Bloodroot (21 page)

“This was reception and processing,” Danny said, heading for the stairs. “Coming in was the only time a kid saw this room. The only kids that left this place went out the back door. Wrapped in a sheet.” He stopped at the wheelchair, fingered a thick leather restraint on one of the arms. “This is what it was like in here.” He turned the light on the giant doctor. “Not like that.”

He started up the stairs, his hand releasing clouds of dust as it ran along the railing. I followed, my hands in my pockets.

“In high school, sometimes when I cut class,” Danny said, “I came here. Exploring. I wanted to see what was left, I guess, after all that time we spent looking through the windows. Few years later, after I figured some things out and I got real bad with the needle, I used to shoot up here. Always had the place to myself.”

We passed the first floor and continued ascending.

“Nothing happened there,” Danny said. “Storage, mostly. A staff lounge. They didn’t want people downstairs hearing anything.”

“Hearing what?”

“Oh, you know. Crying children. Yelling nurses and attendants. Screams.”

We made the third-floor landing. There was no tile here, just flat, smooth, colorless concrete. The floor, the walls, the ceiling—like a cell block.

“This is where most of the action was,” Danny said. “Here on the third floor.” He kicked at the bottom edge of a fallen metal door. “The walls are thicker. And the doors. You can’t even tell this level is here from the outside. There aren’t any windows. There was no stop for it on the elevator.”

Danny passed through the doorway and into the hall. I caught him by the elbow.

“How do you know this stuff? What’re we doing here?” I asked. “It’s not because I’m a history teacher.”

Danny stared down the hallway, the beam of the flashlight pooling at our feet. “No, it’s not.” He turned to me. “You ever wonder about the history you don’t know? All the things that happened, that people did, all the lives that came and went with no one stopping to notice? Not the General Washingtons that you love so much, but the poor bastards that dragged the cannons through the mud. There were hundreds of them, right?”

“Thousands,” I said. “I don’t know, Danny. I feel sometimes my curiosity for what came before us, the big people and the small, died a long time ago. One of those guys in the mud, that’s what I feel like these days. All I can see is the next step in front of me.”

“A lot more gets by us than we ever notice, doesn’t it?” he asked.

“Yeah, Danny,” I said. “I guess it does.”

“And yet we can never get away from it. The past. No matter how small we try to make it. No matter how much we tell ourselves it doesn’t count. Even if we do forget something, for a while, it still comes back from wherever we buried it. The past doesn’t stay in our memory, it gets in our bones, our blood. It stays.”

“Danny,” I whispered. “I need to know why we’re here. I need to know now.”

He turned to me. “This place. This is where I’m from.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“I wasn’t born your brother,” Danny said. “I came to you from here.”

“Bullshit, you’re imagining things,” I said. “It’s the nightmares. You know you’ve always had them. I mean, c’mon, you’re better now, but you’ve cost yourself some brain cells over the years.”

Danny walked away from me, down the dark corridor. He stopped and shone the flashlight through the small window in a big metal door. I ran up beside him.

“Let’s get outta here,” I said. “We can talk about this someplace else.”

“This was one of the laboratories,” Danny said.

I looked through the window. Instead of concrete, everything was tiled. The tile was cracked and molded over in green, brown, and black now but, in its day, easier to clean than even concrete. I realized only neglect and abandonment had brought any color to this place. In the past it had been a two-color world: white and red. Tile and blood. In the center of the room stood a long, metal examination table. In the flashlight beam, through the rust and corrosion, some of the steel still gleamed.

“Dr. Calvin’s
office,
they called it,” Danny said, “but a lab is what it was. It’s where we got our shots, among other things.” He pointed the light down the hall, shining it on one metal door after another. “Calvin was the only doctor I knew by name. Knowing it didn’t help any.”

