The Death of Wendell Mackey (22 page)

“No, not the hospital.”

“Then give me a reason, Wendell. Give me a reason to keep you here.”

“I don’t…I don’t know what you want.” He drank more water, slower now.

“More. I want more. Some information.”

“Okay. I’ll try.”

“So after running into you this morning, I walked up to my apartment, thinking about the rest of my day, and all of a sudden it hit me.
You
hit me. I was putting the key into the lock, I turned to your door, and I just couldn’t stop staring at it. Saying it was a premonition makes me sound like one of those Shirley Maclaine types, which I most certainly am not. Still, something struck me, Wendell, something about you, about you walking into something bad. Something dangerous. I couldn’t shake it, so I called Santos, my own personal handyman and bodyguard from two floors down, and we headed out. I walked the streets for a bit, and Santos took my car. He went west, to where the city turns into a wasteland.”

Wendell noticed that her apartment was the mirror image of his, but clean, almost compulsively clean. It wasn’t the sterility of Unit 200’s floors; it was matronly clean, neat, as if it waited for guests. It struck him as odd that a woman like her, with both an ink stain and a bleach stain on her dress and dirty sneakers on her feet, would keep such a clean home. One didn’t lead to the other, he thought. He let his eyes wander. There was a shawl hanging on a hook on the wall next to the apartment door. Next to it was a short bookcase filled with books, with a framed picture of the pope leaning against a few spines on the top shelf. On top of the case itself sat a statue of the Virgin Mary kneeling and reaching out for another statue, that of Jesus, next to it. The couch looked older than the apartment, with a faded orange print that had died with Watergate. The coffee table in front of it fared better, but still retained its swap meet character. On it was a leather-bound bible, opened, with a mug and a teabag on a small saucer next to it.

“How did you find me?” Wendell asked.

Agatha shook her head. “Honestly, I don’t know. Santos saw you a few miles away, started following you, then called me on my cell and came back to pick me up. He said you weren’t looking good.” She kept shaking her head. “And we… I don’t know, Wendell. Up one street and down another, and then there you were, in a ditch. A
ditch
.”

“Pretty lucky.”

“What, we just happened on you? No.”

She sat in silence, watching him drink the water.

“So Wendell,” she said after a few moments, “how to proceed…”

Wendell stared at her.
Don’t proceed
, he thought.

“What are you doing to your face?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“No mirrors in that apartment of yours?”

“Forget about it. It’s nothing.”

“Not good enough. It’s something. Are you using—”

“No Sister, I’m not. You’re not the first person to ask today, though.”

“Surprise surprise,” she said. “So we’re on to something.”

“I’m no druggie.”

“Fine then. So who’s after you?”

Wendell lifted himself to his elbows. “Who’s after me. Who,” he mused. “Tough to explain. Tougher to believe. You’ll think it’s all in my head.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.

“Yeah you will,” he said, swinging his feet around and off the couch to the floor. For a moment, the blood rushed out of his head as he sat up, but returned slowly, as did the headache. “I almost don’t believe it, so I know you won’t.”

“Why the gloves?”

His eyes shot up. Agatha noted his response.

“Like I said before,” he said. “Chemical burn.”

“On the job?”

“Yeah, on the job.”

Wendell thought of the building at the corner of the lot, its rows of windows like eyes. No one knew about it, that torture chamber, that incubator.

“So, what did you do, in your work?”

“I did what I was told,” Wendell said, and he let his eyes wander around the apartment again. Clean though it was, the apartment was bereft of ornamentation, ordinary, almost drab, with gray walls reflecting either a monastic desire for simplicity, or a general indifference to decoration. Except for one wall. He turned to it and saw that in stark contrast to his apartment’s wall which held his childhood photograph, this one held a line of frames, the first holding a picture of a finely dressed Catholic bishop, a man Wendell had remembered seeing on television but whose name he never knew. The second frame held a photograph of Mother Theresa; the last three held prints of old paintings of soft-colored saints, two women and a man, heads turned heavenward and contemplative. Above the frames hung a simple crucifix, with Jesus on his cross, his head also turned heavenward, but in agony.

