All-Day Breakfast (43 page)

“What for?”

“To comfort her.”

I sat up on the edge of the tub. Duffy was leaning an elbow against the doorframe, one foot cocked behind the other like he was posing in hunting garb with a pack of beagles.

“What's your name, sir?” he asked.

“Lee Pert Girl,” I announced. “Peter Giller.”

“ ‘Giller.' Dean said that Penzler sent you. I've just phoned him and he can't—”

“Not the father. Alice.”

“No, he told me
very
clearly that she didn't—”

“I'm here, aren't I?”

“But where's your vehicle? Who let you through the gate?”

“Walked up from the road. I'd been sitting in a car too long.”

“And the gate?”

“It was open.” I held up my palms, helpless to the fact. “I came on through.”

“But what do you want here?”

“Alice Penzler wants me to bring back a cure.”

He brought his elbow down and stared at me.

“But how are you here already?” he asked. “We only learned this morning that Alice was affected.”

I stared at a diagonal scar that crossed his hairy knee. Sweet Alice in her T-shirt, a zombie. Thick blood simmered in my lips and I raised an eyebrow at him—that had always been my fail-safe for ninth-graders mouthing me off.

“That right?” I asked. “Are you usually the first to find out about anything?”

With his bottom lip he smoothed his moustache. Dropped his eyes to Natalia.

Something kept flickering across my peripheral vision like a fly buzzing in the room, but when I focused on a corner of the ceiling, where blue wallpaper rose to the white crown mouldings, there was nothing. I'd wasted the final days of my life like so much piss down a urinal. But I'd been a monster in Hoover, unable to so much as live with my kids. Piss down a urinal was what I deserved.

“Have you found anything remotely like a cure?” I asked.

“I have no clearance to tell Alice anything,” Duffy said quietly. “And that connective tissue under your ears gives you more than a professional interest.”

I raised a finger to feel down the edge of my jaw, but stopped. Duffy relaxed his posture, smiled his beardy smile.

“We never found any procedure that arrested the process completely. Radiation seeding had her back on her feet for almost a month, but that's prohibitively expensive, and who knows what it did to her cells long-term—look at her. Nobody else had degeneration like hers.”

“Never thought to put her in a fridge?”

He raised his shaggy brows, eyes wide as petri dishes.

“Why would I?”

“Subjects in Nebraska preserved indefinitely,” I said, though now every one of them was dead.

“And no ill effects, seriously, in a fridge? None of them died?”

“Sometimes yes and sometimes no. Wasn't the fridge's fault in any case.”

“Lord a'mighty,” said Duffy. “And all our subjects ended up—”

“Reminds me of when we were first going into space.” I had to distract myself from PBF. “NASA says, ‘Ballpoint pens won't write in zero gravity, we need a space-age pen,' we spend
x
-amount of money, meantime—”

“Russians used pencils,” he said quietly. “I get it.”

He walked across the room and leaned against the window sill. Looked down at the lawn for a minute. I knew it was time to formulate spectacular plans but then my eyes fell on Natalia's waxy features, and vestiges of thought evaporated. Someone else I hadn't reached in time, like Franny.

“Oh, well,” Duffy finally said. “Kirk's been having trouble thinking long-term.”

“Kirk jumps through hoops,” I said. “I know that. This is all your show. Penzler's just the means of production.”

He rolled an eye back at me. “That's what you think, hey?”

“Everybody points to the hippie doctors in California.”

“Hippie doctors.”

“So where's the other one?”

“Ah, those gentleman in Velouria, that's who you talked to. They must've meant George. We have a minute before Dean comes up. Let me tell you a few things.”

“Talk away.” I noticed my left wrist—the filaments had nearly dissolved back into the skin. “I'm an empty vessel.”

“Twenty-five years ago.” He turned to the window, hairy knuckles folded behind him. “Twenty-five years ago, three guys got Chemistry degrees from Michigan, and the army paid for that, provided we were infantry medics every summer and for a couple of years after, so bright futures for all, mothers and fathers proud as peacocks.”

I swallowed hard. “I want no one else to die from this crap.”

