Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 (27 page)

           
She sleeps. I sit on her chest,
almost weightless, scratching my upraised knees with my claws, and I smell the
smells of her breath and her body She has had sex, she is comfortable in her
body and her bed and her mind. I touch her dreams with my thoughts, and she
whimpers. She feels my touch, she feels my feather weight on her chest, and she
is afraid.

           
This is no Pami. I’ll tear this one
into narrow strips and it will tell me everything in its mind. Everything. And
that god-dung creature will never use it again.

           
I knead her chest with my toes. She
opens her eyes. She sees me. She screams.

           
I should have stayed in New Jersey,
Frank thought. The police car was still there in his rearview mirror, pacing
him, not doing anything yet, just pacing him.

           
I shouldn’t have driven into the
city at five in the morning, Frank told himself. I should have waited and come
in at rush hour, disappear in the crowd.

           
The damn thing of it was, he’d
decided to
avoid
the rush hour. Here
he was, still in the Chevy from Weir Cook Airport in Indianapolis, driving
across New Jersey in the middle of the night, and he’d figured the hell with
it, get the trip over with, drive on into New York and ditch the car tonight
and get a hotel room and start fresh tomorrow.

           
So he’d pushed it across
New Jersey
, and then the tollbooth guy at the
George
Washington
Bridge
looked at him funny; he knew it, he felt it
at the time. There was just something about Frank or the car or something that
alerted the guy, Frank knew it. He’d spent a lifetime knowing things like that.

           
And then, on the
Manhattan
side, he was almost alone on the
Henry Hudson Parkway
as he drove down the west side, and at
158th Street
a
police
car
was just pulling up onto the highway.

           
He slowed down to maybe three miles
over the limit, and the blue and white police car tucked in at the same speed
about six car lengths back, and here they both were.

           
The tollbooth guy turned me up,
Frank thought. He knew there was something wrong, and he got the word to the
NYPD, and right now those guys behind me are running this license plate through
the computer at Motor Vehicle. Has it been reported stolen yet? Has the
Indianapolan returned from his flight and taken the courtesy bus to the spot
where his car used to be?

           
Even if not,
even
if not, if the cops back there decide anyway to just check out
this guy in the Chevy on general principles and because it’s a slow night
tonight, Frank is without papers; not on himself and most especially not on the
car. “Who is this car registered to?”

           
“John Doe, Officer.”

           
125th Street
; the next exit. Driving smoothly, without
fuss, even managing to
look
casual
though no one in the world would be able to see his face at this moment, Frank
steered for the exit, flowed smoothly down and around the curve, and the
police car followed
!

           
Damn! Damn damn damn! The first
traffic light Frank came to was green and he went straight and the cops came
right along in his wake, half a block back. The second light was just turning
yellow; he pressed the accelerator and zipped through, then eased off again.
Now would tell; either the police car stops, or its red and white flashers come
on and start revolving and the cops come straight on through the intersection
and right up Frank’s tailpipe.

           
I’ll have to
try
to outrun them, Frank thought, knowing how hopeless that would
be but knowing also that he had no other choice. Take turns, cut back and forth
in all these streets, try to lose them. He kept staring at the rearview mirror,
not breathing, mouth open in fear, and back there the police car..
.stopped.

           
Green light ahead. Frank took the
right turn, then the next left, then another right. Bobbing and weaving, losing
them any way he could. He kept going, switching back and switching back, all on
empty streets in that darkest time of night just before the dawn, no traffic,
no pedestrians. Stay off the highway, that was the thing, find the direction to
go downtown, get undercover some—

           
Sirens, off a ways. Looking for me!

           
A skinny little black girl in a huge
bloodred T-shirt ran out of nowhere into the glare of his headlights, waving
her arms at him, showing him her tear-streaked terrified face. She was
barefoot, and at first he thought she was ten years old, some little kid,
attacked, gang-raped, something, and he instinctively hit the brakes, but
without completely stopping.

           
She grabbed the passenger door
handle as it went by her at about five miles an hour, snatched it open, leaped
headfirst into the car with the door banging against her legs, and Frank,
startled, tromped the accelerator again. She pulled herself in and up, knees on
the floor, arms on the seat, her pleading wide-eyed broken-jawed face staring
up at him, the door imperfecdy closed and rattling as he accelerated,
fleetingly afraid of an ambush situation, and he saw she wasn’t what he’d
thought. She’s a grown-up woman, he realized, staring down at her, ugliest
thing I ever seen in my life.

           
“Mister, take me away from here!” she
cried, with some kind of click-clack accent in her words; not like a spade at
all; those mushmouth
brothers
on the
inside. “I’ll do anything you want,” she begged, “but take me away from
here!”

