Chapter 9
Van saw it on the Zenith, when she bit Valentine’s ear off. A few minutes later, Valentine staggered past the picture window,
surrounded by nurses in white, trailed by security men in khakis and polo shirts. Valentine was screaming, a hand clapped
to his ear and blood threading between his fingers. Van felt a surge of something, some powerful emotion, close to rage, but
happier; close to pride, but uglier. He had never loved his sister more.
The lack of windows and natural light gave him the sense of being underground. When he inhaled deeply, it seemed to him the
air had the dusty, stagnant quality common to basements. In such a place, one felt removed from ordinary time. The clock beside
the bed said it was one twenty. It might’ve been one twenty in the afternoon or one twenty in the morning. He decided it was
early afternoon. A little before three, he began to sweat. It was a bad sweat, with a chemical odor, a whiff of biology lab.
He thought of dead frogs, unzipped from throat to crotch to show the jellied organs, for a sixth-grade anatomy class. His
intestines cramped and then cramped harder.
Van fumbled with the phone. The voice from earlier was there again, chipper and sunny.
“I’m going to shit myself!” he cried.
“Someone will be there shortly to assist you, Mr. McBride,” she half sang.
“Hurry!”
A male nurse arrived, a young man with the bland good looks of a plastic action figure.
He was accompanied by one of the security goons, the fit man with slicked-back hair, his biceps swelling the short sleeves of his polo.
He had a tattoo on his forearm showing what looked like a Spartan’s helmet.
The nurse and the goon manhandled Van into the small, unremarkable bathroom.
“Oh, God!” Van cried, his guts boiling, the pressure in them doubling every few seconds.
They got him turned around and the nurse lowered his pants just in time. His stool was almost liquid, a hot spray. He made
a pitiful little sound as he was emptied. The nurse wiped him, once, twice, a third time, working carefully, while Van shut
his eyes in shame.
By the time the clock said 9:27, he knew he was going through withdrawal, and he knew it was going to be bad. He stretched
out on his bed to try and sleep, but his muscles twitched helplessly as soon as he was still for too long. Spells of diarrhea
swept over him with sudden, unexpected force, sending him lunging for the phone. With his hands in leather sacks, he was clumsy,
and often dropped it with little shouts of frustration and fright. He desperately hoped not to shit himself.
He never had the DTs, not once in the five days that followed . . . but he passed in and out of consciousness, sleeping for
hours at a stretch, on no particular schedule, and the same dream was always waiting for him, as intense and convincing as
hallucination. He was climbing a concrete stairwell, from darkness into darkness. He was running up the stairs or trying to
run up them. His legs were rubbery from exhaustion and his heart kept losing its rhythm, firing unsteadily, in random bursts.
His breath screamed in his throat and echoed in the cold concrete silo. Other voices rang out from below him, some he recognized
and some he didn’t. Jayne Nighswander was down there.
“What are you going to do when you get to the top?” Jayne called out. “Where you going to go? There’s no way out! There’s
no way out and there’s no free rides, bitch. Gas, grass, or ass!” She laughed, and others laughed with her, and he knew everyone
they had ever killed was down there in the (long) dark, a thought that made him sick with fear.
When he was awake, there were times when he wanted a drink so badly, he could hardly bear it.
He felt his craving in his skin, which seemed to want to climb right off his body.
Other times, his perspiration would smell of vomit, and the thought of alcohol made him tremble with nausea. His head thumped.
Nurses brought him meals, listened to his heart, took his blood pressure, helped him to the bathroom, and showered him. At
first it was humiliating to have someone else wiping his ass, then it was just how he went to the bathroom. There were at
least half a dozen nurses on duty, but two of them were senior: a sunny, lively girl named Dover who acted like a young mother
hosting a birthday party for five-year-olds and the bland action figure named Lansing. Once Dover and Lansing came together
to draw six vials of blood. He was too sick to talk to them. His migraine threw dazzling halos around the lights. Van had
seen halos like that around the morning sun in Greenland, sparkling hoops of color and brilliance created by ice flecks high
in the air. He remembered Greenland with reverence, remembered how the sharp air had made him feel sanctified. Had made him
feel he almost deserved Allie.
