When Lily came to, she was in a dank cold place and her limbs were aching. She was sitting unpropped and falling to the side against a cement basement wall. Milo was sitting on the floor across from her. They were in a hallway, the distance between them a few feet. There must have been a plumbing leak, or something else equally distasteful, because swampy water was pooled underneath them. The floor was uneven, they were in the hollow. He could have set them down a few feet higher where the concrete was wet but unpuddled. Milo, however, didn’t even seem to notice—the expression on his tattooed, tainted face was detached from this world.
Something was dripping from her mouth. Lily wiped it—blood from where he hit her. She was still attached to this world.
“What am I going to do with you, Lily? You were in your own home, we were sitting, chatting, and now look what you’ve done, calling the police. You’re wet, uncomfortable. And bleeding.”
“I need to get to the hospital,” she muttered.
“Oh, I know.” Milo said nothing after that, just eyed her. “But I think where I’m going to have to take you is to see your brother. Don’t you think? Do you have a cell phone? We should call him.
Tell him you’re in great distress. Tell him you were abducted by Amy. See what he thinks of that.”
Lily licked her lip. Her blood was thick.
“Tsk, tsk,” he clucked, not sounding quite right when he did. “You think everyone around you is blind. But even the walls have eyes. Amy told me about your family. Your one sister is always working, the other is too busy with her halflings. Your mother doesn’t know who you are. Your grandmother has nothing to barter with. And so we come to your brother.”
Amy—her Amy—discussed Lily with this person. Lily’s feeling of violation was complete.
“What do you want, money?
I’ll
give you money for me. How much do you want?”
Milo laughed soundlessly. “Amy and I are revolutionaries, Lily. Revolutionaries are not interested in money. Did you ever read a book called
Catechism of a Revolutionist
by the Russian nihilist Mikhail Bakunin?”
She shook her head. They were sitting in sewage! What the
hell
was he talking about? It must be the H talking. When was that going to wear off? And when was her lip going to stop bleeding? She licked it again. Never, that’s when. Never. Until all the blood was gone, seeping drop by drop onto the foul basement floor.
“Bakunin was the antithesis of Marx, of Lenin, of Tsarism, Imperialism, Colonialism, Islamism, Fundamentalism, of every
ism.
He abhorred them all for their chains around man. In his book, Bakunin wrote that the revolutionary is a doomed man. ‘
He has no private interests, no affairs, property, not even a name of his own.
’ Which is why I became Milo, instead of who I was.”
“Who were you?”
Milo continued. ‘“
His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion—the revolution. Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose—to destroy it.
’”
Lily sat up straighter. There was a tinge in Milo’s voice, a posture in his demeanor that spoke of something other than narcotics or homelessness. Whose world did this Milo want to destroy?
“That is who I am,” he said. “You want to know who I am? That is me.” He coughed. “With one proviso.”
Lily was afraid to hear.
“That’s right. Amy. She was my passion. She was my muse, my desire, my alms and my church. I could not live without Amy. I still can’t. Where has she gone to? Where has she disappeared to?”
“Whose world did you want to destroy, Milo?” whispered Lily. “Mine?”
He laughed. “You are so small potatoes. I was going to start with something a little bigger than you.”
Lily raised her eyes at him, she stared right through his wounds, through his mangled body. “I have to get to a hospital. Look, you broke my lip, and I can’t stop bleeding. My blood doesn’t clot. I’m sick.”
“Right now, believe it or not, this isn’t about you.”
“If I don’t get to the hospital,” she said, “you won’t have anything to barter with.”
“First we go see your brother. Maybe he can tell us where Amy is.”
“He doesn’t know.”
Milo emitted a hollow laugh.
“And if he did, he wouldn’t tell you. My brother loved her—”
Lily had to stop because Milo emitted such an excruciating groan that it seemed to come not from his throat but from his dissected spleen. The cry was so guttural that Lily, despite her weakness, tried to crawl in the standing water, away from the creature that could make so wretched a sound.
Unblinking, eyes as big as plates, Lily mouthed a conciliation, but it was too late—Milo, fully re-attached to his world, lunged for her, all filthy hands for her, grabbed her around her
elongated, emaciated neck and started shaking her. “Don’t lie to me, Lily,” he hissed. “Why do you speak such lies?”
She tried to say, “All right…”
“They were not in love!” he cried. “
She
wasn’t in love with him! She was in love with me, do you understand? With me.”
“All right…let go…” Inaudibles.
“Say you understand.”