           
Susan woke from a nightmare to a
worse nightmare, sitting on her chest, its claws puncturing her breasts, its
red eyes gleaming at her as she screamed. It opened that hooked mustardy beak,
and its breath was so foul that even in her terror she had to consciously try
not to be sick.

           
“Susan,” it said, in a husky croak,
like a dog that had learned how to talk, and its narrow tongue, forked at the
tip, flashed out and back, as though already tasting her blood.

           
I’m dreaming! But she knew she
wasn’t.

           
A forepaw reached out, one
gray-green talon touched her nose as though in play, and fire seared through
her body from the touch. She shrieked, her own breath as hot as sulphur in her
lungs.

           
“Suuuu-san,” it crooned, and
increased its weight, suddenly and terribly; then was almost weighdess again.
“Who have you met recently, Suuuuu-san?” it asked, the red eyes sparkling as
though it hoped she would refuse to answer. Would refuse at first to answer.
Would refuse for as long as possible to answer. “Who have you met? What are you
doing together?”

           
Andy! she thought, but didn’t say,
and thought again,
it’s a dream
, and
the thing suddenly looked up, as though startled, and bolts of white light shot
out of its eyes.

           
No;
into
its eyes. From everywhere, from nowhere, the white light made
two long thin cones, stilettos, two narrow blades plunging into the demon
through its open eyes, filling it like milk, the white glow inside pulsing
through the scales and fur of its body, swelling it, the demon’s mouth yawping
wide, dislocating its own jaw, the forked tongue frantically flapping as though
caught in a springe and trying to escape desperately from that mouth, that
body.

           
The white light seared the body of
the demon from the center, burning and charring, and the monster writhed in
furious pain, pressing down on Susan’s body and then
leaping
into the air. Great huge gray-black wings sprang from it,
filling the room, beating wildly, stripping the walls of pictures and
mirror—the mirror showing nothing—the demon curling in on itself in the midst
of its thumping wings, trying to bite through itself to that tormenting light
that slashed and destroyed deep within.

           
Count Dracula sat quiedy in the
wooden chair beside the window, right leg crossed over left, hands crossed
calmly in lap as he watched the batde proceed in the middle of the room. Susan,
battered by terror and pain, roused herself half upward, blood seeping from the
long claw-tears on her breasts, and stared at this new horror.

           
Dracula turned his head, faint
sparks of static electricity springing from him as he moved, and smiled at
Susan, showing her his blood-smeared fangs. “So you are
that
important to him,” he said amiably, in no particular accent.
“You are the very linchpin of his plan.”

           
The words made no sense, it was as
though they were a part of the torture. Susan stared at her tormentor in this
new guise, and he turned his attention back to the madness in the air, where
the fury of the wings had slowed, the struggle had been decided. The demon
sagged from its wings, which fitfully shook, creaking like old leather.

           
No, not the demon; the husk of the
demon. Susan understood that all at once; the demon itself had fled from that
battlefield and now sat calmly watching from the sidelines, amusing itself.

           
But so did the opponent understand,
whoever or whatever that might be. Abrupdy, the chest of that ghoul-gryphon
tore open and light poured into the room, blinding Susan, who, as she flung her
hands to her face, saw the Count Dracula apparition cease to be. Gone.

           
In the semi-darkness behind her
hands, eyes squeezed shut but nevertheless seeing through her lids and her
hands, seeing the
bones
in her hands
from the intensity of that light, Susan felt it all change. A great billowing
tenderness enfolded her. The light lost its terrifying incandescence, became
soft, soothed her, setded and calmed her in the bed, removed all pain and fear,
caressed her brain, and she slept, dreamless and full.

           
The alarm sounded. Her eyes snapped
open. What a horrible dream! But it was so real!

           
She sat up, unable to believe
anything, neither that it had been real nor a dream. There were no wounds on
her breasts. The pictures and mirror were in place on the walls. A faint scent,
like burning tires, hung in the air.

           
J
urisdiction
was the word they used. They talked over Li Kwan’s head, or past his ears, as
though he didn’t speak English, or it didn’t matter if he did. They used the
word
jurisdiction,
and they smiled
and smacked their lips and raised their jaws at one another, as though he were
a juicy steak that only one of them could enjoy.

           
For four days they moved him around,
from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The
Star
Voyager's
crew had turned him over to uniformed men from the United States
Immigration and Naturalization Service, who took him in a car across New
York—so familiar, from all the photos, all the films, but so desperately
foreign—to an office building and upstairs to a large room with a mesh cage in
it. They put him in the cage, and fed him one meal, and then
New York City
policemen came and took him away to a
recognizable prison and put him in an isolation cell, and there he spent the
night. Next morning the Federal Bureau of Investigation had a turn at him—and
another cell, in another location—and then the Secret Service, and then the
New York City
police again. And back to Immigration. And
occasional brief incomprehensible appearances before various judges, who
muttered at the officials and paid him no attention at all. And so on.

