Everything's Eventual (18 page)

From behind them, Heinz was keening like a child in love or terror. Now that Fletcher was close to the woman the woman standing against the door of the deathroom with her hands pressed flat against its metal surface he could smell some bittersweet perfume. Her eyes were shaped like almonds. Her hair streamed back above the top of her head. We're not just fucking around, she had told him, and Fletcher thought:Neither am I.

The woman saw the news of her death in his eyes and began to talk faster, pressing her butt and back and palms harder and harder against the metal door as she talked. It was as if she believed she could somehow melt herself through the door and come out whole on the other side if she just pushed hard enough. She had papers, she said, papers in his name, and she would give him these papers. She also had money, a great deal of money, also gold; there was a Swiss bank account which he could access by computer from her home. It occurred to Fletcher that in the end there might only be one way to tell the thugs from the patriots: when they saw their own death rising in your eyes like water, patriots made speeches. The thugs, on the other hand, gave you the number of their Swiss bank account and offered to put you on-line.

Shut up, Fletcher said. Unless this room was very well insulated indeed, a dozen ordinary troops from upstairs were probably on their way now. He had no means of standing them off, but this one was not going to get away.

She shut up, still standing against the door, pressing it with her palms. Still with the nailheads in her eyes. How old was she? Fletcher wondered. Sixty-five? And how many had she killed in this room, or rooms like it? How many had she ordered killed?

Listen to me, Fletcher said. Are you listening?

What she was undoubtedly listening for were the sounds of approaching rescue. In your dreams, Fletcher thought.

The weatherman there said that El C=ndor uses cocaine, that he's a Communist butt-boy, a whore for United Fruit, who knows what else. Maybe he's some of those things, maybe none. I don't know or care. What I know about, what I care about, was he was never in charge of the ordinaries patrolling the Caya River in the summer of 1994. N*+-ez was in New York then. At NYU. So he wasn't part of the bunch that found the nuns on retreat from La Caya. They put three of the nuns' heads up on sticks, there by the water's edge. The one in the middle was my sister.

Fletcher shot her twice and then Ram=n's gun clicked empty. Two was enough. The woman went sliding down the door, her bright eyes never leaving Fletcher's. You were the one who was supposed to die, those eyes said. I don't understand this, you were the one who was supposed to die. Her hand clawed at her throat once, twice, then was still. Her eyes remained on his a moment longer, the bright eyes of an ancient mariner with a whale of a tale to tell, and then her head fell forward.

Fletcher turned around and began walking toward Heinz with Ram=n's gun held out. As he walked he realized that his right shoe was gone. He looked at Ram=n, who was still lying facedown in a spreading pool of blood. Ram=n still had hold of Fletcher's loafer. He was like a dying weasel that refuses to let go of a chicken. Fletcher stopped long enough to put it on.

Heinz turned as if to run, and Fletcher waggled the gun at him. The gun was empty but Heinz didn't seem to know that. And maybe he remembered there was nowhere to run anyway, not here in the deathroom. He stopped moving and only stared at the oncoming gun and the oncoming man behind it. Heinz was crying. One step back, Fletcher said, and, still crying, Heinz took one step back.

Fletcher stopped in front of Heinz's machine. What was the word Heinz had used? Atavism, wasn't it?

The machine on the trolley looked much too simple for a man of Heinz's intelligence three dials, one switch marked ON and OFF (now in the OFF position), and a rheostat which had been turned so the white line on it pointed to roughly eleven o'clock. The needles on the dials all lay flat on their zeroes.

Fletcher picked up the stylus and held it out to Heinz. Heinz made a wet sound, shook his head, and took another step backward. His face would lift and pull together in a kind of grief-struck sneer, then loosen again. His forehead was wet with sweat, his cheeks with tears. This second backward step took him almost beneath one of the caged lights, and his shadow puddled around his feet.

Take it or I'll kill you, Fletcher said. And if you take another step backward I'll kill you. He had no time for this and it felt wrong in any case, but Fletcher could not stop himself. He kept seeing that picture of Tomsss, the open eyes, the little scorched mark like a powder burn.

