The Confessor (2 page)

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Come to Papa.’

The monster started slithering toward him, and he closed his eyes. He’d learned how to deal with the visions. He had no control over their onset, but had discovered shutting his eyes tightly made the hallucinations vanish. He understood they were graphic manifestations of a kind of madness. To his thinking, the psychopathy was the result of a remarkable catalytic reaction, the gradual synthesis of pain and suffering into a new chemical alloy that now resided in his brain like any other part of his psychological make-up – pleasure, fear, anger – and while those catalyzed adrenaline or serotonin or neutrophins, when this new component flared it triggered the visions.

There had been many. He had seen the clinic’s cat sprout steel spikes in its fur; watched Dr. Ling’s face explode discussing synthetic-organic polymers; poked through the melted gruyere on his onion soup to discover neon tetras darting about in the broth; and he’d seen an angel fall from the sky, its flaming wings leaving a trail of smoke in its wake. It was a sign that his intuition was not delusional, that his nemesis was, contrary to reports, alive – and that when they met again his extreme choices would be rewarded.

And he believed all this because the falling angel had Geiger’s face.

Geiger
.

He opened his eyes, raised his hands, smooth and hairless, to his face – and the events of July Fourth started up in his head. They had become more an ever-present part of consciousness than memory – those hours in exquisite detail flashing by behind his eyes:

The call from Hall . . . his pulse amping when he learned he would be working on, of all people, Geiger – the legend, master of their craft, the man called The Inquisitor . . .

The session in Geiger’s own space . . . strapping him into the barber’s chair, asking the only question Hall had provided – ‘Where is the boy?’ . . . Invading Geiger’s cheek with a white-hot awl . . . hammering him with the bat . . . slicing his quadriceps – and Geiger refusing to cave, unwilling to betray the boy he barely knew, or beg or even howl, as if he was immune to mortal pain . . .

Then Geiger attacking, taking control, announcing that both of them were done with torture – then the smashing and shattering of his own fingers and metacarpals – the crisp, loud snapping of bone and the excruciating, unworldly pain . . .

Geiger had become the center of his universe – the sun who ruled every thought, each decision. Geiger had instilled in him a new sense, something he’d never felt before. It had begun as a tiny seed, and bloomed. Now it was a beacon inside him. At first, it was vengeance – and now it had become something beyond that.

The lump beneath the hood moved slightly, just beside the ear. He gave it a tap, the thing buzzed and twitched – and the victim suddenly stiffened in its bonds, a muffled growl rising up from its throat. Tears slid from the corners of the eyes.

‘There are questions I have to ask you.’

The eyes in the hood squeezed shut, cheeks tightening involuntarily – and the hornet stung again. The body pulled fiercely at its ties, and another groan pushed its way through the tape like a deeper echo of the first.

‘I said try not to move.’

His palm suddenly swung up and walloped the victim’s temple. The skull trembled from the shock. The hood darkened with crushed viscera. He brandished the antique scalpel and bent down, face to face.

‘I’ll be using this as my primary tool.’ He put the instrument in his victim’s palm. ‘Go ahead. Hold it. It has a pleasing feel. Perfect balance.’

The eyes in the hood studied the man, trying to plumb the depth of his madness.

‘It’s remarkable how fate plays a hand. You see – you and I . . . we have a –
common bond
, of sorts.’ He grabbed the top of the hood and pulled it off. ‘It’s quite possible you already know who I am – but let me introduce myself. My name is Dalton.’

A slender thumb rose to the monitor and pressed flat against the octagon at the bottom of the screen. ‘IDENT’ blinked twice, then a new document appeared.

Racing through the night and drizzle, he was more a dark phantom than the living – black pullover and sweatpants, black Ghost GTX running shoes, black hair dyed brown and chopped to a one-inch cut, his beard nearly reaching his sharp cheekbones. To the few who knew him, he would be nearly unrecognizable. Thirty violins sang Mahler’s passion and whipped themselves into a frenzy in his head. The streets’ wet sheen made them look liquefied, bottomless. You might take a step and plummet, and never stop . . .

. . . He remembered the madness beneath the river, the desperate, clutching bodies. He remembered finding Ezra’s skinny arms, pulling the boy free of the scrum and shoving him to the surface. He remembered hands closing round his throat – and the waterlogged
ooof!
as his fist smashed into some boney part of Hall, feeling it break and cave.

He’d come out of the river, dragged himself up the bank and crawled toward a squat, dark outline in the mist. It was an old storage hut for the railroad, with a door hanging on one rusty hinge. Inside, he’d torn the pockets out of his sweatpants and stuffed them in the bullet hole in his chest and exit wound in his back, just below the scapula. He thought it likely he’d lose consciousness and didn’t want to bleed out in his sleep.

