Captain Quad (15 page)

"He was here, Sammy," Leona said, her breath rustling in her throat. "Your dear sweet brother was here."

Sam's flesh crawled in cold handfuls.

His mother began to rock.

SEVENTEEN

I expressly refused you permission to do that," Peter said huskily. He was still hoarse from the tube in his throat.

Dr. Lowe fingered his collar. Behind him, arranged in a tight semicircle, a group of students looked on in horrified awe. Earlier that morning Dr. Lowe had come in to extubate Peter, but had neglected to mention the electronic device he'd instructed the surgeons to implant beneath Peter's skin. Peter had found out for himself when a nurse came in to calibrate it.

"It had to be done," Lowe said in his own defense. "Without this device, you'd be stuck on a ventilator indefinitely."

Peter's face reddened to the cast of old brick. "You had no right!"

Lowe backed up a step. "Well, I can see there is little point in continuing this—"

"Don't you dare walk out on me!" Peter roared. "Don't you dare!"

With an outstretched arm Lowe herded his students toward the door.

"Come back here!" Peter shouted. "Come back here, dammit!"

Lowe turned his back.

And Peter spat. Using a technique a school chum had taught him when he was a kid, he amassed a huge gob and propelled it along the curled chute of his tongue. The bulk of it caught Lowe behind the ear, where it dangled obscenely. Sticky satellites speckled his balding pate and the shoulder of his pinstripe suit. Unable to stop himself, one of the students burst out laughing, nervous laughter that was quickly stifled.

Lowe rounded on Peter in fury. "Don't you dare ever do that again." He dug a monogrammed handkerchief out of his breast pocket and wiped his ear with it.

"You stay out of my room!" Peter screamed. "And stay out of my life!"

Keeping one eye on Peter, Lowe hustled his entourage out the door. Peter heard him barking orders at a nurse—and knew that he was meant to hear every word.

"I want him sedated," Lowe commanded in that cool, imperious tone Peter had come to despise over the years. "And I want someone from Psychiatry up here to see him today. He's agitated. Agitated and irrational." Underscoring the doctor's words, Peter heard the busy scribble of his pen on an order sheet.

"Nobody touches me with dope," he hollered. "If anyone tries, I'll bite off his fingers!" Furious tears stung his eyes. "Do you hear me? I'll spit in the fucker's face! I'll—"

You'll do what? a mocking voice interrupted.

You'll do shit, another voice answered. That's what.

Consumed with rage, Peter thumped his head repeatedly into his pillow, wishing it were a cinder-block wall.

Sam turned up around four that afternoon, freighted with books, his pocked cheeks rosy from the brisk autumn air. He had gone first to the ICU, and was gratified to find that Peter had been shipped back upstairs to his room. In the glow of his relief, Sam had forgotten about the implant. The palpable gloom reminded him.

He pulled up a chair and sat at the bedside. And although he secretly applauded
Lowe for taking the initiative—what Sam didn't want was a dead brother—he decided to squat on neutral ground for the time being.

"Want to talk about it?"

Peter sighed. "What's there to say? The fucker went ahead and did it. I can't believe it, but there it is."

Handling it gingerly, Sam examined the compact device. Hooked by two fine wires to a disc-shaped plate beneath the skin of Peter's flank, the stimulator looked like nothing more than a scaled-down Walkman, with two small calibrated dials and a glassed-in indicator that resembled a voltmeter. Another wire ran to the wall above Peter's head, where it jacked into an outlet labeled alarm.

"I feel like a bit of a jackass," Peter admitted.

"Why's that?"

"I really blew up at Lowe over this thing." He chuckled humorlessly. "Called him some nasty names. I even gobbed on him."

"You gobbed on him?"

Peter nodded, the corners of his mouth twitching in the closest thing to a smile Sam had seen on his brother's face in years.

"Not too bright, huh? Sort of like spitting in the judge's eye before the sentence is handed down."

"Maybe he had it coming," Sam offered.

"Fucking A, he had it coming," Peter affirmed, that impotent anger rising again.

As much of that anger as Sam had been witness to over the years, it still distressed him whenever it flared. Before the accident, it had taken a lot to set Peter off—a direct slur on their mother, perhaps, or on Sam himself—but now, anger was Peter's only defense, his only release. And as ugly as it was, that anger was therapeutic.

