“Don’t worry. No bill for my services,” he said.
“What happened to your face?” I asked.
“My face? Why? What’s wrong with my face?”
“It isn’t there.”
“Oh, that. Took too many left hooks.”
“That’s not from boxing.”
“Okay, you got me. That’s what I tell women in bars.”
“Do they believe you?”
“Never.”
“What happened to your face?”
“I was in an accident.”
“There aren’t any scars.”
“It was an accident of birth.”
“Where? Where did the accident take place?”
“In a hospital.”
“Which hospital?” I asked, knowing what the answer would be even with my brain swimming in drugs, knowing the answer.
“This one. It wasn’t always a VA hospital.”
“No. It was a research hospital,” I said. “For the DOE. I know what kind of research, too. You were here. Another resident of Kara Bolka.”
“Kara Bolka,” he repeated. “Ahhh. That was just their nickname for it. The docs. A kind of a joke, really. We weren’t residents of Kara Bolka. We were its refugees. We lived like rats in its shadow. It was our bogey-place. It’s the story they told us to keep us scared.”
“Yes. But who was the bogeyman? Bogey-places have bogeymen.”
He smiled. “I think you met him.”
“Yeah. Someone else did too. Only she didn’t know it at the time. She was 3.”
“The little girl,” he whispered. “Bailey.”
Believe in fairy tales? Ever read one as an adult? Maybe you should. Even when you stop believing in goblins, they can scare the shit out of you.
Fairy tales can be read two ways.
“Bailey saw things the way a little girl would,” I said.
My voice sounded like radio static.
“Rescue workers in white hazard suits looked like something else. They looked like robots with no faces. The noise their radiation detectors made sounded like a language-clicking away at one another like dolphins. Doctors with surgical masks became aliens without mouths. Their MASH unit looked like a spaceship. She remembered a bright blue light-he had the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen.”
“Thank God for the we are not alone crowd, huh?”
“Why?”
“Why? Why what?”
“Why didn’t Bailey become another refugee? Why wasn’t she carted off like the others-like Benjy? Why wasn’t she locked away in Kara Bolka?”
“I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t born yet.”
“You were born after it happened. Here.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Your mother-what happened to her?”
“What do you think happened to her?” he said. “Neutrons and gamma rays happened to her. She was microwaved. I’m what came out of the oven.” He laughed again, but this time, it sounded thin and bitter.
“But you…?”
“What?”
“You’re doing their dirty work.”
“I am their dirty work. Besides, my job opportunities were kind of limited. Call me an honorary trustee who graduated to bigger and better things. And listen, you can’t beat government pensions.”
“Which part of the government? The DOE?”
“Let’s just say a part that doesn’t appear in their directory.”
“You became their hired killer. Their plumber. Even after what they did?”
“Learn your history. You know who the worst guards in the Nazi camps were? The most brutal? Not the Nazis. The kapos-the Jews given their very own rubber truncheons.”
“You weren’t being threatened with the gas chamber.”
“No, just with the top floor of this hospital. That was enough. Besides, they didn’t destroy Littleton Flats. The ghost in the machine did.”
“I’m not talking about Littleton Flats. I’m talking about what they did to Benjamin. What they did to you.”
That eerie falsetto. The Italians called it something else, of course.
Castrato.
“They mutilated you. When you were a baby. Just like they did to Benjamin. They castrated both of you.”
That smile again-you could see it for what it was now. Sneer first, and it won’t hurt as much when they sneer back.
“See this?” He pointed to his face. “Sure you do. Take a good look at it. They thought one of these was enough. They were protecting the gene pool. Hard to blame them.”
I thought his expression was saying something else. Look what they did to me. Look.
“How many survived?” I asked him. “Benjamin, your mom. How many made it out that day?”
“Sorry. I told you. I wasn’t born yet.”
“When the hospital turned VA, they gave them legends,” I said. “The children that survived. The names of MIA vets around the same age. They needed to account for them being wards of the VA-to absorb them into the system. Benjamin Washington became Benjamin Briscoe. He was lucky-he got to keep his first name. And there was one other survivor, wasn’t there? At least one. The one who wandered into Littleton three years ago and went to sleep in the town gazebo. That’s what Wren found out when he went to Washington-why he came back and began to ask questions about the flood.”
“That’s on a need-to-know basis,” he said. “Let me check the list and see if you’re on it. I’ll get back to you.”
“I made copies of everything I have. Everything I know. It’s with the right people.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, looking almost bored. “I don’t think the right people answer your calls.”
“A story’s a story.”
“And you’re a real storyteller. Only your stories aren’t real. They come with grain of salt included. Pound of salt, if we’re being honest. Of course, we’re not. Being honest, I mean. You didn’t make copies of anything. The right people? Even the National Enquirer won’t take your calls.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I didn’t make copies of anything. No one will believe me. So you can let me go.”
He didn’t bother answering me.
“My legs are going numb. Can you loosen the straps?”
“You have a note from your doctor?”
“Please.”
“Practicing medicine without a license is a crime.”
My dentist once went a little overboard with the gas. Not that pleasant floating sensation-more like I was floating right out of the stratosphere, where the air’s too thin to breathe. It felt like that. The plumber would say something, but it took a while for the words to actually appear. They needed to travel all the way to Mars.
They’d pumped Benjy with the same stuff.
All that mumbling around the psych ward. Maybe he’d mumbled about explosions and floods and doctors wielding scalpels. About his real last name being Washington and him never setting foot in Vietnam. It didn’t matter. It was all sound and fury, a tale told by an idiot.
Get used to it.
When I tried to ask the plumber what was going to happen now-would I live or die or maybe live a kind of walking death like Benjy-I couldn’t form the words. They came out garbled. I felt like giggling.
I was in the same room I’d been in before. I noticed that now.
There was a place on the wall reserved for me. I could post my own letter from Kara Bolka. I am MIA from the world. Call God collect.
This was the worst part of the psych ward.
The place they put the hopeless ones, the ones who don’t even get plastic spoons.
Don’t listen to anything he says-that’s what they’d tell the orderlies. He lies. He’ll say anything. He’ll tell you he’s a reporter; he’ll babble about nuclear reactors and eight hundred dead and horrible coverups and Kara Bolka. What’s Kara Bolka, you say? Who knows? The ravings of a paranoid schizophrenic with homicidal tendencies. They say he killed a gas-station clerk. That he shot a 19-year-old kid in Littleton, California. He cut out poor Dennis’s tongue.