Trigger Finger (21 page)

Believe
in the impossible and your world becomes limitless
.

No wonder Brandon persisted in
delusional thinking.
 
These people spent
all day surrounded by absolute bullshit.

I closed my
eyes.
 
When I opened them again, I saw
the clock on the wall and realized I had screwed around here for over an
hour.
 
What would have been a billable
hour, now lost forever.

“I need to go
back,” I said. “We’ll have to continue this later.”

Brandon nodded.

“Believe in the
impossible and your world becomes limitless,” he said.

“Right.
 
Bye, Brandon.
 
Bye, Kenny.”

“Bye,” Brandon said, still
smiling.

Kenny didn’t say
anything.
 
That didn’t surprise me.

But then he
followed me, and that did surprise me.
 
Briefcase in hand, I walked down the hall outside Brandon’s room and waved goodbye to a black
woman on a computer on my way past the nurse’s station.
 
When I reached the door to the lobby, I of
course couldn’t get the door open—this was the lockdown hall—so I turned to ask
the nurse to buzz me out.

And there was
Kenny, right on my ass.
 
Little head
bobbing up and down in agreement with every word that had ever been said in
human history.

“Him go away,”
Kenny said.
 
“Him disappear.”

I blinked.
 
“No, Kenny,” I said.
 
“He doesn’t.”

“Him
disappear.
 
Him go
poof
!
 
Him come back in
morning.
 
Scary.
”

He stood so close
to me, I could smell the remains of lunch on his breath.
 
Something with a lot of garlic.
 
I tried to back away, but the door only let
me go so far.

“You go
poof
too?”

“No,” I said.
 
Suddenly, my mouth turned dry; when I
swallowed, it was like choking on a tumbleweed. “I’m stuck here.”

“Him
disappear.
 
Him go
poof
!”

“That’s…uh…that’s
great, man.”

“Kenny!”
 
The woman at the computer called out.
 
“Don’t you go around bothering people!”

Kenny
grinned.
 
I noticed then that he was
missing about half his teeth.
 
He turned
around and hobbled back in the direction he’d come.

The door buzzed
and I let myself out like the place was about to blow.
 
And when I got to my car, I realized my hands
were shaking.
   

30.

Another
dream.
 
I knew this because I remembered
taking an Ambien to help me get to sleep and lying down in my bed, but in my
next conscious thought, I was in my basement.
 
I couldn’t move.
 
But I could
see.
 
And I could hear.

Flesh smacking
flesh.
 
Sick, stomach-twisting
grunts.
 
The rhythmic creak of the pool
table groaning against itself at its joints.

A very, very,
familiar woman’s voice, crying over and over again:

“Please don’t hurt
my baby.”

There was someone

Abby

crying to my
right, but I didn’t look there.
 
I
couldn’t look there,
wouldn’t
look
there—because my eyes were transfixed on the man raping my wife on the pool
table.
 
I could see his calves, his legs,
his hairy butt cheeks.
 
The back of his
head.

Bald.

“Say it,” he said
breathlessly over the satanic percussion of hips slapping against buttocks and
the backs of legs.
 
“Say it!”

Head hung low over
the green velvet, she didn’t say anything, and when she didn’t he thrust
harder.
 
She cried out in pain, a sound
as sharp and thin as a razor blade yet somehow managing to concentrate all the
agony, rage and shame of the moment on its filed edge.
 
When he grunted again, his voice was barely
human.

“Say it!”

“Kevin!”
 
She screamed.

“Say it, bitch!”

“Kevin!”

And in that moment
I jolted awake.
 
A world away from the
Hell of that basement, I opened my eyes first to nothingness, then to the lumps
and shadows of the furniture in my master bedroom.

“Kevin, wake up!”

Allie’s hand on my
shoulder.
  
Not the green velvet covering
of the pool table—my fish belly skin.
 
My
cold skin, cold even though my forehead ran with sweat.
 
I shook my head and wiped my face with the
edge of the sheet.

I gasped.

“Lay back
down.
 
Come on.
 
It’s okay.”

And I did.
 
I laid down and buried my face in her chest,
and I stayed that way as my heart rate slowly returned to normal and the rest
of my body woke up from the nightmare.
 
