The Death of Wendell Mackey (28 page)

Where am I?

The spotlight came on, but it wasn’t Biddle in its beam, it was Wendell. What started as a sea of smiling faces morphed into collective confusion. Wendell was naked, and they saw him, all of him on display, saw his hands, his face, his whole twisted body, gnarled and knotted like an old tree. They were confused, but not afraid.

They should be running,
he thought,
just tossing their chairs and running, hands beating their breasts screaming for God to kill that thing that’s up there because this is a church and it’s no freak show.

They weren’t running. He was a monster but they weren’t running. Confused, yes. But…

They don’t know what they’re doing. I could kill ‘em all right now.

He wasn’t a lab specimen, not there. He moved to the center of the stage and the spotlight followed him, like he was accepting an award and they all expected a speech. Confused or not, they were waiting on him.

He cleared his throat, surveyed the crowd.

“Pitchforks and torches,” he said.

Smiles again. They rose to their feet in unison and clapped.

DAY EIGHT

T
HE DREAM MAN IS COMING
with his train of cars, with moonbeam windows and with wheels of stars…

Wendell must have dozed off. He was no longer at the window. He was…

“Where am I?”

…so hush my little ones and climb in here, the man in the moon is the engineer…

Wendell was looking down on the kitchen table, looking
down
, from the top of the refrigerator, or higher, clinging to the ceiling like a bat. His vision went fuzzy, then dark.

…hush for mister dream man, hush for mister dream man…

“I know that rhyme,” Wendell muttered, “I know it, know it, from—”

The yellow house, long before he and Dad ate sandwiches out under the beech tree. It was from Grandma Mackey.

Wendell’s vision cleared and he was in the bathroom, hunched precariously on the edge of the sink. His back was on fire. His head throbbed. The lights went out.

…till daylight comes again, we’ll see all the wonders of wonderland,
in the dream man’s train…

Grandma Mackey, a woman never young, with her mothballed dresses and licorice in her pockets. For a time she lived with them, before her strokes and her final trip to the nursing home, and she had sung Wendell to sleep every night. She would smile down on him, stroke his hair, and hold the last note of that song—
How did it end again?
Wendell asked himself—as long as her wavering voice would allow, and then kiss him goodnight. But it wasn’t her voice singing now.

His eyelids felt heavy, but he forced them open. He was standing, staring at the apartment door. He could have been there for hours. He still smelled the urine on the floor.

“Sing it again,” he said. But nothing came. His eyes closed…

…and opened with him in his mother’s bed. Met with a tidal wave of nausea, he lurched up and covered his mouth with his hands. Below him on the floor was a dried puddle of yellow vomit, its smell far worse than the urine in the kitchen. He didn’t remember vomiting. He didn’t remember much of anything since—

The power of attorney
, he thought.

Exhausted, he flopped back down onto the bed and fell asleep.

Thump-thump.

Wendell awoke. It was the door.

Thump.

“Who’s there?”

Nothing.

He paused, grinding his teeth together, his new teeth.

“Hello?”

Still nothing.

And then came the pain, volcanic spasms in his back that made his chest arch upwards and sucked the air out of his lungs. He writhed on the bed and his fingers cut into the sheets. The spasms stopped, echoing in dull throbs. He rolled over onto his chest, trying to catch his breath. Pushing up to his knees, he reached for his red t-shirt wadded up at the foot of the bed, and stopped.

“Please God no,” he said.

The skin on his back had peeled away, curling like dead leaves. Even in the darkness he could make out the thin shapes on the sheet. Some small, some long, all the pieces were a gory jigsaw puzzle that fit together to make something that no longer existed. They were gray, thin like wrinkled paper, and there was blood. The sheet was old and yellowed, but he saw the blood, sprinkled onto it and painted softly on one side of each piece of flesh. He picked up a piece, brittle at the edges, and put it to his nose. It smelled dead, like dirt and expired milk, or like something that had been buried in the corner of a damp basement closet. He dropped the piece on the bed, stood up on the floor and walked to the bathroom.

In the flickering light of the bathroom, Wendell stood with his back to the mirror, twisting his head around to inspect. Yes, he had left most of the skin on the bed. The flesh beneath was similar to that of his legs, but lighter in color, closer to a more normal flesh color.
Closer
, but certainly not normal. The muscles in his back were more prominent, a clearly un-Wendell development, he thought, as he had been skin and bones for most of his life. The tips of his vertebrae ran like a rocky outcropping down the center of his back. And two thick gashes ran where once there were the two healed incisions from the tops of the scapulas down at least twelve inches. What was protruding from them looked like black bone, covered in a translucent membrane. They pulsated—

wings

—in rhythm with his heartbeat.

Wendell tensed the muscles in his neck and back, and the black things pulsed more. He could control them. These weren’t tumors; these were new appendages.

“What am I supposed to do with these?”

He thought back to those men who had been ushered into his room at the institution by Thane and Scotia, that international collection of iron-necked buffalo, finely tailored men whose eyes and scars gave them away as anything but goodwill ambassadors; these were men comfortable with violence. Perhaps they were buyers. And perhaps Wendell was a prototype of something for sale to the highest bidder, some sort of next
next
generation military biotech. Infiltrate, kill, escape, neither carrying in nor leaving any weapons behind because he
was
the weapon. Myth would become reality on the battlefield. So the institution needed him back, not just because they couldn’t afford for the world to see what they did at the end of that winding road off of Industrial Parkway, but because they couldn’t afford to lose their investment.

Wendell stared at his new organs. When they unfurled, the trench coat wouldn’t hide them. So whether they got him back or not, their secret would be exposed.

