Transcription (11 page)

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He’s got me by the arm.

I struggle to get free, but his grip is too strong.
 

I realize that we’re walking. I’ve got my notebook gripped so tight that it feels like my fingers will become fused to the cover.

I tune into what he’s saying mid-sentence.

“…and she’ll come pick you up, and everything will be right as rain.”

“What happened? Where are we going?”

“I’m taking you to the office, Mr. Hicks.”

“But why? Wait. I’m not done with my research.”

“I don’t care what you signed on for, I’m going to have Ed check you out while we’re waiting. If he finds anything unusual, you’re getting an ambulance ride straight to the hospital.”

I shake my head. “Wait. Can you just explain to me why you’re taking me away?”

“I thought you were going to make it all night. You nearly did. Some people just can’t handle isolation. We used to see it all the time when we had to put men in solitary. Some of them lose track of time and start screaming like a baby within an hour. Usually, if they make it as long as you did, and especially if they have a window so they can see that dawn is creeping back in, usually a man will last a few days. No shame on you, though. I wouldn’t want to try it. Especially with all that research under your belt. You were probably seeing ghosts just from the accounts you’ve read, right?”

I shake my head again. I’m not following what he’s trying to tell me.

He bangs on the thick glass and a man turns halfway around. He’s preoccupied with something else, but he takes the time to hit a button. With the buzz of an electromagnet, the door pops free and we step through to their office. It smells of musty old files, being aired out for the first time in a decade or more.

“Have a seat,” Fradeux says. “I’ll make some phone calls.”

While I’m waiting, Fradeux brings over Ed. After a quick introduction, he begins to check me out. Apparently, he was a medic at one point. He declares that I’ve had a panic attack, and that I probably can’t remember exactly what happened.

I remember, but I can’t make any sense of it.

Fradeux has called Judith to come pick me up. I don’t know how that’s going to work—she’s at home with Jimmy. When she arrives, I’m back in my street clothes. I walk out to see her behind the wheel. Jimmy is asleep in the back seat. She made a little bed for him back there and somehow got him to go back to sleep.

I climb into the passenger’s seat. She can drive—I’m too shaky.

I wave goodbye to Officer Fradeaux as she backs out of the parking lot. The gates are up. We don’t have to pass inspection to get back onto the road.

“Did you get what you came for?” she asks.

I’m trying to light a cigarette with shaky hands. I give up.

“Yes and no,” I say. I have only a rough memory of my revelations. It’s like a dream—by the time you’re in the shower, you can piece together some images, but the thread of the story is gone.

“You still think there was something environmental in that cell that caused those men to become violent murderers?” she asks me.

I turn and hang over the seat, looking at my boy, Jimmy. He’s a little angel. He has no idea how precious every second of life is. I jolt upright at the thought. There’s something evil lurking behind that thought.

“I really don’t know,” I say to Judith. “I need to get some sleep, and then I’m going to write. I can feel the words making my fingers twitch, you know? I’m going to bang out some pages tonight.”

“On the story?”

“Maybe. I might take a little detour though. I feel some fiction coming. I might take some time and see where it goes. I’ve got to get the poison out, you know?”

Judith nods. “Don’t neglect the prison story too long. I want to see how it comes out. I want to see how you tie all your theories together on this one.”

“Yeah,” I say. “For sure.”

When we get home, I’m glad to find out that my hands have steadied enough that I can carry Jimmy inside. Judith trudges off towards our bedroom. She has always been really good at falling back to sleep after interruption. Not me. I stay up to wait for Jimmy to wake, so I can get his breakfast and get him off to school. Judith can have some more rest before she has to get ready for work. I hope I’ll be able to get some shut-eye after the house empties out.

While I’m waiting for Jimmy to wake, I sit in the living room, looking out the window and reviewing my notes.