Only then did I talk.

“Sorry,” I
mumbled.
 
“Bad dream.”

“I guess so.”

“Want to tell me
about it?”

“Not really.”

Silence
ensued.
 
A click sounded from the
thermostat in the hallway and brought the furnace to life to fill it.

The Bald Man.
 
The Bald Man had been raping Allie in my
dream.

Are you sure it’s a dream?
 
Asked Dr. Koenig.

“You were getting
raped again,” I said.
 
“And all I could
do was watch.”

She lay quiet for
a moment.
 
She ran the fingers of her
left hand through my hair and let them stop at the back of my head.
 
Her hand on my skull was gentle and
comforting.
 
The mindless terror of my
dream withdrew towards the outer edges of the bedroom.

“I suppose it
makes sense,” she said.

“What does?”

“Dreams like
that.
 
It’s your brain’s way of training
itself to deal with the
what ifs
.
 
An evolutionary was of preparing yourself to
deal with all contingencies.
 
That’s’
what nightmares are.
 
Training sessions.”

“But this is
ridiculous,” I said.
 
“I mean, it’s
done
!
 
We won.
 
Why do I have to
keep…what…training for it?”

“Simple
psychology,” she murmured.

I fell
silent.
 
I thought for a moment, debated
keeping my next thought to myself, then decided against it.

“What if it’s
not?”
 
I asked.

“What if it’s not
what?”

“What if it’s not
a training session?
 
What if it’s a
memory?”

Her body
stiffened.

I propped myself
up on my elbow.
 
“What if it actually
happened?”

“We’ve been over
this already.
 
It couldn’t have
happened.”

“Why not?”

She rolled her
eyes and flipped over on her back.
 
“Do
we have to go through this again?
 
Well,
Kevin, it just seems like I’d remember getting attacked like that.
 
Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m going to take a wild
guess here and say that would be a pretty memorable experience.
 
But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that
I’m wrong about that.
 
Say I’m really good
at repression.
 
Better than you.”

She paused.
 
I listened.

“It’s still impossible,”
she said.
 
“You shot and killed two
men.
 
You keep the rifle in the gun
cabinet in the basement.
 
If we accept
the proposition that this assailant is raping me on the pool table, what are
the chances that he’s going to let you creep away and open the gun
cabinet?
 
And then, who did you shoot in
the hallway downstairs?”

She shook her
head.

“You’re under a
lot of stress,” she said, “and you’ve been through…well, you’ve been through a
lot.
 
And you’re not exactly made for
things like this.”

“I seem to have
done okay,” I protested.
 
“6-0 in favor
of the good guys at this point.”

“Yes,” she
sighed.
 
“That’s true.
 
Which is all the more reason to believe a man
like you would never just sit there and watch somebody hurt me.
 
Or our baby.”

She sat up long enough
to kiss me on the cheek, not a romantic kiss, but a punctuation kiss—marking as
it did the end of a conversation and sending a clear message that she’d
finished discussing such things and that I should finish, too.
 
She laid back down and covered her shoulders
with the sheet and comforter.

“Now go back to
sleep,” she ordered.
 
“You have to work
in the morning.”

I laid back down,
but I didn’t go to sleep.
 
I lay awake
for a long time, trying every little mind trick in the book to calm down enough
to where I actually could sleep.
 
I found
myself thinking about Brandon Cross
disappeawing
right in front of Kenny.
 
Brandon disliked his
present reality so strongly that he had invented a way of escaping it and going
to a place where nothing that plagued him here existed—where everything that
bothered him and made his life intolerable wasn’t real at all, but a
nightmare.
 
I pictured another Brandon then, the face and
skull a little wider and less pinched, more normal-looking.
 
Hair cut short in the military style, skin
clear, manly angles chiseled into the kind of face that you would expect to see
on a fighter pilot.
 
A handful of men in
a locker room, donning flight suits.
 
Brandon grinned, and he
said,
you guys would not
believe
the fucked-up dream I had last night.
 
I dreamed I was a retarded kid in a care home
in North Carolina.

That
is
fucked up
, said one of the men.

Cross needs to stop smoking crack before he
goes to bed,
said another.
 
