Captain Quad (16 page)

Breathing hard, Leona rose stiffly to her feet. She stumbled toward the piano, meaning to lift the fallboard and examine the keys. . . but at the last minute she altered her course. If she raised that cover and found ten bleeding fingers underneath, she would run screaming off her tenth-story balcony.

From the uncapped bottle on the end table, Leona swallowed the first of the day. She sat on the couch, wiped a hand across her booze-slopped chin, and rethreaded the tape.

By midmorning Leona had passed out again. She came to just over eighteen hours later, sitting abruptly erect and uttering a startled cry. She gaped over the couch back at the piano, now a ghostly white shape in the unlit room, and felt a legion of invisible spiders skitter over her flesh. There was a terrible emptiness at the center of her being, and a frightful clarity dawning in her mind. For a moment, almost fondly, she remembered another life. . . then she realized what was wrong.

She was sober.

When her eyes had adjusted to the dark, Leona reached for her bottle. It sat on the far side of the coffee table, precariously close to the edge, and instead of closing around its comforting smoothness, her trembling fingers sent it tumbling to the floor.

Leona cursed and jumped up, barking her shin on the corner of the table as she tried to save the precious intoxicant—this was her last bottle, and it was the middle of the night. She could hear the liquid gurgling out, seeping into the rug like spilled blood, and a degree of panic she had never know took hold of her like the hands of a frozen giant.

She groped in the dark for the bottle. When she found it, it was empty. She thought of sucking the puddled rug and then recoiled against the couch, clasping her abraded shin and sobbing like a frightened child. She was cold and alone and she wanted her booze. . . but she couldn't move. Her brain was working again, and it lobbed unwanted truths at her like live grenades.

That was no dream last night, sister, and it wasn't your son. It was the DTs, an alcoholic hallucination. Can't you see what you've done to yourself? You're a lush! A common drunk! You belong in a gutter. . . and what'll become of you when Sammy finally leaves? Have you thought about that? Ever slept in a Dumpster? Ever eaten garbage? Oh, you fool. You fool, you fool, you fool. . .

I'll call somebody, Leona thought frantically. That's what I'll do. 911. The hospital. I need help. Oh, God, I need—

Leona scrambled to her feet like a woman possessed. She stumbled out to the kitchen and groped for the light switch, found it, and then stood blinking in the light, trying to get her bearings. When the glare became tolerable, she fell to her knees and opened the cupboard under the sink. Desperate, she fished around inside, knocking unused containers of Windex and Easy-Off and Borax every which way, until she found what she was after.

"My little ace in the hole," she crooned to the dusty bottle of Jack, thrusting it up to the light like a pagan idol. "I almost forgot about you." She unscrewed the top and drank deeply.

Sam found her there six hours later, unconscious on the kitchen floor, a fresh scab forming on her shin.

EIGHTEEN

For the next two weeks Peter tried to duplicate the experience. These efforts had exactly nothing to do with wanting to visit his mother again, if that was in fact what he had done. No. What Peter was after was that gut-grabbing sensation of flying. For he knew that, even in the fleetest of jets, never would the thrill, the sheer exhilaration of motion, match what he'd experienced in that shimmering corridor of light. In contrast to all of the previous nights in which the dream had haunted him, Peter actively sought the dream now, tried to induce its occurrence.

The dream came, but that was the only constant. Each night, as always, he awoke in a panicky fever, bare seconds before the truck barreled over his legs. Nothing he could do or imagine would prolong the dream beyond the thunder of the truck. Finally, in a funk of frustration, he gave up. And through some strange paradox, defeat was the needed catalyst.

He felt low that night, lower than usual. For two weeks now he had allowed himself the hope that some new. . . what?. . . dimension? had opened its gates to receive him. And this hope had inflamed the old desire, the yen that had at one time consumed him. He wanted to fly again, to bullet through that vertical kaleidoscope of light until his senses reeled and his heart galloped free in his chest. It was this desire—this need—that canceled any compulsion to verify the reality or unreality of recent events. That part of it didn't matter. So desperate was he to escape the featureless drone of his life that he would do anything, endure anything—and believe anything—to make it happen again.

Just once.