Sobbing, Heinz took the blunt fountain-pen-shaped object, careful to hold it only by the rubber insulated sleeve.

Put it in your mouth, Fletcher said. Suck on it like it was a lollipop.

No! Heinz cried in a weepy voice. He shook his head and water flew off his face. His face was still going through its contortions: cramp and release, cramp and release. There was a green bubble of snot at the entrance to one of his nostrils; it expanded and contracted with Heinz's rapid breathing but didn't break. Fletcher had never seen anything quite like it. No, you can't make me!

But Heinz knew Fletcher could. The Bride of Frankenstein might not have believed it, and Escobar likely hadn't had time to believe it, but Heinz knew he had no more right of refusal. He was in Tomsss Herrera's position, in Fletcher's position. In one way that was revenge enough, but in another way it wasn't. Knowing was an idea. Ideas were no good in here. In here seeing was believing.

Put it in your mouth or I'll shoot you in the head, Fletcher said, and shoved the empty gun at Heinz's face. Heinz recoiled with a wail of terror. And now Fletcher heard his own voice drop, become confidential, become sincere. In a way it reminded him of Escobar's voice. We are havin an area of low bressure, he thought. We are havin the steenkin rain-showers. I'm not going to shock you if you just do it and hurry up. But I need you to know what it feels like.

Heinz stared at Fletcher. His eyes were blue and red-rimmed, swimming with tears. He didn't believe Fletcher, of course, what Fletcher was saying made no sense, but Heinz very clearly wanted to believe it anyway, because, sense or nonsense, Fletcher was holding out the possibility of life. He just needed to be pushed a single step further.

Fletcher smiled. Do it for yourresearch.

Heinz was convinced not completely, but enough to believe Fletcher could be Mr. Maybe He Will after all. He put the steel rod into his mouth. His bulging eyes stared at Fletcher. Below them and above the jutting stylus which looked not like a lollipop but an old-fashioned fever thermometer that green bubble of snot swelled and retreated, swelled and retreated. Still pointing the gun at Heinz, Fletcher flicked the switch on the control panel fromOFF toON and gave the rheostat a hard turn. The white line on the knob went from eleven in the morning to five in the afternoon.

Heinz might have had time to spit the stylus out, but shock caused him to clamp his lips down on the stainless steel barrel instead. The snapping sound was louder this time, like a small branch instead of a twig. Heinz's lips pressed down even tighter. The green mucus bubble in his nostril popped. So did one of his eyes. Heinz's entire body seemed to vibrate inside his clothes. His hands were bent at the wrists, the long fingers splayed. His cheeks went from white to pale gray to a darkish purple. Smoke began to pour out of his nose. His other eye popped out on his cheek. Above the dislocated eyes there were now two raw sockets that stared at Fletcher with surprise. One of Heinz's cheeks either tore open or melted. A quantity of smoke and a strong odor of burned meat came out through the hole, and Fletcher observed small flames, orange and blue. Heinz's mouth was on fire. His tongue was burning like a rug.

Fletcher's fingers were still on the rheostat. He turned it all the way back to the left, then flicked the switch toOFF . The needles, which had swung all the way to the +50 marks on their little dials, immediately fell dead again. The moment the electricity left him, Heinz crashed to the gray tile floor, trailing smoke from his mouth as he went. The stylus fell free, and Fletcher saw there were little pieces of Heinz's lips on it. Fletcher's gorge gave a salty, burping lurch, and he closed his throat against it. He didn't have time to vomit over what he had done to Heinz; he might consider vomiting at a later time. Still, he lingered a moment longer, leaning over to look at Heinz's smoking mouth and dislocated eyes. How do you describe it? he asked the corpse. Now, while the experience is still fresh? What, nothing to say?

Fletcher turned and hurried across the room, detouring around Ram=n, who was still alive and moaning. He sounded like a man having a bad dream.

He remembered that the door was locked. Ram=n had locked it; the key would be on the ring hanging at Ram=n's belt. Fletcher went back to the guard, knelt beside him, and tore the ring off his belt. When he did, Ram=n groped out and seized Fletcher by the ankle again. Fletcher was still holding the gun. He rapped the butt down on the top of Ram=n's head. For a moment the hand on his ankle gripped even tighter, and then it let go.

