Skullcrack City (13 page)

“Maybe he was saying ‘Deckard’ like the name in those poems we found on his hard drive.”

“A boyfriend?”

“I don’t know. I got a weird feeling that the poems were about his turtle.”

“Yeah, maybe. Who knows? This fucking guy, right?”

“Right.”

“I’m cooked. Let’s let him sleep and then we can find out if this guy still thinks we’re angels in the morning.”

“That sounds perfect. Can you look up that article Ms. A. told me about? I’ll be with you in a sec.”

“I don’t know if you can hear me, Mr. Doyle, or if you really are Mr. Doyle at all, but I know one thing for sure: you have been to a terrible and hopeless place, far, far from the light. That place will never leave you. I wish I could tell you it would, but…it won’t. And for that, I’m sorry. But at least you’re here now, you’re home, and that’s mostly a good thing, I hope. We’ll see. But I guess I just really wanted to be the first person to hold your hand and say, ‘Welcome back.’ So there it is, Mr. Doyle…welcome back.”

At first I’d believed the sound I heard was a new cruelty, a trick in the darkness to remind me of the world from which I’d been torn. The noise was barely human, a contorted, warbling static phantom which made me feel all the more alone in my suffering. I wished, as I had so many times before, that I could simply die and be free of that place.

But then, through the empty space, I heard a man’s voice, distinct and clear. Angry.

“Listen, buddy. You’ve got to give me a vein to work with or I’m going to have to pump this shit up your ass. You don’t want that. I don’t want that. C’mon, motherfucker.”

After that, I felt my body again, my real body for a wisp of a moment, as something sharp slid into my neck and sent a sweet sensation through my nerves, what I used to call pain before I fell into the throat of the black wolf.

Beyond that moment, I existed in two spaces: one which allowed me nothing, and another which allowed me the sound of two voices. One male, one female, both an almost unbearable kindness in contrast to the crushing abyss.

I was never religious, but given my new reality, I was converting. So as I was torn between the two worlds, as I understood that they were talking about some real, half-remembered version of myself, I came to believe that they were angels.

It was only after I woke in our world, naked and cold and strapped to a stretcher inside a dimly lit warehouse, that I began to have my doubts.

It was only after I looked down and saw two dead obsidian-black beetles on my broken chest—their mandibles latched into the thin skin above my heart—that I started to scream.

“Hey, sleeping beauty, hey, hey. You’ve got to calm down. Okay? We don’t have an x-ray machine here but your chest is looking pretty roughed up. You keep hollering like that, it’s only gonna get worse.” It was the man who’d saved me. He wore khaki pants and a frayed blue t-shirt which barely concealed a paunch. The text on his shirt read “I HAD A BLAST AT COCONUTS!” Beneath the slogan was a cartoon drawing of an unconscious goat next to an empty beer mug. The man’s fingers were dusted with bright orange Snak-Ums cheese.

I was not in any kind of sanctioned medical facility.

“He’s up?” The woman’s voice came from behind a curtain partition across the warehouse.

“Oh, yeah. He’s wide awake now. We might need some codeine for his chest. I think his ribs are killing him.”

“Not…my ribs…it’s those bugs…they…”

“I know. It’s kind of nasty. But those guys are why you’re here now—they’re the ones who clipped the signal. If you want I can pull off the thorax and abdomen, but Ms. A. says we have to leave the jaws in until they naturally unlock.”

It seemed like madness. But then I thought of where I’d been, and I realized that they could coat my whole body in bullet ants if it kept me from going back to that place.

“It’s okay,” I said, “You can leave them. You…they saved me…I was in the throat…”

“Save it, buddy. You’re here right now because we know all about that place. Trust me. Don’t try to describe it—you’ll just sound like you’re spouting bad heavy metal lyrics, and the feeling might come back to you. It’s best not to give it any energy at all.”

“The Hex…”

“Is gone, buddy. It’s all gone.”

I was surprised to find, for the first time in months, that the absence of Hex was no longer terrifying. What had they done to me?

Her voice again. “I checked. We don’t have any codeine. Tons of acetaminophen, but I’m guessing his liver is maxed out. Ask him if he can take a full breath.”

“You heard her, buddy. Can you give us a big inhale?”

I tried. My right side set fire. The jaws of the beetles tore deeper. I cried out, which only made it worse. I tried to calm down before this turned into some new pain loop.

“He’s pretty rough, Dara.”

“Maybe put a topical by the scarabs, ice his ribs, and ask him to calm the fuck down? His body is still processing the perphenadol. I don’t think more drugs is what this guy needs right now.”

Amen. I thought of where I’d been, gave perspective to this pain, and took a few slow, measured breaths short of what shifted my busted chest.

The man leaned in close and studied my face. He had Snak-Um breath slightly underscored by the smell of sour lager.

“He sure looks like the picture in the article.”

Article?
Shit. The roasted bankers. The massacre on 45
^th
. Who knew what the media was saying about me? Between the bank and Delta, there were billions of dollars available to make sure people heard the approved message. And mom. What about mom?

Panic again. Straining not to hyperventilate.

“Listen. Whatever they’re saying about me, they’re lying. You’ve got…”

“First things first, buddy. My name is Tim. My pal over in the kitchen is Dara. Now who exactly are you?”

