dark. Womack got in the street and
called Joe's name. There was no answer. Just a glimpse of Joe's
pasty, pelican face disinterestedly sliding past the window. Alan
didn't appreciate this. In fact, Alan had begun to evince a rather
odd behavior as of late: every wayward stink, every grit-sounding
cough and Alan was on his toes, trying to spot the source, looking
for that familiar coat, that familiar slob. Yes, at this point,
even Joe would be welcome. He could materialize in a cloud of
farts, waving a toilet brush wand, and Alan would be grateful.

The problems, they loved this. They now grew
unchecked, at an alarming rate. Alan had to stop counting them --
their total number was too frightening to behold, an incomputable
mathematical monstrosity that broke calculus, disgustingly
shanghaied it, along with any other fey arithmetic that got thrown
its way.

Alan glanced outside, his own eyes feeling
second hand, like garage sale jewelry. He felt like the darkening
sky looked. Disgusted. Suffering. Reflected in the window was a
desperate looking figure, his own, swaddled in a raincoat although
it had yet to actually rain (wardrobe blue balls -- the clouds,
they just weren't putting out). The cityscape beyond took on a
tediously miniature appearance, resembling a poor man's train model
-- foam balls for tree tops, bus benches made of matchsticks, and
little army men pulling double duty as citizenry.

He'd intended to be at the hospital first
thing in the morning, after the office. Rose, who he had now made a
priority, was part of a broader appeal to the forces of TMP. Yes,
if there was ever a time Alan needed a heavy dose of thoroughness,
meticulousness, and precision, it was now. TMP would show him the
way. TMP would make Rose talk. Because if her roommates were
killing and eating people, then somewhere in that woman's dazed
brain existed names, descriptions, hiding places. Things Alan
needed.

He had called ahead to the hospital first.
The doctor, a short-tempered woman with a chisel for a voice,
promptly told him that he'd be wasting his time.

"Her fever's down but she's still delirious,"
she said.

"But it's absolutely important," said
Alan.

Alan thought he could hear the woman
examining her cuticles. "I'm aware of these things," she remarked.
"But the patient needs rest. Does rhabdomyolysis mean anything to
you? How about septic shock?"

"This is an extreme situation--"

"Tonic clonic seizures? Endocarditis?
Bacteremia? Look. She won't understand a word you say to her. Call
back later."

Dare Alan say, that was very un-TMP-like.
Where was the old TMP spirit, that old pep squad hoorah?

Maybe he'd have better luck with Vincent. The
previous evening a hastily organized tip hotline had been
established with Vincent in charge of vetting any promising leads.
But when Alan finally found the man, deep in the station's
basement, he was frantically administering first aid to a female
switchboard operator, catatonic from some kind of stress
affliction, or combat disorder. Because what nobody could have
predicted was that the tip line would unleash a monumental backlog
of community-wide grudge, a majorly colossal outpouring of gripe.
It was a free for all -- everyone was an accuser, everyone accused,
seeking retribution for crimes past, present, future, and
prehistoric, both real, imagined, and patent-pending. The telephone
operators had been taking unbelievable phone call fire from every
corner of the city. Nay, the Earth. The entire Earth had been
calling in.

And even there, Alan could feel Bleecker
frowning down at him, judging. So he ran. TMP be damned. He ran
from the small police army that was being marshaled to scour
through missing persons reports and criminal profiles and which
would soon be embarking on an extensive canal-wide search for
anything suspicious, anything at all. But mostly he ran from the
notion that some part of him didn't care about any of this, that
some part of him had already given up.

He drove to the squatter building and met
Womack. But the dirt palace was still a vagrant desert. And the
loading dock door had miraculously been locked, keeping Alan from
getting inside. Some of the guys there, it was almost as if they
didn't believe him, that he'd imagined the place swarming with
potential suspects just the day before.

There were several check-up calls to Vincent.
There was more hopeless surveillance. There were three failed
attempts to re-reach Rose's doctor. Until finally it came time for
the second corpse's autopsy. Perhaps there TMP would make its
triumphant comeback...

Throughout the autopsy Alan remained
uncharacteristically pessimistic. They had another male, a senior
citizen, stringy. No stabbing this time. Oddly, the victim had died
of seemingly natural causes, a heart attack. Although the teeth
marks were identical -- the body had still been eaten at. Alan
found all this to be hugely uninspiring. He was there ogling the
deconstructed cadaver and all he could think was -- what was the
connection? Where were the answers?

He called the doctor again.

"Do you know lactic acidosis?" she said. "How
about hypokalemia? Bilateral infiltrates, pleural effusion,
pyelonephritis..."

"I need to see her," said Alan, angrily. "You
need to let me see her."

But the doctor had been disconnected. Or had
hung up. "Fuck," he shouted. People were staring at him.

Alan returned to the bridge. The entire
street had been blocked off to keep out the crowds of sightseers
and reporters. Three of the officers posted there had no job other
than to continuously gaze at the bridge's ass. Alan spent an hour
watching the canal water percolate. Watched it writhe and fester.
He felt strangely catatonic, immobilized.

What were the clouds waiting for? Bring the
deluge. Put the world ten feet underwater, drown us all. Let it
rain and rain and rain and stop only when the water meets the
clouds. Maybe the people who came after could live on islands of
vapor. Maybe they'd never have to know about all this, down at the
ocean's bottom, about this sad little history that went
nowhere.

More time, trashed. He was getting good at
this. Alan, the trash man. He drove to a gas station, erratically.
He parked his car in a puddle of oil and grabbed some coins for the
payphone. By then the wheel of the sun, diffuse in the overcast
sky, was already headed earthward.

First Alan went to the cashier's booth, an
outhouse-sized box of bulletproof glass. He felt so unlike himself.
So distracted. For instance, there was the thing with his legs. All
day, Alan had suddenly been finding himself absorbed by the sight
of his own legs. Particularly while in repose. He wouldn't just
watch them -- he'd spy on them. They seemed so strange, so suddenly
perverse. An entire half of you was legs. It was odd that you spent
so much time thinking about brains and guts and faces, but what
about the quiet half, the silent half, those two stealthy
witnesses? And so out of the loop, so way out in the sticks. So far
from the bourgeois hubbub of torso action. And so cheapskate. We
owed our mobility to a trick of brute balance -- not a shred of
grace in those two gangly pipes, those inelaborate stilts, with the
dome knee, the screwy ankle, and the feet, oh those feet, caught
pants down sideways between a flipper and a hand, a fland, a
hipper. The whole works smacked of bargain-caliber knockoff, some
no-name brand. Fucking legs. A couple of evolutionary
afterthoughts, tacked on for good times, for a few dumb laughs.