That afternoon the Canadian Forces air show had taken place outside his ninth-story window. The Sudbury Science Center, which sponsored the show, had been its ground base, and thus the focal point of the breathtaking aerobatics. Strapped in his wheelchair, Peter had watched the show from the roof, which overlooked the science center and its newly sodded grounds. At first he hadn't wanted to go out, but Sam had coaxed him until finally he'd given in. In the end he was glad. . .

Or so he had thought at the time.

Now the memory of those sleek CT-114s, banking in a tight diamond formation or carving impossible loops, burned hot fire trails in his brain, and he ached to climb aboard one of them, to feel his fingers close knowingly around the joystick. During the show, Sam had run down to the recruiting trailer the forces had set up and had scored a large full-color poster of the nine red and white jets dwarfing the curve of the globe. At Peter's unthinking request, Sam had taped the thing to the wall at the foot of the bed. Now its presence seemed to mock him.

But, oh, the wonderful thunder they had made, rocketing past at Mach 1 and beyond, punching holes in the sound barrier and causing the air to resonate with an almost electric intensity. That resonance had centered in his heart as he craned his neck to glimpse those smooth metal underbellies, and it had rippled down through his bones, creating the closest thing to an actual physical sensation he'd experienced since the fateful day of his accident.

Lying here now, in the deep autumn quiet of his room, Peter discovered a tiny pocket of that sensation still intact, expanding outward as he drifted toward sleep, eeling its way through his body like a drug. He imagined himself humming like a tuning fork, his very molecules becoming so agitated they began to defy gravity. . . and float.

The thunder. The thunder was back.

Fearful of the dream, Peter opened his eyes. . . but the thunder was the real thing. Sleet tapped impatiently at the thermal panes, and flash-glares printed negatives of the room on his retinas.

A freak autumn thunderstorm.

Peter gazed through the bleary windows of his eyes at the bedside clock and discovered that he'd been in that vibratory semitrance for an hour, though it had seemed like only minutes.

Thunder cracked, rolled. . .

And Peter slept.

When he awoke he was sitting in the chair at the foot of his bed. But no. . . it wasn't his bed, couldn't be, because there was someone else asleep in it. The room was dark, the only light a pale yellow fan from the corridor beyond the nearly shut door.

It wasn't his bed, but it was his room. There was his TASH environmental control unit on the shelf by the bed. Technical Aids and Systems for the Handicapped. Great stuff. If you could blow out a candle, you could "control your environment." He had a fourteen-inch color TV, a Sony VCR, a Hitachi tape player, and a case full of tapes, all of which he could control with a slight puff of air—and all of it compliments of Sam.

Now his eyes scanned right, to the stuffed floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and the nightstand in which he stored the few remaining artifacts of his old life, items too painful to list. And there was the poster of the CT-114s, its edges already curling. According to the digital clock, it was six minutes past five in the morning. The worst of the storm had passed, but sleet still ticked at the window glass.

He looked again at the sheet-covered hump.

Who's that sleeping in my bed?

With dreamlike ease (that's what this is it's a dream) Peter rose to his feet. . . and then off his feet. From a yard above his bed, he looked down at himself.

A sudden panicky fear bludgeoned him. Was he dying again? Or worse, already dead?

So what if you are?

Yeah. So what?

But he didn't want to die. Not anymore.

He wanted to fly.

Dead?

No. The gimp Walkman was functioning perfectly, its red LED flashing with each electrical impulse it dispatched to his diaphragm. Beneath the sheets his chest rose and fell.

He drifted closer, noticing that beneath his eyelids the globes of his eyes flickered in the crazed, trapped-animal patterns of REM sleep.

He was dreaming.

Closer. . .

Then two things happened simultaneously. First, a breathless sensation of free-fall that was a lot like being sucked whole into a vacuum. And second, a repulsion so savage it seemed to tear his essence to shreds. Repulsion from the bony, misshapen mess in that bed, from the open-grave stench of the bedsores that cratered its butt, from the incomprehensible truth of its existence. . . and its identity.

The repulsion won out. In a heartbeat he was back at the foot of his bed, still standing but winded, punchy, reeling in the clutches of nausea.

A shadow crept by in the hallway, stretching itself out like ghostly toffee before vanishing in a squeak of crepe-soled shoes.

