Wild Cards V (23 page)

Croyd paced the small room, swilling coffee, as Dr. Finn read over his case history, snorting on several occasions and at one point making a noise amazingly like a whinny.

“I didn't realize you were the Sleeper,” he said finally, closing the file and looking at his patient. “Some of this material has made the textbooks.” He tapped the folder with a well-manicured finger.

“So I've heard,” Croyd replied.

“Obviously you have a problem you just can't wait for your next cycle to clear up,” Dr. Finn observed. “What is it?”

Croyd managed a bleak smile. “It's the matter of getting on with the crapshoot, of actually going to sleep.”

“What's the problem?”

“I don't know how much of this is in the file,” Croyd told him, “but I've a terrible fear of going to sleep—”

“Yes, there is something about your paranoia. Perhaps some counseling—”

Croyd punched a hole in the wall.

“It's not paranoia,” he said, “not if the danger is real. I could die during my next hibernation. I could wake up as the most disgusting joker you can imagine, with a normal sleep-cycle. Then I'd be stuck that way. It's only paranoia if the fear is groundless, isn't it?”

“Well,” Dr. Finn said, “I suppose we could call it that if the fear is a really big thing, even if it is justified. I don't know. I'm not a psychiatrist. But I also saw in the file that you tend to take amphetamines to keep from falling asleep for as long as you can. You must know that that's going to add a big chemical boost to whatever paranoia is already present.”

Croyd was running his finger around the inside of the hole he had punched in the wall, rubbing away loose pieces of plaster.

“But of course a part of this is semantics,” Dr. Finn went on. “It doesn't matter what we call it. Basically you're afraid to go to sleep. This time, though, you feel that you should?”

Croyd began cracking his knuckles as he paced. Fascinated, Dr. Finn counted each cracking noise. When the seventh popping sound occurred, he began to wonder what Croyd would do when he was out of knuckles.

“Eight, nine, ten…” he subvocalized.

Croyd punched another hole in the wall.

“Uh, would you like some more coffee?” Dr. Finn asked him.

“Yes, about a gallon.”

Dr. Finn was gone, as if a starting gate had opened.

Later, not telling Croyd it was decaf he was guzzling, Dr. Finn continued, “I'm afraid to give you any more drugs on top of all the amphetamines you've taken.”

“I've made two promises,” Croyd said, “that I'd try sleeping this time, that I wouldn't resist. But if you can't knock me out fast, I'll probably leave rather than put up with all this anxiety. If that happens, I know I'll be back on bennies and dexes fast. So hit me with a narcotic. I'm willing to take my chances.”

Dr. Finn shook his mane. “I'd rather try something simpler and a lot safer first. What say we do a little brain wave entrainment and suggestion?”

“I'm not familiar with the procedure,” Croyd said.

“It's not traumatic. The Russians have been experimenting with it for years. I'll just clip these little soft pads to your ears,” he said, swabbing the lobes with something moist, “and we'll pulse a low amp current through your head—say, four hertz. You won't even feel it.”

He adjusted a control on the box from which the leads emerged.

“Now what?” Croyd asked.

“Close your eyes and rest for just a minute. You may notice a kind of drifting feeling.”

“Yeah.”

“But there's heaviness, too, within it. Your arms are heavy and your legs are heavy.”

“They're heavy,” Croyd acknowledged.

“It will be hard to think of anything in particular. Your mind will just go on drifting.”

“I'm drifting,” Croyd agreed.

“And it should feel very good. Probably better than you've felt all day, finally getting a chance to rest. Breathe slowly and let go in all the tight places. You're almost there already. This is great.”

Croyd said something, but it was muttered, indistinguishable.

“You are doing very well. You're quite good at this. Usually I count backward from ten. For you, though, we can start at eight, since you're almost asleep already. Eight. You are far away and it feels fine. Nine. You are already asleep, but now you are going into it even more deeply. Ten. You will sleep soundly, without fear or pain. Sleep.”

Croyd began to snore.

There were no spare beds, but since Croyd had stiffened to mannequinlike rigidity before turning bright green, his respiration and heartbeat slowing to something between that of a hibernating bear and a dead one, Dr. Finn had had him placed, erect, at the rear of a broom closet, where he did not take up much space, and he drove a nail into the door and hung the chart on it, after having entered, “Patient extremely suggestible.”

 

MAY 1987

 

All the King's Horses

IV

“I NEED A MASK,”
he said.

The clerk towered above him, grotesquely tall and thin, with a manner as imperious as the pharaoh whose death mask he wore. “Of course.” His eyes were gold, like the skin of his mask. “Perhaps you had something specific in mind, sir?”

