NOS4A2 A Novel

The Library


MAGGIE LEIGH’S OFFICE BEHIND THE FISH TANK WAS STILL there—in a manner of speaking. The tank was empty, with filthy Scrabble tiles heaped in the bottom, the cloudy glass walls giving a view of what had once been the children’s library. Maggie’s gunmetal desk remained, although the surface had been gouged and scratched and someone had spray-painted a gaping red vulva on one side. An unlit candle bent over a pool of violet wax. Maggie’s paperweight—Chekhov’s gun, and yes, Vic got the joke now—held her place in the hardcover she was reading, Ficciones by Borges. There was a tweed couch that Vic didn’t remember. It was a yard-sale number, some rents in it patched with duct tape and some holes not patched at all, but at least it wasn’t damp, didn’t stink of mildew.

“What happened to your koi?” Vic asked.

“I’m not sure. I think s-s-someone ate it,” Maggie said. “I hope it m-m-made sss-someone a good meal. No one sh-sh-should go hungry.”

There were syringes and rubber tubing on the floor. Vic was careful not to step on any needles as she made her way to the couch and lowered herself upon it.

“Those aren’t m-m-m-mine,” Maggie said, nodding to the syringes, and she went for the broom that was leaning in a corner where once there had been a coatrack. The broom itself doubled as the coatrack now; Maggie’s filthy old fedora hung upon it. “I haven’t sh-sh-shot up ss-ss-since last year. Too expensive. I don’t know how anyone can afford to get high in this economy.”

Maggie set her hat on her sherbet-colored hair with the dignity and care of a drunk dandy about to sway out of the absinthe hall and into the rainy Paris night. She took up her broom and swept. The syringes clattered in a glassy sort of way across the cement.

“I can wrap your leg and give you some Oxy,” Maggie said. “Way cheaper than heroin.”

She bent to her desk, found a key, unlocked the bottom drawer. She reached in and removed an orange pill bottle, a carton of cigarettes, and a rotting purple Scrabble bag.

“Sobriety is even cheaper than OxyContin,” Vic said.

Maggie shrugged and said, “I only take as needed.” She poked a cigarette into the corner of her mouth, lit a match with her thumbnail: a good trick.

“When is it needed?”

“It’s a painkiller. I take it to kill pain.” She drew smoke, put the lighter down. “That’s all. What happened to you, Vuh-V-V-Vic?”

Vic settled back into the couch, head on the armrest. She could not bend her left knee all the way or unbend it, could hardly bear to move it. She could hardly bear to look at it; it was twice the size of the other knee, a purple-and-brown map of bruises.

She began to talk, telling about the last two days as best as she could remember, getting things out of order, providing explanations that seemed more confusing than the things they were meant to explain. Maggie did not interrupt or ask for clarification. A faucet ran for half a minute, then stopped. Vic let out a sharp, pained breath when Maggie put a cold, damp washcloth against her left knee and gently held it there.

Maggie opened her medicine bottle and shook out a little white pill. Fragrant blue smoke unspooled from her cigarette, draped her like the ghost of a scarf.

“I can’t take that,” Vic said.

“Sh-sh-sure you can. You don’t have to d-d-dry-swallow ’em. I’ve got lemonade. It’s a little warm but pretty tasty!”

“No, I mean, it’ll put me to sleep. I’ve slept too much already.”

“On a concrete f-f-f-floor? After you were gassed? That isn’t s-suh-sleep.” She gave Vic the tablet of OxyContin. “That’s unconsciousness.”

“Maybe after we talk.”

“If I try to help you ff-ff-find out what you want to know, do you pruh-p-promise you won’t r-ride off till you rest?”

Vic reached for the other woman’s hand and squeezed it. “I do.” Maggie smiled and patted Vic’s knuckles, but Vic did not let go of her. She said, “Thank you, Maggie. For everything. For trying to warn me. For helping me. I’d give anything to take back the way I acted when I saw you in Haverhill. I was scared of you. That’s not an excuse. There isn’t any excuse. There’s a lot of things I wish I could redo. You can’t imagine. I wish there was something I could do to show you how sorry I am. Something I could give you besides words.”

Maggie’s whole face lit up: a child seeing a kite lift into the blue, blue sky.

