Projection (24 page)

He didn't respond.

I noticed a copy of J.D. Salinger's
Franny and Zooey
near my feet.  I slowly crouched to pick it up.  "A kindred spirit?" I asked, holding up the book.

He looked at me, but said nothing.

"I wonder what Salinger would say about me standing here.  You think he'd dismiss it as coincidence?"

"Certainly not."

"Then there must be a reason to talk more."

He moved his hand to the butt of the shotgun.  "Not necessarily.  Perhaps you're here to end your life," he said.  He tilted his head up and to the right, the same mannerism that accompanied his brother's grandiose ruminations.  "The sign out front says
NO TRESPASSING
.  You broke into my home.  Cynthia told you, no doubt, about this gun.  And here you are standing in close range."

The comments reminded me of others made by Emma Hancock and Matt Hollander and Trevor Lucas himself, all of them wondering whether I was unconsciously orchestrating an elaborate suicide.  I thought of the Harpy surrounding me on the grounds outside the hospital, of the assault helicopter hovering in front of me after strafing the locked unit.  Was I asking to be killed?  Was some fatal mixture of grief and guilt driving me to my own demise?  Or is the search for a broken man’s soul always a journey toward destruction?  "I'm here for the truth," I said.  "If  you shoot me, I'll have part of it — that what went on in this house so utterly crushed two little boys that, hundreds of miles apart, they both became killers."  I shrugged.  "Maybe that's what really brings me into ‘close range.’  Maybe I'm
your
destiny — to find out you're no different than your brother."

Lucas’ jaws worked against one another.  His eyes stayed locked on mine.  I worried I had pushed him too far.  But then, all of a sudden, he moved his hand away from the gun.  His gaze lost its menacing quality.  "Well put," he said.  He seemed lost in thought for a time.  When he finally spoke, his voice had a hint of warmth in it.  "The books that get burned are the ones full of lies.  I've warmed my feet beside everything from
Mein Kampf
to
Das Kapital
to
Listening to Prozac
.  If it gets any colder outside, I've got a nice supply of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson."

I smiled.  Cynthia took the few steps to stand at my side.  "I'm looking for the biography of Trevor and Michael Lucas," I said.

"I've told you what I know.  My brother made me a freak.  Our mother apparently turned him into a monster."  He stared into the fireplace.  "Or maybe he was already a monster."

There it was, I thought to myself — the real question that Michael Lucas needed to answer.  "You think he might have meant to hurt you, that he did it on purpose."

"I don't care anymore."  A twitch in his lip said otherwise.  "It doesn't matter."

"He was eight," Cynthia said.

"I was five," Lucas shot back.  "My mother's favorite.  Her ‘sweet boy,’ she called me.  That was my crime.  He hated me for that."

My skin turned to gooseflesh.  Those were the words we had found carved into Grace Cummings after she leapt from the fifth floor of Lynn State Hospital.  Were they the words that an eight-year-old Trevor Lucas, shivering in his cage, wire and dirt underfoot, had heard his mother call lovingly to little Michael?

"How can you know he hated you?" Cynthia asked.

"Has he truly repented?  Has he knocked once at my door since he left this house?  No.  Not him.  Not my father.  Not even after Mother died."

"How did he end up living with your father in the first place?" she asked.  "Why did she let him go?"

"She didn't, as I recall.  Keep in mind, I was a child.  But I believe she fell ill at work.  Her appendix, or some such thing.  My aunt came by and found Trevor locked up in the basement.  I remember her making frantic arrangements."

"Did you miss him?" Cynthia asked.

Lucas seemed taken aback by the suggestion.  "No one ever spoke of him again," he said, neatly avoiding her question.  "It was as if he never existed — except for one rather stark reminder."  He reached up and ran the tip of his index finger down the disfigured half of his face.

"What sort of work did your mother do?" I asked.

"She was a nurse," Lucas smiled.  "A saint."

I thought of the pregnant nurse, Nurse Vawn, bound into her seat at the nurses’ station on the locked unit.

Lucas looked into the dormant fireplace again.  "What has my brother done with his life?" he asked.  "What did the monster do before losing his mind entirely?  Pave roads?  Write ad copy?  Rob banks?  What?"

