Drink for the Thirst to Come (29 page)

For the last hour he’d followed signs for The Hall of Pain. He cruised curved streets that slimmed to alleys, alleys that shriveled to paths and paths that died at brick walls or fenced lots. At every ending or turning, a sign: “See The Hall of Pain” or “Don’t Miss The Hall of Pain,” then an arrow and a decreasing number of miles then fractions of miles.

“This must be
the
place,” he said aloud. The rain stepped up as he crawled from one island of yellow light to the next along the sad dark dead-ends.

This one ended at a river. Ahead was a black iron pedestrian bridge. By the bridge, a sign and an arrow: “
H LL F P N.
” Below: “Y r The e! His headlights kicked back from the white wall of rain and mist. He switched off. Across the bridge a black silhouette stood against the sky. His vision was grainy. Static sparks snapped in his blood; his body sang with exhaustion. Coffee nerves or Rat Time? He’d run too long. 3,000 miles at speed on I-buzzing-90, I-friggin’-80. Whatever fucking “I” he’d had to run, he’d run it.

“Stay or hit the road?” he wondered.

The museum was a square block of company houses, the lousy dumps factories rented to their workers month-by-month for damn-near each month’s pay. The crummy dumps he and Uncle Ben lived in when he was… Through the rain-run window, the museum flickered.
Uncle? No Uncle.
Ben or otherwise! What the hell was that?
Nerves, yeah.

He stretched, twisted. His spine popped all the way down.

“Hall of Pain,” he said to the empty Chrysler. “Perfect. This is America.”

A dim light glowed to life in an upper window of the building. With it, his blood rushed, flushed his vision clear. The chatter in his arms and belly steadied. “Ah,” he said to the light, “a fellow human. Well.” He remembered to lock the car as he walked away. Rain misted him like the body-hot sweat of bad work. No matter how tightly he clutched his jacket, the rain soaked his neck. The iron bridge was painted with shadows. Drooping weeds, junk trees, sumacs, ginkgos, grew, dripping, from the riverbanks, below. To his right, a smooth coil of water rolled over a spillway. The cataract pounded the stone bridge supports and transmitted the rumble to his feet. A suck of cold air washed him as the flood thrumbed downstream, down the dark.

“Great day for a field trip, Miss Kerkauff!” he shouted, his voice lost in the roar of waters.

The museum entrance was a stoop and a wooden door, one of a dozen, either way along the building. Above the door, a single bulb glowed yellow against mossy brick. The lamp was clear glass, like the streetlights he’d potted with his BB gun when he was a kid. He smiled. Then the thought, “What the fuck?”
BB gun? Jesus, no.
“Put your eye out, Allie,” Aunt Florence said. Then another gut-punch:
Who in Christ was Aunt Florence?

He tried the knob and
What the fuck?
It opened. He never expected it to, but it did and that pissed him off. Why the hell? Even this shit-house should be locked, at—he squinted at his watch—4:28 in morning. He was ready to kick, to smash a face… And, Jesus, there was nothing and nobody and Jesus Fucking Christ it was not going to be a good day for
some
body. Maybe a few somebodies would have a day of bad hurt and long forevers. Wait till he found the Manager.

Above the rain and rushing river, he heard a cry from inside, a sob. He listened, tuned.

Another.

“It
is
the Hall of Pain.” His voice came back from the darkness. “Scare me, will you?” He stepped inside. And it felt so good to not be rained on. When he shut the door, the roar of falling waters was lost. A lamp came on overhead, then farther along. They made a trail of light. They didn’t brighten the place, but he could see the path. Ahead, to the sides, a half-dozen paths maybe, maybe more, he didn’t count. Hard to tell, but the ceiling didn’t look right, too high, too high. But the floor—he bounced on the balls of his feet—good carpet. He liked that. Deep, solid underneath.

Above one corridor was a sign: “Those Who Suffer,” it said, “Have Hope!”

Alex smiled. Above the smile came the sound, again the cry, a whimper from beyond the words. By God, he knew something of suffering, he did. He followed, alive now, tingling. The wonder of Rat Time: it posed no questions, it led and was reason alone, logic itself.
Bless those who cry
. Alex moved quickly from pool of light to pool of light. The whimperer ahead was one who knew the score, had no illusions left of life or of when death would come. The cry was the sob before the trigger. “Thank you,” it said. “Please do it right, do it quick.”

Alex was come to serve.