“Oh, darn, V-V-V-Vic. You’re gonna muh-m-make me cry! What’s better in the whole world than words? Besides, you’re already doing s-s-something,” Maggie said. “You’re here. It’s so nice to have someone to talk to! Not that it’s m-m-m-much fun to talk to m-muh-mmme!”

“Shhh. You shush with that. Your stammer doesn’t bother me half as much as it bothers you,” Vic said. “The first time we met, you told me that your Scrabble tiles and my bike were both knives for cutting through the stitches between reality and thought. You had that right. That’s not the only thing they can cut. They wound up cutting both of us good. I know that my bridge—the Shorter Way—damaged me. In here.” She reached up and tapped her left temple. “I traveled across it a few times too many, and it put my mind out of joint. I’ve never been right. I burned down my home. I burned down my life. I ran away from both of the boys I love because I was scared of damaging them or not being enough for them. That’s what my knife did to me. And you’ve got this thing with your speech—”

“’S like I mmm-mm-managed to cut out my own tongue with my knife.”

“Seems like the only one who never winds up bleeding from using his psychic knife is Manx.”

“Oh, no! Oh, no, V-V-V-Vic! Muh-Muh-Manx has had it worst! He’s been bled completely dry!” Maggie lowered her eyelids, drawing a deep, luxurious lungful of smoke. The tip of her cigarette throbbed in the darkness. She removed the cigarette from her mouth, looked at it thoughtfully for a moment, and then stabbed it into her own bare thigh, through one of the tears in her jeans.

“Jesus!” Vic shouted. She sat up so quickly that the room lurched hard in one direction and her stomach lurched hard in the other. She fell back against the armrest, overcome by dizziness.

“For the best,” Maggie said through clenched teeth. “I want to be able to talk to you. Not just sp-spray you with spit.” The breath spurted out of her in short, pained exhalations. “’S only way I can get my tiles to say anything anyhow, and sometimes even that isn’t enough. Was necessary. What were we saying?”

“Oh, Maggie,” Vic said.

“Don’t make a big deal. Let’s get to it, or I’ll have to do that again. And the m-m-more I do it, the less well it works.”

“You said Manx is bled dry.”

“That’s right. The Wraith makes him young and strong. It p-preserves him. But it’s cost him his ability to feel regret or empathy. That’s what his knife cut out of him: his humanity.”

“Yeah. Except it’s going to cut the same thing out of my son, too. The car changes the children Manx takes with him on his trips to Christmasland. It turns ’em into f*ckin’ vampires or something. Doesn’t it?”

“Close enough,” Maggie said. She rocked back and forth, eyes shut against the pain in her leg. “Christmasland is an inscape, right? A place Manx invented out of thought.”

“A make-believe place.”

“Oh, it’s a real place. Ideas are as real as rocks. Your bridge is real, too, you know. It isn’t actually a covered bridge, of course. The rafters, the roof, the boards under your tires—they’re stage dressing for s-s-something more basic. When you left the Gasmask Man’s house and came here, you didn’t cross a bridge. You crossed an idea that looked like a bridge. And when M-Muh-Manx gets to Christmasland, he’ll be arriving at an idea of happiness that looks like . . . I don’t know . . . Santa Claus’s workshop?”

“I think it’s an amusement park.”

“Amusement p-park. That sounds about right. Manx doesn’t have happiness anymore. Only amusement. It’s an idea of endless fun, endless youth, dressed up in a form his dumb little mind can understand. His vehicle is the instrument that opens the way. S-s-suffering and unhappiness provide the energy to run the car and open his p-passage to that puh-p-place. This is also why he has to take the kids with him. The car needs something he no longer has. He drains unhappiness from the children just like a B-movie v-v-vampire sucking blood.”

“And when he uses them up, they’re monsters.”

“They’re still children, I think. They’re just children who can’t understand anything except fun. They’ve been remade into Manx’s idea of childhood perfection. He wants kids to be f-f-ffforever innocent. Innocence ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, you know. Innocent little kids rip the wings off flies, because they don’t know any better. That’s innocence. The car takes what Manx needs and changes his passengers so they can live in his world of thought. It sharpens their teeth and robs them of their need for warmth. A world of pure thought would be pretty cold, I bet. Now, take your pill, Vic. You need to rest and get your strength back before you ride out of here to f-f-face him again.” She held out her palm with the tablet in it.