           
For the first two days, Kwan kept
trying to make his case, make it with somebody, anybody, but no one would
listen, no one cared, not the judges, not the people in uniform who led him
from place to place, not anybody. Men in shabby suits, carrying highly polished
attache cases, would occasionally appear and claim to be attorneys and say they
had been assigned to “represent” him, and he tried to tell his story to
them
, but none of them was interested.
That was the point, finally, if there was one: no one in the world was even
interested.

           
One attorney, the most honest of
them—the only one honest of them—said it straight out: “Never mind that, Kwan.
You aren’t political, so forget all that. You aren’t political because it would
be too goddamn awkward if you were political, so you’re not. You’re, let’s see,
you’re”—studying the papers he’d taken from the gleaming attache case—“you’re a
stowaway, an illegal immigrant, an accused thief—”

           
“Thief! Who says I’m a thief?”

           
“You’ll have your day in court,
Kwan. That’s the name, right? Li Kwan? Your last name’s Kwan?”

           
“My family name is Li,” Kwan answered.
“My given name is Kwan.”

           
“Oh.” The man frowned some more at
the papers. “They got it backward here.”

           
“Li Kwan. That’s correct.”

           
The man smiled in sudden
understanding. “I get it! You
do
it
backward! Is that a Chinese thing, or is it just you?”

           
“It is Chinese.”

           
“So you’re Mr. Li, is that it?”

           
“Yes.”

           
“Like the guy does my shirts,” the
man said, and grinned in a sloppy friendly way and said, “I’m here to do what I
can for you, Mr. Kwan. Mr.
Li.
I’ll
get it. And I’ll do what I can.” Kwan never saw him again.

           
But the worst was the women. Several
of the functionaries who passed Kwan through their hands like worry beads were
women, and Kwan simply didn’t matter to them. They were in uniform or otherwise
severely dressed, and their eyes were cold or indifferent or distracted. Most
of them had muscle bunches beneath their mean mouths. They met Kwan in small
bare rooms with hard metal furniture, they carried their attache cases or
manila folders, they clicked their ballpoint pens, they met him alone or they were
accompanied by others, and at no time did he matter.

           
At first, he tried to attract their
attention in the usual way, being a pleasant and interesting and unthreatening
but sexually intriguing young male, and not once did they respond in any way at
all.

           
It was not that he hoped for or
expected a sex act atop one of these metal desks, but that he simply wanted
interpersonal contact in a way he understood, an acknowledgment of their shared
humanity, of the world of possibility outside and beyond the airless chambers
in which they met. By not noticing him, they made him something less
noticeable. By their refusal to have a gender, they refused him one as well; in
desexing themselves, they desexed Kwan.

           
He didn’t understand that
specifically, only knew that to his natural outraged frustration at being
silenced and stifled by these unemotional automatons, there was added a
steadily deepening depression, a loss of self-assurance, a lessening belief
that he could ever prevail. The governments robbed him of his high moral
ground, the bureaucrats filched his rights and remedies, but the women emptied
him of his natural self.

           
For eleven days they played him, as
a cat plays with a mouse. No one listened, and no one ever would. He was simply
the shuttlecock in their badminton game. He could not become a participant, so
there was no way to win the game.

           
After eleven days, he decided to
stop being nothing by becoming nothing. He took the full tube of toothpaste
with which this most recent holding cell was furnished, removed the top,
inserted the tube as deeply into his throat as he could, and squeezed as much
of the toothpaste into his body as his trembling hands could press from the
tube before the lights swirled around him, pain opened through his body, and he
passed out.

           
If he hadn’t made a clatter when
falling, he might have died.

*
 
*
 
*

           
It was a black moment when he
regained consciousness in the hospital. For the first day and night he took no
interest in his surroundings, tried to pretend he’d died anyway. He couldn’t
speak, in any event, could in fact barely move. Tubes went into his nose and
into a new hole in his throat. Needles pumped fluid into his arms. His wrists
and legs were strapped down. White-clothed men and women passed through,
ignoring his brain, caring only for his body; he ignored them as much as they
ignored him. A bright window to his left showed the changing sky; he didn’t
care.

           
The second afternoon, a rumpled man
in tweeds and a bow tie pulled a chair over next to the bed on the side away
from the window and said, “I thought you Orientals were supposed to be
patient.”

           
This was so outrageous that it
yanked Kwan immediately out of his lethargy, and he turned his head to glare at
the man. Round face, round eyes behind round horn-rimmed spectacles,
false-looking thick brown moustache. Stupid bow tie, dark blue with white
snowflakes; what a stupid thing to wear. If only he could say that.