I
couldn’t tell them apart; they all looked the same.

I’m telling you guys,
Brandon went,
it’s those damn powdered eggs.
 
You eat those things and they mess you up all day.

Let’s go kick some ass.

Yeah, buddy
.

And they headed
off along the route that fighter pilots take to get from their locker room—do
fighter pilots
have
a locker room, my
loosening mind wondered, or do they just get dressed at their bunks—to the
flight deck.
 
Where they would climb into
their steel birds and wait for the steam-powered slingshot to catapult them
into the sky.

I thought about Brandon flying a plane.
 
I hoped he found a way to do that tonight;
the thought calmed me, made me feel good; so good, in fact, that when a less
calming, less feel-good thought tried to surface, I was able to force it back
down below the waterline.
 
I never even
knew what it was.
 
Instead, I thought
about Brandon,
I thought about missile-laden fighter planes climbing towards the sun, and I
fell asleep.
 

31.

“The Bald Man
raping your wife again,” Dr. Koenig said.
 
“This is beginning to sound familiar.”

I snorted.
 
“Tell me about it.”

Southern Rifleman
—the cover, anyway—had
disintegrated into almost nothing.
 
On my
way back from court the other day, I had swung by Office Depot on

“Have you
discussed her coming to see me?”

“She doesn’t want
to,” I said.
 
“Guess you’re stuck with
boring old me.”

I chuckled, but he
didn’t.
 
Instead, he pursed his lips and
made another notation on his notepad.
 
Patient uses humor to deflect unpleasant
questions
.
 
Remember to check insurance coverage.

“What did she say
about the dream this time?”

I told him.
 
When I finished, he frowned at me.

“Did you tell her
about the pool table?”

“Pardon?”

“You said, ‘you
were getting raped again.
 
All I could do
was watch.’”

“Yeah.”

“When did you tell
her it was happening in the basement?
 
When did you ever say anything about the pool table?”

I blinked.
 
For a moment, I couldn’t speak; my lips froze
as my brain flipped through its Rolodex of memories until it found the card
corresponding to the night before.
 
I
pulled it out.
 
I read everything on it.

I hadn’t said
anything about the pool table.
 
Or the
basement.

“I’ve had the
dream a lot,” I said.
 
“Not just last
night.
 
Like, a lot.
 
So I’m pretty sure that even if I didn’t say
my dream took place in the basement last night, I probably said it another
time.”

“Because it does
take place in the basement,” Dr. Koenig said.

“Yes.
 
I’m sure there’s some kind of deep
psychological meaning there.”

“Are you.”

I nodded.
 
The one drawback about the plastic cover was
that it made rolling the magazine into a tube more difficult.
 
Static electricity made the plastic want to
bind to itself and resist my rolling efforts.
 
Maybe I could find a less clingy cover next time I went to the store.

“The basement is
mine,” I said.
 
“The rest of the house
belongs to Allie, but the basement is my man-cave.
 
Big TV, old furniture that doesn’t match, a
custom bar and a pool table.
 
Basketball
posters.
 
It’s
mine.
 
If you really want to
hurt a man, plugging his wife’s a great way to do it.
 
But it’s even better to bend her over
his
pool table and make him watch.”

“The man-cave is
yours,” he noted.
 
“And so is Allie.”

I looked at him.
 
He looked back at me expressionlessly.

“That part of her
is,” I said.
 
“She’s never been with any
other man.
 
Just me.”

He wrote.
 
I always felt a little defensive when he did
that; he could have been writing something positive or something innocuous, but
I always felt the scratching of pen on paper to be a criticism of whatever I’d
just said.

“And I’ve never
been with any other woman other than her,” I added.
 
“We met when we were 18.
 
We belong to each other in that way.
 
That’s not a bad thing.”

“I didn’t say it
was.”

“I’m not some
possessive psycho just because I like the fact that no other guy has ever had
sex with my wife.
 
I think it’s perfectly
fine.”

“It is.”

“So what did you
just write down?”

He looked up.
 
“Why are you asking me that?”

“Because I feel
like a lab rat in here.
 
Like you’re
making these observations, these judgments, about everything I say and you’re
writing them down.
 
