The Parallel Apartments (25 page)

“Here, princess. Fucking take the fucking caps.”

She put out her hand. He gave her two capsules. She didn't recognize them, and she'd been prescribed pretty much every mellower in the PDR, or so it seemed. They smelled faintly of finger paints. He opened the Sprite and gave it to her. She swallowed the pills.

The raccoon had shuffled to the end of the table to paw at something in the enameled tray.

“Gimme that,” said Sherpa, walking back to the table and snatching something out of the animal's paws: a syringe. Sherpa scruffed its neck like a cat and dragged it back to the center of the table, and, with one hand, in one motion, popped the lid off the syringe and stuck the needle into the meat of the raccoon's hind leg.

The raccoon exploded in motive panic. Sherpa held on tightly. Ten seconds later, it was limp as a raw steak.

“Sux,” said Sherpa, grinning widely, wrinkles forming at his stubbly hairline. “My concession to the mainstream. But you won't need it.”

Sherpa took an object from the deep tray. It looked a little like a mother-of-pearl barrette. He performed a movement, and the object doubled in length. Oh, a razor, straight-edge, the old-fashioned kind. Justine screamed, but it came out comically diluted, a scream not screamed but said.

“Jesus, shut up. I'm not gonna hurt him, I'm just shaving a teeeee
nine
sy bit of fur here off the hind legs so I can find a couple veins. The animal here will be himself again soon, cured of his little affliction. How's that sound to you?”

Sherpa shaved the raccoon's hind legs near the ankles. Lou watched, looking small, tired, hopeful, a gambler who just got dealt his first pair of aces in three days. Dot had fallen onto Lou's shoulder.

A strand of hair fell into Justine's eye, irritating her tear duct and vaguely nauseating her, but it seemed beyond human effort to reach up and brush it away. She could neither keep her eyelids shut nor prevent them from falling: they fluttered at half-mast by the involuntary power of their own tiny, drugged musculature. Justine's tonsils began to contract, signaling panic.

“I want to go home.”

No one heard, or appeared to have heard. Had she even said it?

Sherpa went to the steel counter and opened the bag of balloons. They were long and slender, balloon-animal balloons. He wrapped one tightly around the raccoon's leg, then inserted a large-gauge needle with an orange plastic valve at one end into a vein just below the tourniquet. He did the same to the other leg, then removed the balloons with a snap. Into one valve he injected a clear liquid.

Justine's panic passed, giving way to a floating feeling of invisibility. Not a bad feeling, that. Maybe everything would be fine.

“Anesthesia, my own formula. You—Dot, right?—must be awake, so you will not need it, but the dumb animal—” Sherpa grabbed the raccoon's tail and shook it like a dinner bell “—would not likely understand that the transformation is for his own good. He would thrash.”

“Makes sense, Sherpa,” said Lou.

“Shut up.”

With the shears he snipped a short length of fresh tubing from the coil on his table, then plugged one end into a valve protruding from the odd machine, and the other into the valve of the raccoon's right cannula.

Sherpa repeated the procedure with the raccoon's other leg, a new tube, a separate valve in the machine.

“Circuit completed,” he said, giggling.

He opened a little door in the machine and placed an object of some kind inside. He began to slowly crank the machine.

“Now, this is purely for demonstration, remember,” he said, continuing to crank. “The real business will be our next, and last, appointment. Louis, c'mere, crank.”

Lou stood up, unsteady, like a film of a dying caribou played in reverse
slow motion. He made his way over to the grinder and began to crank. Sherpa slapped him on the back of the head, the power behind the motion nearly knocking Lou to the ground.

“Counterclockwise, Jesus, man.”

Lou reversed direction. Presently a fine meniscus of blood began to grow in the tube attached to the raccoon's left leg. It threaded through the tube, as thin and attenuated as mercury in a fever thermometer. It reached the machine. After a moment it reemerged from the machine and into the other tube, crawling the length of the tube and back into the raccoon's body, the blood somehow transformed, somehow purged of its muds and poisons.

