Strawman Made Steel (29 page)

“I know what happened to me. And what do
you mean I can’t go?”

The machine tut-tutted me and beeped apace.
I ripped the sticky plasters off. Wrong thing to do, apparently. It started
wailing.

The nurse leaned across me with a sigh and
silenced it.

“You’re in no condition―”

“This
is
my condition,” I said, and
gripped the IV line just above where it punctured my skin. I squinted, and drew
it out. The sticky plaster tore away, and the line left a dribble of pink
liquid along my wrist.

“You’re coming up from a blood sugar crash.
Your kidneys nearly packed up. And the lab, after three days, still has no idea
what hit you.”

“Wait,” I said, staring into nothing. I
turned to her. “Is that a catheter?”

I took her silence to mean yes.

I hate catheters nearly as much as I hate
underdone hashbrowns.

I sunk my hands beneath the sheet and
pulled it free, feeling for a moment like the worm being threaded onto the
fishhook.

“Now, where are my clothes―wait!” I said.

Her eyes flashed in exasperation.

“Did you say ‘three’ days? Have I been out
three
days?”

She nodded.

That explained why my body only felt like
snap-frozen laundry rather than burning brush.

“I have to get out of here,” I said, and
threw the sheet back.

Finally a real spark leapt into her eyes.
She stood, stood over me, and said, “No. I won’t let you.” She crossed her
arms.

“I
need
to go,” I said.

“You need to rest.”

“Someone might die,” I said.

“My point exactly,” she said.

It was like arguing with a head cold.

I swiveled my legs around and put my feet
on the floor. I tested their weight. Each leg gave me the thumbs up but I
couldn’t help thinking they were exchanging concerned glances.

The nurse uncrossed her arms and laid one
hand on my shoulder.

I gave her the eyeball.

“Really?” I said, gently mocking.

Her only response was to crook an eyebrow
and jut her chin.

And suddenly it was the most funny thing in
the world. I laughed hard. It hurt, brought tears to my eyes, but I couldn’t
stop.

Here was this girl, giving away a hundred
pounds and a foot, going to stop me with her little mitt, when all she had to
do was step out of the room and call for security. Instead she’d opted for a
feat of arms.

I collapsed back onto the pillows and
waited for the laughter to stop wracking my body. I covered my eyes with my
hand and rested for a moment in the sweet darkness.

“There now,” she said, when I was spent.
“Now you’re being reasonable.”

“Lady―” I began. Then, “What’s your name?”

“Charlie,” she said.

“Charlie, I have to get out of here. With
your help, if possible, or without it. Either way, I am leaving.”

She was silent. I could only guess what she
was thinking from inside my cave.

I felt the mattress tilt. I opened my eyes
to find she’d sat next to me.

“You haven’t told me your name.”

“Janus,” I said.

“Janus,” she said, trying the word like the
first mouthful of an unfamiliar dish. “That’s a nice name. Does it have a
meaning?”

Entries and exits
, I thought. He who looks both ways. Hedge-better. Symmetry. I
wondered if my mother had known she was prescient.

Symmetry.

Symmetry...

I opened my eyes and found hers looking at
me. They were pretty eyes despite the red marbling. Clear blue. Young eyes.
Eyes that saw to a horizon not yet cluttered by an inkling there exist other
kinds of endings than happy. At any rate, that is what I saw in them.

“Can I tell you a story,” I said.

“Sure,” she said, sounding the opposite.

“Once upon a time,” I began. Then, “Scratch
that. It begins like this: It was a dark and stormy night...”

And I told her. About me. About Grace.
About the hole in time that I slipped through most days like a coin through a
torn pocket. About the Speighs dropping like flies. About all of it.

All of it I could be bothered telling. I
gave her the skeleton from tip to tail. The bones of my story.

She sat beside me, silent and still. Her
eyes on the carpet, her head cocked as if listening for a distant call. It was
impossible to tell what she was thinking.

When I’d finished I tried telling myself it
didn’t matter what she thought. Sure, it might be tougher breaking out of an
insane asylum, but apart from that...

But I didn’t believe me. It did matter. On
the other side of the mirror Nate knew I needed him. I don’t know why it had never
occurred to me that I needed someone this side too.

“The man in the story,” she said, “is you.”

It wasn’t a question.

“Yeah,” I said. “And?”

“And what?” she said.

“Do you believe me?”

She shook her head gently.

I braced myself to stand, but she was talking
again.

“Search me,” she said, still shaking her
head, “but I do.” She looked at me. “I do believe you.”

“I knew you were a good kid,” I said.
“Welcome to the madhouse. Don’t drink the water.”

She got me home. She wanted to fuss
over me, stock the fridge, plump my pillows, pepper me with questions. She was
full of advice. I ignored most of it, but she did convince me of one thing. I
couldn’t wade straight back in. I was stiffer than I’d thought. I gave myself
the day off.

She hung around, poking through the scant
rooms of my apartment, making me feel like the exciting uncle. Every so often
her gaze would linger on something of Grace’s―a necklace, a comb―and she’d turn
to me and say, “Hers?” Perhaps I looked like the necklace-wearing type. I
suppose I had just had my ass handed to me.

Later we sat around the dinette, drinking
tea out of cups big as soup bowls. She was nestling hers in two hands, balanced
on the top of her drawn-up knees. I was absorbed by the steam winding up off
the liquid’s surface.

“I found your card the day after you were
admitted,” she said.