“Maybe I could use something. Not just for my knee. For my head,” Vic told her, and then winced at a fresh stab of pain in her left eyeball. “I wonder why I always feel it behind my left eye, whenever I use my bridge. Been like that since childhood.” She laughed shakily. “I wept blood once, you know.”

Maggie said, “Creative ideas form in the right side of the brain. But did you know the right side of your brain sees out from your left eye? And it must take a lot of energy to shove a thought out of your head and into the real world. All that energy zapping you right”—she pointed at Vic’s left eye—“there.”

Vic looked longingly at the pill. Still she hesitated.

“You are going to answer my questions, yes? With your tiles.”

“You haven’t asked anything I need them for yet.”

“I need to know how to kill him. He died in prison, but it didn’t stick.”

“You already know the answer to that one, I think.”

Vic took the OxyContin from Maggie’s hand and accepted the carton of lemonade when she offered it. The juice was warm and sticky and sweet and good. She knocked the Oxy down on the first swallow. The pill left a faint, bitter aftertaste.

“The car,” Vic said. “The Wraith.”

“Yeah. When the car fell apart, he fell apart. At some point someone probably yanked the engine right out of it, and he dropped dead at last. But then the engine was put back and the car was fixed up, and there you go. As long as the car is roadworthy, so is he.”

“So if I destroy the car . . . I destroy him.”

Maggie took a long suck on her cigarette. The tip of it was the brightest thing in the dark. “Bet on it.”

“Okay,” Vic said. It had only been a minute or two, but the pill was already starting to kick in. When she closed her eyes, she felt as if she were gliding soundlessly on her old Tuff Burner, moving through a dim and shady forest . . .

“Vic,” Maggie said gently, and Vic pulled her head up off the armrest and blinked rapidly, realized she had been just a moment from dozing off.

“Some pill,” she said.

“What do you need to ask my tiles?” Maggie prodded. “You better get to it, while you still can.”

“My kid. I’m going to have to go to Christmasland to get him. They’ll be there tonight, I think, or early tomorrow morning, and I’m going to be there, too. But by then Wayne will be . . . different. I could hear it in his voice when I talked to him. He’s fighting it, but the car is making him into one of those f*cking things. Can I fix him? I need to know that. If I get him back, is there some way to cure him?”

“I don’t know. No child has ever come back ff-from Christmasland.”

“So ask. Your bag of letters can tell you that, can’t it?”

Maggie slid off the edge of the couch onto the floor. She gave the moth-eaten sack a gentle shake. The tiles clicked and rattled within.

“Let’s see what we can s-suh-see,” she said, and plunged a hand inside. She troweled about, came up with a fistful of tiles, and dropped them on the floor.

XOXOOXOXXO

Maggie stared at them with a look of weary dismay.

“This is all I get most days. Hugs and kisses f-f-for the lonely, stammering girl.” Maggie swept one hand across the floor, grabbing the letters and jamming them back into the bag.

“Okay. It’s okay. It was worth a try. You can’t know everything. You can’t find out everything.”

“No,” Maggie said. “When you come to a library to f-f-find something out, you should get what you want.”

She dug around in her faux-velvet pouch and came up with another fistful of tiles, threw them at the floor.

PPPPPPPPP

“Don’t st-st-stick your tongue out at me,” she said to her letters.

She snatched up the tiles, dropped them in the bag, then shoved her hand in the Scrabble purse once again. This time her arm disappeared almost to the elbow, and Vic heard what sounded like hundreds of tiles grinding and clattering around. Maggie came up with another fistful, let them fall.

FUFUFUFU

“F*ck me? F*ck me?” Maggie cried. “Throw my earrings back in my face? Fff-f-ff-fuh-f*ck you.”

She plucked her cigarette out of her mouth, but before she could sink it into her own arm, Vic sat up, caught her wrist.

