He put on his gloves and the mask from the lab. Averting his face, he opened the canister and dribbled a few drops of its contents into the AC unit’s air-intake duct. When the air conditioner started running, the liquid would be aerosolized and dispersed as a mist throughout the room.
"No more postcards, Tess," he whispered behind the mask. "I’m sending you a message of a different kind."
Now he was home in his private room, his special sanctuary, staring at a wall covered with a collage of newspaper clippings, photos, and yellowed archival documents. One of the smallest items in the display was the one he most cherished-a black-and-white photo of his mother that he’d found in her high school yearbook. She had attended a small, private, fancy school for girls, a school catering to debutantes and heiresses. His mother had been both, until the first fruits of her germinating insanity had gotten her disinherited.
He had tracked down the yearbook in the school library and ripped out the crucial page, using exactly the same ruse Jack Nicholson had employed in Chinatown, a phony sneeze to cover the sound of tearing paper. Now she was on his wall of memories, or perhaps he should call it his wailing wall, a place to mourn the dead. Only in this case, it was his own death he came to mourn.
His mother had been just nineteen, a graduating senior, when the photo was taken. Melinda Davenport, later to be Mrs. Harrison Beckett. A pretty girl, austere and fine-featured and smooth-skinned. Looking at her, no one could guess that less than ten years later, in 1968, she would go insane.
After his mother had stopped living with them, his dad had warned him that someday she might try to get him to go with her, and that it would be dangerous to go. But when she’d visited him at recess, she hadn’t seemed dangerous. And he hated school, which was boring, and he hated recess even more, because he was never picked for any games. So when she’d asked if he wanted to go to the rodeo, he’d said yes.
But there hadn’t been any rodeo. There had been only miles of blurry back roads and the crazed repetition of a single song on an eight-track player, and she had hummed along with it in a furious nasal monotone.
"Na na na na na na na, na na na na na na naaa…"
By the time they reached the Howard Johnson’s in Alcomita, New Mexico, he hated her. He knew this one thing with certainty. He didn’t like to be scared, and she was scaring him very badly. If he’d had a gun, he would have shot her- bang, dead-and she wouldn’t have scared him anymore. When her back was turned, he even pretended to have a gun, and he pantomimed pulling the trigger and making his mother go away.
Bang.
Dead.
Sometime in late morning, while a policeman talked through a bullhorn outside and the crazy song played on the portable phonograph, his mother filled the bathtub.
"You’re dirty," she said. "You need to be clean. You’re a very dirty boy, and you’ve caused me a lot of trouble."
He didn’t think he had caused any trouble. He had been quiet and good. But he did not protest, because he liked baths.
"Can I play with my submarine?" he asked. The submarine was a plastic model he had taken to school for show-and-tell and had brought with him in the car.
She didn’t answer, just went on filling the tub.
When the bath was ready, he slipped out of his day-old clothes and eased into the hot water, taking his submarine with him. Outside, the policeman was saying something, but over the blare of the record player he couldn’t hear it. When the music started to bother him, he submerged, holding his breath, moving the toy sub underwater and imagining nautical adventures.
Needing air, he surfaced, and his mother was there.
She stood over the tub, and her face…her face was strange. It was not his mother’s face at all. There was no love in her eyes, not even any recognition. She looked at him as if he were a stranger.
"Mommy?" he whispered.
She did not move, did not blink.
"Wipe out," she said, and the gun bucked in her hand.
Mobius blinked, reliving it-the impact, the sudden inexplicable numbness. He touched his chest. Through the thin fabric of his shirt, he could feel the lump of scar tissue in the shape of a starfish, where the. 38-caliber round had entered, and where the long ribbons of blood had come out.
His gaze switched from his mother’s photo to the central item in the collage-the entire front page, both above and below the fold, of the Albuquerque Tribune ’s September 21, 1968, edition. A huge headline stretched over the multicolumn story.
"WIPE-OUT" IN ALCOMITA HOJO’S
A tense, hours-long standoff at the Howard Johnson’s motor inn in Alcomita came to an abrupt and tragic end at 12:20 P.M. when sheriff’s deputies heard two shots discharged inside the room where alleged kidnapper and former mental patient Melinda Ellen Beckett was holding her eight-year-old son…
Melinda Beckett had lost custody of the boy after her third hospitalization for mental illness. She was recently separated from her husband, Mr. Harrison Beckett, who had been raising their son alone. Mrs. Beckett is said to have become obsessed with violent, paranoid thoughts, and had twice been placed in restraints while institutionalized.
Sheriff’s deputies report that throughout the standoff Mrs. Beckett played the song "Wipe Out," an early 1960s hit for the Surfaris, on a portable phonograph. Deputies also found an eight-track tape containing the song in the dashboard tape player of Mrs. Beckett’s 1964 Buick Grand Sport.
Harrison Beckett, who arrived at the scene only minutes after the twin shootings, is described as being in a state of shock and is currently under medical care…
He would never leave medical care. Harrison Beckett was still in a hospital somewhere-Mobius had long since lost track of his father’s whereabouts, as the Wyoming bureaucracy shuttled him from one institution to another. He was an incurable patient, one who-in the quaint parlance of 1968-had suffered a "nervous breakdown." Quite simply, he had lost all contact with the outside world on that day in New Mexico.
Two parents, both crippled by mental illness. It was almost enough to make him doubt his own sanity.
The other items on his wall were less sensational. There was his birth certificate, obtained from a Casper, Wyoming, hospital. Some of the medical records compiled during his long recuperation from the gunshot, the months of physical and psychological therapy. A snapshot of his triumphant release from the hospital at the age of nine. Nurses and doctors were all gathered, grinning at the camera, and in the middle of this crowd stood a wan little boy with a pinched face and cool, untrusting eyes. He remembered exactly what he had been thinking as the photo was snapped.
Bang. Dead.
It was too late to make his mother dead for what she had done to him. The psychologists had worked long and hard to make him understand this. And he did understand. But what the psychologists didn’t realize was that there was a whole world of other people out there, and he hated them all. He hated the doctors who had brought him back to life. He hated the deputies who had cornered his mother and provoked her. He hated the social workers who had put her in a mental hospital in the first place. And the new family that had adopted him-he hated them too, hated their frozen smiles and evasive eyes and the way they touched him like glass.
He hated the entire world, and he wished he could make it all go away with one pull of a trigger, one clap of his hands.
He wished he had a way to do it. A weapon to kill them all.
And now, perhaps, he did.
He was cleaning out his pockets, disposing of evidence, when he realized he was missing something.
The tape player.
Maybe it had fallen out in the car. He went into the garage and checked under the driver’s seat. Not there.