Passages intersected. He didn’t care, didn’t count. He followed his stomach. Rooms slipped by. Exhibits. Lives in mannequins, worlds in props and furniture. He glimpsed an amputation, a shattered limb hacked in flickering electric candle. The patient howled in silence, straining, frozen, from the blood-wet table, the saw poised for another bite of flesh, nerve, and marrow.

He’d seen better in life. Still, he almost tasted the loose-bowel stink in the air. An effect? Bad plumbing?

In other rooms, tortures, ancient and modern, the usual tools: flame, pincers, tongs, flesh-flecked rope and gore-beaded spikes, batteries and clamps. Accidents, industrial and domestic. Rooms of flickering solutions, many solutions, all failed, attempts that yearned for the perfection of finality. Photo montages tacked on cracked walls: holdups, murders caught on camera, dismemberments. Parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and the damned of love. Or scenes of famed mayhem acted in silent film: local talent, Lizzie Borden, that swinging doll, her own Rat Time Two-Step blessing her. Crippen, Gein, Manson, Jones, and Dahmer, the wonders of Kosovo, Saddam and Sons…

And all lousy. None of it satisfied.

He wanted that voice, the still-wet meat-throat that led, the yellow-brick whimper down the halls of Pain.
Where are you? Where are you?
Through a window, dark: a man in gloom, a dummy man, slope-shouldered, by a bed. On soaked sheets, the newly dead—another dummy—legs spread, gown rolled, her whatchacallit place between her legs; she was a red crater, belly to knees. The guy? He held something. Something nice and red. Newborn, the thing, a baby.
Ah!
Alex had thought he’d done her with a knife, an ax, his hands, his teeth. But, no, no she had died of birth. Like his mother. Nice. The doctor, head hanging, hands blooded, held the life that had killed its mother. Frustration? Exhaustion? Disgust? Annoyance? Did he want to smash the little wet doll he’d saved?

“Fuck up, Doc?” Alex wished the doc were alive so he could kill him now, kill him to pieces.

The sob was near. A splash of light washed from an open door across the hallway. The sob was there. In there. Rats stirred deep, behind Alex’s eyes, in his balls, at his jaws.

“Ahhh...” Alex walked into the light.

The room was a bright cube of no one. The sobs drained away.

“Ahhh...” His throat rumbled. He put a clamp on Rats about to tumble.
It had
been
here.

In the corner was a toilet. He used it. There was a sink. He splashed his face. There was a comfortable-looking chair, a refrigerator. The fridge was filled. He had a bite and it was good. There was a television. The bed invited. Every wall had windows, each window had curtains. He opened them one at a time. Nothing. Dark glass. One-way glass, he’d bet.

This was an exhibit. An exhibit in-process, in the making.
Me.
He sat on the bed and it felt good. It was still. So comfortable to sit on a thing didn’t do 85-90 miles-per-hour. The ceiling was a transparent blue like summer. If he imagined, there were clouds. If he wanted, there was a breeze from across the, yes, meadow.
Damn.
This was a big room and his, no one else’s. His room.

His door closed.

For the first hour, he smashed himself against the glass, the door. He shouted until he couldn’t. Nothing gave, no one came, and he was bloody with effort. He dumped furniture, smashed it, looked for weapons. He could make knives, bludgeons, garrotes. Wonderful tools, but nothing to use them on.

He sat to think.

He thought nothing. He ate. He collapsed on the bed and pretended to nap. He’d catch whomever, prickbastard, cocksucker soon-to-be-dead-as-a-doornail motherfucking son-of-a-someone, sneaking.

No one came. Soon he slept for real.

When he woke the light had dimmed. Without glare, the room was almost pleasant. Personal rats swarmed his spine and loins, of course. They burrowed, rammed the inside of his skull. There he was. In memory the projector chattered behind him. Hinnershitz’s wool pants prickled his leg. He ate deeply of Hazel Gensler’s grape breath. Alone in his room, food, water, plenty of everything and he was going…

Going a little ratty. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. Rat Time tunes and not a partner in the hall.

He whimpered and monkey punched a knot in the muscle above his right knee.
Good!
He clenched and hit himself again. He screamed. Again. Harder. Harder. He screamed. Sobbed. The sob. He recognized the sob. He’d known it before he knew it now. He was the expert on sobs, the tear without illusion, the cry that knew the score, the gasp before the trigger. Yes. He.
Alex, Alex, Alex. Winkler. Winkler. Winkler.
He reminded himself as he struck. All but his name slipped away. He buried knuckle in flesh, through nerve, struck bone. He called, “God! I’m a friggin’ professional!” He bit his cheek to shut himself the fuck up. He shut, finally, the fuck up when he tasted meaty cheek, oozing salty, a morsel on his tongue. Then it wasn’t bad. Wasn’t too bad if he sat unmoving, so still no one knew he was nibbling inside. Just a knotting of the jaw, a quiver in the eye. But small. So small. Rat Time condensed.