Fletcher started to get up and then thought, Bullets. He must have more. The gun's empty. His next thought was that he didn't need no steenkin bullets, Ram=n's gun had done all that it could for him. Shooting outside this room would bring the ordinaries like flies.

Even so, Fletcher felt along Ram=n's belt, opening the little leather snap pouches until he found a speed-loader. He used it to fill up the gun. He didn't know if he could actually bring himself to shoot ordinaries who were only men like Tomsss, men with families to feed, but he could shoot officers and he could save at least one bullet for himself. He would very likely not be able to get out of the building that would be like rolling a second 300 game in a row but he would never be brought back to this room again, and set in the chair next to Heinz's machine.

He pushed the Bride of Frankenstein away from the door with his foot. Her eyes glared dully at the ceiling. Fletcher was coming more and more to understand that he had survived and these others had not. They were cooling off. On their skin, galaxies of bacteria had already begun to die. These were bad thoughts to be having in the basement of the Ministry of Information, bad thoughts to be in the head of a man who had become perhaps only for a little while, more likely forever adesaparecido. Still, he couldn't help having them.

The third key opened the door. Fletcher stuck his head out into the hall cinder-block walls, green on the bottom half and a dirty cream-white on the top half, like the walls of an old school corridor. Faded red lino on the floor. No one was in the hall. About thirty feet down to the left, a small brown dog lay asleep against the wall. His feet were twitching. Fletcher didn't know if the dog was dreaming about chasing or being chased, but he didn't think he would be asleep at all if the gunshots or Heinz's screaming had been very loud out here. If I ever get back, he thought, I'll write that soundproofing is the great triumph of dictatorship. I'll tell the world. Of course I probably won't get back, those stairs down to the right are probably as close to Forty-third Street as I'm ever going to get, but

But there was Mr. Maybe I Can.

Fletcher stepped into the hall and pulled the door of the deathroom shut behind him. The little brown dog lifted its head, looked at Fletcher, puffed its lips out in awoof that was mostly a whisper, then lowered its head again and appeared to go back to sleep.

Fletcher dropped to his knees, put his hands (one still holding Ram=n's gun) on the floor, bent, and kissed the lino. As he did it he thought of his sister how she had looked going off to college eight years before her death by the river. She had been wearing a tartan skirt on the day she'd gone off to college, and the red in it hadn't been the exact same red of the faded lino, but it was close. Close enough for government work, as they said.

Fletcher got up. He started down the hall toward the stairs, the first-floor hallway, the street, the city, Highway 4, the patrols, the roadblocks, the border, the checkpoints, the water. The Chinese said a journey of a thousand miles started with a single step.

I'll see how far I get, Fletcher thought as he reached the foot of the stairs. I might just surprise myself. But he was already surprised, just to be alive. Smiling a little, holding Ram=n's gun out before him, Fletcher started up the stairs.

a

A month later, a man walked up to Carlo Arcuzzi's newsstand kiosk on Forty-third Street. Carlo had a nasty moment when he was almost sure the man meant to stick a gun in his face and rob him. It was only eight o'clock and still light, lots of people about, but did any of those things stop a man who waspazzo? And this man looked plentypazzo so thin his white shirt and gray pants seemed to float on him, and his eyes lay at the bottom of great round sockets. He looked like a man who had just been released from a concentration camp or (by some huge mistake) a loony bin. When his hand went into his pants pocket, Carlo Arcuzzi thought, Now comes the gun.

But instead of a gun came a battered old Lord Buxton, and from the wallet came a ten-dollar bill. Then, in a perfectly sane tone of voice, the man in the white shirt and gray pants asked for a pack of Marlboros. Carlo got them, put a package of matches on top of them, and pushed them across the counter of his kiosk. While the man opened the Marlboros, Carlo made change.

No, the man said when he saw the change. He had put one of the cigarettes in his mouth.

No? What you mean no?