Sam drew it out.

"Maybe we should hire a lawyer," he suggested. "Sue the bald bastard's ass."

"Nice thought, but forget it. They're calling it a lifesaving maneuver." A defeated sigh escaped him. "And the hell of it is, they're right. I'm nothing but a fucking head, Sam, and still I'm afraid to let go. Some prize turnip, huh?"

Sam's stomach rolled threateningly. The one thing he could not stand from his brother was this kind of talk—but the sickness he felt now bubbled up from someplace much deeper.

(uhnn. . . fflug. . . idd)

He wondered if Peter remembered his mute, late night entreaty.

"Cut that shit," Sam said with forced levity. "Nobody wants to die. So you'd better not die, dickbrain, 'cause if you do, I'll come back here and kill you myself." It was intended as a joke, but the words hung heavy between them. "I meant—"

"I know what you meant."

A nurse came in then, carrying a small burgundy tray with a loaded syringe and an alcohol swab arranged side by side on its surface.

"Hey, welcome to the Cocaine Café," Peter said cynically, doing a passable Cheech Marin. "What'll it be today, man? A hundred of Demerol to keep the feeb at bay? Or how's about ten of Valium? That oughta keep the kumquat quiet."

Afraid Peter would create another scene—there had been many over the years, each of them ending with these forced injections, like punishments—Sam got quickly to his feet.

"Stick around," Peter told him calmly, chuckling again, that same hollow, mirthless sound. "No pun intended." He grinned falsely at the nurse. "I'll go quietly."

Shooting a tense glance at Sam, the nurse swabbed Peter's thigh and injected the Valium.

"Oww!" Peter squealed, tipping a wink at Sam when the nurse flinched back. Sam grinned, but he was not amused.

"Be sure to tell them I was a good little squash," Peter said to the nurse as she left.

Sam looked down at his shoes.

"Not so impressed with your big brother anymore," Peter said, more than a little shame in his voice. "Huh."

"That's bullshit and you know it," Sam protested, feeling angry now himself. "The way they treat you, it makes me want to cave their fucking heads in!" He sighed. "And yet, I know they're just doing their jobs. It's a trap, man. A god-awful trap." His eyes reddened with approaching tears.

"Hey," Peter said. "Hey, man, I'm sorry. It's just that sometimes I get so damned angry I want to bust something, you know? Kick the living shit out of something. . . but I can't. So I crap on whoever's around. God help me, I've even done it to you."

Sam started to object. . . but it was true.

"It's almost impossible to think of anyone else's problems when you're in this kind of shape, Sammy. But that doesn't excuse it. Christ, just look at you. Trekking in here every day, doesn't matter if it's shitty outside or you're sick as a dog with the flu, you're here. Studying, holding down three jobs just so you can keep me in toys and the old lady in booze." Sam flinched visibly; this was the first time since the wreath that Peter had mentioned their mother. "I don't know how you do it."

"Do you know why I do it?"

"Yeah, kid," Peter said, compassion lumping his words. "I do."

They were quiet for a time, the Valium having its way with Peter. Then: "You know, Sammy, I dreamed about her last night."

"Who?" Sam said, guessing he meant Kelly. Peter rarely mentioned her anymore—the bitch had run out on him, just like all the rest—but Sam suspected that his feelings for her still ran deep.

"Mom," Peter said, making the word sound profane. "I hadn't even thought about her in years, let alone dream about her."

This was a lie, and Sam knew it, but he decided to let it slide. He made no comment, expecting the discussion to end there.

But Peter pressed on.

"It was the strangest dream, Sammy. It started with something similar to what happened on the night I nearly croaked." He told Sam about the floating, detached state he had found himself in that night.

"Wow," Sam said, astonished. "I've heard of that happening. Sixty Minutes did a thing on it a few years back, or maybe it was W-Five. They called it an out-of-body experience."

"Yeah," Peter agreed. "I saw that program, too. And I've read about the phenomenon." With a nod he indicated his well-stocked library, which occupied a tall stack of shelves against the opposite wall. "Truth is, I thought it was all bullshit. Until now."

Sam regarded his brother with an expression of open wonder.

