I
woke to find the sheets wet with sweat. Kitty was not there. I was alone, but the cries echoed in the room. My neighbors were asleep in the houses up and down Pajarito Road. The bloody eyes—what were they beseeching me? I couldn’t make sense of it. I was beginning to think I had to tell someone about these dreams.
When I got to the office I put my hand on the ID screen and the door did not open. I called Golz. “Sheila, what’s going on?”
“It’s on account of the identity theft, James. We have to reset all your clearances until we can confirm there has been no security impact. It’s just temporary. Take a few days off until we can iron this out.”
“Can’t I come in for a minute to get some stuff?” I couldn’t think of any stuff I needed to get, but before I conceded taking a day off I wanted to feel this situation out a little further.
“Don’t sweat it,” she said. “Just take a sick day or two.”
“Is that it? Is this how it comes down?”
“I’m sorry, James.”
“I can’t believe this.”
“I’ll call you when I know something, okay?” She rang off, as they say in Europe. Don’t say she hung up on me.
It took me all day Thursday to get my identity back, and by the time I did it was worthless. The money market had been a little too closely connected to the checking account. Now all of my accounts were frozen, and everyone I spoke to told me to call back next week.
I did not sleep. I smoked weed. I had already smoked half my week’s weed. I knew that if I slept I would return to my nightmare. And I knew I would miss Kitty worse when I woke up.
Every time I started dropping off I shuddered in reflex before letting go. Every time I shut my eyes my nightmare hit like a punch in the gut, blowing the wind right out of me, so that the mercy of sleep was shot to hell.
Don’t close your eyes!
The edge of sleep a shadow always receding, then the awful seizure—torture.
Pass along the message.
Can’t I just shut my eyes for a second and give myself a break? It would feel so good to just doze off …
Don’t!
I went to the fridge, raided Kitty’s cheese drawer, lay on the couch with a big wedge of brie and
Valley of the Witches
, and read:
A brujo might choose his victim deliberately for reasons of vengeance or at random to sharpen his art. Slowly, secretively break down that person’s physical and psychological resistance. Poison, harassment, and hexes gradually sicken and kill a rival, a husband’s mistress, or a boy in the village who was just a bit too beautiful.
O
n Friday morning I went into the garage. The ash on my car had been baked by Thursday’s heat and solidified by the cool of night. I remembered my financial situation and took the change jar from the laundry room. I had no idea what the day would bring, but I didn’t feel like being caught off the Hill again with only Lord Calvert in the stores. My accounts were frozen and Oppie’s ceremony had burned up all my remaining cash, so I went into my study and got the liter of scotch. I stuffed it under the driver’s seat and put Kitty’s pills and the change jar on the passenger seat.
At Starbucks I paid $12.75 with quarters and left eight cents in the tip jar. I couldn’t even eat my morning panini after realizing I wouldn’t have anyone to give the cheese to. A big lump rose in my throat, and when I tried to melt it with a twenty-eight-ounce Café Heeganty I almost choked. I threw my breakfast in the trash and went back to the Spider for a slug of the scotch.
I had an appointment to talk about the latest lipid tests, and I sat in the reception area at Farmer’s clinic. They got me in an examination room and a few minutes later Farmer came in wearing his doctor duds. He closed the exam room door.
“James, you look awful.”
“Nice to see you too.”
“Mary told me about Oppie.”
“I’ll stop by for a drink after work and tell you the whole story. Meanwhile, can you prescribe me something that will let me get some sleep—the dreamless kind?”
“I can’t give you anything. I can’t even offer you a drink.” Farmer slid into doctor mode and handed me the blood results. “I’ve got to take you off the statins immediately. Your liver is off the charts, and look at the lipids.” He pointed to the LDLs. These were not the happy lipids. “Have you been taking any additional medications? Tylenol?”
“No. Unless …” I thought about Kitty’s pills. “What is it they cut codeine with?”
“Jesus, James. Let me look at that hand.”
“It hasn’t been hurting.”
“Not if you’ve been popping oxys it hasn’t.” He lifted the bandage from my tent-stake wound and made a not-so-bedside-mannerly face. “Look at the redness around the edges, the swelling. We’re going to have to put you on a series of antibiotics.”
