Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars (6 page)

The days flow by as blurs of feverish color: rising in tarnished gold, crashing and bleeding out in scarlet haze, clotted with violet shadows. My pharmacology isn’t what it used to be, and I keep it too dark to consult my manuals, so I’ve dispensed with the niceties. Do I have a drug problem? Hell no. I’m a doctor, so I can get all I want. I pop Halcyon from the trash bag of samples drug companies mailed to my house last fall, so I could pass them out to trick-or-treaters. I’ve long since bypassed the ethical dilemma of prescribing my own therapy. My situation is such that understanding would be hard to come by.

I suspect I may have built up a tolerance to the sedatives, and I wish I could afford a sensory deprivation tank, so I could go deeper. These fleeting moments of lucidity are more than enough to convince me that there is no alternative, nowhere to go but inward.

In the few minutes between waking to change my IV and catheter, washing down another handful of pills and actually returning to blackout is when the ache of loneliness becomes true physical pain, when the pressure in my head drowns out all other sensations, all other thoughts but her, and the echoes of her blood in my veins.

They called her Jane Doe Seven: the seventh unidentified female of the year when they found her at 1:30 AM on April 13 of last year, but she was the first and only one to be discovered alive. The media, with its unfailing gift for degrading tragedy, christened her the Mole Girl and the El Segundo Cellar Dweller, and so gave her the names by which many of you included her in your prayers. She became one with Baby Jessica, the girl with the baboon heart; David, the legendary Boy in the Plastic Bubble; and the legions of crack-addicted and AIDS-afflicted babies, the famine-struck stick-people of the Third World.

It was hardly the top story of the morning, but it stuck in the throat long after anxieties over air pollution and the war had been smoothed over. She was receiving treatment at the University Medical Center, pending examination by a team of specialists. I had only to consider the challenge and opportunity this girl’s condition offered, the groundbreaking research sure to yield mountains of publishable data, and I instantly became quite passionate about Jane Doe Seven’s plight. I was prepared to fight for her, never suspecting that she was already mine.

Traffic inched through the trough of its own petrochemical shit infinitely in both directions, each driver blankly despising the others as dumb, dead obstacles. Each of them heard the news and their faces froze in mid-curse. They were a bit less begrudging in allowing others into their lanes that morning, and congratulated themselves that at least the world wasn’t a mess because of them. It got me to the hospital that much faster, so I couldn’t condemn it. I was parking when my phone chirped and they offered me her case.

Jane Doe Seven was under heavy sedation in one of the soundproofed basement cells for quarantining infectious patients. Every light on the ward was switched off to simulate the darkness of her natural habitat.

She’d been curled up in a basement when firefighters found her, where she’d lain, by all accounts, since before she could walk or talk. She was skin and bones held together by a lifelong accretion of dirt, dust and spider webs. Once the nurses had cleaned her, she looked so raw and frail that you’d catch your breath for fear her onion-thin, moonstone-pale skin might break open with the slightest stirring of the air. Her limbs might come off with one wanton twist of the hand, like the legs of an insect. Nurses kept a vigil around her oxygen tent, intently playing miniature flashlights over her muted vital signs.

I was told to expect a social worker, Carmen Fuchs. A red-eyed woman with too much turquoise jewelry camped outside the girl’s door, studying a case file and nursing a coffee. She didn’t notice me when I leaned over her, so I tapped her on the shoulder. She jumped from her chair, but her mind lingered someplace else.

“Ms. Fuchs?”

She set down the file and offered her hand, clammy and shaky from caffeine and sleep deprivation. “I hope you’re Dr. Shields?”

I nodded. “How long have you been here?”

“Since they found her, at about two. I don’t know how much Dr. Randels told you over the phone, but you can look over the file I started. Early blood tests confirm he was hers. Nobody guessed he’d had a daughter until she was found in that basement. If not for the fire, she’d still be down there. She’d almost have been better off if he had beaten her… buried underground her entire life, in the dark, his own flesh and blood…” She choked back more tears, leaving me thinking she meant for me to comfort her, but she recoiled, eyes grazing the floor. “Maybe you should just go talk to the police, or Dr. Randels. I’m a little high strung right now.”

“I’d rather hear it from you, if you don’t mind. Maybe we could go to the cafeteria.”

“Sure,” she said, distracted. “Do you smoke?” I shook my head, and she moaned. She tried to uncoil her knotted neck muscles as I led her to the elevators.

“I never thought I’d run out of stomach for this job. Do you know why the lights are off in there? She was blinded by the first light the firemen shined on her, and went into deep shock. I don’t think she’s ever even seen light before. She’s
below
feral; she’s not even an animal, and the doctors say she’s twelve. I just wish he wasn’t killed in the fire, so he could answer for this.” She was looking beyond me, thinking out loud as fatigue and, perhaps, misplaced maternal instinct got the best of her.

“Maybe he couldn’t live with his sexual impulses towards the girl and locked her away,” I offered, “to protect her. Starting the fire would, then, be a predictable outcome to such a repressive syndrome.” I was trying to infuse some logic into the conversation. I should have known she’d have none of it.