Sherpa lit a cigarette.

“It will take forty minutes for a therapeutic percentage of the animal's blood to circulate and filter through the field. But, of course,
you
,” said Sherpa, smiling, pointing his chin at Dot, “are sicker, larger,
bloodier,
and will take about five hours.”

Upstairs, the kettle finally boiled dry. All was quiet but the crank.

Then they were in the car. Lou was driving. Justine was in the passenger seat, fully reclined, Dot limp across the backseat. A misty recollection of Lou carrying her. No one talked or moved. They didn't stop. They didn't do anything but listen to Don Gibson sing “Sea of Love” on KVET, and drive.

Justine struggled up the stairs to her room, locked the door, undressed with hands that felt not like her own but a lecherous stranger's, lay down on her bed, and called Troy, but there was no answer and he had no machine so she hung up. No matter, she might not have been able to put a sentence together, anyway. For more than an hour she masturbated with frantic, hard slaps and swipes of her stranger's fingers, a sensational guilt at her recent and present actions building along with the approach to the oasis of orgasm that would quench both. Finally, accomplishing neither, she stopped and lay as still as she could, counted the tickling drops of sweat as they ran down the shallow gullies between her ribs. The phone rang. She answered, her hands her own again.

“It's like two,” said Troy.

“God, I need to talk to you,” said Justine, sitting up, sore, lacquered in rapidly drying sweat.

“You forgot me. Stamp club ended like thirty minutes ago, and I'm sitting out here on the curb and Rogers LeRoi and Gary Fike are smoking and looking at me like they might be thinking about kicking my ass. Are you gonna come get me?”

“I forgot, sorry, but the weirdest stuff happened—I'm kind of freaked out.”

“Really? Hey, what are you eating? It sounds soft. Donettes?”

“Nothing. I'm just slurring a little, from pills. I'll explain.”

“Well, are you coming?”

“Leaving right now.” She stood up, a bit dizzy, but without difficulty. It had been five or six hours since she'd eaten the blue capsules.

“Hurry up. Hey, do they know?”

Downstairs, a door slammed. It was Charlotte's peculiar slam. Home from the Wheelers', where she played pinochle on Sunday afternoons.

“Who? Know what?”

“That I'm coming over to meet everybody?”

“Oh god,” said Justine. “I forgot. Look, that's not gonna happen, Troy. Everything's different now. Everything's weird, and I don't know what the hell to do.”

Troy sighed. “What happened? No, don't tell me. Come get me, then tell me. Hurry. Rogers is gonna whale on me really soon, I know it.”

Troy's green Dodge Aspen blew clouds of smoke as Justine drove to Austin High School.

Troy was sitting on the curb near the pay phones, intact. Rogers and Gary were indeed buzzarding nearby.

“He's scary,” said Troy, climbing in and slamming the passenger door.

“What are they doing here on a Sunday?”

“I think they live at the school.”

“Man, I'm glad to see you,” said Justine. “You're the only normal person I know.”

“Rogers is not like a good, heroic delinquent like Ponyboy or anything. He's more like Scarface. Drive away.”

“Would you forget about Rogers?” said Justine, slipping the Aspen into gear and pulling out onto San Marcos Street. “He's nothing, Troy. But listen…”

“He has an Uzi hidden on school grounds, and he drives to Houston once a week to buy heroin to traffic to fourth-graders at Hyde Park Baptist. Ponyboy just had a broken bottle.”

“You know Lou that I've told you about?”

“Damn hot today. What is it, like, March?”

“April 2. Will you listen to me? The scariest shit happened today—”

“Hot weather makes people like Rogers LeRoi want to subjugate or kill weak persons. And it makes weak persons weaker. Wimps, nerds, geeks. Stamp-clubbers.”

“So roll down your window, Troy, Jesus.”