Danny led us back to the stairs. As we climbed, skipping the fourth floor, I wondered if the drugs had damaged my brother more than I ever knew. The places he’d been, the things he’d seen, the shooting galleries and crack dens, the emergency rooms, the psych wards, the junkies, dealers, hookers, paramedics, cops, and doctors, the needles and spoons and guns and handcuffs—they’d gotten confused in his brain. To make sense of it all, he’d put them together and built this haunted house. One roost for all his demons. Maybe that somehow made his memories bearable for him.

But then there was Dr. Calvin. I’d heard that name from my mother in the midst of one of her fits. Someone she used to work with, I’d figured. An old boss. But where would Danny have heard that name?

We left the staircase at the fifth floor, the top floor.

“Boys’ residential floor,” Danny said. “Girls lived on the fourth.”

We walked slowly down the hall and into an ammonia stench that made me gag.

“Jesus,” I said, fighting for breath and searching my bag for my cigarettes. “What the hell is that?”

“Bat shit,” Danny said, unaffected by the stink. “They live in the attic and the roof. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Take shallow breaths. You’ll get used to it.”

We passed door after door, these smaller than the ones downstairs, without any windows into the rooms. The doors wilted in their frames, bent and weakened. Nailed into each door was a rusty metal number, just like the apartment doors in my building. I touched the number nine, my apartment number, and rust flaked off on my fingertips. Glued under the number was a small ceramic clown. Missing one hand, it clutched broken balloons in the other. Still, this clown had held up better than half the building. I rubbed at the filth on its smiling face with my thumb and the door creaked. I jumped back and hustled after Danny, who had stopped before a door at the end of the hall.

“This was my room,” Danny said, pushing the door open. “Me and six other boys.”

I walked up behind him. Room fifteen. His clown had both hands but no head. No balloons, either. Over Danny’s shoulder, I peered into the room. It was about the size of a walk-in closet. Tile walls, tile floor. Chessboard black and white. Like the asylum lobby, like the kitchen in Danny’s apartment. Huge, thick water pipes ran across the low ceiling. No way seven children of any age or size fit in that room. There wasn’t room for more than three beds. There was no toilet, no heater. I saw no fixtures where either might have been. One window set higher than any child’s reach and guarded with thin iron bars stared out at the world. One concrete eye to watch the moon.

“Danny,” I said, “your room was next to mine, in our parents’ house.”

“They didn’t even give us beds,” Danny said. “Just filthy blankets that they washed once a month. We had fleas, like dogs. One kid couldn’t even scratch himself. He had no hands.”

“We each had our own bed in our own room,” I said. “The same one, with the ship’s wheel for a headboard. Remember?”

“What do
you
remember, Kev?” Danny asked. “About us at five, six. We’re less than a year apart. Shouldn’t you remember
something
?”

I searched: the two of us Christmas morning under the tree, or out in the backyard under Mom’s watchful eye while she tended her garden, or getting dragged off to church in our Easter best. I could see the two of us at eight, ten, twelve years old walking back and forth to school, playing Wiffle ball in the street, but back before that was only me. No Danny in the emergency room after I’d hit the ice, no Danny building flower boxes with me and Dad. There were places he wasn’t and should have been so I tried putting him there.

Danny came into the pictures and flickered back out, a snow-flake that wouldn’t stick. I squinted my mind’s eye and tried to focus on specific things, his eyes, his hands, the sound of baby talk and crying, but I came up empty. In every memory he should have inhabited, Danny floated beyond the edges of my vision, inches out of the frame. I could feel him out there but I couldn’t pin him down, couldn’t get a grip on him. He was like a lost name dancing on the tip of my tongue.

“You’re asking about a time,” I said, “when I was . . . when we were very young.”

“But you remember other things, I bet,” Danny said. “Birthday parties, preschool, trips to the park, moving to Staten Island. Where am I? I’m not
there
because I was
here
.”

