The Confessor (26 page)

‘What . . . the . . . fuck . . . ?’

The burn in Geiger’s skull was more lava than fire – seeping down in thin, molten rivulets – and his knees buckled and he hit the floor on them, moaning, head in hands. There’d be no black closet sanctuary, no music to feed on to slay the beast – only cold light and an audience of one. He slumped forward from the waist, forearms and forehead meeting the concrete – a mournful penitent without a priest.

Dewey thought it might be epilepsy. He’d seen a guy have a fit once, when he was in basic – but Geiger wasn’t flopping around like a hooked fish on the bottom of a boat, so he didn’t have a sense of how much time he had. It was the singular smell of singed body hair that made him look to the space heater on his left – its brilliant glowing innards seemingly afloat within the rippling, seared air around it. He tried to get a feel for the center of his body – then started jolting himself to the left in short bursts – and the chair started to move sideways, one quarter inch at a time.

The hammer came down on the anvil –
Whack! Whack!
Geiger’s ears were amplifiers, turning every sound into a blast and bursting nova.
Whack!
The pain was weightless, bottomless, without borders. It was a night sky – starless and immeasurable . . .

Dewey gave a final shove and the side of the chair came flush against the fiery heater. A mad dog growl gathered behind his teeth as he watched the tape binding his left arm and leg start to melt, tiny bubbles rising in it – and fuse with his skin. He started levering his arm toward his chest – and the tape began to stretch, and finally the fibers started to shred, and give way, and with a last howl he tore his arm loose. He reached down, grabbed his ankle and yanked it up – and the heated tape ripped apart, freeing his leg.

‘
YES!
’

He began pulling at his right wrist, and clawing at the thickly wrapped tape, without success. ‘C’mon, you mother . . .’

Geiger slowly raised his head, and saw Dewey at his task. Every atom in the air sparkled and swirled, a metallic blizzard. Then his eyes shifted . . . and found the knife on the floor between them. He raised himself up onto his hands and knees – and began to crawl toward the weapon. The floor tilted like a raft on a river . . .

Dewey glanced over at Geiger – and saw where he was headed. The gleaming blade on the floor. Dewey crooked his free arm and started hammering away at the inside of the chair arm with his elbow, punctuating each blow with a snarling cry. On the fifth strike the wood cracked and broke off. He anchored his free leg, then pushed back as hard as he could and the chair tipped over backward onto the floor with a thud. He raised his foot and began stomping at the seat. It started to loosen . . .

Geiger needed the blackness and the music. He was desperate for it. He stopped moving and closed his eyes – and listened. The sound of Dewey’s pounding rattled his mind – and then the growl of an electric guitar called out from far away, coming toward him like a night train down a long track.
Well, I stand up next to a mountain . . .
the lightning bolts of sound were cool silver, slashing into the scorching white heat in his head . . .
and I chop it down with the edge of my hand . . .

Dewey’s foot smashed at the seat. From his position on his back, he craned his head around to see Geiger slowly rising to his feet like a drunk from the gutter. He brought his knee back till it met his chest – and pile-drove his shoe forward into the seat. With a loud crack the chair broke apart in pieces, and he rolled over and stumbled to his feet. A chair leg was still bound to his right calf, part of a chair arm was attached to his right forearm, and the chair’s back was still taped to his.

To Geiger, Dewey was a bizarre creature – part-human, part-wood – as he came lumbering forward, getting linebacker low as he rammed into him . . . and Geiger knew immediately, even before he hit the floor, that his left shoulder had dislocated. The immediate pain of the event was breathtaking, but solid, flesh-and-blood pain – a heightened version of the kind that had been a companion most of his life, that lived inside him, shared his days, hands-on pain that he could beat down. But there was a firestorm inside his head.

Dewey trundled to the knife, picked it up with a grunt, and came back to Geiger. He hurt too much to gloat. He raised the weapon.

‘Relax, man – I’m not gonna mess with you. I should – I should really mess you up, right? – but Dalton wants you in mint condition.’ He started carefully cutting the mass of tape round his chest. ‘What’s wrong with you? Epilepsy?’

‘. . . Migraine.’

‘Tell me something. You and Dalton. Why do you hate each other so much?’

Geiger took a breath – and slowly rolled off his back onto his good side. ‘I don’t . . . hate Dalton.’