“Hank, lately I’ve been thinking it’s possible something might be going to happen.”
“What?”
“Have you ever thought about the possibility of an emergency in Los Alamos? A really big one?”
“Sure, we’re all trained for it one way or another.”
“Ten times more radiation than they got at Hiroshima—what would that do to you, you think?”
“Nausea, severe leukopenia.”
“What’s leukopenia?”
“A decrease in light blood cells, the kind you get with chemotherapy. There might be a sudden and severe destruction of platelets, and that might result in some bloody discharge.”
“How about a hundred times more radiation?”
He frowned like someone playing a doctor on TV. “I don’t know. Seizures, tremor, ataxia. Total breakdown of the nervous system.”
“Could it make a sane person claw his own eyes out?”
Hank caught himself. Or Dr. Farmer caught Hank. “You’re under a lot of stress, James. It’s only natural for the mind to make irrational associations, especially at a time of psychological vulnerability.”
“Shit, Hank, did you just say
psychological
?”
“You know what I have to recommend, and it’s not just for professional liability—I’m saying this as a friend.”
“Aw, hell no, Hank. Stop. I’m not listening. Just let me go.”
He made me take a scrip for penicillin, but I was past the point of worrying about a little cut on my hand. I didn’t tell him about the nightmares.
B
ack in the Spider I checked the phone for my schedule. The week before I had made an appointment for a
Surge
interview with a scientistgardener, and I thought it would be best for things at work if I just proceeded as normal and kept the date. Miss one month’s paycheck now and everything would end up underwater: the car, the house, my life … Connect the dots.
I was sitting across from a kindly old scientist in thick-lens eyeglasses. I didn’t have a fresh notebook, so I was taking slapdash notes on the backs of some tire store receipts I’d found in the glove compartment. I wasn’t keeping control of this one. Instead of telling me about his philodendrons, the subject was talking about his prostate. But I was still supposed to be taking notes. I was always supposed to take notes.
“It wasn’t the full surgery—not yet. It was more like a scrubbing to clean out the garbage disposal. You know, like a bottle brush …”
It was a hot summer afternoon. The cookies, Pepperidge Farm Chessmen, glistened on the plate. It was getting late. We hadn’t even touched on his hobby. He wheezed to his wife, forty years younger, to set an extra place. We’d go on talking over lunch. This was against all my rules of protocol: get the story, get out, never befriend them. I caught glances of the poor wife through the kitchen door and saw an expression on her face that said embarrassment mixed with homicidal rage, like,
He’s caught another one, and now I’ll have to listen to the same crap all through lunch for the hundredth time while he bosses me around
.
I interrupted: “There’s a house I’ve been going to.”
The subject stopped short. “What?”
“There’s a house I’ve been going to, over the mountains in Mora County.” He looked at me quizzically. “Nobody has lived there for years. I think it’s got some strange energy to it, though. Witches meet there—modern witches.” The wife peered in from the kitchen. Drying her hands on her apron, she cocked her head to the side and looked at her husband. The subject’s expression transformed before my eyes, and I realized he saw me for what I really was: unkempt, unshaven, a kook. Outside at the edge of his pristine lawn, the Spider, caked with ash, was parked like a car advertising a horror show. I continued, “Or teenagers with a dark obsession …”
The phone rang and the subject stood up. When he walked past me, he glanced over at my pad and saw what I had been doodling while he spoke: little L-shaped boxes. I heard him in the kitchen: “I see … No problem at all. Yes, we’ll do it another time.”
The subject suddenly remembered that he and his wife had other plans for lunch. He had to get ready to leave. Would I mind showing myself out? He would call the editor in the morning to set up another time for the interview …
Humiliated, I stumbled out of the house with my pen and scrap paper and climbed into the Spider.
My cell phone vibrated. No ID.
I figured I couldn’t afford any more bad news, but I also couldn’t afford not to get good news, so I took the call. “Hello?”
There was the clunk and clatter of a desk phone coming off speaker. “Oberhelm?” It was McCaffery.
“Yes.”
“Are you aware that you’ve been suspended from service on administrative leave?”