Outwit the place. Ha!
As long as there were no people, safe ones he could not get to, the other side of the glass, the door, as long as there were no people anywhere in this world, Rat Time would leave him the fuck alone.

He sat quiet, belly full, in good soft light. The window reflected him back at him. He saw Alex in the dark glass, Alex in the room. Alex, quiet. Maybe, in the distance, a tiny chatter, a shutter clacking (maybe). Open-shut. Open-shut. Ultra. Slow. Motion. Was it? There. Yes it was. A shutter. Each click, a picture. Each picture, a moment. Pictures mean people, people watching. Smart guys, scared guys, fat guys, beautiful women, pimply girls, tough guys, and guys just trying to help. Guys who’d disappear into the mass of rats around them. He hardly recognized himself among them in the flickering frames and pictures, those watching, and him, another rat in plenty.

Only his teeth moved. He chewed rich, slippery cheek meat, blood-salt seasoned. It hurt. Hurt like.

It’s supposed to.

Each bite was a revelation of what pain, idealized, might aspire to. Each bite an apotheosis (Good word, a word to chew over.
Thank you, Miss Kerkauff
). Each bite a shot to take you to the stars on cold fires of dead-eyed physics. So far to go and so little of him, so little of this flesh to carry him.

Well, not so little. He still had (he counted): his lips, his tongue to work with. There were fingers, miles of fingers. Each hand had,
count them
, one, two, three…
Fourteen. Fourteen knuckles, each one a meal
, each, an ocean of pain to cross. He studied: a hand was a future, a planet of undiscovered pain to explore. And before the knuckles, the fingernails, each one hugging its meat. Each could be mined.
Oh, yes, fucking Hillegas, yes
.

Who were they, the watchers in the museum? Among those who would not be there: the Baseball Family, the Empty-Eyed Girl in the Ladies’ John, the Sweaty Kid Who Would Be a Man, the Beauty Piece of Kagen’s Island, his Partner, Fat What’shisname. And What’shisname, the Manager Mister,
Mis
ter Hillegas. They’d never be there.

He ran the trip in his head. Start to finish. There were more he’d forgotten. Where was he now? The beginning? Was he always here? No, no, he’d just arrived. Ah, that kid on the bus, the Greyhound out of Berdoo, the Doofus kid he’d left to breed, alive in the breathing world, he was out there.
Could he be watching?
And the Chrysler Lady. Oh, Chrysler Lady! He’d pay for them, oh the sins of so long life were not the deaths, oh no. The sins were those he’d left to live. So many. So, so, many. He’d pay for those, all those.

For now, he joined them. He looked at his image in the black glass: a small man, seated, quiet, a perfect gentleman. A man at rest on square-one, and, like everyone alive, watching. He was very, very, very, very, very, very good. And, he’d get better. He’d see to that.

THEN, JUST A DREAM

A kid walks. Late afternoon. All alone, he walks the rail line. Trees push close to the tracks, one side; the other, a graveled drop-off leads to more trees. Pine trees cover the hillside down to a river, maybe a lake, but something watery is off that side of the tracks and down there. He smells it, the water, the mud, fish, mosquito eggs; those smells rise from that side. He’s walked miles. As long as he can remember the day, he’s walked it. It’s summer, late summer, not hot, but warm. Nice. No place to go from here but home. The smells, the feel of the gravel underfoot, the scent of creosote bubbled from the ties, it smells, yes, like home. Near-home. He’s wanted to go there for…

Then, a soft click, metal, or a sound that would be metallic if it weren’t smothered by leather and a soft foot, and he isn’t walking. His foot is stuck. Now, he looks. The boot, his foot and ankle in it, is caught in a switch. A spur of a spur, the rails split at just where he was walking and a switch that he never noticed and hadn’t seen closed just as his foot arrived there. Jesus Christ. Along some track, middle of nowhere, a guy’s walking along, and the thing just closes, thump, like that. It doesn’t hurt; it simply holds him. Fact is, he couldn’t tell if it closed on him or if he just stepped in it and got wedged there. Doesn’t matter. Point is he cannot get out.