Shawna Blane, Peter thought, dull anger mingling in a brooding backwater of his mind with an old and bitter arousal. The animosity between them, which had begun about a year ago, had been born innocently enough. Peter had misread Shawna Blane, mistaking her pity for interest. And one late night as she was turning him, he had asked her to. . . touch him. One of his unbidden erections—which he was somehow aware of, a sort of faraway ache perceived more by the brain than the groin—had bobbed up when she drew back the sheets, and it had made him wonder if, were she to stroke him, then maybe, just maybe, he might feel it, at least at a psychological level, and perhaps even ejaculate. Shawna had always seemed so cheerful around him, so friendly, touching his face, engaging him in an ongoing, faintly sexual banter—or so he had judged at the time—that never failed to arouse him. Asking her to touch him that night, in the silent tomb of the vegetable ward, had seemed so. . . right. He'd sincerely believed that she wanted to.

What a chump.

Shawna had flipped out, called him a disgusting, horny little veg, and then slapped him in the face, where she knew he could feel it. Peter had retaliated in one of the few ways left open to him, by hurling insults at her in a voice that trembled with humiliation and rage.

Somewhere outside, a muffled voice called Shawna's name.

"Hold on," Peter heard the dream-Shawna answer. "I've got to tinkle."

Dream?

Peter didn't think so.

He crossed on unfelt feet to the door, reached for the knob. . . and watched gleefully as his hand passed unimpeded through its substance. With a smile, he glanced back at his bedridden body and thought he saw it vibrating, ever so slightly.

Then he waltzed through the thickness of the door into the muted light of the corridor.

Walking at first, then lofting like a gull on an updraft, Peter followed Shawna Blane to the ninth-floor loo. She closed the door as he got there. . . so he simply passed through it.

His timing was perfect. Shawna was just hiking up her skirt. . . and oh, sweet Jesus, she was wearing a garter belt! She wiggled out of a pair of bikini panties—revealing a set of powder-white buns which in their plump perfection surpassed even his wildest imaginings—then turned with what Peter chose to interpret as deliberate slowness. . . and before she perched on the porcelain hoop, she allowed him a fleeting glimpse of heaven. He heard a faint, tinkling hiss as Shawna let go—and then, to his total shock and dismal disappointment, such a thunderous and sloppy passage of wind that he found himself instantaneously returned to his room, his formerly keen arousal burst like a balloon at a dart toss. In all his life, the few times he'd even considered it, he had never imagined a beautiful woman capable of such a thing.

Floating above it, fighting a fresh wave of revulsion, Peter looked down at his body again. He could see an erection poking up under the sheets.

Then, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a large commercial jet outside his window, landing lights twisting, the huge torpedo of its body declining with smooth majesty toward the Sudbury Airport, twenty miles north of the city.

All else was forgotten as he stood on the waist-high windowsill and watched the plane complete its descent. It was a 747, an uncommon visitor to this barren north country, and as always, its massive size astonished him. He had hopped up here—floated, really—the instant he'd spotted the airliner.

The yearning was deep now. Deep and compelling.

Peter leaned forward, to press his face to the cool glass. . . and met no resistance at all. With a gut-clutching lurch, he pitched forward through the window, leaving it intact. The frost-sugared lawn hurtled solidly up at him, and he felt as if his entire being had compressed itself into the dry well of his throat. Bare yards from the ground, he pulled up his nose. . .

And soared into the coming dawn.

He rose in a breathtaking vertical thrust, like a warhead, then angled east in a steady climb. Beneath him the twelve-story monolith of the hospital shrank into insignificance, then vanished in a purple haze. In seconds the entire sloping clockface of the city melted into that haze and he was high on the edge of dawn, the heavens above a cold, dark indigo, the horizon below a garish slash of orange. Higher he soared, and at the rim of the world the sun lifted its blazing head. Light the color of apricots speared out in great fan-shaped rays, blinding him. Thrumming with a crazy mix of wonder, exhilaration, and fear, he banked away from the furnace of the sun and sliced still higher through the air. When the globe beneath him revealed its curving hip, he paused, hung there at what felt like the outer margin of the atmosphere, and looked down.