“I understand…let go…”
Milo brought his face closer, and opened his mouth and Lily’s angle was just so, and the dim light was just so, and when he opened his mouth and hissed, she saw that Milo had no tongue.
Lily screamed—mutely.
“She wasn’t in love with him,” said Milo in a sibilant groan. “She was going to kill him.”
“What happened during the peyote dance, Jerry?”
“Milo kept telling us we weren’t taking enough. I don’t know how much we took in the end. The usual dose back in Oklahoma was tiny, micrograms. Very little. But we took…I don’t want to think about it, not now, not ever, but after what happened, I need to believe that our visions became distorted because we took too much. That we were misguided and behaved excessively.”
“Obviously that’s true. What visions?”
“Well, I suddenly believed that I was tall and lean, not short and squat like I am, and had wings and could fly.” He shuddered violently. Even now sometimes, a voice goes off in my head, and the voice is saying, can you fly, Hobbit? Did you ever want to? Did you ever think you could?”
“Whose voice is it?”
“Milo’s.”
Spencer sat like a stone on the bed. Even Gabe sat down next to him.
“I wonder if he plied us full of mescaline deliberately, poisoned us with mescaline…”
“Why would he do that? You were friends…” said Spencer.
“But what if he was done with us? Wanted us out of the way,
perhaps was afraid we’d tell someone about taking the shaman, and other things we were up to? I know he and Amy wanted to return to New York, what if he didn’t want us running around the country knowing about him? I don’t know. But what remains, remains. Petra slit her wrists and watched herself bleed out. We all watched her. We saw her bleeding, believing it was right and she was dancing—or laughing—and we were dancing as she bled—and laughing. Simon beat himself with the gourds and rocks and then hanged himself off a dead mesquite tree. He was swinging so gently, he looked like he was in a child’s playground, on a swing, it was so calm and seemed so right, just the rope moving, his body moving, barely a night-time breeze, and we were still eating peyote.”
“Who were these people, Simon and Petra?”
“Don’t really know. Just some couple we picked up in Death Valley. He was from England. She was from Germany.”
“What happened to Amy?”
“Don’t know. In my memory she seems fine. I think Amy didn’t take as much as the rest of us. She seemed still in control.”
“Milo?”
“Milo—I can’t, no, I can’t.” Jerry suddenly fell to the floor from his chair, writhing, the stumps of his destroyed legs in a seizure, his hands over his face, his head shaking, his torso in spasms. “I can’t, I can’t. I can’t see it, can’t, please.”
Spencer was on the floor with him. “Tell me, talk to me. You’ll never have to talk about this again, but talk to me now.”
With his hands still over his face, Hobbit said muffled words that Spencer thought he had misheard. “Milo took the hunting knife Petra used for her wrists and cut out his tongue.”
He convulsed on the brown stone floor.
“But he didn’t end there. He pulled down his pants and sliced off his penis.”
It was Spencer’s turn to turn away from Jerry and stare with stupefaction into Gabe’s stunned face.
“After this the laughing stopped. That’s how I remember it. The laughing stopped, and there was screaming, Amy’s screaming. Milo was not, he was spluttering in his throat, there was a black fountain gushing out of his mouth, and I thought it was his tongue rising up to heaven, and Amy was trying to—I don’t even know—hug him, help him, stop the bleeding? I remember her pouring what was left of the peyote over Milo’s groin. I thought that was ingenious, like the starfish regenerating itself, the peyote is supposed to heal the sick. Her shirt was off, she was pressing it to his stomach, he was lying down on the ground, and she was bent over him, and we said, is the dance over, and she yelled something through my haze, something about driving him away. I think she drove us down the dirt trail back to the highway. She was a very good driver, Amy. And then she got out with Milo, left me and Lindsey in the van, somewhere on Highway 88. Lindsey and I drove off. We were still fully under the spell. We drove up the winding Apache Trail, to get some more, to find some more, I don’t know. I think we were lost. I believed I wasn’t in a van but in a plane and we were so high up in the mountains, the oxygen was thin and it was going to my brain. I thought Lindsey and I were flying, you see. When I drove off the edge of the cliff, I had no fear, only exhilaration. We flew. I
flew
into the ravine with Lindsey.”
Hobbit’s hands remained over his face. “And here I am.”
Spencer could not believe what he just heard. “You know for sure Milo cut off his dick?” he said dully.