I glanced at Cynthia, realizing she hadn't told him his brother's profession.  All of a sudden, the room and everything in it seemed absolutely still and bursting with energy at the same time, as if longing for revelation.  "Trevor went to medical school," I said.  "He trained as a plastic surgeon."

Lucas squinted at me.  "A..."  He swallowed hard.  "A plastic surgeon."  I could see him struggling to remain untouched.  Within half a minute, the divine symmetry overwhelmed his resistance.  A tear slid down his cheek.

I let several moments pass.  "It sounds to me like your brother's been trying to come home for a long time.  In a way, maybe he finally has."

Lucas didn't respond.

I realized what I really wanted from him.  "Would you come back to Massachusetts with us?  Will you help us talk Trevor into surrendering?"

"Not a chance."

"They'll kill him," Cynthia said.

"Lucas smiled indulgently at her.  "My brother died thirty-five years ago.  And I have no desire to raise him from the dead."

I thought of Louie and Harry again.  "You might end up reborn yourself."

"Not in this body, thank you."

I noticed a copy of Shakespeare's
King Lear
on the mantel.  I nodded at it.  "‘Pray you now, forget and forgive’," I quoted.  "It's one of my favorite lines from
Lear
."

His eyes locked on mine.  "The wheel is come full circle," he quoted back.  "That's my favorite."  He stood up.  "It really is time for you to leave."

I pressed harder.  "I think it's time you left — time you left your childhood and this... mausoleum."

He picked up the shotgun but didn't raise the barrel.  "I want you to go away now."

"Michael...," Cynthia started.

I held up a hand.  From the cold resolve in Lucas’ eyes, his past history of trauma and his choice of words, I worried pressing any further really could cost us our lives.  Maybe the foundation of his psyche was no more stable than Trevor's.  "I understand," I said.  "We appreciate you letting us in at all."  I took Cynthia by the elbow.  "We need to go," I told her.

We walked to the front door.  I gently guided her ahead of me, onto the landing outside.  "Just out of curiosity," I said, turning back toward Lucas, "Which side of the kitchen was the stove on?  Would Trevor have reached up to the pan of oil with his right hand or his left hand?"

"Why?" he asked.

"I'm just trying to imagine the whole thing.  That's all."

He shrugged.  "It would have been on the right.  He used his right hand."

"That's the way I pictured it," I said.  I paused.  "That's the arm he cut off after he took over the locked unit.  He cut off his right arm."  I didn't wait for a reaction.  I started down the steps with Cynthia, hoping that Lucas might call out to me, that he might reach out for his brother.

The door slammed shut behind us.

*            *            *

Cynthia and I started walking south on Jasper Street, looking for a pay phone to call a cab.

"The police found the real killer," I said.

"They...  Where?"

"A unit for violent patients at Austin Grate.  My friend runs it."

She looked down.  "What happens now?"

"I can't say.  For all I know, they'll be waiting for me with cuffs at the airport in Boston."

"They wouldn't
arrest
you."

I smiled at Cynthia's naïveté.  "The power of the state is an awesome thing.  Stand in the way, you'll generally be crushed beyond recognition."

She glanced at me with a kind of desperation in her eyes, as if she was searching for words to put me at ease but had none.

I took her arm and pulled her closer.  We kept walking until I spotted a pay phone inside the Balmer Café, a greasy spoon that was already bustling with a blue-collar trade.  Construction workers in overalls and padded canvas jackets packed the counter, steeling themselves with fried eggs and pancakes against another icy day.  A wiry man at the grill yelled out orders as he filled them and comments on the Baltimore Ravens football team as he thought of them.  Cynthia ordered breakfast for us while I made the call.  Before I headed back to our booth I stopped in the men's room to get at the stash of heroin in my boot to keep withdrawal at bay.

"The taxi will be here in about twenty minutes," I said, taking my seat by the front window.  My coffee was waiting for me.  I sipped it.  It was just hot enough and just sweet enough and served in one of those well-worn, heavy white ceramic mugs with no glaze left at the lip.  I wrapped my fingers around it.  The window was fogged at the edges, cold and a little wet to the touch.  There was magic in the place, and it relaxed me enough to think about what would happen next.  "It's time to fly home.  I have as much information as I'm going to get.  The question is whether I get the chance to use it to coax Trevor back toward reality."

