Thrust (6 page)

One of his symptoms was that he couldn't answer in the short form.
 
He had to run the whole thing out.
 
Every time.
 
Always the same.
 
Jez
had given it to him the first week in the hospital, and now it was another trigger.
 

He pulled it and the bullet came out the same way each time.
 
"It's a disease of the mind characterized by a constellation of distinctive and often predictable symptoms. Those most commonly associated with the disease are called positive symptoms. These include thought disorder, delusions, and hallucinations."

Now he had to pause and wait for the question he'd originally asked
Jez
, and it had to be played out the same way.

Dawn said, "What's…?"

Okay, now he could go again.
 
"Thought disorder is the diminished ability to think clearly and logically. Often it is manifested by disconnected and nonsensical language that renders the patient incapable of participating in conversation, contributing to his alienation from his family, friends, and society.
 
An affected person may believe that he is being conspired against, called paranoid delusion."

Even as he spoke aloud he could hear
Jez's
voice saying the words, the room going white as the walls of the ward.
 
"'Broadcasting' describes a type of delusion in which the individual with this illness believes that his thoughts can be heard by others. Hallucinations can be heard, seen, or even felt.
 
Usually they take the form of voices heard only by the afflicted person. Such voices may describe the person's actions, warn him of danger or tell him what to do."

Thank Christ, he was coming to the end of it, rattling faster and faster, trying not to take another breath because it would throw off his entire rhythm.
 
"At times the individual may hear several voices carrying on a conversation. Less obvious than the 'positive symptoms' but equally serious are the 'negative symptoms' that represent the absence of normal behavior. These include flat or blunted affect, such as a lack of emotional expression, apathy, and social withdrawal."

"Who were you just then?" the
goth
girl asked.
 
"Fred or Cindy?"

"A woman named
Jez
."

Dawn chuckled and the leather-
deather
spun away with a grimace.
 
"Okay, you're coming into focus some.
 
You're in touch with your feminine side.
 
No wonder you write so well."

"Not quite," he told her.
 
"
Jez
is dead."

"Well then," she said.
 
"That must be good for your art too, right?"
 
Her eyes calling to him.
 
Telling him things.

D
awn still didn't draw out his book, just staring at him with a passionate but distant gaze.
 
If she hung around long enough, she'd ask about his illness again, get totally freaked when he gave the same recitation, pausing in the same places.
 

He kept looking at his book there, wedged in tight, the binding bent, corners starting to dog-ear.
 
It had been a long time since he'd really cared about something like that—about the poetry, the need for contact with the reader—and it was such an unfamiliar feeling that his fingers grew itchy.
   

He could tell she had a taste for the place already.
 
The action of the club, the energy of the spoken word, and the dance of fools.
 
It called to her.
 
She probably had fifty notebooks at home filled with verse scribbled during study hall.
 
She held Plath and Baudelaire close and wouldn't understand Eliot's "
Prufrock
" for another twenty years or so, when her beauty started to fade.
 

The other ladies began discussing Shake and his charisma but Dawn kept after him.
 
"So it's not an act like the rest of them.
 
You've got reasons for writing the things you do.
 
All that anger and weirdness.
 
Talking about your mother and father, the friends you've lost.
 
Jail."
 
There, finally coming out and saying it.
 
"It's always moody, sometimes a little ambiguous or baffling, but usually worth the effort."

"You sound a lot older than you look."

Those eyes flashing back and forth, blue and green and blue.
 
"I'm almost twenty."

"You've still got a while to go before the buzzards start circling."

"Can I buy you a drink?"

"No thanks."

"That's right, you don't drink anymore.
 
You write about that too."

"I have to see the boss and find out if I still have a job."

Timmy gave her another glass of raspberry juice and pointed to Isaac's office.
 
"He's still here, Gray.
 
Go clear the air if you can."

"You that worried?"

Timmy thought about it some.
 
"I can't stand working in a place with such spiritual disharmony."
 
He crossed his arms and settled back on the balls of his feet.
 
He'd been a bartender for half his life and knew when an alcoholic was glowering off the back end of the wagon.
 
Chase didn't want a drink but felt as if he should've been dying for one.
 

It was that kind of twice removed emotion that had been playing havoc with him a lot lately.

"One last thing," he said.
 
"A woman tonight wearing a black dress, dark hair worn up in a twist.
 
Do you remember her?"

"What did she have?"

"She wasn't drinking so far as I saw."

"Then why should I know her, I've been in back of the bar since six.
 
I'm about to give last call."

Of course,
Jez
was dead.

Dawn grinned as if the entire experience had been amusing but might not be worth repeating.
 
She dug into her bag, passing up the book again, searching for her wallet or keys.
 

She said, "Thanks for an interesting night."
 
That would've been an insult coming from anyone else, but he realized she meant it.
 
"When are you performing again?"

"Tomorrow night, if I haven't been canned."

"I'd like to hear more.
 
