Solaris Rising (25 page)

“It turned my head inside out.”

“What’s that mean, turned your –”

The door opened and two men entered. The older man, Ray, was in charge – he handled the late shift intakes. About forty, lean and muscled, he looked like a penitentiary cliché. Tattooed thorns vined around his muscled forearms and a pack of smokes bulged in his short rolled up sleeve. Rehab wasn’t jail, but so far it shared a similar flavor. Or so Brian imagined. The younger man was actually a kid David’s age, eighteen or so, pale and blooming with acne.

“Nick’s going to check your bag for contraband,” Ray said.

Nick, all business, opened David’s hastily-packed suitcase and began pawing through it. He tossed aside a paperback novel. Brian had packed the book for David, thinking it would help him get through the next month.

“Why can’t he have that?”

Ray picked up the novel and handed it to Brian. “The only book allowed in here is The Big Book.”

“That’s –”

“Dad, it’s okay. I don’t care about it.”

“What your son needs, he has to keep his mind on recovery.”

“Yeah, I get that.”

Ray pushed the insurance papers across the table and held out a Bic pen. Brian sighed and started on the forms. Until it was time to say goodbye, David did not speak another word.

Business as usual.

For a week David had been living in his car, a black 1993 beat-to-shit Honda Civic. Turning the ignition key produced a rapid series of dead clicks. When Brian picked him up, they left the Honda parked on a residential street in a south Seattle working class neighbourhood. Sooner or later somebody would call the city to get it towed. Before that, Brian decided to strip out whatever ‘contraband’ he could find.

A Mag-Lite in his left hand, he popped the glove box. Registration papers, parking tickets, a dead cell phone, half a dozen disposable syringes, and a pipe that looked like it was hand-tooled out of plumbing parts. Brian sniffed the bowl, winced at the burnt smell.

He dropped the syringes and pipe into a plastic Safeway bag then swept the Mag-Lite around the foot wells. Among the crumpled cigarette packs and Taco Time wrappers, colonies of little Ziploc baggies gleamed in the moving light. Some were empty and some contained a faint residue of white powder. Brian scooped them all up and added them to the Safeway bag.

He found the miniature aspirin tin under the cup holder insert, shook it, flicked the lid up with his thumbnail. Five chalky blue tablets, each printed with the same Greek letter. David’s mystery drug? A car turned onto the street behind the Honda, headlights swinging through the Honda’s rear window. Brian froze but his shadow tilted across the dashboard, as if ducking out of sight. The car rolled past without slowing.

Brian let his breath out. He pocketed the tin, checked the backseat and the trunk, then walked quickly back to his own car. He dropped the Safeway bag in a garbage dumpster behind a Korean restaurant.

By midnight he was drunk, holding down a stool in The Sitting Room, a quiet lamp-lit bar two blocks from his apartment. Even on the best of nights, the studio apartment felt like a divorce tomb. This was not the best of nights. Murphy’s Irish whiskey and pints of Stella failed to erase various realities, the tomb-apartment being one of them.

He fumbled his cell phone out and thumbed a garbled text. Immediately, he regretted it. But when Trish failed to reply, he regretted that even more. He ordered another drink and nursed it along until closing time.

Halfway up the hill, stumbling towards his apartment, the phone vibrated in his pocket. He squinted at the display window.

One word, from Trish: ‘Okay.’

“You’re a mess,” she said when she opened the door to her condo. She wore a Seahawks jersey and nothing else. Her hair was messed up, like she’d been asleep.

“Bad day,” he said. “Look, I shouldn’t have texted you.”

“I know that.”

“Oh –”

“And I shouldn’t have invited you over. So we’re both stupid.”

In the bathroom he toed his shoes off, dumped the contents of his pockets on the towel rack. He rinsed his mouth in the sink, the tap water cold and metallic.

Trish was sitting up in bed, waiting for him. “I’d offer you a drink, but that would be like offering kerosene to a burning man.”

“Yeah.” He collapsed on the bed beside her.