“You’d say as much in court, wouldn’t you? Some things, even a sick mind is no excuse for. When I think of the loneliness he condemned her to, the chance for humanity he took away from her, I only hope they make Hell even hotter for him.”

She was obviously too overwrought to see reason on that subject. “What about the mother? Was Cykes ever married?”

“Yes, to a ‘Roja Zachardo.’ She was an illegal alien, from Guatemala. None of his neighbors reported having seen her for the last several years, and nobody’s been able to find her. His was the only body they found, so we’re assuming she left him, maybe went back over the border. I don’t know how anyone could throw away her daughter like that, but I hope she’s somewhere safe.”

What she told me made me want to see the house.

Even with the fire engines and the curiosity seekers gone, I had no trouble finding it. The house was deep in the heart of the Hispanic ghetto east of Watts, on a dead-end street that had somehow managed never to get paved. Chickens and kids selling bushel bags of oranges and hot dogs wrapped in bacon dodged my car and cursed my dust.

Clouds of ash and the overpowering reek of burning still marked the area. The Cykes house had been razed to its brick foundation, leaving only a gaping black cavity in a row of other likely firetraps. A pair of investigators in windbreakers and plastic hardhats knelt and sifted the ashes.

Norman Cykes was an orphan, raised in foster homes throughout the Eastern United States. He distinguished himself in school and received a grant from a research firm to study hematology at Stanford. Unlike many such hardship cases, whose scarred self-esteem prevents them from applying themselves, he buried himself in a cocoon of work. I wish I could have been half as dedicated as the young Dr. Cykes.

He derailed his illustrious career almost before it began, however, when he quit his residency at a San Diego hospital and disappeared. He met Roja Zachardo there while treating her for an injury she sustained while crossing the border. They were married shortly thereafter and moved to Los Angeles. Cykes stole a lab’s worth of equipment from the hospital, and bought the house with the last of his meager savings. They had groceries delivered and performed their own repairs.

According to neighbors, Roja Cykes was a
bruja
, a Santeria witch, who healed ailments with rituals, prayer and transfusions of her own blood, probably their sole income. He’d only been sighted outside once, when he shot a dog caught rooting through his trash. A classic misanthrope, paranoid but hardly pathological. Mrs. Cykes stopped seeing patients seven years ago, and was believed to have run away. No one ever knew there was a daughter.

“Can I help you?” The investigator offered me a blackened glove and too-firm grip. He looked as if he’d lost a coin toss to talk to me. His eyes homed in on the clip-on badge I wore, and his face became static. I’ve grown accustomed to the guardedness many laymen adopt around shrinks. I once derived a banal thrill from tweaking their discomfort, but it’d long since become a bore.

“I’m Jane Doe Cykes’ psychiatrist,” I said. “If it’s not too much trouble, I’d like to see the basement.”

His broad, sunburned face soured. “Let me get some extra gear.” He walked back to his truck, where the other investigator was now reclining in the cab. They exchanged words about me while he rummaged in a tool locker. He returned with two flashlights and another hardhat. We crossed the sidewalk onto the Cykes property; as he held up the yellow CAUTION ribbon for me to cross, he introduced himself as Bart Shanley and remarked, “You figure out why he did it yet?”

“Unless the girl can speak, which is highly doubtful, we may never be able to do more than guess about his motives. Isolation can compound our anxieties over time, as our inner world, our imagination, takes the place of the outside world.”

He snorted. “I heard of a deputy sheriff, lived in a trailer park in Mono County, Krazy Glue’d his mother’s ass to a toilet seat to keep her from going off to a rest home. She sat there for six years before a Jehovah’s Witness heard her hollering that her TV was busted. Said he loved her too much to let her go.”

I shrugged. “Anything’s possible. Is the cause of the fire known yet?”

“No mystery, there. Splashed a can of kerosene all through the place, blew out his pilot lights and opened a couple oxygen tanks upstairs. Place was full of old books and papers. Went up like a fucking bomb. You could see it for miles.” Shanley gazed out over the wreckage, inhaled the ashes lustily. Discussing fire plainly both relaxed and exhilarated him, even before a complete stranger. He was in his element in this sort of carnage and, very likely, was sexually aroused. “The cellar door’s around back.”

We skirted the ruin and passed through a warped wrought-iron gate into the backyard, a waist-high field of what looked like long black hair. It ran unbroken for fifty feet to a ramshackle scrap lumber fence. The investigator’s mind was lost among the hillocks of charred house bones until I asked him if anything had been salvaged.

“I doubt it. Something this old burns this hot, even the fixtures get melted down. The flashpoint—” the ruin’s heart, marked by a twisted tree that might have been the steel pipes of a bathtub, “—had a lot of heavy lab equipment, and it brought the whole second story down, when it went. Witness said the guy was watching from a window the whole time, like it was someone else’s house burning down. Totally batshit. That girl, she couldn’t have found a better place to hide. She was damned lucky being where she was. Here…”