So I’d like to know
what you’re writing.
 
I’d like to see
your notes.”

“No.”

“You’d better keep
an eye on your briefcase,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” he
replied.
 
“I will.”

“It’s all
good.
 
I probably don’t want to know what
you really think of me, anyway.”
 
I
chuckled again and stood up to stretch.
 
On my feet now, I couldn’t resist walking over to the big picture window
and looking out at the stone bench in the courtyard.
 
It hadn’t snowed yet—we might get some
flurries at the end of January, maybe an inch or two before spring began
yawning and stretching—but it looked cold out there anyway.
 
The gray sky matched the bench.
 
“You must think I’m something of a
monster.
 
On some level, at least.”

“Why would I think
that?”

“I’m like that
bench out there.
 
Cold.
 
Hard.”

“You’re a hard son
of a bitch,” he said.

I nodded.
 
I wasn’t looking at him, but I could feel him
looking at me.
 
“When I shot Pinnix and
Ramseur, I didn’t give one cheek of a rat’s ass.
 
It doesn’t matter, though.
 
I’ve never killed any people.
 
I’ve only killed golems.
 
Conjured from plain earth.”

He didn’t write
that down.
 
I was pretty sure he already
had it in another pad.
 
Instead of
writing, he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
 
When he’d rubbed all the sleep out of them,
or whatever he wanted to get rid of, he left them closed.
 
At first, it looked like he was thinking
about something very deeply, a subject so difficult that his brain couldn’t
process visual stimuli and this other concept at the same time.
 
Then I began to suspect he was just tired and
falling asleep.

“Doc?”
 
I asked.

“The Bald Man,” he
said.

“The Bald Man.”

His eyes opened and
on went his glasses.
 
He filled his
narrow chest with a deep breath—a
ki
breath—and released it in a long, slow exhalation.

“I’d like to talk
about the Bald Man,” he said, “in detail.
 
If you don’t mind.”

I sat down on the
couch.
 
I reached down to that nasty
coffee table and grabbed my plastic-encased
Southern
Rifleman
.
 
“Sure.
 
Let’s talk.”

“In these dreams
where he’s…assaulting Allie.”

An image: smooth
skin, made for the touch of my hands only, rippling from the violent impact of
his hips against the backs of her legs, her buttocks.
 
That
slapping
sound.

My stomach
knotted.
 
I shuddered.

“
Standing
isn’t what I’d call it,” I
muttered.
 
“If all he does in my dreams
from now on is
stand
, I’ll be a happy
man.”

“But he’s behind
her.”

“That’s how he
likes it.”

Dr. Koenig stared
at me.

“In my nightmares,
I mean,” I said quickly.
 
“She’s always
turned around—I can’t ever see her face.
 
He
can’t see her face.
 
Must be how he likes it, because that’s how
he always does it.”

“You can’t see her
face,” Dr. Koenig said.
 
“But can you see
his
face?”

I swallowed and
shook my head.

“No.
 
In these dreams, I never see
the…beginning.
 
How Allie’s pants come
off, how his come off.
 
It’s always in
the middle of things.”

He appeared to
ponder this for several moments, and as he did, I pondered along with him.
 
My mind wandered, and when it did, it
wandered back to 1989 and an afternoon spent with Kate and Bobby.
 
A palm reading from a cut-rate fortune teller
who plied her trade in an old camper.

Don’t get married.
 
Live alone always.

I spoke up.

“There’s a lot
that bothers me about these dreams,” I said.
 
“For obvious reasons.”

Dr. Koenig looked
up.

I wet my lips with
the tip of my tongue and pressed them together.
 
I had to breathe through my nose when I did this, and so it didn’t last
long.
 
I felt a sinus infection coming
on.

“But one thing
that has occurred to me,” I continued, “is that there’s definitely
something…supernatural about all this.”

If he agreed, he
gave me no indication.

“These dreams,” I
went on, “could be the product of an overstressed mind—Allie thinks it’s my
brain training itself on what to do if something like that ever happens—but it
could be something else, too.
 
If we
accept the postulate that this isn’t a memory…could it be a premonition?”

I leaned forward.

“Could the Bald
Man be showing me what he’s working up to?”