“Don’t,” Vic said. The room swooped this way and that, as if Vic were sitting in a swing. Still, she held Maggie’s arm. Maggie stared up at her, her eyes bright in their sunken hollows . . . bright and frightened and exhausted. “We’ll get it another time, Maggie. Maybe I’m not the only one who needs some rest. You were in Massachusetts a week and a half ago. You came back by bus the whole way?”

“I hitched some,” Maggie said.

“When’s the last time you ate?”

“Yesterday I had a s-s-s-suh-sandwich from s-s-s-s-s—” And like that she went mute. Her face darkened from red to a deep, grotesque shade of violet, as if she were strangling. Spit foamed at the corners of her lips.

“Shhh,” Vic said. “Shhh. Okay. So we’ll get you something to eat.”

Maggie exhaled smoke, glanced around for a place to extinguish her cigarette, and then put it out in the far armrest. It hissed, and a black coil of smoke drifted toward the ceiling.

“After your nap, V-V-Vic.”

Vic nodded, slumping backward. She didn’t have it in her to wrangle with Maggie.

“I’ll nap and you’ll nap,” Vic said. “And then we’ll get you some food. Get you some clothes. Save Wayne. Save the library. Make things better. Do it all. Wonder Twin powers activate. Lie down.”

“Okay. You take the couch. I’ve got a nice old blanket. I can just stretch out on the f-f-fl-fluh—”

“With me, Maggie. There’s room on the couch for us both.” Vic was awake but seemed to have lost the ability to force her eyes open again.

“You wouldn’t mind?”

“No, sweetheart,” Vic said, as if she were speaking to her son.

Maggie slipped onto the couch beside her and pressed herself to Vic’s side, her bony hip against Vic’s, her bony elbow across Vic’s stomach.

“Will you hold me, Vic?” Maggie asked in a tremulous voice. “It’s been a long time s-s-since anyone nice held m-m-muh-me. I m-m-muh-mean, I know you’re not into girls, since you have a k-k-kid and all, but—”

Vic put her arm around Maggie’s waist and held the thin, shivering woman against her.

“You can shut up now, you know,” Vic said.

“Oh,” Maggie said. “Oh, okay. That’s a relief.”





Laconia


THEY WOULDN’T LET LOU WALK ANYWHERE, DIDN’T WANT TO TAKE A chance that the fat man might get dizzy and fall onto his face, so after his examination he sat in a wheelchair and a man-nurse wheeled him to recovery.

The man-nurse was his age and had sleepy eyes with dark circles under them, and a jutting Cro-Magnon forehead. His name tag said, improbably, BILBO. He had a spaceship tattooed on one hairy forearm: Serenity from the TV show Firefly.

“‘I am a leaf on the wind,’” Lou said, and the man-nurse said, “Dude, don’t say that. I don’t want to start crying on the job.”

The detective followed, carrying Lou’s clothes in a paper bag. Lou didn’t like the way the guy smelled of nicotine and menthol, but mostly of nicotine, and he didn’t like the way the guy seemed too small for his clothes so everything sagged: his shirt, his clam-colored trousers, his shabby jacket.

Daltry asked, “What are you two talking about?”

“Firefly,” the man-nurse said, without looking back. “We’re Browncoats.”

“What’s that mean? You two gonna gay-marry?” Daltry asked, and laughed at his own joke.

Bilbo the man-nurse said, “Jesus. Go back to the fifties, dude.” But he didn’t say it loud enough for Daltry to hear.

Recovery was a single big room containing two rows of beds, each bed parked in its own little compartment defined by pale green curtains. Bilbo wheeled Lou almost to the far end of the room before turning toward an empty bed on the right.

“Your suite, monsieur,” Bilbo said.

Lou heaved himself up onto the mattress while Bilbo hung a bright sack of fluid from the stainless-steel rack standing alongside. Lou still had the intravenous cannula taped to his right arm, and Bilbo plugged it into the drip. Lou felt the fluid right away, a strong, icy stream that measurably dropped the whole temperature of his body.

“Should I be afraid?” Lou asked.

“Of an angioplasty? No. On the scale of medical complexity, it’s only slightly trickier than having your wisdom teeth removed. Just have the surgery. No fear.”

“Uh-uh,” Lou said. “I’m not talking about the angioplasty. I mean the stuff you’re pumping into me. What is it? Something serious?”