"Then last night I was having the dream." Sam knew all about Peter's recurring dream. "It was the same as always, except at the point where I usually wake up I was suddenly hovering in the air above the whole scene, just like the other night. I guess my subconscious just built the experience into the dream.

"But then I realized I was saying something, or my body was, down there on the road. . .”

He took the story right up to the point where he arrived in that strange, dingy room, following the pull of that eerie music. But as he described the room in the meticulous detail of the dream, he witnessed a peculiar transformation in Sam. Suddenly the kid was sheet-white, the hollows beneath his eyes a pale, unhealthy green, and he seemed to be having difficulty catching his breath.

"Sam," Peter said, concerned. "What—"

"You saw the shrine?" Sam blurted. "And the couch? And that crappy room divider?"

"Sam—"

Sam raised a forestalling hand. He was trying desperately to remember if he'd ever described the apartment to his brother. But no, Peter hadn't even allowed him to talk about the move. And without being able to stand there and study the room himself, even Sam could not describe it in such detail.

"Sam, what the hell. . . ?"

"That was no dream," Sam said finally, recalling his mother's drunken claim of the night before.

(He was here, Sammy.)

"What do you mean?" Peter said, a hint of fear in his voice.

"You were there," Sam whispered. "You were actually there."

(Your dear sweet brother was here.)

The night following her son's ephemeral visit, Leona Gardner sat expectantly awake and painfully sober until just before dawn. With jittery fingers she rethreaded the tape again and again, barely noticing when at one point Sam stormed out of the apartment, slamming the door behind him.

The music had brought Peter back to her the last time.

It would do so again.

When by four-thirty nothing had happened, and the shivery, gut-sick shadow of withdrawal had consumed her, Leona cracked open a fresh bottle of Jack and guzzled her way deep into its fiery oblivion. Sleep stole over her sodden gray cells like death, and she dropped precipitously away. Anyone seeing her there on the couch—half sitting, her skin a diseased yellow, the shallow intake and boozy outflow of her breath barely perceptible—would surely have thought her dead.

On the table beside her, the tape flapped repeatedly. . .

But the music played on, distant at first, rising from the depths of some unseen chasm, then swelling as her awareness of it heightened. Through slitted eyes she saw the dumb revolutions of the take-up reel, the loosely flapping tail of the tape, and now she sat up on the couch, her liver-eyes as round as saucers.

The music wasn't coming from the tape.

It was coming from the piano. . .

But the benchseat was bare, the fallboard closed over the keys.

Leona rose on slippered feet and wove her way toward the piano, shifting from handhold to handhold like a sailor on a yawing ship. She approached the instrument from its bent side, laying a trembling hand on its polished lid for support. The wood vibrated beneath her fingertips.

With music.

Like a mother snatching a child from a burning bed, Leona grabbed the fallboard and slammed it open, revealing the gleaming keys, like the teeth of a friendly monster.

They were moving, up and down, like the keys of a player piano.

Leona dropped to her rump on the rug. Before her eyes the air above the benchseat began to ripple like a desert heat shimmer, and then to take shape, human shape. . .

Peter's shape.

Intent and miraculously whole, he sat hunched over the keyboard as he always had, still transparent but hardening, assuming the lovely substance of reality. His sandstone-colored eyes were lidded in the rapture of creation, and his athlete's hands glided expertly over the keys. He glanced briefly her way, that funny, lopsided grin on his face, the one he always got when he played, then turned back to the keys.

Stunned, Leona could only watch. . . and then crab her way backward as her son's image underwent a hideous metamorphosis, his lithe body wasting, his strong limbs retracting as the tendons shortened with audible creaks. The clean refrains of the sonata deteriorated into the inexpert plunkings of a beginner, and finally into the furious poundings of a retardate. As if in revolt, the fallboard slammed shut like an alligator's jaw, severing Peter's fingers at the middle joints. Rotating on the bench, he held up his hands for his mother's inspection, grinning at her from a face that was otherwise inert.

I am not dead, the spidery ruin on the piano bench told her.

Not dead. . .

Leona awoke on the floor with her back jammed against the room divider, sweat oozing from her pores. On the coffee table behind her the tape flapped monotonously. She squinted at the piano in the dawn light—and saw blood drizzling from beneath the fallboard. She blinked. . . and the blood was gone. The fallboard gleamed in the morning's new light.