“Wait. Look,” he said, opening up his Liberty stamp album. “I traded my dumb Scott #524 to Sam for his mint #325 with a tiny, insignificant burn mark on McKinley's face, but you can still tell it's him. Sam's new at collecting.”

“I'm driving, Troy,” said Justine, beginning to roll her own window down. “I'll look at your stamps at the next light.”

“Don't open your window, or my dupes'll blow away. Look what else, I got half a sixty-five-cent Graf, left half, the best half, from Orvance, who just gave it to me, he said it muddied his collection. But guess what, Hansika's stupid Uncle Vijay or somebody bought her a Scott #112, mint, no hinge or anything. I'll never have an Uncle Vijay. I'll never have a Scott #112. I'll never have a collection like Hansika. Me and Sam and Orvance and Willie are thinking about expelling her from the club. That'll make my collection the third best, next to—”

“Troy, shut up.”

“What?”

“I have to tell you about what happened today.”

“What?”

“It was so scary, I took Lou and his sick friend Dot I've been telling you about? to the so-called doctor they've been seeing and I hoped he was just a hippie all-natural guy or an acupuncturist or something, but he's a psychopath, just like I thought—”

“Now Rogers, there's your psycho.”

“You haven't met them yet, but Dot means a lot to me, and I think this quack might kill her, literally end her life. And he's taking all their money.”

“That sucks,” said Troy, trying to fit a stamp with Skylab on it into a tiny plastic sleeve.

“Will you help me figure out something to do?”

“You want me to go kick his ass?”

Justine did want something like that. But Troy couldn't do such a thing, for reasons both moral and physiological. For a moment, she wished she were friends with Rogers LeRoi. She could barter with him. He gives Sherpa a nice throttling, Rogers gets a nice blow job. No paperwork.

“I don't know.”

“God,
I wish I had a Scott #112.”

Justine opened her mouth to speak, but then said nothing. The light at East Eleventh and the frontage road turned red.

“Okay,” said Troy, cracking open his album to near the beginning. “This is a really short light so I'll explain fast. See the picture of this square stamp? See? It's brown, really. Or buff. It's worth more than a hundred dollars.”

The tears were coming. Old tears, cave-woman tears of aloneness and resignation. She had been expecting them, but they were coming too early. Troy, less than worthless when faced with lachrymose demonstrations, would either shut down completely, or, worse, would beg for a blow job.

The light at East Eleventh remained red. Justine shut down her throat, ground her incisors edge-to-edge, and pulled tight the threads of muscle across her cheekbones. If it didn't turn green soon she wouldn't be able to keep the tears back. Turn! The light's reputation as mercifully brief seemed now to have been a great municipal lie.

But it changed.

“Light, sweetie.”

Justine stomped on the gas. The tears retreated back to their tear sacs or wherever it was they bivouacked when not dripping off her chin and the end of her nose.

“Home?” she said after a moment.

“Huh?”

“Want me to take you home?”

“No, Thundercloud. I need a shift, and I'm pretty sure Winnie'll give me one. I
must
own that #112.”

“Thundercloud. Why didn't you tell me that? I wouldn't have come this—”

“Unless…,” said Troy, pointing to the Tomby Motel, coming up on the
left, where in 1973 the Rev. Richman Joe Mackelar got busted snorting gunpowder and cocaine out of the deep ensellure of a thirteen-year-old hooker, “you want to get a roo-oo-oom.”

Justine ignored him. She turned on the radio, which was tuned to KVET, the station Dot and Lou listened to. KVET brought her down, so she twisted the dial in search of a better one.

“Does your silence indicate that you are you seriously considering my offer right now?” said Troy. “There's the Tomby. Look right there. There it is. Right there. Just hang a left. Quickly now. Left. Oh, you missed it. Now you'll have to pull a yooey.”

Justine ignored him. She found a robust station playing country and western. She turned it up.