"They could have stormed the unit already," Cynthia said.

"I called the State Hospital from Hopkins.  Things were holding together."

"Maybe you should call again."

I looked at the clock on the wall.  8:55
A.M.
  Six hours had gone by.  I thought of checking in with Rice, but decided against it.  I didn't want to tell him by phone what I had learned about Michael Lucas.  If he didn't think it was enough to change anything, he might be tempted to move the assault up.  Of course if Emma Hancock had gotten to him, nothing I could offer would be enough.  "I don't want to answer any questions while I'm here and they're there," I said.  If Captain Rice is still willing to give me my shot, he may not understand how I can use what you and I found out to end the siege."

Cynthia nodded tentatively.  A few seconds passed.  "Why
do
you think telling Trevor about Michael would make him less crazy?" she asked.

"I'm not sure it would.  But the truth can extinguish even the most bizarre psychic dramas."

"You think the truth is that powerful?"

"The mind is lazy by nature.  It uses the least possible psychic energy to keep itself chugging along, to keep us eating, sleeping, working.  Its first choice is always to see things for what they are, to stick with the facts as life unfolds.  Because reality is free for the taking."

"Which is why an hour with me runs two hundred dollars," she said.  She looked embarrassed.

"It always costs something to create a fantasy.  Only when reality seems unbearable does the mind spend the creative energy to make up a cover story — like painting a pretty scene over an ugly crack in a wall.  If you're a beaten, abandoned kid who can't stand to think of it, your mind might create an inflated ego that keeps you from feeling worthless.  When the pain is much more extreme, your mind could try to bury it once and for all by making you believe that you're royalty or that you're Superman."

"And Trevor?"

"Trevor's truth is that he destroyed his brother.  His unconscious mind has been working overtime to keep him from feeling overwhelming guilt — that's the crack in the wall of his psyche.  He was only eight when Michael was scalded.  I doubt he even remembers the accident — presuming it was an accident.  He may not even remember Michael.  But somewhere deep inside, he knows what he did, and he knows that his mother, who was supposed to love him, started torturing him and ultimately abandoned him because of it."

Our breakfasts arrived.  Fried eggs, crispy hash browns and toast brushed with butter.  I thought of my breakfast with Matt Hollander before I entered the locked unit.  I was worried for him and I missed him.  I had the feeling he would have been able to get further with Michael Lucas than I had.  "Good thing I'm not on a diet," I joked.  I swallowed a forkful of hash browns.

"You need the calories," Cynthia said.  "There's no nutritional value in anything you can snort."  She ate a bit of her food, then paused.  "So why didn't Trevor go crazy before this?"

"Because he was able to stay one foot ahead of the truth.  His mind was essentially running like a Ponzi scheme, trying to cover up reality whenever it started to show.  I would guess being shipped out of state allowed him some distance from his guilt for a while.  Maybe his father assured him the whole thing was a nightmare, that it had never happened.  His developing narcissism helped him to not look back.  He probably used sex as an analgesic, losing himself in passion.  Becoming a plastic surgeon, basking in the public eye, bought him more time.  But when he was kept in prison, stripped of his professional identity and his women and his possessions, none of it was enough to carry him through.  The bars of the cage were right in front of him.  Every hour.  Every day.  For months.  Unbearable memories about what he had done to Michael — and what his mother had done to
him
— surged toward the surface.  The crack started to widen.  Eventually the whole wall felt as if it might fall, unleashing a tidal wave of guilt, despair and shame.  So his mind came up with a last-ditch fiction to prop it up.  It disowned the very arm he had used to knock that boiling oil off the burner.  That arm wasn't part of his ‘self’ any longer.  It was part of Satan, captured territory in a sham war between good and evil.  That made it easy to cut it off, to bury it — and the truth — under the rubble of Armageddon."

"But cutting it off didn't stop him.  It didn't end anything."

"No. Because the whole puffed-up drama was nothing more than another mural on a crumbling wall.  A bigger lie.  The truth keeps pressing to be known.  It slowly eats at anything in its way.  It will not be held back forever.  Trevor Lucas could chop himself to pieces without getting rid of the guilt he has locked up inside."