“Maybe. Yes, I guess. This morning my hand didn’t work in the scanner.”
“You shouldn’t be there right now. You have to desist all work related to the Lab.”
Through my mind flashed a mental list of things so far that had gotten fucked up: laptop, camera, bank accounts, credit cards, Oppie, Kitty, liver, and now job. I said to myself,
Ever since I went to that house, my whole life has been going to shit. Connect the dots
.
McCaffery said, “Meet me on Pajarito Road, your house, in fifteen minutes.”
“Are you sure—”
Click
. McCaffery hung up.
I reached between the seats for the pill bottle and shook out another oxycodone, chewed it. I tossed my nonsense notes on the floor and put the Parker back in my shirt pocket. That’s when I felt a soreness in my chest. Was this it already, the coup de grâce? But the pain was superficial, more a burning on the surface of the skin than anything arterial. I unbuttoned my shirt and noticed a long red welt rising like a badge on the skin above my left breast. Now what? I buttoned back up and drove home to Pajarito Road. The pill kicking in, I started to loosen up.
I stood in the kitchen and it had become horrible, a reminder of what could have been. The effect of the yellow paint on the walls was grotesque. The sunlight struck me as out of place.
McCaffery did not sit. “Why have you been Googling conspiracy theories on Area 54 and researching antisecurity freaks like LASG?”
Christ! I didn’t know how closely these jerks were watching me. “Can’t sleep.”
“Look, Oberhelm, let’s figure out what our needs are. You need some safety and stability returned to your professional file … Am I right?”
Don’t say anything about the house in Ledoux or Ritchie Motherfucker. McCaffery didn’t know about the blood tech. As far as SAP was concerned, the trouble started with Sunshine. “I want my life back,” I said.
McCaffery looked at me with weary eyes. “I’m going to make my recommendation straight to you, off the record. Get out of Los Alamos. Go away for a few days.”
“You think I’ll be able to keep my job?”
“It’s going to be harder for you to keep it in jail.”
“I better … I better take some time …”
“That would be great. Take some time off. Don’t let yourself obsess over this.”
“I’ll get a flight to L.A. The other L.A. Hollywood, L.A.”
“There you go. Take in some movies. Go to the ocean. You got any money?”
“I have enough frequent flier miles.” And I did.
“Can you make it this weekend?”
“Yes.”
“It’s going to cost you a lot of miles.”
“I know.”
“Just don’t try coming into work again. Don’t contact any Lab employees until we can sort this thing out.
Okay?”
“Okay.”
After McCaffery left I drank some scotch and popped a few oxycodones. I woke up the PC and checked my frequent flier balance. I found a Sunday-afternoon flight to L.A. and a cheap hotel on Venice Beach, booking the ticket and the room purely with miles, the one thing the identity thieves had not thought to cash in. It started to get dark and I made a pot of coffee.
All night I smoked and watched cable. I went through all my weed. I did not want to see the nightmare again.
I
took the jar of change from the laundry room to Smith’s. After the Coinstar machine took its cut, I brought my ticket to the customer service desk, and the cashier was as surprised as me to see that it had come out to forty dollars on the nose.
I headed back to Mel’s and banged on his trailer door in the silence between two cumbias. He let me in and I followed him to the stove.
“Sunshine stole my fucking identity.”
“Ain’t that a bitch.” Mel pulled on a joint and hawked something semisolid from deep down in his chest, bull’s-eye against the side of his red-hot Scandia. The water in it steamed off in a few sizzling seconds and left behind a black badge of tar.
“He got a lot of money.”
“
Someone
got a lot of money. That Sunshine was always too much of a weasel to do anything right on his own.”
“You could have mentioned some of this.”
“I never told you to go looking for him. Besides, you’re the one came around asking about the Johnson house. What’d I say? When you walk up to a house like that …”
“Walk away.”
Mel spat another tarry phlegm ball. The coating on the stove was made up of black patches of the sticky resin from Mel’s throat. Thousands of badges layered the sides and top of the log burner, one for every useless night spent chugging Milwaukee’s Best. I looked down at my injured hand and saw a similar coating of such crud on the bench where I sat. I choked back a gag.