Jog On Fat Barry (17 page)

“I sound like a dirty old man,” I grumbled.

“Forget about it,” was all he’d say back. “It’s just a name. And anyway, we’ve got a job to do.”

But no good deed ever went unpunished.

One afternoon, Kaelem, a third-grader at another school, walked into my classroom at Eastman. Kids had told him about Ruby, the janitor, and me. They’d guessed I was
The Exposer
. My disappearing cuts and bruises had clinched it. Simple deduction or sixth sense: kids were hooked into both.

“This boy,” Kaelem eventually said. “He does things to me that he shouldn’t.”

I told Kaelem we could see Shanley. I said Shanley would make it okay. But when we walked outside the
boy
was there, waiting for us. For whatever reason, I never smelt him: not like I had the others. Perhaps I was careless, or too dog-tired. Whatever it was, I lost count of how many times the
boy
pushed the knife he was holding into my belly. I was a pincushion, blood streamed through my fingers, and Kaelem was the last thing I could remember seeing: running across the playground screaming for his life.

The average human adult has ten pints of blood in their body: 7% of their body weight. Exsanguination—the speed at which you bleed out—depends on the gravity of the trauma. It could be minutes, or seconds. Hypovolemic shock kicks in when you’re about two quarts down, and your chances of survival are greatest if you can get to a hospital within the golden hour.

A nurse walked into the room to pull the blinds as the sun started inching up over the horizon, and she stood by the window for a moment encircled in diffused light. There were all kinds of drips and tubes and monitors around the bed, and in one corner of the room, a strand of electric lights draped over a leafy plastic plant flickered on and off. Someone was singing “Silent Night” and the nurse hummed along. I tried moving but had no feeling below my neck. I tried talking but no words would come out. I kept trying and eventually one word did. The nurse jumped when she heard it. She spun around and stared at me. There was a mixture of disbelief and confusion on her face. I repeated the word, before forcing out another, and another, and another, and another.

“Who sings carols in May?”

“It’s not May,” the nurse said. “It’s Christmas.”

She called for a resident. I was confused. It couldn’t possibly be Christmas. I wanted to ask how but it was too painful to speak. She called for the resident again and stepped up to my bed, guardedly, like she was frightened I might jump up and grab her. She cautiously took my hand and squeezed it ever so gently in her own. My fingers started to tingle, and when I squeezed back, her face lit up.

The next forty-eight hours saw an endless gush of pathologists, cardiologists, neurologists, internists, psychiatrists, nursing staff, medical students, and administrators stop by my bed to interrogate me. Each one told me how fortunate I’d been: dead on arrival having lost two quarts of blood in the playground and another quart on the gurney. They gawked and poked and prodded. They were confounded. And not only at the speed of my recovery, but that any reanimation had actually occurred to begin with, because ten minutes had elapsed after complete brain and respiratory failure. I was comatose for six months, but up on my feet less than twelve hours after regaining consciousness, and specialists from all over the country were jetting into Los Angeles just to see this freak of nature for themselves. A television evangelist wanted me to confirm that life existed in the hereafter, while a professor at UCLA wanted me to refute it. And articles were being written about me for
The Lancet
, the
BMJ
, and the
New England Journal of Medicine
.

I left endless messages for Shanley on his cell, and at the precinct, but for whatever reasons, he never got back to me. Then a detective named Dowland showed up out of the blue.

“Why all the interest in Shanley?” he asked.

It took an hour to convince Dowland that Shanley and me were friends, and he’d only accept it after a proctologist verified I’d been in a vegetative state for six months. Then Dowland spoke, and what he said was brief and to the point: Shanley was dead. He’d been shot four times outside his apartment building five months ago. No one had seen anything and the triggerman was still at large. Dowland said Kaelem had also been killed: a victim of hit-and-run at Olympic and Pico. Dowland said he knew nothing about the boy chasing him. And when I asked him what he knew about
The Exposer
, Dowland said whoever whacked Shanley probably whacked
The Exposer
too.

