Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars (24 page)

Howell stepped inside. A body lay on the couch, but there were many machines, a congregation of automated mourners beeping and wailing their grief and providing the only light, trees with dripping IV solutions and the atonal music of binaural chimes.

Atwater spoke into his ear in a low whisper. “He was our first extreme case. Semi-vegetative autistic from birth, ward of the state. We secured power of attorney before the first bricks of the Institute were laid. He was going to be my greatest triumph.”

Howell approached the couch, feeling like he did in the mansion, as if he were about to ignite and combust from the heat pouring out of the body on the couch.

“At first, he responded swimmingly, but the deeper we tried to drive into his subconscious, the more he retreated… until one day, about three years ago, he just stopped waking up. I concluded that the psychic disintegration—for that’s what it looked like, to me—was a result of his distorted self-concept, his lack of imagination. But I underestimated just how powerful his imagination really was, didn’t I?”

Howell tried to remember where he went to school, who his parents were, anything more than three years old, and wondered why none of it had ever mattered before. Because he was a hermetically sealed, self-contained world unto himself, and nothing outside him had ever been anything but numbers, until she forced him to touch her, and escaped.

“At the time, we never reckoned on the possibility that our patients were manifesting in a shared environment, let alone that one could escape it. When Ms. Heaton began to exhibit your symptoms, we thought it was a ploy. Ms. Heaton was very cunning, manipulative, and had attempted suicide more times than her family bothered to keep track of. We never dreamed she could contact the other patients, let alone that she might find you. But
you
found
her
.”

Howell leaned closer to the sleeper, eyes roving over the only truly familiar face he’d ever known. The geography of it, seen from any angle for the first time, totally engrossed him, so that he didn’t notice when Atwater locked the door and took out a syringe.

“His name is Jeremy Ogilvie, but we use code names for our patients, to protect their privacy. The nurses coined his—he used to scream at the top of his lungs whenever he was touched, so they called him the Howler.”

Atwater’s shadow loomed across the white desert of sheet, but Howell only leaned closer to the sleeping face.

“For so long, I’ve thought of you, Mr. Howell, as my only failure. It would appear that you are the only one I ever really cured.”

Howell reached up and touched the mouth of the sleeping face, and smiled when its eyes opened.

Protestors lined the steps of the ivy-crusted Veteran’s Hospital. Police pushed them back, but they leaned over the barricades to scream and spit at us as we walked in a line.

On the left, draft resistors called us sheep, but their radical chic tasted like piss in their mouths.

The ones on the right called us cowards. The chickenhawks hated us because they wanted to see us die on TV, and the disabled vets hated us because they had high lottery numbers, and there were not enough of us to go around.

We took a final physical, and signed forms they didn’t let us read. I saw a box that I’d checked had been covered with layers of official stamps. I pointed this out to the corpsman, who got a PR officer. “The family doesn’t want him to meet you.”

Then we went into bright, tiled rooms where we were shaved, drugged and strapped down on gurneys.

I woke up during the surgery. I felt only second-hand pain and cottonmouth nausea. I remember smiling at the blood gushing out as they sawed off my left leg, but the magic trick went on too long. It didn’t feel like my leg was gone, but I didn’t want to look at it. I tried to move my head, but it was wired down tight.

I rolled my eyes around. It was weird how nobody seemed to notice I was watching them take me apart.

I couldn’t talk for the hoses going down my throat and up my nose, but I could look past the doctors and nurses and the armed MP at the door, up the walls of the surgical theater to the gallery. I could see the soldier sitting up there in his wheelchair, looking down at me and crying.

I couldn’t move my arms to give him the thumbs-up, because one was numb, and the other was gone. I think he would have saluted me if he could.

Later, I got to read his file, everything but his name. A private in the 29
^th
Rangers, born and raised on an Iowa farm, nineteen and a proud father of twins. Lost his left leg, both arms and most of his face in a blue-on-blue napalm strike at Esfahan. A Purple Heart, but no valor medals, because
America doesn’t drop napalm
.

Crying, and he couldn’t wipe the tears from his intact eye. Someone came and wheeled him away, but he saw me looking at him for a second, and we connected together at the dotted lines of our symmetrical wounds, in the seconds before he was gone, and they came for my face.

Even if my country cannot forgive my refusal to fight, I saw understanding in the eye of the soldier who will walk out of this hospital on my leg, and hold his children, and maybe another rifle, in my arms. His war is over as mine begins, but I know that I have already won a battle, without getting out of bed.

Sloane rolls into the parking lot of the Hitchin’ Post Motel and scans the hearses and hatchbacks plastered with bumper stickers invoking the names of the undead. As she parks and climbs out, the music beats at the plaster walls like the last frantic defiance of a premature burial; syncopated bassbin thunder leaks out into the dry, cold night, loud enough to set off car alarms. Even louder: the screams, the manic laughter, the weeping.

“This isn’t the biggest one,” she tells her passenger, “but it’s the most volatile. You better wait in the car.”

Sloane pops open the trunk and goes around to fetch the bags of supplies. An old man lurks in the open door to the office, timid petulance carving his shapeless face. “Tell your friends to keep it down,” he calls out as Sloane makes for the loud room at the end of the row of tumbledown fuck-shacks.