In those first days he was too ill to hold a conversation with anyone—he was as ill as he could ever remember being in his life. Not that anyone was conducting interrogations. Van had the sense
nothing could happen while Joe Valentine was recovering, and it was four days before Van saw him again, striding down the
hall past the picture window. His head was swaddled in bandages. A great lump of gauze smothered the right ear. Van supposed
they had sewn it back on. A shame—he wished Donna had had the good sense to swallow it.
On the fifth day—or maybe it was the sixth, things had got a little fuzzy while he went through the throes of withdrawal—Nurse
Dover turned up in what he took to be early morning, to give him his usual brief physical. The security officer with the Bela
Lugosi hair stood inside the closed door, arms crossed over his chest.
“’S’your name?” Van asked him, out of curiosity. His voice was a dry croak.
“Salem,” the guard told him.
“Two questions,” Van said. “First, did they let you pick it or was it just assigned to you?”
“I hope the second question is better than the first,” Salem said.
“Is Joe Valentine free? Why don’t you find out, and tell him I’m ready to talk. I’ll tell him whatever he wants to know, in
exchange for a coffee with a splash of Irish cream in it.”
Salem nodded, smiling ever so slightly in a way that made Van hate him and hate himself for begging. “I’ll pass it up the
line. If you’re ready to work with us, I’m sure all requests will be given reasonable consideration. You may have to buckle
up and hold on a while longer, though. Valentine was pulled away this morning and isn’t expected back for a day or two. Who
knows, you might not be missing your wife for much longer.” And he winked broadly.
Van’s insides bunched up and there was a dull ache, a kind of physical memory of earlier cramps. His heart did an erratic
giddy-up—there had been a lot of that lately too—and made him short of breath. His first, shameful thought was that he hoped
they got her, because he wanted to see her, to be near her, more than anything. To put his head against her chest, even for
a moment, would be better than any drink, any bump of cocaine. He recoiled from himself, wished he could unthink such an evil
notion. If they got her too, who knew what they might do to her, to force him to talk. The thought made him weak.
But they didn’t get her.
Late in the afternoon, Nurse Dover fled down the hall, a hand clapped over her mouth, tears streaming from her reddened eyes.
She was pursued by Nurse Lansing and the Black woman in the tweed skirt, who wasn’t smiling for once.
Lansing caught up to her and got an arm around her, began to murmur comfortingly, although Van couldn’t guess what he was saying.
The window was all but soundproof. The Black woman in the tweeds ushered them both out of sight.
Nurse Dover wasn’t the only person in tears that Van saw that day.
All afternoon, people were going up and down the hall, everyone in a hurry.
Once, a chubby clerk came chugging down the hall in something close to a run, and crashed into the guard named Salem, who was coming the other way, head down, speaking into a walkie-talkie.
The clerk was holding a manila folder. Papers flew, and the chubby little clerk bounced off Salem as if he had run into a lamppost. Salem glared, looked for an instant like he was going to use the walkie-talkie as a club, then gave his head an irritated shake and stalked on.
The clerk got down on all fours to pick paper off the floor.
Van stood at the window and had a look, saw a grainy faxed photograph of a burning tree with a car in it.
Lansing turned up with dinner, later than usual: a pile of limp green beans and a slice of rubbery turkey. He fed Van precisely
cut pieces of white meat, chased with sips of cool skim milk.
When Van was about halfway done, he said, “How many died this time?”
Lansing shot him a sidelong look. “You’re here to answer our questions, babe, not the other way around.”
“I was going to answer questions. This morning, I would’ve prostituted my own mother for an Irish coffee.” But that was eight hours
ago. Now he had a dull, sullen headache and a dry mouth . . . but for the first time since arriving in Motel Hell, he did
not feel he was dying, nor did he wish for his own death. “I was expecting Valentine.”