“Something impressive,” Tom said. You could buy a cheap plastic mask for under two bucks in any Jokertown candy store, good enough to hide your face, but in Jokertown a cheap mask was like a cheap suit. Tom wanted to be taken seriously today, and Holbrook's was the most exclusive mask shop in the city, according to
New York
magazine.

“If you'll permit me, sir?” the clerk said, producing a tape measure. Tom nodded and studied the display of elaborate tribal masks on the far wall as his head was measured. “I'll be just a minute,” the man said as he vanished through a dark velvet curtain into a back room.

It was more than a minute. Tom was the only customer in the shop. It was a small place, dimly lit, richly appointed. Tom felt acutely uncomfortable. When the clerk returned, he was carrying a half dozen mask boxes under his arm. He set them on the counter and opened one for Tom's inspection.

A lion's head rested on a bed of black tissue paper. The face was done in some soft, pale leather, as buttery to the touch as the finest suede. A nimbus of long golden hair surrounded the features. “Surely nothing is as impressive as the king of beasts,” the clerk told him. “The hair is authentic, every strand taken from a lion's mane. I couldn't help but notice your glasses, sir. If you'll provide us with your prescription, Holbrook's will be pleased to have custom eyepieces made to fit.”

“It's very nice,” Tom said, fingering the hair. “How much?”

The clerk looked at him coolly. “Twelve hundred dollars, sir. Without the prescription eyepieces.”

Tom pulled back his hand abruptly. The golden eyes in the pharaoh's face regarded him with condescending courtesy and just a hint of amusement. Without a word Tom turned on his heel and walked out of Holbrook's.

He bought a rubber frogface for $6.97 in a Bowery storefront with a newspaper rack by the door and a soda fountain in the back. The mask was a little too big when he pulled it down over his head, and he had to wear his glasses balanced on the oversized green ears, but the design had a certain sentimental value. To hell with being impressive.

Jokertown made him very nervous. As many times as he had flown over its streets, walking those same streets was another proposition entirely. Thankfully the Funhouse was right on the Bowery. The cops avoided the darker alleys of Jokertown as much as any other sane person, even more so since the start of this gang war, but nats still frequented the joker cabarets along the Bowery, and where the tourists went the prowl cars went as well. Nat money was the lifeblood of the Jokertown economy, and that blood ran thin enough as it was.

Even at this hour the sidewalks were still busy, and no one took much notice of Tom in his ill-fitting frogface. By the second block he was almost comfortable. In the last twenty years he'd seen all the ugliness Jokertown had to offer on his TV monitors; this was just a different angle on things.

In the old days the sidewalk in front of the Funhouse would have been crowded by cabs dropping off fares and limousines waiting at the curb for the end of the second show. But the sidewalk was empty tonight, not even a doorman, and when Tom entered, he found the checkroom unattended as well. He pushed through the double doors; a hundred different frogs stared at him from the silvered depths of the famous Funhouse mirrors. The man up on stage had a head the size of a baseball, and huge pebbled bags of skin drooping all over his bare torso, swelling and emptying like bellows or bagpipes, filling the room with a strange sad music as air sighed from a dozen unlikely orifices. Tom stared at him with a sick fascination until the maître d' appeared at his side. “A table, sir?” He was squat and round as a penguin, features hidden by a Beethoven mask.

“I'd like to see Xavier Desmond,” Tom said. His voice, partially muffled by the frog mask, sounded strange in his ears.

“Mr. Desmond only returned from abroad a few days ago,” the maître d' said. “He was a delegate on Senator Hartmann's world tour,” he added proudly. “I'm afraid he's quite busy.”

“It's important,” Tom said.

The maître d' nodded. “Whom shall I say is calling?”

Tom hesitated. “Tell him it's … an old friend.”

When the maître d' had left them alone, Des got up and came around the desk. He moved slowly, thin lips pressed together tightly beneath a long pink trunk that grew from his face where a normal man would have a nose. Standing in the same room with him, you saw things you could not see in a face on a TV screen: how old he was, and how sick. His skin hung on him as loosely as his clothes, and his eyes were filmed with pain.

“How was the tour?” Tom asked him.

“Exhausting,” Des said. “We saw all the misery of the world, all the suffering and hatred, and we tasted its violence firsthand. But I'm sure you know all that. It was in the papers.” He lifted his trunk, and the fingers that fringed its end lightly touched Tom's mask. “Pardon, old friend, but I cannot seem to place your face.”