“We don't want a
cure
, all right? We want a compound that works properly from day one! You see this?” He gripped the edge of the window and bent his knee so I could stare at his scar. “First year after college, Bush Senior takes us over to Iraq, and here's what I get. Friendly fire, too, but that's not the issue—after triage I had a ligament and three arteries still intact, and an artery is not load bearing, you understand? But Lieutenant Kirk Penzler, my buddy, had this
stuff
the Kuwaiti medics left with him before their unit withdrew, some Bedouin cure-all no one had heard of, a kind of
gum
, a sap, and it took eighteen months of chewing it before the bone and tendon had grown back, rolling my foot behind me on a little cart—and George, he got leave to sit around Kirk's house with us while I healed up.”

“I've been in that house.”

“Well, you couldn't have met Alice anyplace else. But George got bored, went back west so he could nail his high school girlfriend, but she kept him out there, got married, and what'd the girl do?”

“Probably dropped dead.”

“Not your first rodeo, is it? Stroke at age thirty-four, just about kills our lad too, that messes George up but good. I've got my fellowship from UCSB, working on seed crops, so he comes out here in the summers, mixes one compound, spits in another, and this past July he and I cobble up this faster version of the Kuwaiti concoction, rich in omega-threes, gets pet odor out of furniture, and Kirk sends his little girl out here to try it on her to fix the kid's scoliosis. Ol' Kirk was scared spitless of her, I guess she'd gotten pretty rough with him—hard to picture.”

Two blue-bottle flies had found their way onto her eyes, sipping away with their pseudotracheae. I waved them away.

“Then the other night ol' George drains the box of wine, passes out on the porch, wakes up with a kink in his neck, figures, ‘Hey, it's all well and good for Kirk and his new pals, what good did our concoction ever do me?' Doses himself, fourteen times just to be sure. Good science, hey? No control subject at the dosage, does it all to
himself
. Kink in the neck. Dean'll take you out to the workshop in a second, you'll get a good look at George.”

On cue, Dean bent under the doorframe to clump into the room.

“Hi, Dean,” I said.

“Come look at this, Giller. See down there?”

I didn't budge, but Duffy pointed out the window as though I had.

“That animal lying there is named Hopper, you see her? Look at those wings. The pride of Pismo Beach colony.”

“She's a him now,” said Dean.

“You're entitled to your opinion.”

“Why'd you treat the animal like that?” I asked.

“For the same reason that any field of medicine is pursued!” Turning, Duffy smiled slowly, gradually, as though he'd just figured out he was capable of it. “To answer the question, ‘Exactly how much can this poor creature stand?' But I repeat, I don't answer to Alice on this. Not for ten seconds. And not even her dad talks to me like you've been doing.”

His tone had changed like I had a spanking coming, and as the tiny hairs inside my ears detected the switch, I felt like I was already taller, though I was still sitting down, and my fingers curled into hard little animals, and the muscles in my neck turned hydraulic so I could head-butt the top off a guy's skull, and neither of them even noticed.

“That lion has a sister.” Now with every word Duffy jabbed a finger down at the floorboards, like the soapbox hippie he was, every syllable
political
and
important
. “A
twin
sister, and her grafts have been much less debilitating. Dean'll take you down to her. Between the two of them, sir, you can consider yourself cured. Your problems, sir, are behind you.”

“
His
name's Whistler,” said Dean. “That other lion.”

With hands the size of hubcaps he picked me up around the shoulders, which brought my forehead level with his nose. His armpits smelled of tangy human b.o. I bunched every iota of pink goop into the back of my neck, let it compress there while Dean went on talking.

“If we can,” Dean told me quietly, “we'll—”

I launched my forehead through the bridge of his nose. His hands opened and I dropped to the floor, and he would've fallen flat on his back except the wall got in his way, and with a new hole in his face he wound up sitting down cross-eyed while the whites of his eyes filled with blood. I got up and faced the doctor, who stood with his hands spread on the wall, his back against the bright rectangle of window. My lips pulled back from my teeth like I was a saber-toothed tiger, though my main thing was still to stay inconspicuous. As I came closer he wheezed. I hadn't had any kind of fight since Pimples and Patrick Pig the day before, and my system wasn't engineered for such a long intermission.