“Oh. This is nothing. You’re not going under the knife today, so you don’t get the good shit. This is a blood-thinning agent. Also, it’ll mellow you out. Got to keep the mellows going.”

“It’ll put me to sleep?”

“Faster than a marathon of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.”

Daltry dropped the paper bag into the chair next to the bed. Lou’s clothes were folded up and stacked in a pile, his boxers on top, big as a pillowcase.

“How long has he got to be here?” Daltry asked.

“We’ll hold him for observation overnight.”

“That’s not real good goddamn timing.”

“Artery stenosis is famously inconvenient,” Bilbo said. “It never calls in advance. Just drops in to party whenever it feels like it.”

Daltry slipped his cell phone out of his pocket.

“You can’t use that here.”

Daltry said, “Where can I use it?”

“You’d have to walk back through the emergency room and go outside.”

Daltry nodded, gave Lou a slow, disapproving look. “Don’t go anywhere, Mr. Carmody.” He turned and started down the length of the room.

“And he paddled away in his douche canoe,” Bilbo said.

“What if I need to make a call?” Lou said. “Can I make a call before I go beddy-bye? My son, man. Have you heard about my son? I need to call my parents. They’re not going to be able to sleep tonight until I let them know what’s happening.”

A lie. If he got his mother on the phone and started telling her about Wayne, she would have no idea who he was talking about. She was in assisted living and only capable of recognizing Lou himself one day out of three. It would be even more surprising if his father were interested in the latest news. He had been dead for four years.

“I can snag you a phone,” Bilbo said. “Something we can plug in next to the bed. Just try and relax. I’ll be back in five.”

He stepped away from the bed, drew the curtain shut, and walked away.

Lou didn’t wait, and he didn’t think about it. He was the kid on the motorcycle again, hauling skinny Vic McQueen up onto the seat behind him, feeling her trembling arms around his waist.

He threw his legs over the side of the cot and jerked the cannula out of his arm. A fat BB of blood swelled up from the needle hole.

As soon as he heard Vic’s voice over the earpiece, he’d felt the blood rushing to his head, had felt his pulse banging in his temples. His head had started to get heavy, as if his skull were full of liquid metal instead of brain tissue. What was worse, though, was that the room began to move in his peripheral vision. That sensation of the world beginning to rotate around him made him motion sick, and he had to stare directly down at the table to block it out. But then his head got so heavy he tilted over and kicked his chair out from under him.

It wasn’t a heart attack, was it? he asked the doctor while she listened to his throat with her stethoscope. Because if it was a heart attack, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.

No. Not a heart attack. But you may have suffered from a transient ischemic attack, she said, a pretty black woman with a smooth, dark, ageless face.

Yeah, Lou told her. I figured it was either a heart attack or a transient schematic attack. Transient schematic attack was my second choice.

Ischemic. It’s a kind of mini-stroke. I’m hearing a hollow whoosh in your carotid artery.

Ah. That’s what you were listening to. I was just about to tell you I think my heart is lower.

She smiled. She looked like she wanted to pinch his cheek and give him a cookie. What I’m hearing is serious plaque buildup.

Seriously? I brush twice a day.

Different kind of plaque. In your blood. Too much bacon. She patted his belly. Too much butter on your popcorn. You’ll have to have an angioplasty. Possibly a stent. If you don’t receive one, you could suffer a major, even fatal stroke.

I’ve been ordering salads when I go to McDonald’s, he told her, and was surprised to feel tears stinging at the backs of his eyes. He was, nonsensically, relieved that the cute little FBI agent wasn’t around to see him crying again.

Now Lou grabbed the brown paper bag in the chair and wiggled into his underwear and jeans, pulling them on under his hospital johnny.

He had passed out after talking to Vic; the world had gone greasy and slick, and he couldn’t hold on to it. It squirted right out of his fingers. But up until the moment he passed out, he was listening to her. He understood, just from the pitch of her voice, that she wanted him to do something, that she was trying to tell him something. I have to make one stop, and then I’m going to go see a man who can get some ANFO for me. With the right ANFO, I can blow Manx’s world right off the map.