Dewey pulled the tape off, and the chair-back came with it. He flung it away, and stretched his back with a wince.

‘Fucking back . . .’ He started cutting the tape from his forearm.

Geiger watched Dewey through the glittering whir. ‘Dalton will have Soames . . . killed.’

Dewey shrugged. ‘Life’s tough, man.’

‘You have me now. Call Victor . . . tell him to . . .’ Geiger had no sense of his voice coming out through his lips and into the room. There was someone inside him doing the talking. ‘Tell Victor to slip away from her, come here . . . and the three of us leave. Soames doesn’t know where Dalton is – so she doesn’t die.’

Dewey ripped the armchair off him and dropped it. ‘No can do, man.’

The migraines were Geiger’s master in many ways, but they’d never taken his power of reason from him. He knew he had one last chance. One shot. He tried to see it happen. Pushing off, one-handed – his left arm, useless. Leading with the right shoulder. Aim was a relative concept, but below the ribs if possible. And it would be all in the legs. Two strides to get to him. He flattened his palm against the floor for leverage, and waited – while Hendrix howled his confession and his scream of strings raced through Geiger like an electric charge.
I’m a voodoo child . . . Lord knows, I’m a voodoo child!

Dewey eyed Geiger’s splayed posture. ‘Shoulder’s out?’

Geiger nodded. Dewey bent at the waist and, looking down, started cutting through the tape on his leg.

‘We’re gonna have to pop it back in, man. Like I said –
mint
condition.’

Geiger raised himself up on his right hand and pushed off the balls of his feet. He saw the energy of his movement part the swarm of tinsel molecules before him, and he got one solid stride in before Dewey glanced up – but then the room went into a roll, and he ended up ramming into Dewey’s rib cage, as much with his head as his shoulder.

For a moment the impact seared away all sensation – just a buzzing whiteness – but the blow was powerful and momentum carried them backward before Geiger dropped. Dewey kept going in a stumble, and plowed into one of the water heater’s two-by-four stilts. The old wood snapped in two, and the platform drooped as Dewey tumbled to the floor. The tank was without its support – and the bolts holding it to the wall began to lose their grip. Faint showers of dust puffed out of the concrete . . .

Geiger was watching it all from his knees, a guilty bystander. Dewey was on his back, grimacing, one hand grabbing at his sacrum – and Geiger saw, in Dewey’s eyes, the exact moment when he suddenly understood that the tank was going to fall . . . and all that it would mean – then gravity stepped up to play its part, the tank broke loose with a metallic groan, and it landed with a crunch, sideways across Dewey’s torso. All four limbs shot out straight in a grotesque, toy-like reflex – and then settled back onto the floor.

Dewey’s lips parted, and his breath came out in slow spurts – thick and wet. ‘Get it . . . off me,’ he gasped. ‘Get . . . it off . . . me.’

Geiger shuffled over on his knees. He tried to push the tank with his good arm, but its weight had crushed the middle ribs and sternum and created its own concave resting place. He couldn’t move it. He lay down on his back so he could use his legs, bent his knees, put his shoes against the steel, and thrust – and the tank slid off the body, hit the floor with a loud clank and rolled away.

A sound came out of Dewey – dry, fallen leaves being swept up by a soft wind and sent into a twirling dance.

‘Jesus . . .’ he said. ‘I’m . . . gonna die.’

His head turned to Geiger, and the movement released the blood that had been pooling inside him. It slipped out of the corner of his lips in a thin scarlet thread and a puddle quickly began to grow on the floor.

‘Oh God . . . I’m . . . dying . . .’ There were tears in his eyes. His shattered chest rose and fell, lungs filling and deflating, the time between each breath lengthening. ‘It isn’t . . . fair.’

Geiger watched a few tears fall into the spreading pool of blood, dappling the dark burgundy with tiny spots of a paler rose. When he looked back up, Dewey’s eyes had an opaque glaze. Geiger moved closer.

He had never seen death in someone’s eyes. When he’d pushed the knife into his father, the fierce, cold eyes had closed – and being witness now to the magnitude of the change was compelling. Dewey had been rendered irrelevant – a complex mass of tissue, bone, sinew and electrical networks that was obsolete and meaningless. The heart beats, and then it doesn’t – and the distance between that last thump and the absence of another was the most immeasurable and indefinable of things.