“Once upon a time,” he whispered, seeing the yellow house as vivid in his mind’s eye as if it were on the other side of the bathroom mirror. Back there at the house, he would only imagine flying, a comic book superhero with a bath towel draped over his shoulders and held in place by a clothespin. But such were life’s cruelties. What he had wanted, what every boy at some point had wanted, was granted him in technicolor horror.

A siren wailed outside.

He whipped his head around, left the bathroom and went back into his old bedroom, to the window. Pulling the drape back, he looked down to the street. The afternoon was quickly receding; the morning had never existed, at least not to Wendell, as he had apparently spent most of it passing in and out of consciousness. On the street cars lined the sidewalk, with one sticking out awkwardly like a fractured bone. Black garbage bags sat in a pile on the curb. A man squatted on a front stoop, fanning himself with a folded newspaper. Bicycles, pedestrians, a slowly leaking hydrant, all was well. And then a delivery truck rumbled by, and as it passed, two men appeared, not there before the truck but clearly there after, as if they had hopped off of it, or materialized behind it. Two men, their polo shirts and khakis exposing them as not of the neighborhood. They spoke to each other and gestured at the apartment building. One pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and spoke into it.

Wendell pulled back from the window.

“Just two guys,” he whispered, “just two guys talking rental space or something. It’s nothing.”

It’s something. Of course it’s something
.

Wendell left his bedroom and went into his mother’s room to get his t-shirt, which he pulled on, tearing a sleeve in the process.

“What am I tasting?” He licked his lips. Whatever it was felt like moss on his tongue.

You know what it is
, he thought.

He walked into the kitchen and stood in front of the sink, moving his tongue around in his mouth, not wanting to think about it but feeling forced to do so, to picture
him
, slumped in a dank pool of his own parts.

“Not that. I didn’t do
that
.”

So what am I tasting then?

It all tasted rotten, his tongue, lips, gums, like they were covered in a fetid film. He leaned into the sink, turned on the faucet and lapped up the water like a dog, but the taste persisted. He rubbed at his tongue with the rag he had been using as a sponge, poured borax onto it and rubbed harder, fraying the rag on his teeth, but nothing changed.

“Didn’t do it, not that, didn’t do it, none of it went in my mouth,” he said, trying to convince himself, sputtering and spitting water onto the counter.

Fangs, claws, hooves, and now wings. Of course he did it. He remembered how the man’s leg was twitching when he left the alley, like it was the last part of him to die.

Wendell spat, and turned the water off.

Something told him that it was there to stay, that taste, as permanent as those
things
coming out of his back, or his hands, or those god-awful headaches. And it would most certainly get stronger if he
gave in
, if he did what he didn’t want to do but somehow needed to do.

“No, I didn’t...”

But he couldn’t convince himself. He turned from the sink and sat down at the wooden table.

“I didn’t, but I’m sorry for…” There was no easy way to finish his thought. He just waited—waited and hoped—for a rumble of thunder, some lightning, something to tell him that he was being heard, perhaps even forgiven. But in the end, remorse was for humans. Animals didn’t care. He had merely done what his new instincts told him to do: defend, attack, crawl back into his cave and hibernate. The institution had sent him backwards, reducing him to a brain stem and adrenals. Subhuman.
Inhuman
. Beyond God.

“Carve ‘em up,” he said, “all of ‘em.”

He curled his fingers into rakes on the table and dug the tips into the wood, pulling them back to peel the wood away in little furrows. There was no longer a need for the gun. He didn’t need those military men to tell him he was a weapon; there was a line of dead bodies to do that. He pulled his fingers up, the digits hard and black, like segments of an insect exoskeleton. The curls of peeled wood fell from his fingers to the table.

A knock came at the door.

And then, “Wendell?” It was Agatha.

He sat bolt upright.

“Wendell?”

“Who’s there?”

“You know who it is.”

“Did you come by before?”

“Yes. And you were in there, I know it.”

“I was…”

“Avoiding me.”

The gloves were still in the coat’s pockets, and the coat was still bunched up on the kitchen counter. Wendell stood up, put the coat on and pulled the gloves out of the pockets and slipped them on. He saw the sneakers still sitting next to the kitchen sink, picked them up and slowly pulled them over what was left of his feet.

“I’ll be right there,” he yelled over his shoulder.

He walked to the door and removed the chair from its place wedged under the doorknob. Without even looking through the peep hole he opened it.

She looked smaller, as if time had fast-forwarded, aging her too quickly. Or perhaps his eyesight was going, corroded by whatever was causing the headaches.

“You’re here now,” she said.

“Sorry about that.”

“Well, it’s clear you weren’t sleeping. You look awful.”

“I’ve been getting sicker.”

“Wendell, I’ve been thinking about what you told me on Thursday. About that place, where you said you were kept.”

He said nothing, and just stared at her.

“I was thinking about it, and…” and she paused, cocking her head. “Your face looks much worse,” she said. “But you haven’t been…”

“No, no drugs.”

“You get that question a lot.”

“I’ve got bad skin.”

“Cracked skin, like you’re coming apart at the seams. They didn’t have a dermatologist at that institution?”

“Part of the whole thing.”

“The whole thing?”

“The sickness, the stuff they did, the—”

“Yes, about that too. Come with me,” she said, reaching out for his arm, “we’ll go over to my place, sit down, have some tea.”

“I better just—”

“There’s no
no
, just
yes
.” She took his wrist, gently, but he knew she wouldn’t let go of it easily. “Come with me.” She pulled him out of his apartment, allowing him only enough time to make sure the door closed behind him, and led him into hers. She gestured to her kitchen table. Wendell sat and Agatha closed her door, joining him at the table.