“I remember him throwing it in the fire and dancing around it and then dropping to the ground. I remember it falling in the flames and burning and how the human flesh smelled—pungent and bitter, a choking overbearing scent, and I can’t eat meat to this day—then him falling and I remember Amy trying to pull it black out of the fire and failing…and crying, Ben…oh Ben…”
“You were under an extreme hallucinatory spell. You could have imagined it.”
“Perhaps. But I’ve never smelled cooking human flesh before. And I didn’t imagine flying off that cliff.”
Spencer’s beeper went off suddenly, making Jerry shriek. It was the station. It said urgent.
What are you talking about, kill him?
But Lily couldn’t say it. She spluttered down, coughed down her fear and pain, sank down to the ground, coughed up blood with her terror. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve, felt fainter, fainter, more disconnected from him, as if her lifeblood were being drained from her body by leeches. Andrew! Her mind wasn’t working.
Kill her brother?
What was he talking about?
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lily said. “Amy and he were…”
“They were nothing!” Milo hissed. “Nothing to the end. She sought him out, befriended him, for one purpose only.”
Once again—Lily’s whole life, all of the things she supposed and believed and accepted as true were being forcibly torn away in shreds of skin from her body.
“Amy was non-political. Amy didn’t know politics. What are you talking about?” she said weakly.
“Lily, the universe is so vast, and you are so small, and you barely even know about your corner of it. Amy was radically, wholly, intensely political. She was political in high school, she was political in Hunter, she lived what I lived, she believed all the things that I believed. She was supremely loyal. To me. The art was just a ruse, Lily. And what a good ruse it was.”
Milo snickered. “Didn’t you ever notice that Amy couldn’t draw?”
Oh my God.
The world in the wet basement had stopped making sense. Life was not being righted, Lily didn’t know how to right it. She wiped her mouth, and couldn’t speak for many minutes.
There were things like this. Her life had shown her these things in the last year—which were unfathomable. You go merrily along, believing one thing, not even believing so much as just living—unthinking, blissful—and suddenly all the things that once held you together are gone. Suddenly you win the lottery. Suddenly you get cancer. Suddenly Spencer tells you that the single imperative of his life has been a thing you had never even
suspected.
Suddenly your mother has frost-covered windows in her soul. Suddenly Amy goes missing, and the ground keeps rising and rising, swelling and swelling, and Lily is blindsided by the eruptions, sitting with her back against the basement wall. You have to lose your whole life before you have a hope of regaining it.
Oh my God.
“But what did
I
have to do with anything? Why move in with me? Why single me out?”
Milo grimaced. “You were Amy’s just-in-case, Lily. She never knew how things were going to go, and she wanted you on our side. And look how handy you’ve become. You’re my last resort and I’m going to get to your brother because of you.”
“So why didn’t you do it then?” Lily said dully. “Get to him. What were you waiting for?”
“Who said we were waiting? We tried. We tried to harm him, to show him what it was like to have your life be destroyed by another human being, like he destroyed our life. We just didn’t succeed. We failed in our one planned attempt. Then in another. And then I got unlucky and went away for a couple of years. But we were getting right back on track again, until Amy disappeared.”
“Milo, you’re sick.”
“No, you’re sick, Lily.”
“You were in prison for two years. Why didn’t Amy slip some mescal beans in his coffee if she was going to kill him? Why didn’t she kill him while you were away?” If Lily wasn’t seeing the whole picture, she was sure Milo wasn’t either.
“She was waiting for me to come back. We were in it together.”
“So why did she break up with him if she was going to kill him?”
“It was stupid of her,” he snapped. “Oh, I know the game you’re playing, Lily, trying to sow seeds of doubt in me. But it was just stupid of her, nothing more.”
“It wasn’t stupid, Milo,” said Lily, becoming less afraid between the bloodletting and the speaking and the
not
understanding. She shook her head. “No. It wasn’t stupid. It was deliberate. Why’d she do it?”
“I don’t know what you’re insinuating.”
“Milo, you were in prison. And while you were in prison, isn’t it possible that Amy and my brother fell in love? Maybe once when she was with you a long time ago, she believed what you believed, but somewhere along the line she stopped believing it. She didn’t want to kill him. She didn’t kill him. When you turned up again, she broke up with him to protect him. Couldn’t that be true?”
“No! IT'S A LIE! It’s a lie!”
Lily remembered something else Spencer had told her. “Not only did she break it off with him, but she pushed me to go to Maui last year.”
“Yes, she wanted you out of the way.”
“That’s right, Milo. No alibi. No offense, no defense, but
out of the way.
I’d be safe in Maui.”