The magnitude of pain was new, its presence unbordered, so he’d kept his mind drenched with Chopin –
Fantasie Impromptu
,
Prelude in E Minor
– trying to finesse the pain, negotiate instead of wage all-out war on fronts too wide to control. He slept most of the first two days, and when he went outside on the third night, he found a sleepy town a mile away, vegetable scraps in the garbage behind a diner, and an orphaned wind-breaker and bottle of water on a dugout bench at a ballfield. On day five he left at dawn, and it took four hours to walk the two miles to the highway on his mutilated leg. He only stuck his thumb out for trucks, and the first that stopped took him all the way to the city . . .

Brooklyn was a mongrel jumble of edifice, ethnicity and class. Every turn seemed to transport him to someplace unconnected and alien. A shadowed stretch of warehouses and saggy-fenced lots became a well-lit block of townhouses with flat-screens and stuffed bookshelves behind windows, which morphed into a pocket of shabby check-cashing storefronts and grimy bodegas pouring reggaeton into the street, then around a corner came brick and chrome hipster restaurants and bars with neon ‘Brooklyn Lager’ signs.

He’d considered leaving, starting over. He’d gone to Richmond, Brattleboro, Boston, and stayed a few days – but they never took hold. New York was his planet, its singular gravity kept him tethered. Another place would not hold him in orbit. He could float into black space and drift like a broken satellite. And – he had a task to finish here.

It had taken months before he had healed sufficiently to run again. There was new pain, a prickly burn in the left quad under the fresh scars of Dalton’s cuts. Coupled with the old issues in his hips and ankles, equilibrium was at times elusive – but the music, as always, helped the alchemist in him transform pain into pure sensation . . . and power.

As the light turned green and he jogged into the deserted intersection, the strings reached their peak, and in his mind’s eye strands of sound circled each other in a mating dance, then rushed into an embrace, fusing into a multicolored ribbon. The music was ripe. He tasted spearmint, strawberry – and heard the urgent snarl of the horn one second before the black, speeding mass entered his peripheral landscape, wrenching him around to a head-on view of the Dodge Dakota as it ignored the red light and barreled toward him. The streetlamps shone on the windshield, illuminating the three faces behind it – the widening eyes and stretching lips – then the driver jerked as he hammered the horn again and stomped the brake, and the vehicle flinched on the wet asphalt and went into a skid.

The tires’ screech overpowered the strings, and he fought the drift of inner tumult. He’d been here before – caught unaware when the world snuck up on him, slowing the nature of things to an exquisite crawl. Perpetual motion broken into minute segments, falling dominos, connected but separate and distinct. Sounds spread like mercury on tilted glass, then lingered beyond their usual half-life. He put his hands out in front of him.

In the final moment, a thought surfaced that he found unexpected:

He wondered if someone had ever discovered his father’s body on the mountain, trapped under the truck’s tire, the knife deep in his heart. Geiger could feel the leather hilt in his child’s hand as he’d pushed it in. More likely, wolves had devoured the flesh. Mountain lions and foxes had played with the bones, scattering them, the sun had dried the blood-soaked ground, and the wind had scraped the darkened dirt free and swept it away. All that was left of the man was what Geiger carried with him, inside and out – the demented rituals, the elegant circuitry of scars, the kinship of pain, the final declaration from pale, bleeding lips:
The world knows nothing of you. That is my gift to you, son. You are no one.

The truck was upon him. In the front seat, the young woman between the two men covered her face with her hands. The tortured cry of tires died as the gleaming silver grill met Geiger’s upheld palms – and stopped. Had there been witnesses, they might’ve thought he was some superhero able to stop speeding vehicles with his bare hands.

The door swung open and the driver hopped out. He looked a few hard years past twenty, had a beer bottle in hand, and wore a sweatshirt that read ‘STAR SPANGLED BANGER!’ in red, white and blue letters. He ran a hand across his buzz-cut, then spread his arms like a rainmaker about to pray to the sky.

‘What the fuck, man? What the fuck’re you doing, huh?’

Geiger straightened up. ‘You drove through a red light,’ he said.

Something about Geiger’s smooth, uninflected tone put a grin on the man.

‘Red light? This is fucking
Brooklyn
, man.’

‘You should be more careful. It was a stupid thing to do.’

The man’s smile held its ground. He glanced at the others. ‘He says I’m stupid.’

The other man in the truck laughed, and threw an empty beer can through the open door at his friend. ‘He’s right, you dumb asshole!’

The driver turned back to Geiger, and held up his bottle. ‘You made me spill my beer, man. It was almost full – my last one. Bummer.’

Since his return Geiger had kept face-to-face events to a minimum, but the man’s chatter was firing his sensors, probing beneath the surface of words and tone for intent. Somewhere a fire engine was keening for a new tragedy. He took out his earbuds.