Breathing. Slow, shallow breathing. A muffled sighing, like wind in the distance.
He looked around the space, his vision growing sharper in the dim light. The breathing came from all sides, from some kind of open bins that were stacked in tiers against the walls. He walked over to the nearest group and looked inside a bin that came as high as his chest.
It held a sleeping teenage boy. A plastic tube had been inserted through the boy’s nose and taped to his face. Another piece of surgical tape ran across his forehead with a series of numbers scrawled in black ink. At other points on the boy’s body different tubes and wires were attached.
One black cable ran into a metal plate that seemed to be sutured to the side of his head.
The boy didn’t awaken as Ralph looked at him. The breathing was so slow and shallow as to barely raise the boy’s bare chest.
Ralph backed away, the skin on his shoulders and neck stiffening. There was a bin below the one in which he had looked, and two above. His eyes circled the room, counting the tiers. It came to an even hundred bins, each with its tube and cables running in and fastened onto its occupant. A hundred children suspended in something deeper than sleep, suspended above death by the plastic tubes that nourished them.
He felt something sink and go cold within him. So this is what Stimmitz found, he thought. There’s something wrong, they lied to us, they’re doing something here—
He clenched his fists to keep his hands from trembling. Get out, he told himself, I’ve got to get out of here. They’ll kill me if they find out I’ve seen this.
Fear cramped inside him as he spun around, looking for the door. He spotted it at last and headed for it. His breath swelled in his constricted throat when he pushed the door open and saw another dimly lit space, outlined by the same tiers with tubes and wires dipping into the bins.
For a dismaying span of seconds it seemed as if he were caught in a line of mirror images, like the dream field’s repeating sections of a small town.
But here it would be an infinity of dark rooms, stale air thickening with the slow breathing of the sleeping children . . .
Convulsively, Ralph spun away from the door. He saw now that he had lost his bearings in the dim light—the door by which he had come in was on the other side of the room. He hurriedly crossed the space towards the door and collided with a large object set in the middle of the floor.
It was a metal filing cabinet. Gasping to catch his breath, Ralph pushed himself away from its side. The top drawer rattled out as he took his hand away. What he could see of the cabinet’s contents produced a chill of recognition.
The stiff manila folders filling the drawer were delinquent children’s personal histories. He had seen hundreds of them when he had been working at the Juvenile Hall to the south of L.A. The folders were soiled and battered-looking from too many hands, thick with each child’s accumulated court papers, therapist and probation officer comments, booking slips, and other records—troubled lives compressed into dry ink and paper.
The personal history folders travelled with each child to every institution to which he was sent. Now the folders were here, stored close to the unconscious youths. On impulse, Ralph pulled out two of the folders from the drawer and stuck them under his arm. He crossed to the right door and hurried out of the room’s semi-darkness.
The man who had passed him in the passageway was nowhere to be seen, and the one on the cot behind the desk was still asleep as Ralph cautiously went by him. In a few seconds he was out of the building, around the corner and running with the two folders clamped to his chest towards the nearest clump of brush in the open desert.
Sliding the folders ahead of him on the sand, Ralph crawled through the opening in the fence. He stood up on the other side and brushed the grit from his pants. Looking over his shoulder, he saw the edge of one of the Thronsen Home buildings wavering in the noon heat, the unsuspected pools of darkness inside them hidden from sight again. He picked up the folders from the ground and headed back to the base.
When he came to the spot above the gully where the woman with the camera had been, he halted. The light had changed its angle and now he could see distinctly what she had been photographing. As if something had been butchered on the spot and the earth had soaked up the blood, the ground itself was discolored with an irregular, reddish-brown stain.
Ralph paced slowly around the dried mark. Something in its outlines, or its color, pushed back the memory of the Thronsen Home’s dark interior for a moment.
A thought crept into his head. He looked away from the stain and towards the base. The concrete cube of the line shack was visible in the distance. With careful precision he tried to recall the different directions he and Stimmitz had taken during the last shift on the field. The adrenaline in his system had sharpened his memory. The line, he thought, runs east and west inside the building. When we got to the field we turned . . . right, I think . . . He closed his eyes and pictured the section of small town. It was close to being firmer in his mind than the real world.
We turned right. In his mind Ralph saw the two of them moving slowly through the dreamfield sections, stopping occasionaly to watch a sequence or to rest, then finally turning the corner to follow the slithergadee—
He opened his eyes and laid the line he had constructed in his head down on the ground between himself and the distant line shack, and suddenly felt cold beneath the desert’s noon sun. If his calculations were right, then it was the same distance from where they had let go of the line to where the slithergadee had attacked Stimmitz, as it was from the line shack to this blood-colored spot.
He looked from the gray building, small in the distance, to the brownish red mark on the ground. His thoughts seemed to have frozen in his head. There was the stain, the building, and all the desert in between, but the connection was still elusive. The more Stimmitz’s universe coalesced around Ralph again, the darker things got. He squeezed the manila folders in his hands and walked quickly, then broke into a run away from the spot.
Chapter 5
The six o’clock news was on the television in Goodell’s apartment.
Groups of blurred soldiers were directing great block-long gushes of flame into a blackening jungle. The jungle sagged and crackled. Unseen jets could be heard wailing mournfully somewhere. Ralph put his index finger under a beer can’s tab and lifted.
A newsman’s rouged face came on, all the way from some studio in L.A., but Ralph didn’t hear what he was saying. Little stars lit up on a pink and green map of South America behind the newsman.
Ralph didn’t hear the other watchers slouching in the apartment’s chairs either. He sipped at the first cold, sharp edge of the beer, and let his mind pace slowly among his thoughts.
The two folders he had stolen from the Thronsen Home were hidden beneath the cushions of the couch in his own apartment. He had glanced quickly through them but had found nothing to throw any light on what he had witnessed on the other side of the fence.
He imagined the spot out on the desert. Its outlines reformed, throbbing, inside his head, fading into the memory of the sand in the shoes, then into the woman he had seen with the camera. Was the Bach tape Stimmitz had left for him part of the mystery also? He sipped again at the beer. Who knows, he thought.
After all—a group of sullen-looking South American Indians with machine guns were trooping across the television screen—it could still be all right. So what if the kids in the Thronsen Home are wired asleep? Ralph asked himself. Maybe that’s just part of the therapy that they don’t tell anyone about. For appearance’ sake. Another pull, and the beer can was half-empty.