“Oh?” I said.

“What’s a provenor?”

“Hmm?” I said. That streamer of steam was
downright fascinating.

“Provenor,” she said. “Says that on your
card.”

“It’s what they call a private
investigator, after the Event,” I said. “In New York, at any rate. I haven’t
travelled.”

“I thought you said you’d been all over the
world?”

“I have,” I said, and smiled. “This side of
the mirror.”

“For a company?”

“For clients.”

“Doing what?”

I shrugged. “Fixing things.”

“What sort of things?”

“Broken things,” I said.

She paused to adjust her grip on her cup,
and said, “You must be very smart.”

“I had an expensive education,” I said, and
watched her gaze become furtive. My guess was she was trying to work out which
was more interesting—my past, or the future.

I slurped my tea, from habit not heat.

“After the Event the world went to hell in
a handbasket for a while. When it returned―a little disheveled, a little
thinner, and with eyes just that little bit crazy―nine out of ten police
investigations were about property disputes. Certifying the provenance of a
parcel of land, an artifact, occasionally a body, was vital to putting life
back together. So much of it had been wiped from the face of the earth by the
flick of a switch. There was a massive backlog, even after the switch from
martial law. The cops handed a lot of the work to private dicks. An army of
them sprang into existence to deal with that one problem―putting as many of the
pieces back together as possible, restoring the image of old Liberty.”

I slurped more of the tea laced with honey
and a whiskey stiffener.

 
“The
name stuck, even though provenors now deal with the whole shtick, everything
the police dicks touch and some more they don’t.”

“Sounds exciting,” she said, then shivered.
Her gaze touched my face then flicked to her cup. “But not the torture.”

I said nothing.

“You were not always quiet when you slept,”
she said.

I sculled the rest of my tea.

When I looked at Charlie again, I found her
blue eyes still hunting through the room, questioning, speculating. I thought
about my decision to tell her about me. Symmetry, I’d thought. Someone this
side of the mirror to confide in.

But that’s about where the symmetry ended.
In every other way, Charlie was the opposite to Nate. Female to male. She was
the first page to his last. She was a sponge and he was a well. She was the
ore, and he was metal thrice-worked.

It made me think about Grace. I suppose
that made me Law, according to the apostle Paul.

Graceless, according to everyone else.

“I’m gunna hit the sack,” I said.

“Of course,” she said, and laid her cup
down half-full.

I let her out onto the floor’s corridor and
walked with her to the elevator.

“My next shift’s not till the weekend,” she
said. “I’ll check on you tomorrow.”

“Not tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll be working.
Try the day after. Then I might have something worth telling.”

She nodded, hesitated, then apparently
thought better of whatever she’d been about to say.

“See you then.”

I was dead tired but not sleepy.

I sat in front of the Royal and typed up
the stray case notes that had been nagging me to get out:

* The murder scene at the Landmark Hotel:
the ice found in the ensuite had to be put there by Eutarch, before his demise,
or else his killer. Which, given the melt, made it a big piece of ice to begin
with. Or big pieces.

* Why such a blood bath for Eutarch?
Different brother, different MO?

* A syndicate called Phlogiston Capital are
paying big bills for Alltron projects.

On a whim, I took down Grace’s crusty,
one-volume Webster dictionary and looked up phlogiston. It told me phlogiston
was a combustive, fire-like element at the center of a defunct scientific
theory. Didn’t mean anything to me.

I finished up:

* Why me?

I pulled the paper free of the typewriter
and stowed it with the others.

Over on the wall parallel to the end of the
bed was a bookshelf. It had a bench running waist high and on that was a
Pioneer record player. Records were stowed in a rack in a cupboard beneath the
player, and I hunted through the fuzzy-edged sleeves of my 78s for something
pared down but heavy. I settled on Muddy Waters. (Which album? His ‘77
comeback, Hard Again.) I slipped the album from its cover and slotted it onto
the spindle. The motor spun up and I placed the needle on the vinyl, and heard
the hiss and pop of the lead-in.

I let him growl at me that, yeah, ooh yeah,
everythin’ was gonna be alright.

But a minute later I’d lifted the needle
and was pacing the floor. Turned out I couldn’t sit still. I’d been too long
doing nothing. My limbs felt charged with an unwanted energy. I was a dumped
TV-tube with a killing charge. I needed earthing.

So I reached my acoustic down from its
bracket by the end of the bookshelf and settled into the armchair. Sitting
slantwise with one leg cocked over the arm I could get at the strings.

After a few false starts my fingers went
hunting for the so-blue-you-can-eat-it rhythm of the Allman Brothers’ Not My
Cross to Bear. There was a speckle of rust on the phosphor-bronze strings, but
they were crisp enough.

When I got to the end I went back to the
start and began again―teasing with the resolve then turning it around. When I
got to the end of that I did it again. A serenade for sleep.

The rhythm wore a rut so deep in my head I
hardly noticed when my fingers began to embellish it. They hung harmonics over
it, like wind chimes on a locomotive. My left pinkie couldn’t stop poking middle-G
like it was a bruise. I hunted for the high resolve.

I hunted a long time for the perfect
resolution.

When I finally hung the guitar up, I was
hard pressed shedding my clothes before falling into bed. Someone had switched
all those tons of oxygen for a soporific.

The last thought to trouble my mind that
night was the memory that most versions of Not My Cross to Bear run to just
4:48, when the song ends with a fade out.