Of your work and you just talking.
 
Maybe we can go out for a drink afterwards?
 
I mean, dinner, you know."

He was silent for so long that Timmy had to lean over and shoulder him out of it.
 

"Sure," Chase said.

He watched her go then, slipping through the others, but wasn't exactly sure of when she was actually gone.
 
One of his other symptoms was time-sense aphasia.
 
An hour could go by and feel like three seconds.
 
Or he could pour himself a glass of water, freefall in his mind for a few hours, and come back before the glass overflowed.
 

He always had to be aware of his surroundings, of his place among them, and even then he could never be certain he wasn't already fading away.

Timmy said, "I think she likes you.
 
Don't let that make you crazy.
 
It's a good thing.
 
Well, sometimes."
 
Hesitating, and frowning a bit.
 
"For some people, anyway."

"You really know how to set somebody's heart to rest."

"Yeah, sorry about that."

Chase backed away from the remaining patrons, sticking to the walls and shadows.
 
As if Nurse
Jez
might appear from within them, her arms thrusting free, to grab hold and draw him back in with her.
 

He got to Isaac Barth's office and knocked.
 

The latch hadn't been completely secured and the door wedged open.
 

This was the kind of thing that could trap him—that's all it took.
 
A door opening could lead him anywhere down the back corridors.
 
You walk through and instead of Isaac's office you're in a cemetery so broad and wide you can't see any ending to it.
 
The stones hiss.
 
The statues turn to face you.
 
If the door is open, you're being invited into some unmapped circle of hell prepared just for you.

His father sat at the desk, with a bullet wound in his head.
 

Huh.
 

Well.
 

All right, Chase thought.

Dad looked up.

His left eye oozed onto his cheek, watching Chase as he entered.
 
Staring with an accusing glare, the blood still pumping down the side of his face.
 
This is how the man had ended up.
 
A suicide in their den after the cops busted him for raping
Doreena
and burying the newborn in the woods.

Chase had found his father's corpse at his desk, a hastily scrawled note propped up against the base of his writing lamp.
 

The puddle of gore and brain fluids didn't quite reach the piece of paper, which flapped slightly from the breeze coming in through the open back door.
 
Dad's mouth was open, lips curled as if in the middle of his last word.
 

The pistol was a .38 and the smell of gunpowder remained heavy in the room.
 
There was also the stink of burned hair and meat.
 
Chase hadn't touched the note but he'd been able to read three words:

not my fault

That had somehow become the creed of Chase's life.
 

As he watched, his father cleared his throat, turned his dead head, looked straight at him and smiled.

But no.
 

Isaac Barth sat at his desk reading Shake's latest book of poetry, published by an independent press that had already gone under.
 
Shake had thirty-five collections out and no more than three had ever been released by the same house.
 
And he was actually a success story, so far as poets went.

Isaac smiled warmly.
 
He saved his page with a cloth marker and gently closed the book.
 
Every movement seemed well-practiced and designed for maximum effect.
 
He gestured to the seat opposite him and Chase took it.
 

"Hello Gray, I'm glad you came back.
 
I wanted to talk with you."

Here would either come the ax or the thoughtful please-tell-me-more-about-your-sickness speech.
 
Isaac actually did care but he was easily enthralled by any kind of character swing that went to the dark end of the bell curve.
 
He was the kind of guy who wanted you to try to put your weirdness into context, as if you could just give him a run-down, a simple answer.
 

"Okay," Chase said.
 
He had some trouble not adding "Dad."

Isaac barely broke five two, and behind the large desk he looked like a kid playing among an adult's belongings.
 
The tiny, liver-spotted hands almost too awkward to be touching a grown-up's things.
 
His nose twisted left and right, broken several times during his adolescence in Brooklyn, one of the few Jews in a mostly Italian neighborhood.
 

That's where it had started, Isaac's need to know.
 
Why they hated him, why the world didn't kick open the doors to the death camps years earlier. Where the unrelenting frenzy came out from, and the passion and the lunacy.
 

His steel-gray hair was wiry and unkempt, and it swirled around his head to cover and uncover bald patches.
 
Revealing a blueprint of scars and sun cancers.
 
His pants rode a little too high and he always wore suspenders and cufflinks, with his shirt buttoned to the collar.

His eyes held a pleasant humanity about them that was married, somehow, to an awful melancholy.
 
They checked his wrists for a Holocaust victim's tattoo, and felt a useless and unearned guilt.
 
Isaac had never been closer to Germany than a hot dog vendor's sauerkraut tray on
Cassina
Boulevard.
  

The pain came from being a caring man who'd seen seventy years of the world and had understood almost none of it.
 
An artist at heart without outlet.

As usual, Chase scanned the room and became lost among the titles sitting packed on the floor-to-ceiling crammed shelves.
 
Hundreds of volumes of poetry, classic novels, books on philosophy, religion, and history cluttered the walls.