           
The man smiled at him. “You aren’t
particularly inscrutable either, Kwan,” he said. “May I call you Kwan? Mr. Li
seems so formal. If you could talk, you could call me Bob. As you’ve no doubt
guessed, I’m a psychiatrist.”

           
Kwan closed his eyes and turned his
head away. Shame, disgust, boredom, rage.
Bob:
stupid name, like a sound a yeti might make.

           
Bob laughed and said, to Kwan’s
closed eyes, closed face, closed mind, “That’s the true fate worse than death,
isn’t it? The trouble with suicide. If you fail, you have to talk to a
psychiatrist.”

           
Kwan deliberately opened his eyes
and stared at the man, trying to make himself as cold and dead as possible. Fie
knew what this psychiatrist was up to; he was so obvious, it was insulting. He
wanted to become pals, become chums, force Kwan to accept this Bob as a caring
fellow human being. If he were only to accept Bob’s humanity, it would imply
that

           
Bob—and therefore mankind
generally—accepted Kwan in the same way Which was a lie.

           
Bob said, “Okay, Kwan, at the moment
you just want the facts. Fine. You did a pretty good job on your insides, made
enough of a mess that they had to bring you over here to
NYU
Medical
Center
, where they’ve got specialists and
specialized equipment that can maybe put you back together again. So you aren’t
in any kind of jail any more, but there is a cop outside that door, twenty-four
hours a day. They wanted to put him in here, sitting in the corner there, but
several of us talked them out of that.”

           
Smiling at the look of inquiry that
crossed Kwan’s face despite his best efforts to remain impassive, Bob said,
^cc
We
felt a world full of cops is what drove you to this condition. We’d like you to
know it doesn’t have to be that way. Believe me, Kwan, if you’d waited just a
little longer, all those faceless people
processing
you would have faded away and there would have been somebody to listen.” He smiled,
a coach full of positive reinforcement.
^cc
Well, fortunately, it
isn’t too late. In a week or two you’ll have your voice back, and we can start
figuring out whafs best for you. And we will. Kwan?” The cheerful open face
above the stupid bow tie loomed toward him.
^cc
Will you at least give
me the benefit of the doubt?”

           
No. And I don’t want my voice back.
I don’t want anything back.

           
He’s Sam Mortimer, Kwan thought. He
reminds me of Sam Mortimer, the reporter in
Hong Kong
who betrayed me. All heartiness and fellow
feeling and honest concern; and nothing underneath. Professional warmth. He
gazed at the professional and willed nothing to appear on his face.

           
Bob waited, then leaned back and
shrugged. “We have time,” he said, apparently unaware how chilling that
statement was. “You know, Kwan,” he said, “you don’t have to be strapped down
like this. The only reason was to keep you from hurting yourself, pulling the
tubes out or whatever. I mean, you know, you really and truly can’t kill
yourself in this room, but you could probably do yourself some damage, and
nobody wants that. Now, if I guarantee the doctors and that cop out there that
you won’t do anything self-destructive, I’m pretty sure I can get those straps
taken off, and then you could even sit up and look at the river outside that
window. Or I could get you something to read. Chinese or English? Would you
like some reading matter?”

           
Kwan closed his eyes. The tears on
his cheeks felt like acid. There was no way to win. They were legion, and they
had soldiers for every campaign. And here he lay, helpless. Alone, helpless,
hopeless, betrayed, despairing but not even permitted to
stop.

           
“Magazines? Chinese?”

           
Kwan, behind his closed eyes,
nodded; another defeat.

*
 
*
 
*

           
Sitting up, his view to the left was
of the
East River
and some industrial part of
Queens
on the far side of the wide water. River
traffic was sparse and almost all commercial: barges, tugs, the occasional
small cargo boat. Every once in a while, a small seaplane took off or landed.
This side of the river, just barely visible at the bottom of the window, was
the rushing busy traffic on the
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive
; all that barely glimpsed bustle on the
roadway made the river seem even emptier, without at all suggesting that it
might be serene. Looking out that way, watching the shifting shades of gray on
the river, Kwan was reminded of his rowboat crossing from mainland
China
to
Hong Kong
. What a different person he had been then.
With what hope he had pulled on the oars, and seen the lights of the city come
closer.

           
His view to the right was of the
door, through which the doctors and nurses and Bob from time to time came.
Every time the door was opened, Kwan could look out and see a uniformed
policeman, every shift a different one, seated on a metal-armed office chair
against the opposite wall, usually reading a newspaper, sometimes just seated
with arms folded and feet planted wide as he gazed away down the wide corridor,
probably admiring some nurse’s behind. Once it was a policewoman out there; she
read a magazine.