“She didn’t want you safe! She didn’t give a shit about you.”
“That’s not true,” gasped Lily. “That’s not true.”
Time ticked away in a theoretical sense only. Time stood still in the wet basement in a building off 9th Street, where Lily sat
on the damp concrete pressed against the wall, trying not to faint, and Milo crouched across from her, drumming fingers on his knees, drumming out what remained of Lily’s life on his homeless rags. “I have to go to the hospital, Milo,” she said. “I’m not collateral, I’m not an alibi, I’m not a hostage. I’m sick, and I will be no good to you in five minutes. I need to get to the hospital now.”
“You’re not going anywhere.”
There was something wrong with him. Something other than the partial tongue. Lily wished she were strong, were healthy, had red blood instead of Beluga blood, had oxygen pumping through her brain instead of maple syrup, she wished she could jump up, hit him with something, maybe with that fire extinguisher that was hanging three yards away from her, strike him, then run for her life, screaming.
“Andrew is armed, he’s protected,” she said. “He never leaves the house alone, he has two Federal agents with him at all times. You will never get to him. Never. They wouldn’t let someone like you within half a mile of my brother. There’s an APB out on you, they’re looking for you everywhere. Where are you going to turn, Milo? How could you get to him?”
Milo laughed and Lily got another glimpse of the blackness inside his mouth. When he finished making his sloshing mirthless cackle, he said, “Lily, did you ever take history in school? Did you ever hear of a Russian tsar, Alexander II? The story of his assassination is a lesson in persistence, a lesson that teaches you that you can kill absolutely anybody, as long as you persevere. Alexander II is a classic study in revolutionary determination.”
Lily was quiet, waiting for the depleted blood to work its way into her brain. “Why—are—we…talking about a Russian Tsar?”
“Because he gave birth to the modern revolutionary, he gave birth to nihilist zeal, to ideals that were more righteous than mere human life, to an ideology that was more noble, more visible, and more permanent than mere humanity.”
“Is there such a thing?”
“It’s all around you, wake up!” said Milo. “Have you not seen it? It shapes everything this world turns on. It’s everywhere in the modern world, it’s everywhere in the old world. And the Russian Tsar gave birth to it. You wouldn’t understand it now, Lily, wasting your life with painting human beings kissing in your little primordial cave, but you’ll understand it soon.”
“I think I’m beginning to understand it now,” said Lily on wet concrete, edging toward the fire extinguisher. She moved her legs an inch and then her torso followed. Another inch. And another. Milo didn’t seem to notice. The extinguisher was three yards away. Nine feet. A dozen times perhaps to edge her sitting body sideways. She was nearly diagonal from him. Soon he would notice and she needed to be prepared for this. How could she get prepared? She lay down on the damp floor. He didn’t mention it, notice it, mind it. When she lifted herself up, she was another half a foot closer.
“In 1879, a school teacher tried to assassinate Alexander II,” said Milo, “He failed and was promptly hanged, as were sixteen of his co-conspirators. A teacher, Lily! That’s how bad things got.”
“Even teachers can be subverted, even teachers are not infallible,” said Lily.
“A few months later,” Milo continued in his rasping drawl, “a faction from the original nihilist group called the People’s Will was determined to succeed where the teacher Soloviev had failed. The People’s Will put nitroglycerine on the Tsar’s train, but they had miscalculated and blew up the wrong train. Then they tried to blow up a bridge over which the Tsar was passing and failed there, too.”
“A bumbling terrorist group then?”
“Not terrorist! Revolutionary! Radical. They were scientists, scholars, engineers, fighting unabated for a new political order.”
“A new political order terrorizing innocent people?”
“Nothing innocent about your brother.”
“Completely innocent, Milo. What did he do?”
“Stole an election for one.”
“He didn’t steal it, he won it. In a horse race by a nose in a photo finish, but a win is a win, even a close one.”
Milo growled like an animal. “A hundred and twenty years ago, a carpenter started work in the Winter Palace, close to the Tsar, and he smuggled small packs of dynamite with him and hid them in his bedsheets. Finally he built a shaft under the Winter Palace dining room, and the bomb went off just when it was calculated that the Tsar would be having his dinner. But again, the dinner had been delayed and the Tsar wasn’t there. Sixty-seven other people were killed or maimed in the explosion.”
Lily was quiet. “Just collateral damage?”