“So what happened?”

“David called and I checked him into Lakeside.”

“I’m so sorry, Brian.” She held his hand, picking up where they left off – where Brian left, actually. The Man Who Couldn’t Stay. “But it’s kind of good, too,” Trish said. “I mean, maybe it’ll straighten him out this time.”

“There’s always that chance. At least I’ll know where he is for the next six weeks.” Brian covered his eyes with his free hand. “I really am an idiot. My head’s going to hurt so bad tomorrow.”

“Wait a minute.” She scooted off the bed, returning shortly with a tall glass of water. “Stick your tongue out.”

He did, and she placed two bitter-tasting tablets on it.

“Aspirin. Swallow – and drink that whole glass. Plus the next one I’m going to bring you. It’ll undercut the hangover.”

Brian came awake at some dead hour of the morning.

He had been dreaming about playing catch with his son. In the dream they stood on a grassy slope in Steel Lake Park, near the old neighbourhood. David was a young boy again. The baseball sailed between their gloves, and the good world, the lost world, was restored. Then something woke Brian and it was over, his son was gone – as if David had stepped out of the dream, and the sound of his passage had awakened Brian, like a person leaving the bedroom and pulling the door shut.

The good years, right. Not long after Brian taught his son to catch a baseball, a man was murdered in that same park, knifed repeatedly. Some gang thing, the opening event of the neighborhood’s long, steep slide. The victim’s blood stained Brian’s good memories, like sour wine spilled across a holiday table cloth.

Trish’s bedside clock read 4:17AM. Brian was
wide
awake. Sharply, almost painfully, wide awake. He did not feel drunk or hung-over. Trish slept on her side, turned away from him.

In the bathroom his haggard face regarded him from the mirror. He rubbed his sandpaper cheek. His mouth tasted like rust. He stuck his tongue out, almost expecting to see it coated with iron oxide. His wallet and keys were on the towel rack over the hamper. Brian stuffed them into his pockets.

In the living room he grabbed his empty water glass and carried it into the kitchen. A little tin of aspirin sat on the counter next to the microwave. Brian stared at it. He set his glass down, wiped his lips with the back of his hand. The tin rattled when he shook it. He pried it open. Three chalky blue tablets with Greek letters. When he found the tin in David’s car it had contained five.

“Trish?” He shook her gently until she woke up.

“Huh? God, what are you doing awake, it’s –”

“Five. Never mind that. Last night you gave me aspirin. Where did you get them?”

Lying on her back, she held the clock up and squinted at it. “My God, it
is
five.”

“Trish, the aspirin. It’s important.”

“I was out but there were some with your wallet and keys in the bathroom. What’s wrong?”

“Shit.
Shit
.”

She sat up. “What’s wrong, what’s happening?”

“Nothing’s wrong, except those weren’t aspirin.”

“Oh, God, Brian, what were they? Is it something David had?”

“Yeah.”

She took the tin out of his hand. “What are they?”

“I don’t know,” he said, thinking:
Like father like son
.

“What’s this symbol? Damn it, I’m sorry, Brian. I should have looked more closely. But I was half-asleep and –”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Let me hold on to one of the pills. I’ll show it to a lab rat I know at the hospital. Maybe she can figure it out.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Are you on any other medication? There might be something reactive –” Trish suddenly inhabiting her full-on RN mode.

“I’m not taking anything. Don’t worry about it, okay?”

“Excuse me for trying to help.”

“I’m sorry. Look, tell your rat they might be part of some kind of drug trial at the UW. David said that’s where they came from. And I appreciate it, I really do.”

“Okay.” She looked closely at him. “Are you feeling anything… weird?”

“Just really wide awake.”

“Maybe they’re some kind of stimulant. That wouldn’t be too bad.”

“No, that wouldn’t be bad.”

It was bad.