Geiger made it up onto his feet. Walking to the table was a slow, off-kilter trip full of tilts and squints. He wouldn’t be able to get his shoulder back in by himself – he knew he needed help – and that recognition was a sense he’d rarely experienced. There was one person he could contact. Just one. There was no one else.

He picked up the iPad and knelt down, placing it on the floor before him, then pressed the iChat icon and the keyboard popped up on the bottom of the screen. The letters on the keys were wriggling about like tiny creatures dancing to a piper’s tune. His fingertip hovered above them – and then descended . . .

The nature of sleep had changed since July Fourth – it was never a deep state now, and he took short naps to fill in the holes in ragged nights – so he was dozing when the iChat alert’s ding came out of his iPad, and he shot up so quickly that he spooked the cat nestled beside him and it leaped off the bed. He swung his legs round and hopped to the floor, heart thudding, because only two people knew his account name – his father and Harry – and that must mean they were okay. His mother wasn’t home yet, but he ran to the door and closed it gently anyway, then dived to the iPad on his desk. The caller on the other end was ‘guest’ but he was too ramped up to stop and consider why.

Ezra clicked ‘accept’ – and the screen filled with a rough grayness. The first image that came to mind was concrete – maybe a sidewalk – then he noticed some kind of gizmo in the upper-right corner, a pinwheel shape, metallic. He leaned in . . . It was a small sprinkler head – for a fire system. He was looking at a ceiling.

‘Dad? Harry? Hello?’

Something started sliding up into view from the bottom of the screen. A face. ‘Ezra . . .’

Ash-pale, tight-fisted with pain. A ghost in limbo. It set off a chain reaction – charged neutrons racing into space at incalculable speeds, crossing thousands of miles in the skip of a heartbeat, like sticking a finger in a live socket, an emotional fission that made Ezra’s eyes blaze and his body expand.

‘Oh God . . .’ said the boy. ‘. . .
Geiger
.’

Too many feelings and too many questions were causing a logjam inside Ezra – in his head and his chest. He couldn’t nail down a thought. He couldn’t seem to pull in a full breath. His parts weren’t working.

‘Ezra . . . I’m in a . . . bad situation. I need your help.’

‘What
happened
to you?’

‘Ezra . . .’

‘Where are you?’

‘You just need to listen, Ezra. I don’t . . . know how long I can talk.’

‘Okay. I’m sorry. Okay.’

‘I’m in Paris. I’m hurt. I don’t . . . Write this name down.’

Ezra grabbed a pencil and one of his notebooks. ‘Okay. Go.’

‘Christine Reynaud. R – E – Y – N – A – U – D. Say it . . . back to me.’

‘Christine Reynaud. R – E – Y – N – A – U – D.’

‘She is Harry’s wife.’

‘Harry’s
wife
?’

‘Ex-wife. I met her today . . . she . . . lives here.’ Geiger squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again. ‘I need you . . . to call her. Find her number . . .’ His face suddenly dropped out of view.

‘Geiger?’ Ezra’s throat clogged with panic. He swallowed but he couldn’t send it back down. ‘
Geiger
?’

‘I’m . . . here,’ came the voice. ‘Get the number.’

Ezra yanked his chair over, sat down and smacked his computer to wake it up. The screen lit and he went at the keyboard. It was good to have something to do – to focus on – to help put the fear at arm’s length. Google gave him dozens of choices for ‘paris france phonebook’ – and he picked the first one and typed in the woman’s name.

‘Got it!’ He heard the volume of his voice and looked to the door with a wince. ‘I got it,’ he said softly.

Geiger floated back into sight. ‘Call her. Tell her I need her help. Ask her . . . to come to 315 Rue Questel. Q – U – E – S – T – E – L. A boarded-up store. Back door. Call her . . .’

Ezra stared into Geiger’s eyes. ‘Okay. I will – right now. Just tell me . . . Did you find them?’

‘I know . . . where they are, Ezra. Make the call.’

Ezra nodded – and couldn’t stop nodding – as if some mechanism was trying to convince him of his abilities. He picked up his cell.

‘I can do this. I can absolutely do this.’ Geiger had left the iPad screen again. Ezra was talking to himself. He dialed the number – and heard it ring. And ring again . . .

‘C’mon . . . Pick up.’

. . . and again . . .

‘Come –
onnnnnnn . . .
’