“He’s been held up. He might be back tomorrow. He might be back the day after.”
“So he survived, then. Sorry to hear it.”
Lansing flashed him a sharp, penetrating look, but only said, “How about some green beans?”
It was Nurse Dover the next morning. Her color was bad and there were lines bracketing her mouth Van had never noticed before.
She bent to cut up a pancake for him. He watched her work without speaking, regarding her red-rimmed eyes and faraway stare.
When she lifted the fork to feed him a piece of pancake he said, “Did Allie wipe out someone you knew?” and she squeaked and
dropped the cutlery.
“That’s not—” she began and bent and snatched the fork up and wiped her sleeve at her eyes. “I’ve got nothing to say to you about—” She fought down a fresh wave of emotion. “You don’t think it could happen to someone you know. But that’s the work we’re in.”
Van nodded, slowly, with a show of gentle understanding, making sympathetic eye contact. “I know, right? Who would’ve thought
anyone was going to get hurt? In the middle of a violent abduction attempt?”
Feelings worked their way across her face: a spasm of hurt, lips puckered in outrage, a twitch of disgust. She put the fork
back down on the tray and wheeled the trolley to the door.
“Can I at least have my coffee?” he asked.
She rolled the cart out without replying, and for days after he only got Nurse Lansing. There was no sign of Joe Valentine
either, who, between getting his face eaten and walking his team into another massacre, was having a tough few weeks. Van’s
heart went out. He didn’t see Valentine, Nurse Dover, or Mr. Francis again until the night of the Christmas party. People
walked by the picture window in twos and threes, dressed in Hawaiian shirts with Christmas patterns on them. Some of them
carried piles of presents in shiny wrapping. Others carried red plastic cups. Francis went by in a Hawaiian shirt with a print
of reindeer fucking on it. That interested Van, who had been a journalist for nearly ten years and could spot a telling detail.
Hawaiian shirts, not Christmas sweaters. Wherever he was, it was somewhere people could go around in shirtsleeves.
He sighted Joe Valentine wandering down the hall, poking at his BlackBerry.
The Black woman with the librarian glasses strutted beside him, swinging a tinsel boa and gabbing at him in a cheerful way.
No one paid Van any attention, standing at the glass, like a broke urchin staring at pastries through a bakery window.
Nurse Dover went by the window, wearing a little red Christmas elf’s skirt, a pair of felt reindeer horns on her head, and Van’s heart ached for Allie.
Allie in her unicorn outfit, pawing at the air, offering him her rubber hooves so he could swing her around the skating rink again.
No one else got it. How he loved the way she could plunge into foolishness with all her heart, giving herself over to pretend, to absurdity.
For most of his adult life, he had been hung up on intoxicants, but Allie’s foolishness was the only one that didn’t come with a hangover.
Plus, she was an alcoholic too, and would never say those four terrible words, “Maybe we’ve had enough. ”
He stood in the dark of his room, watching them come and go in twos and threes, drinking gin fizzes, flushed with happiness
and companionship. Late in the night, Nurse Dover staggered by in her green heels with a couple of the security thugs, and
one of them said something that set her off, and she got laughing so hard she tottered into the wall, then slid down it and
sat on the floor, with her legs apart, and Van could see a black triangular flash of her panties. She was so drunk. The sight
didn’t turn him on—it repelled him. He could not have been more repelled if she had pissed herself. He thought, I hope I never swallow another mouthful of booze in my life. The sight of her happiness enraged him. Everyone who went by, drinking, chattering, making merry, wearing their cheerful
fucking shirts, stoked his fury. He wished King Sorrow had got more of them. He wished for their obliteration. It felt good—to
hate so purely, so simply, without the diluting effects of alcohol.
After they were gone and he was in his bed, he had another thought. If it was Christmas this week, then it was New Year’s
next week. Soon it would be time for Colin to give King Sorrow a name or two. It was his turn this year.