I was surprised, in fact, how far back I could remember. Details from when I couldn’t have been more than four or five. The stink of baby goats at a petting zoo, the rye-bread smell of the crackers I fed them. The blue and white blanket I carried everywhere. Red cowboy boots I always wanted to wear to church. God, I had pitched such a tantrum the day we left Brooklyn to move across that big, scary bridge. I screamed myself hoarse. All kinds of things popped up. But not Danny.

“I mean, yeah, there’s some shit,” I said, “but it’s all vague. Bits and pieces. I was . . . we were so young. One day it was me, Mom, and Dad in Brooklyn, and then it was the four of us on Staten Island. One day you’re just . . .”

“I’m just there,” Danny said. “Out of the blue. All of a sudden. You can’t remember me in the Brooklyn house at all, can you? Shouldn’t I be there? I would’ve been five when we . . . when you moved.”

Couldn’t be. Danny couldn’t be right. Then I thought of Mom. Talking to Danny like a baby patient, talking about Dr. Calvin, pacing the living room carpet wondering how to bring Danny home. I covered my mouth with my hands. Everything blurred and my knees went watery. Holy shit.

“It took me months to put it together,” Danny said. “In here, walking the halls, my own nightmares in front of my face like some old ghost town movie set. Maybe ’cause I was so fucking high.” He walked to the window. “It clicked for real when I took a good look out this window.”

I stood beside him and looked out. There was nothing to see but the night sky and a rolling, empty field beneath it.

“This place takes its name from that field,” Danny said. “Bloodroot Valley. Every spring that field goes white with bloodroot flowers. I’ve only seen it a couple of times. The blooms don’t last but I know it happens.”

I swallowed hard. “Mom’s garden. That’s when we knew spring was here, when the bloodroots bloomed.”

“This is where she got them,” Danny said. “And this is where she got me. She worked here; I fucking
know
it. How do you think Grandpa knew so much about Calvin and what went on here? He had an informant. He had photos, for chrissakes. You think that would’ve been allowed here?” He chuckled. “Mom fucking stole me from here.”

I believed. I remembered enough for that. My mother suddenly quitting nursing not long after the move to Staten Island, when that was the reason we’d moved there to begin with. That she got a new job at a big children’s hospital. At least that was what I’d always been told. But no one had ever said which one. Had Grandpa sent her here? Made our mother his own spy in the enemy camp?

“Imagine finding out,” Danny said, “your worst nightmares are actually your memories.”

“I never knew. No one ever told me.” I pulled the rum out of my jacket and took several long swallows. “This is un-fucking-believable.”

I offered Danny the bottle. He waved it off.

“That doesn’t make it go away,” he said. “Believe me, I know.”

“Why? Why are you telling me all this, after all these years?”

“Those people at your school,” Danny said, “they want to build a memorial here, for all the kids that never made it out. Restore this place, give tours. Make it a museum. Show off the antique exam tables and the old-fashioned wheelchairs. How sick is that? It was a living hell, a mad scientist’s laboratory where they gave kids diseases as experiments. Made us into pincushions before I ever even heard the word
heroin
.

“This fuckin’ place needs to be ground into dust. I need that to happen. Santoro can make it happen, if we help him.” Danny gripped the bars over the window. “Can’t you see the symmetry here, Kev? It’s fate. It’s irresistible. Me, after all these years, coming back to destroy this place. There’s millions at stake here, Kev. Millions. And we can get us a slice. A big one. All of us, you, me, Mom and Dad can get taken care of for life by bringing this place down. It’s perfect. It’s justice. This place that made me a monster is gonna free me from every shitty thing I’ve ever done because of the needle.” He turned to me, his eyes shining in the moonlight. “You gotta help me. One last time. So I can sleep through the night without a head full of chemicals. Help me finish what Mom and Grandpa started. Let’s make Dad proud.”

How could I say no? True blood or not, he was my brother. We’d lived too long that way for it ever to be different. That was one thing all our secrets would never change.

“Sometimes I still come up here to this room,” Danny said, turning back to the window. “Early, early in the morning. Instead of getting high I watch the bats come home. Count them like they were stars.”