They’d saved me. They had my things. They might already know the truth. The pain in my ribs and the restraints stripped me of my will to create any more fake realities.

“My name is S.P. Doyle. And I didn’t…”

“Sorry to interrupt again, but do you have, um, any proof of that? We couldn’t find identification in your bags.”

“It’s in my pants.”

“Nope. We checked there too.”

“There’s a secret pocket near the crotch. Thin Velcro seam. It’s hard to see but you can feel the cards.”

“Okay…aaaand…got it.”

He had the whole batch of I.D.’s: the Unsustainable Fraud Scheme Card Series. Collect ’em all, kids, and you too can live a lie.

“Dara, you’ve got to come see this.”

She rounded the partition with a frustrated sigh. What kind of life was she living, that she could feel weary about paying attention to a suddenly conscious man she’d strapped to a table and saved from oblivion.

You’re here right now because we know all about that place.

She had a large mug of steaming tea in her hands. I can’t quite remember what she was wearing, probably just blue jeans and a white tee, pure utility. Short black hair against olive skin, both oily from staying awake for days saving my ass. I mainly remember the way she walked. It wasn’t a show, some calculated sway of the hips, but rather a kind of gentleness that made me think it would be beautiful to watch her swim in a still pond, to see the way the water would move around her. It was grace.

The other thing I noticed, right away, was that she had only her right eye, the left covered by a patch. She passed her partner and leaned close to look at me, chamomile on her breath as a nice contrast to Mr. Snak-Um’s. After a second’s confusion, I figured out how to focus solely on her remaining eye, the green iris flecked with tiny hints of yellow. The beauty of it stood out in isolation.

Her gaze stayed on me. “Let me guess—He has a bunch of fake I.D.’s?”

“Well, a few. So the bank fraud part of his story, especially when you add in that big old sack of cash, that’s probably legit. It’s not so much that, as it is…well, check out
this
license.”

Waking naked and strapped to a table after an overdose should have been awkward, but I’d heard their voices and knew that this situation was somehow par for their course. I was so grateful to be back in my body that I was barely conscious of my nudity, of the way my Crooked D was probably shriveled from the cold, of the fact that they must’ve attended to my other functions over the last few days. No, it was only when Dara turned to look at my fake I.D. as Maria Scharf that I felt my skin flush with embarrassment.

Part of this feeling came from knowing that I’d made such an ugly woman. My DMV yellow-neon-lit drag photo was some hellish mockery of the beauty that this woman effortlessly radiated.

Part of this feeling came from a sudden realization: From the very first moment Dara had looked into my eyes, I was falling for her.

Doom isn’t something you want to focus on, but when you unexpectedly find yourself wanting someone who is literally surrounded by the truth of who you really are, it feels like disaster. This would not be my meet cute overdose or some story Dara and I would tell to our kids. I knew this would be another stillborn dream to file away.

But when she looked at the incriminating I.D., she smiled and nudged Tim. “Wow. Do you think he even checked the mirror? Yeesh. He’s much more handsome as a man.”

And then she winked at me and laughed, and hope returned as quickly as it had fled.

If there were an audio recording of my first day in Tim and Dara’s warehouse hideout it would reveal that I was attempting to spin my story into one of charming haplessness, to find some way to de-creep my path to their sanctuary.

I answered enough basic questions—Who are you? Which bank did you work for? Who was your Hex supplier? Does anyone else know about your plan?—to earn my way out of restraints and into a warm blanket on their couch. Dara handed me my own mug of hot tea and a towel-covered ice pack for my chest and gave me a warning.

“You’re still in the early stages of separation from their signal. We got you this far. It would be
very
unwise for you to try to run. It’s clear the officials are looking for you, but after what’s happened to Mr. Port and Mr. Egbert, the authorities are the least of your concerns. I can tell you we’ve reviewed your hard drive, and read a very unflattering portrait of you in the Post, but I’m hoping you can give us a fuller picture.”

I’d heard her, somewhere in the midst of my fugue state, speaking with the one they called Ms. A. It was my involvement in the death of the Hex dealers that they were truly intrigued by. I’d give them all the info I had on that subject, but I knew I’d be remiss if I passed up this shot at revising the whole of my history.

So I tried to paint myself as an anti-corporate crusader, some Robin Hood trapped in the grip in a very bad drug habit, but my bag of cash (clearly never distributed to any poor souls) and the profound size of my Hex stash had already told them deeper truths.

I left out the unholy amount of masturbation, but they’d already seen Crooked D in all his punch drunk glory.

I tried to sell the idea that I had some agency in my escape from danger, but they’d found me broken and rag-dolled. Hell, beautiful dumb luck and their rescue efforts were the only reason I was speaking to them at all.

Every time I veered from the ugly truth into a version of the story more amenable to the survival of my ego, I noticed their eyes squinting, their lips tightening. Tim and Dara were ace lie detectors. I was mostly untrained at selling my delusions to anyone other than myself. It was frustrating.

When it came time to tell them about the thing that attacked me on 45
^th
, I figured their bullshit detectors would swing way into the red, but during that part they quietly listened and nodded. There is no feasible way to describe being mauled by a near-invincible brain-eating man-gorilla with multiple voices and an extendable jaw without sounding like you should be committed. But then I remembered what Tim had said:

You’re here right now because we know all about that place.