“Out there on the streets,” Wendell said, “walking along, it was strange. All of these empty neighborhoods, and then all of a sudden, I see my dad, up in this train car.” Wendell shrugged. “Something bad is happening to me.”

“Your mother never mentioned your dad.”

“There wasn’t much to mention.” He stopped himself.
No, that’s not right. There’s plenty to say.
“He was a good man. Did his best. The anniversary flowers might have been a day or two late, but he always tried.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“And what happened? If you don’t mind me asking, that is.”

“Dead.” He remembered that the steel pipe had been left on the couch. After the police had finished up, his mom just flipped the cushion to hide the stain. “It’s not normal that I saw him, is it?”

“No Wendell, I don’t think that it is.”

Wendell saw her look down at his gloved hands, then back up at his face. She smiled, but he knew that the smile hid something, a real concern, not for her own safety, but for his. He looked back up to Jesus on the cross, suffering.
At least that guy was a sacrifice,
he thought.

“After he died,” Wendell continued, “that’s when my mom…changed. She was always cold, always hard. But after he was gone, she…” His headache grew, and Wendell looked at Agatha, who began to fade into a silhouette, with the background buzzing and going white, like watching a snowy channel on television. He turned his head to the pictures on the wall, but he saw only the black picture frames and a faint line of the crucifix before everything went black. He dropped the water bottle, and just tried to keep himself from tipping over.

“Wendell? Wendell?” He felt Agatha grab his arm.

Light came back, then color, then his depth perception. Wendell blinked hard. Now his head felt heavy, cemented.

“For a minute,” Agatha said, “I thought you were a narcoleptic.”

“How long was I out?”

“Just for a minute. Wendell, we should get you to a hospital.”

“No.”

“But maybe they can—”

“No, they can’t.”

Agatha sighed. “You’re just as stubborn,” she said.

“As what?”

“As what…” she repeated. “I’d work the front steps of St. Jude’s, the church over on Dresden Street.” She stood up and walked into the kitchen. “It was my sanctuary,” she said over her shoulder. “Still is, in fact. That’s where I attend Mass. The city’s throwaways would come—prostitutes, runaways, crack heads, all these faces without names.” She returned with an opened bag of pretzels, which she dropped in Wendell’s lap, and then reached down and picked the water bottle up off the area rug and handed it to him. She sat back down in her chair. “Eat and drink,” she said. “You need it.”

Wendell slowly sipped at what was left in the bottle, waiting for Agatha to continue.

“That’s what I’d tell them too, ‘Eat and drink,’ these people living on nothing but coke or meth or alcohol, and any Twizzlers or pizza slices they could scrounge up or steal. A sandwich here and some water there is what we gave out, whatever we could scare up that morning. Just an old nun, with my rosary in my hand, knowing that it might not change much. It’s hard for people to change. These folks are stubborn, addicted, probably both. Maybe like you. And so they stay how they are. And so sometimes, I might not see them on the church steps, but down at the coroner’s office instead. I was there last week for a runaway, a girl that was used up and tossed out like a tissue. I thought I might have been getting through to her. Anyway, it’s making me old fast.” And she clapped her hands down in her lap. “But it’s all taught me a few things. One is that life is about sacrifice. You have to put yourself on the line for others.”

“Listen, I should go—”

“Another is that prayer isn’t always easy, but always necessary.”

“—but thanks for—”

“The last thing is that I can’t save you.”

Wendell stopped.

“What?”

“The world is a rough place, full of rough people,” Agatha said. “Like I need to tell you that.”

“I figured you’d just try to sugarcoat it a little.”

“Everything’s sugarcoated, Wendell. That’s part of the problem. A hospital helps you when you’re sick, but it can’t save you. It can’t take away whatever is chasing you. Or change who you are. Neither can I.”

“Didn’t think you could.”

“But you looked surprised when I said it.”

“That’s because it was surprising. You nuns are trained to be idealists.”

“If that’s true, then I’m one bad nun.” She reached over and pulled out a handful of pretzels from the bag on Wendell’s lap. “I know human nature, Wendell, which makes me quite the cynic. It’s what brought me into this life in the first place. God is always there for you; people aren’t.”