“Have any of your other guests complained?” Sloane barks acid laughter into the auto-exhaust breeze. None of the drunks, junkies, jarheads and whores in the neighboring rooms is in any condition to file a grievance. The manager flips her the bird and retreats to his office.

A shirtless teenage Uncle Fester opens the door after she beats on it long and hard with her fist. So wasted he probably doesn’t know or care that someone scrawled BREEDER across his forehead in black permanent marker. His eyeliner runs in black streams down to his chins.

“Where’s Evelyn?” she shouts over the Godzilla-stomp of a redlined Skinny Puppy track. The breeder shrugs and dives into the crowd, leaving her marooned on the shore of a surly black sea.

She scans the ranks of black dusters and goth-frocks, zombie pancake makeup, silver studs and chains dangling from pierced noses and nipples, a murder of dysfunctional crows. Nearly all at least technically male, except for a few wolfish Vampira types and a brigade of plug-ugly rivethead dominatrixes with a skinhead escort.

Pot and clove smoke, Boones Farm bottles everywhere underfoot. Western-motif wallpaper, all wagon-wheels and cow skulls, spray-painted with His name and plastered with smeary Xerox copies of His face, the bed propped against one wall to make room for the slave-ship intimacy of the crowd.

Sloane notices that some idiot has already tried to set the mattress ablaze. Black serpentine singe-trails scar the flame-retardant nylon shell, so semen-encrusted it wouldn’t burn in a volcano. She wants to complain about the damage, not because she gives a shit about the deposit, but because it’s a symptom of lack of focus. They need even this childish, destructive energy, but it must be harnessed and channeled, if this party is to serve Him.

The music storms out of a sound system that looks like a SWAT crowd control robot, all trunk-sized amps and bassbins and a display with a gnashing sixteen-band equalizer grin. Skinny Puppy throws a rod and shudders to a stop, slam-cuts to Joy Division. Scanning the playlist on a jacked-in laptop, she approves. All artists dead, all bands split by overdoses, suicides, accidents and angst. All of it faithfully copied from the playlist on the website. Good mood music.

It is the purpose of all parties. All drunken dancefloor orgies, all wet T-shirt date rape keggers, are debased invocations of blessed nothingness, to the blind idiot god of the night itself, an exorcism of daylight, an unspoken prayer to hold Time hostage and make a fool of Death.

For His fans, life was an overlong rehearsal for the grave, a dreary dumb show that spawned a fetish for the trappings of death and the afterlife. His music awakened them to the beauty of their mortality, and the futility of their daily lives. It liberated them from faceless conformity, made them feel chosen for a higher purpose, to be true individuals—exactly like Him.

Her own purpose looms large before her, and she gets back to work. Surfing the churning crowd for five minutes before she reaches the bathroom where, true to form, Evelyn is holding court, chopping out rails of moist, chunky crank on a razored jewel case from His first CD for a rapt captive audience of juvenile tweakers.

“Truly visionary artists are never appreciated in their own lifetimes, and God help us if they were,” Evelyn says. “Celebrity destroys art, children. Great art is like poisoned Tylenol or letter bombs: only produced in obscurity, in anonymity. If M—”

“Nobody says His name, tonight,” Sloane snaps.

Eyes rolling out of her half-naked skull, Evelyn drags Sloane into the bathroom and offers up a fat caterpillar of a line. Sloane declines with a sneer, and one of the teenaged jackals snorts it up with a rolled-up playing card.

“Parasite.” Evelyn knees him in the crotch.

The tweaker drops, gagging, and one of his friends rolls up his sleeve. “But, yeah, but—no, that’s like, bullshit, right?” he jabbers. “Because He was a fucking god, right? Like, check this out.” He bares his scrawny, white bicep and the ineptly carved name in ugly pink nightcrawler scars on it. “My parents sent me to this reformatory in Coeur D’Alene two years ago, right? And like, I busted out and hitchhiked home, but like, I got so out of my fucking head when I was there that I, like, did this? Listening to His songs was the only thing that kept me from doing it to my throat, right?”

“He
is
God, dude,” the third magpie chimes in, a townie steakhead who dyes his hair with used motor oil. “Like Jesus, I mean. They fucking killed Him before He could get His message out to the people.”

“It’s like everything’s dark, now, dude,” the scarred one mutters.

“You know,” Evelyn starts in, “when a light like His goes out, it leaves a hole behind, a dark place that closes up quickly, but those with the right kind of inner light can follow…”

Sloane jabs her with car keys. Not yet. “School’s out, posers. Leave.” She flanks the door and kicks the still-prone teenager on the scummy tiled floor. Mumbling, “Bitch,” the other two pick up their friend and leave. Sloane slams the door and drops the bags.

Evelyn is one of the chief officers in the national fan club. For a tweaker, she’s fairly sharp, but not sharp enough by half, Sloane fears, for what she needs to do. “What the fuck, Sloane? Everything’s ready.”

Sloane pulls out a Ziploc bag stuffed with forest green capsules. “Babysit these until midnight. Keep these assholes in check so nothing, but
nothing
, happens until then. The manager’s ready to call the cops.”