“Completely irrelevant. No one remembers them. They’re dust. But everyone remembers Soloviev, everyone remembers the carpenter. One of the main members of the People’s Will was caught during this brief time and he told the police that nothing they could do would save the life of the Tsar.” Milo stopped. “And that’s what I’m telling you, Lily. Nothing you can do will save the life of your brother. Nothing Amy can do will save the life of your brother.”
Lily lay down again—because she had to; the listening, the adrenaline, the panic was too much for her. What would Spencer do? she thought. Ah. Spencer carried a 10mm automatic weapon, one of the most powerful pistols ever made. Spencer would not be sick, Spencer would be strong, would be healthy. Is that what she was supposed to do now? Get healthy fast? Lily moved another inch or two while lying down on the ground. Milo, absent-mindedly, because he was so intent on his words, moved sideways along with her on the opposite side of the wall, to be closer to her, to be heard better.
“On March first, 1881,” Milo continued, “Alexander II was traveling in a closed carriage from one palace in St. Petersburg to another. When the signal was given, members of the People’s Will threw bombs at the Tsar’s carriage. And missed.”
“Really, the most inept group,” muttered Lily, using it as an opportunity to move once more.
“Inept or not, the bombs burst among the Tsar’s guards, the Cossacks. He got out of his carriage to inspect the damage, and to check on the state of his wounded soldiers. While he was standing out in the open, another revolutionary threw his bomb, and this one, my dear Lily, did not miss. The Tsar was killed instantly, and the explosion was so great that it killed his assassin as well.”
Lily stopped inching over for a moment. “Is that what you want?” she said. “Is that the price you’re willing to pay for your beliefs? You’re willing to lay down your life for my brother’s life?”
“Anything for your brother’s life.” Milo hit his head against the wall, from side to side.
Lily was under the fire extinguisher when she stopped.
“There is no justice in American politics,” continued Milo. “Have you noticed? When a congressman is brought into power with only fifty-two votes that he steals, where is the justice in that?”
“You want more people to vote against my brother? Go rock the vote, Milo.”
“He stole that election!”
“Oh, please. Stop. And what do you care? What do you care? Since when does dull Edward Abrams inspire such passions in high school kids—” She broke off, staring open-mouthed at him.
“When his wife Bernadette Abrams kills herself because she can’t take it any more.”
“Oh, my God,” groaned Lily. “Oh, my God. You’re—”
“Ben Abrams. Very good, Lily Quinn. Nice to meet you.”
Lily stopped listening. Milo was Ben Abrams! Amy was with Ben Abrams, the son of Edward Abrams, Andrew’s opponent! She remembered his mother because after the recount and Andrew’s victory she was made to carry some of the blame for Abrams’s defeat. Lily remembered that Mrs. Abrams had been compared unfavorably with Mrs. Quinn; she was not as gracious as Miera Quinn, as attractive, as young. Miera took this to mean
that she deserved more of the credit for Andrew’s victory, which made her even more insufferable. But Bernadette Adams, unfortunately, already had problems with depression and an addiction to diet pills. Three or four months after the election, she overdosed on her medication.
Her son must have gone into some spiral. And he took Amy with him.
Milo smiled, horrible, almost toothless. “I am going to get him. With or without Amy. Her faith had wavered a little, but I told her with or without her, with a little perseverance, Andrew Quinn would become Alexander II.” He blanched, made a noise of profound anguish. “Oh, how she was when we came back to New York from Phoenix. She was more determined even than I! The forcible retirement of your brother from politics was the focus of our whole existence. It gave our lives meaning, it was our beauty and our joy.”
“Plotting to kill my brother gave your life joy?” said Lily. “The ancient Egyptians would be unhappy with you, Milo.” She was single-mindedly focused on the extinguisher mere inches from her hands. But she would have to jump up, grab it, turn to Milo, run to him maybe, and strike him with it. Did it seem far-fetched? “Plotting to kill my brother, a husband, a brother, a son, a father of two children gave your life beauty?”
“Oh, yes,” said Milo. “Everything that has happened to me is because of him.
Everything.
” He groaned in agony.
The fleeting moment of her own existence flew by Lily like a wounded sparrow. Flew and fell to the ground. She sat up, she got up on her haunches, she crouched. When Milo didn’t move from his sitting position, she stood up. Still he didn’t move. The extinguisher was to the right of her. Was it attached to the wall? Was she going to have to struggle with it, pulling at it, tugging at it? Her heart, pumping tar through her veins at 200 beats a minute could not take the pressure anymore. Lily’s knees began to give out and her arms trembled. Her lip continued to drip congealed blood. The terror and the threat of Milo were being removed from her.