According to one doctor, complications arising from liver and kidney failure could have been one explanation for my having fallen into a coma. Another said hypoxia. Expert after expert stood at the foot of my bed and hypothesized. It was the blind leading the blind. Not that I cared, I was on the mend, and that was the main thing. I missed Shanley though. He and his ball-puzzle had become the closest thing to family I’d known. We were friends: something I’d not had since my wife died eight years before. But maybe that was because something inside me died when she did. Not in the same way, I mean, I was still walking and breathing. But my emotions got shut down. It was the only way I could deal with the pain I felt. Loss and loneliness can cripple you if you open your door to them. Maybe that was the reason He chose me in the first place, so I could see that I’d been dead to the world for all that time. In any case, I had no more electric shocks, or goose bumps, or cold sweats to endure. The stench of child molestation had lost its hold on me. I was growing stronger with each passing hour. Shanley and I had done what we could. Now it was payback time. It was my chance to begin again: to start from scratch; meet someone special; change lanes. Washington or Florida. Didn’t much matter which. One place was as good as another.

The 20th century was coming to an end. Countless millions had been shot, bombed, gassed, landmined, starved, maimed, raped, tortured, robbed, and humiliated, but, according to Neil Armstrong, there had been at least one “giant leap” for mankind. Of course, you might think otherwise. But what you couldn’t argue with was that the next millennium was about to begin, and with its commencement would follow the dreams and aspirations of seven billion people. My dreams were simple. I wanted to buy a trailer and look for a place called home.

I got out of bed to stretch my legs. I had traded in my walker for a cane and could walk quite well. I saw the nurse who squeezed my hand. Her name was Poppy and she was pushing an old man in a wheelchair. As they passed, a jolt of electricity shot through me, and goose bumps raced up my arms. I was overwhelmed by the stench of shit and vomited onto my slippers. Moments later I grabbed the old man.

“Uncle Fred has a potting shed at the bottom of his garden,” I heard myself snarl.

The old man sat upright. He shot a glance at me with frightened, watery eyes, and tried to pry my fingers loose with his own bony, liver-spotted hands.

“Time to pay for what you’ve done,” I whispered in his ear.

He started to hyperventilate; couldn’t catch his breath. His feeble little hands clutched at his feeble little chest. Poppy yelled “Code Blue” and moments later a crash team were trying to resuscitate him, but they were wasting their time and I told them so.

“He’ll suffer for five minutes,” I said. “And then, only then, will he die in order for retribution to begin in earnest.”

It seemed my new life had been put on hold.

I was aware that Shanley would need replacing, and since Dowland was the only other detective I knew, I decided to sound him out. All the telephones in the hospital lobby were out of order, so I went outside in search of another. The wind blowing in off Big Bear sent newspaper pages twisting and twirling along the sidewalk. One wrapped itself around my legs, and as I bent down to unravel it, I heard Kaelem’s voice.

“How come you’re wearing pyjamas, Exposer?”

I spun around. Kaelem was standing in front of me with Leena beside him.

“Leena wanted to tell you it isn’t your fault what happened to her. It was the people from Health and Human Services. You warned them not to do it but they sent her home anyway. Why did they do that? Why did they send Leena home?”

He was pointing to the newspaper page I was holding. I looked at it. It was out of a country paper and there was nothing to see: just market news, stock and feed. I turned it over. There was a picture of Leena: below that was an obituary. It was suicide. She’d hacked her wrists to pieces with a bread knife after drinking a pint of bleach.

“Those dumb fucks,” I heard myself say.

I looked up. Kaelem and Leena had gone.

“Fucking useless fucking motherfuckers,” I shouted.

I kicked a cardboard box into the street. When I stepped forward to kick it again, an indescribable pain doubled me up instead. I couldn’t breathe; my head began to spin. I stumbled and started to fall, but just then a hand reached out to steady me. I looked up and saw a young man with the brightest blue eyes I’d ever seen.

“Don’t worry, Pilgrim,” he said, smiling. “The pain will pass.”

Beds of flowerless lotus plants stretched out across the lake. We had driven to Echo Park in a rental car from Hertz, and I was surprised when the man told me I didn’t have long to live.