I wrote them only hours before, but it seems like all that stuff happened in a different life. And yet, it doesn’t. The experience changed me. I can feel it down in my cells. Either that, or I’m so tired that I’ll believe anything. The day is beautiful as the sun comes up. There’s a tiny bit of mist clinging to the ground near the trunks of the trees. Dew sparkles like little diamonds scattered in the grass. Only the birds and squirrels take advantage of the morning Eden. They’re up and at work while the rest of the world is still shaking off sleep.

A few houses down, I see Mrs. Dando come out of her little ranch house. She doesn’t even glance up at the gutter that needs fixing. It’s the right behavior—don’t waste time thinking about a silly gutter when life has so much to offer you—but I know she’s coming at it from the wrong attitude. She has given up. She believes that everything is going to turn out rotten, every time, no matter how she tries to fight. What she needs is a swift kick to the head to wake her up. She needs to seize control of her pathetic life and make something of herself. She needs to chase her dreams, and if she should fall flat on her face, then at least she will have gone down trying. She needs someone to educate these facts into her soft, doughy countenance at the end of a clenched fist. She needs the sharp blade of reason to pierce her…

“Honey?” Judith asks.

“Yeah? Shouldn’t you be asleep?”

“You were grinding your teeth,” she says. “I could hear it all the way from the bedroom. You were grinding your teeth and almost … growling.”

“Huh,” I say. “I don’t know. I was lost in thought.”

“When you’re done with this prison story, do you think you could work on something happy for once? Maybe you could write about the new zoo they’re building in Lewham?”

“Yeah, that’s a good idea,” I say. I didn’t even know there was a new zoo coming. I’m just agreeing to agree. “Go back to bed, honey. You have an hour before you need to get up.”

“Okay,” she says.

She leaves me again. Mrs. Dando is gone. She’s off in her little yellow car.

It occurs to me that I want to write the story of Mrs. Dando and her pathetic life. I want to write about someone who teaches her a lesson. Maybe that will be the fiction I write tonight. I’ve already given myself permission to do it. It might as well be about her. It occurs to me that I told Judith that, “I’ve got to get the poison out.”

That wasn’t entirely accurate. I’ve got to get the
venom
out. A poison is something you ingest, and you might regurgitate before it kills you. What I’ve got inside me is something my body manufactured. It’s a product of me, and I want to expel it from my body so that I might hurt someone else. Or, maybe it would be more accurate to think that I want to express the venom so that if I were to bite accidentally, I wouldn’t have the accidental capacity to kill.

What a strange analogy.

Don’t they milk cobras and rattlesnakes so they can make antivenin with the extract? Perhaps that’s the image I’ve been hunting for.

CHAPTER 11: BALCONY

T
HE
NEXT
DAY
WASN
’
T
as bad as James had feared. He woke, ate, and sat down to write. Everything seemed fairly normal and comfortable. The day after that was miserable. He woke a little early after rolling in his sleep. He was unable to get comfortable with the throbbing in his legs.
 

With the subject top of mind, he used his extra time to begin unpacking his exercise equipment. He was pretty sure the apartment below was vacant, but he would ask Bo the next time he saw him. James preferred to avoid conflict whenever possible. He didn’t want to be introduced to his downstairs neighbors when they complained about his noise.

It wasn’t until he sat down that he realized how much pain he was in. There wasn’t enough aspirin in his apartment—maybe not in the world—to relieve the dull ache in the backs of his legs. The worst spot was right where his calves met the backs of his knees. When he spent any amount of time with his legs bent, straightening them was agony.

James resolved himself to a grueling night of pain.

The story he picked was about a young woman. He didn’t realize until he was already committed to transcribing it. Danielle was the face of the victim as he wrote. No matter how hard he tried—even when he attempted to substitute Chloe’s face in his mind’s eye—he always pictured Danielle. She was the one pleading for her life on the other side of the gun’s barrel. She was the one forced to her knees, and forced to take the gun into her mouth. It was her brains that he arranged lovingly into a haiku on the wood floor.

“Spirit and beauty. Formed with sorrow into blood. She lives in her flesh.”