Tabitha Hutter, and all the other cops who were listening in on the call, heard what Vic wanted them to hear: They heard “info” instead of “ANFO.” It was like one of Vic’s Search Engine pictures, only a picture made of sound instead of color. You didn’t notice what was right in front of you because you didn’t know how to look—or, in this case, listen. But Lou had always known how to listen to her.

Lou yanked off his johnny, pulled on his shirt.

ANFO. Her father was the man who blew things up—took out ledge rock, tree stumps, and old pilings with ANFO—and who had blown Vic off without a look back. He had not ever even held Wayne, and Vic had talked to him perhaps only a dozen times in a dozen years. Lou had spoken with him more often, had sent him photos and video of Wayne by way of e-mail. He knew from things Vic had told him that the man was a wife beater and a cheat. He knew, too, from things Vic had not told him, that she missed him and loved him with an intensity perhaps matched only by what she felt for her son.

Lou had never met the man but knew where he lived, knew his number—and knew that Vic was going to see him. Lou would be waiting when she got there. She wanted him there, or she wouldn’t have told him.

He stuck his head out through the curtain, looked down an aisle made by rows of hanging sheets.

He saw a doctor and a nurse—a female nurse, not Bilbo—standing together, running down items on a clipboard, but their backs were turned to him. Lou carried his sneakers in one hand, slipped into the aisle, turned right, and pushed through a pair of swinging doors into a wide white hallway.

He wound his way through the building, moving in a direction that felt like it would take him away from the emergency-room entrance. He tugged his Vans on as he went.

The lobby ceiling was fifty feet high and had big slabs of pink crystal hanging from it, giving it a Fortress of Solitude vibe. Water splashed in a black slate fountain. Voices echoed. The smell of coffee and muffins wafting from a Dunkin’ Donuts made his stomach clutch with hunger. The thought of eating a sugared jelly doughnut was like imagining putting the barrel of a loaded gun in his mouth.

I don’t need to live forever, he thought. Just please for however long it takes to get my son back.

A pair of nuns were getting out of a cab, right out in front of the revolving door. That was damn close to divine intervention as far as Lou was concerned. He held the door for them, then climbed into the backseat. The rear of the cab sank on its springs.

“Where we going?” the cabbie said.

To jail, Lou thought, but what he said was, “Train station.”


BILBO PRINCE WATCHED THE CAB LURCH AWAY FROM THE CURB IN A gush of filthy blue exhaust, noted the number and the license plate, then turned and walked away. He drifted down halls, up stairs, down stairs, and exited at last through the ER entrance on the opposite side of the hospital. The old cop, Daltry, waited there, having himself a smoke.

“He took off,” Bilbo said. “Like you said he would. Caught a cab outside the lobby.”

“You get the cab number?”

“And the license,” Bilbo said, and told him both.

Daltry nodded and opened his cell phone. He pressed a single button and put it to his ear, then half turned away from Bilbo.

“Yep. He’s moving,” he said to whoever was on the other end of the line. “Hutter says just watch him, so we watch him. See where he goes and be ready to step in if the fat bastard starts to vapor-lock again.”

Daltry hung up, pitched his smoke, and started moving away, into the parking lot. Bilbo trotted after him and tapped his shoulder. The old guy looked back. His brow furrowed, and his expression suggested he recognized Bilbo but already couldn’t quite remember who he was or how they knew each other.

“That it, man?” Bilbo said. “Where’s the love?”

“Oh. Oh, right.” Daltry dug around in his pocket and came up with a ten-dollar bill and stuck it in Bilbo’s hand. “There you go. Live long and prosper. Isn’t that what you Trekkers say?”

Bilbo looked from the grimy ten-dollar bill—he’d been expecting at least a twenty—to the tattoo of Serenity on his hairy arm. “Yeah. I guess. But I’m not a Star Trek fan. My tattoo here? This is Serenity, not the Enterprise. I’m a Browncoat, man.”

“More like turncoat,” Daltry said, and laughed. Flecks of spittle hit Bilbo in the face.

Bilbo wanted to throw the ten dollars at his feet and walk away, show the ugly, loudmouthed f*ck what he thought of his money, but then he reconsidered and stowed the cash in his pocket. He was saving for a Buffy tattoo on the other arm. Ink wasn’t cheap.