A week later, Brain still hadn’t slept. He no longer felt sharply awake, but he didn’t feel sleepy, either. Or he felt he
was
asleep, walking through a dream. But he knew that wasn’t true. Reality did not bend the way it did in dreams. At least, it hadn’t so far.

Three north bound lanes of Interstate 5 were shut down for resurfacing, and even at ten-thirty PM traffic was slow, rolling into Seattle. Brian slouched behind the wheel of his Ford Focus, windows cranked down. He was wrung out after nine hours on the night shift, stringing wires in the fuselage of a 737. A big industrial fan circulated air through the hatch but it didn’t help much; the air was thick and hot, stinking of human sweat and machine oil. The fan blades scraped the safety cage – like a blade scoring the inside of Brian’s skull.

The lights at Safeco Field blazed over the twelfth inning of an interminable tie game between the Mariners and Toronto. A play-by-play broadcast chattered from the radio speakers, which was a lucky break, considering the radio hadn’t worked in two weeks.

The last game he had taken David to had been four years ago. They sat in the sun, Brian with his seven dollar Budweiser and David with his four dollar Coke (all Brian could afford, after paying for the tickets and parking). The plastic cups sweating in their hands, they watched the Mariners take their lumps against the Oakland A’s. The Mariners were
always
taking their lumps. David sipped his Coke and crunched ice with his teeth, speaking only when he had to respond to something Brian said.

In the traffic crawl, Dave Niehouse, the Mariners’ venerable color commentator, was in the middle of calling a pop fly to right centre field, when the broadcast washed out in a tide of static. Brian reached for the knob to turn the volume down but hesitated when another voice, low and intense, began speaking. “I hate you, you fucker. You think you got away with it, but you didn’t.”

Despite the heat, a cold breath prickled the hairs on the back of Brian’s neck. The voice was familiar but Brian couldn’t quite identify it. He adjusted the volume up but there were no more words, just the usual static that had been hissing out of the speakers for weeks. After another moment, he punched the radio off. Then Brian remembered something, and it wasn’t a good something.

Dave Niehouse was dead.

A heart attack had nailed the commentator over a year ago. So, what did that mean? Was Niehouse some kind of auditory hallucination? Was it starting, whatever ‘it’ was? David’s ‘inside-out’ head?

A dog loped out of nowhere, head down, sniffing the hot, grated surface of the road. It appeared oblivious of the packed traffic. Brian gripped the steering wheel and hunched forward. A golden retriever, the dog favored its left hind leg, and Brian recognized her immediately. This was Gypsy, the family dog – back when Brian had a family.

Gypsy was as dead as Dave Niehouse.

The muscles tightened in Brian’s chest. Behind him, somebody laid on a horn, and he jumped half out of his seat. A pair of truck lights glared in his rear-view mirror before swerving around and passing on the right. In the thick traffic the manoeuvre was impossible – but the truck managed it, anyway, as if there
were
no traffic. Or maybe it was the truck and dog that weren’t really there. That seemed more likely, given what Brian now saw.

Cancerous rust had eaten holes in the Suburban’s left front wheel hub. The driver’s arm hung out the open window with a cigarette. The big, ramshackle SUV cut back in, almost clipping the Ford’s bumper. Brian tapped the brakes. An old California plate, orange numbers on a black background, hung crookedly by a single screw from the Suburban’s bumper.

It was the same truck that had killed Gypsy seven years ago.

Even before Brian could process that idea, the Suburban struck the resurrected dog. Brian almost felt the dull thud of impact reverberate in his bones. The dog yelped in pain.

“Asshole!”

The truck moved off, at times occupying the same space as other vehicles, overlaying them like an optical trick.

Brian pulled into the narrow break-down lane, parked, switched on his hazard flashers. The dog lay smashed against the jersey barrier, where the impact had landed her. Nobody but Brian seemed to notice. The tortured, squeaking yelps of pain drilled into Brian’s mind – just as they had seven years ago. He had been having a rare, loud argument with Sheila. She had just discovered his first affair. David hadn’t come home from school yet – except he had, and neither one of them knew it.