James finished the story with tears streaming down his face and insane laughter trying to escape his mouth.

When the sun came up he ran to the porch, forgetting, for once, to lock the door behind him. He hung his body over the railing and sobbed his grief. He looked at his hands, expecting to see Danielle’s blood there. He expected to find chunks of her skull and brains stuck under his fingernails. Of course, he saw none of that. The blood was in the story. Somewhere, in the real world, Danielle was probably still asleep.

He took a deep breath and pressed his hands to his face. Despite what his eyes and logic told him, he could smell the gore.

“You okay?” a voice called from below.

James moved his hands and saw Bo down there, on the sidewalk.

“How come every time I step out onto this balcony, you’re down there?” James asked. His tone was a little too cold to be joking. It was a little abrupt to be polite. He didn’t care. “Are you stalking me or something?”

“Ease on back there, bud,” Bo said, putting his hands up defensively. “I pulled twilight shift, so I’m going to go stock shelves and hate customers.” He began to walk away. He turned to keep talking at James. “Maybe you should take some time today and brush up on your interpersonal skills.”

James turned from the railing and walked back inside.

He made it to the kitchen before he remembered the door. He shut and locked it, and then put the little stick in the track of the slider, so it couldn’t be forced open. James pressed his back against the curtain and slumped to the floor.

“At least my legs feel better,” he said. He laughed. It was a pathetic sound, and he stopped it quickly.

He ate more aspirin with his breakfast and then collapsed on top of the covers. When he woke up, he had a pounding headache. He treated himself to a shave and shower before he stepped out into the afternoon heat of the balcony. It felt like a sauna. Even though he had just showered, he enjoyed the sweat that popped to his skin immediately.

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Bo was swinging the paper bag when the appeared around the corner. He didn’t address James, or even wave to him, before he began climbing. Once he took his chair next to James, he handed over the paper bag and sighed.

“Sorry about this morning, man. You looked like you were in tough shape.”

“No, I’m sorry,” James said. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you. You were just trying to be nice.”

Bo nodded.

“You up for another hike this weekend?”

“I don’t think so,” James said. “I have some work to do before I’m ready for another hike. I have to get my legs back in order. I’m ashamed to tell you how broken I was for days after that last trip.”

Bo smiled with a corner of his mouth and nodded. “It will only hurt a few times, I promise.”

“You say that as the proud owner of young legs,” James said. “I used to have those. I lost them years ago.”

“That’s too bad,” Bo said. “I think Danny has a crush on you. She would probably love an excuse to spend a little more time with you.”

“You’re insane. She’s half my age,” James said.

“I didn’t say she wanted to marry you, or even date you. I just said that she has a crush on you. You never had a crush on an older man?”

“No,” James said with a laugh. “I can honestly say I haven’t.”

“You don’t know what you’re missing. You get to work with that strange power dynamic, and play with some daddy issues. It’s really the best kind of crush to have.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Did I ever tell you about my thing with the gym teacher?”

“No. Do I want to hear it?”

“Probably not. I was just a teenager, and it involves some pretty inappropriate contact. I’m sure he’ll get over it some day though. In my defense, he deserved what he got.”

“That’s not funny,” James said, but he had a smile on his face.

“Nope,” Bo said. “Not funny at all. Just meted out a little Bo justice. People have to dish out their own justice sometimes. There’s this guy, Marvin, who comes into the Foodway. He used to trade his food stamps for cigarettes. He was taking food out of his kid’s mouth, just so he could have his cigarettes. Bart was the only one who would let him trade for butts, and he got fired a long time ago, but Marvin still tries to buy his cigarettes. Even though he looks to be about fifty, we card him every time. His license is suspended, so when he tries to use it for ID, we tell him it’s no good. He’s dumb enough to believe it.”

“Why doesn’t he just buy his cigarettes elsewhere?”

“I’m sure he does, but the Foodway is the only place his wife takes him regularly. Every week he comes in. Every week someone turns him down. Even most of the managers are in on it. That’s Bo justice.”