“Think,” Duffy finally stammered. “If your intent—”

I threw myself around his swirling pink-and-green middle and drove us out through the glass. I squinted against the violent sunlight at the oval of lawn stretching under us. We flipped once in the air, then I made sure my shoulder was against Duffy's sternum—in the name of medicine we'd see exactly how much impact he could stand. We'd come down in the middle of the lion. Some open-mouthed guy in a blue plaid shirt cast a shadow. The smell of grass wafted up.

After we hit I must've blacked out for one second, then I was peering at the yellowy dominoes of Duffy's spine. One of his shattered ribs was jammed against my elbow but I wiggled it loose and sat up with the sawdust reek of the lion dripping from my ears. Hopper's shaved hip rose to my right and her ragged shoulder on my left, but her middle had dissolved so it was like I'd pushed Duffy into a kiddie pool of yogurt. The doctor's eyes gazed up at me, though blood had burst from every opening in his face. I didn't even think that was gross. It was just science.

The sheep-faced guy stood framed against the white wall of the farmhouse. He held a blue syringe.

“I was trying to bring her temperature down,” he said.

“This dumbass said there wasn't any cure.” I staggered to my feet, shaking yogurty goop off my arms. “But that's not right, is it?”

He swallowed with his big Adam's apple. “There's no cure,” he said.

I bunched up a yogurty fist. He dropped the syringe, and I was only a step from him when a wasp stung me familiarly on the side of the neck. I had to drop to one knee. I looked at the sheep guy but there were stars all around the periphery.

I saw Camouflage Mike bring a rifle down from his shoulder up on the driveway. A-ha, I said to myself: Good Old Tranquilizers (A Penzler Company).

I had to stay on one knee while Mike rolled his wheelbarrow across the lawn. At least I wasn't looking at Hopper and Duffy, I was sick to hell of those two. My shoulder-bone throbbed from its minor fall.

“You sure one's enough?” asked the syringe guy.

“You tell me, Tyrone.”

Mike picked me up under the armpits, then Tyrone got my ankles and they floated me into the wheelbarrow. My arms and legs draped over its sides but otherwise I just melted into the bottom like it was a bathtub.

“Why not kill him?” Tyrone was suddenly ballsy.

Colleen
, I thought,
Harv
. Luke Skywalker dangling from Cloud City.
Help.

“What are we here for in the first place, baby?” Mike lifted the handles and I rolled across the lawn. “See what makes the fucker tick, right? Exploratory surgery.”

“Jesus, but look at Doctor—”

“What would the doctor say if he was standing here, hey?”

“He'd say,” Tyrone admitted, “ ‘Get the heck back to it.' ”

As we started up the slope my hands dragged across the grass. I tried to waggle my fingers, and they
did
waggle. Thirty more seconds and I'd be ripping some nuts off.

“And what else?” hissed Mike.

“He'd say, ‘Call no one in authority until every invoice has been filed.' ”

“Zigactly.”

Mike pushed me onto the driveway. I saw his rifle propped against the bench on the porch between the broken screen door and ceramic cat.

“What about Hopper?” Tyrone asked.

“Thas one more chore for Dean,” said Mike.

He rolled me toward the garage, and I tried baring my teeth. And did bare them. But then the wheelbarrow was set down.

“Just grab that gun,” Mike said behind me. “Can't hurt to give him one more.”

I woke up
in a fetal position with red bungee cords tight around my wrists. I was hyperventilating, so I slowed that down, took some deep breaths. Seemed that I was inside a long plastic case like delis use to display sausage rolls. Man, was anything better than a nice fresh sausage roll, if the sausage was nice and peppery, and the flakes of pastry melted like butter on your tongue? My mouth filled up with drool.

It's possible my head wasn't quite in the game.

I gulped back that spit, because maybe it held all the nitrites available to me. I pulled my knees toward my face, and saw my ankles were tied up too. The case was too shallow for me to even turn over, but I twisted my neck and saw cages and tanks around me, and a big blue tarp that was the ceiling. I took another deep breath, guessed that there was only about three cups of air left in there, and wondered if any other past visitor to Dickside Synthetics had been permitted as much pure enjoyment as I had.