“I don’t expect you, or God, to save me.”

“I’ll let you take that up with him yourself,” she said. “Human nature, Wendell. We’re all broken, and on our own we can’t stop whatever it is that’s chasing us. You need to know that. It brings me back to my rosary.” She pulled the line of beads out from a pocket in her skirt, stared at it as it dangled from her knobby hand, and then put it back. “A little old lady can’t clean the world. Little old ladies just have to reach out to somebody bigger.”

“So, why’d you even come and get me then?”

“I didn’t say I couldn’t help. I just can’t save you.”

“So there really is no hope then.”

“You’re not listening. There is.”

“Not for what I got. Listen, Sister Agatha, you’ve got your own little cocoon here, helping your street people and doing your good deeds, but in my world you just don’t fit, and don’t
want
to fit, believe me.”

“That gun,” Agatha said, “in your pocket.” She pointed to her kitchen table, and for the first time Wendell realized that he was without his coat, which sat neatly folded on top of the table. On top of the coat was the gun. “Santos was going to take it and get rid of it. I told him not to. It was probably foolish on my part. Maybe you’re crazy, like he thinks, and you’re going to do me in. But maybe you really are running from something, and you need it for protection. I don’t know.” And then her face changed as she gave Wendell a look that he hadn’t yet seen on it, one of stone-faced seriousness. “I don’t know your world, and I don’t expect to fit into it. But I’m not some sheltered old lady.”

Wendell grabbed a handful of pretzels and dropped them two-by-two into his mouth. She threw down the gauntlet, so he would tell her. She would listen, he thought, and then start to giggle, schoolgirl giggles of polite mockery, which would tumble into belly-loosening guffaws. Or her skin would blanch and she would shrink into herself, cursing herself for letting an insane man into her apartment. But either way, she wouldn’t believe it. No one would.

“You ever been out in the southern part of the city,” Wendell began, “over by Pinkney Avenue, near that big park with the fountains?”

“Yes.”

“There’s a road off of Pinkney, called Industrial Parkway.”

“Near that old medical complex?”

“Yeah. And off Industrial Parkway, near the end, like it was an afterthought, is another road, unmarked. It’s long and it bends around, so you can’t see what’s at the end.”

“I don’t know it.”

“Of course you don’t. Hardly anybody does. And if they do, what they think they know they really don’t.”

“So what is it?”

“It’s a place where…things are made. It’s where I was kept, for a long time.”

“What do they make?”

“Sister, this isn’t going to work.”

“No, Wendell, what do they make?” She was getting annoyed.

You don’t just come out and say it, you idiot
, he thought.
Guys building careers on human mutilation, eating souls. It’s all insane. That’s why she’ll think you’re crazy.
But he knew he had to do it.

“You know,” he started, “I should have known when they started giving me pills and taking my blood. I should have known back then that things weren’t right. I mean, who
does
that? You get treated like a lab rat because, surprise, you’re a lab rat.”

“Wait, what?”

“It’s one giant laboratory, except what’s under those microscopes is me, and maybe other guys like me. They terminated my job and kept me there, against my will, and began experiments.” And like the stench from a sewer, an image hit him, of his first time being wheeled into surgery, seeing men standing like robots, because with eyes covered by goggles and mouths covered by surgical masks all that he saw were scalpels and clamps like metal fingers protruding from rubber hands.

“Who are these people?”

“It was months, maybe longer. I don’t know. You lose all sense of time in there. But they would do things…”

“Now wait a minute—”

“They’d strap me down, and then fill the room with gas.” He licked his lips.

“Hang on.”

“I’d vomit everything out of me.”

“Just slow down.”

“Submerge me in these tubs, full of this…stuff. And they’d—”

“Wendell.”

“—use these lights on me, baking me, then injecting me full of all sorts of—”

“
Wendell
.”

“And the surgeries. They were endless. And I don’t know what they were taking out of me, or putting into me, but—”

“
Who
, Wendell?”

“What?”

“Who are these people?”

“I don’t know. Scientists. They’re called Unit 200.”