Chapter 17
They were back for him five days later: Lansing, Salem, and Little Rock. At the sight of them entering his room, Van’s kidneys
turned to cold jelly. They’re back to finish what they started last week, he thought. Get ready to go for one last swim.
Van was sitting on the end of the bed in his pajama bottoms. The Zenith was on, but the screen showed a flurry of digital
snow, and the only sound was the insensate roar of the white noise. He had been watching DTV—Donna Television—until about
an hour ago, when the power in the whole complex stuttered and went out. In the hallway, beyond his picture window, a strip
of emergency lighting had blinked on, producing a dingy, jaundiced glow. His bedroom had become a box of discolored shadows,
filled with a sepia-tinted gloom. A few minutes later there was a powerful whir and thrum, somewhere far away, and the lights
came stammering back on. The TV came on too, but by then Donna was gone, replaced by that flurry of white pixels. Van watched
it anyway. He thought it looked like his future—disintegration and violent emptiness.
“Field trip!” Salem called. Nothing ever seemed to get Salem down.
Little Rock hauled Van up by the arm. The kid was massive and slow, and Van would’ve bet anything he still watched cartoons
over his breakfast.
“Hey, Little Rock,” Van said, as the kid marched him to the door. “Of all the capitals in this country, why do you think they
picked that one for you?”
Little Rock gave him a vaguely hostile look. “Why do you think they picked that one?”
“I was just wondering if it was supposed to refer to your physique,” Van said, “or those things rattling around in your skull.”
Little Rock slammed him into the doorway on their way through. “Are you getting smart?”
Van stood straight, let them walk him into the hall. “Naw, old son. I wouldn’t want you to feel left out of the conversation.”
They walked one on either side of him, Salem to the left, Little Rock to the right, Nurse Lansing following behind and studying
a clipboard. They passed an open door onto a break room. The single round folding table was strewn with papers and empty cups.
A stack of folders had been dropped on one of the molded-plastic chairs. Several had slid off and scattered across the linoleum.
It looked like no one had been in to clean for weeks. A man sat on the floor, under the cork notice board, his knees pulled
to his chest and his arms wrapped around them. He watched Van go by with watery, hateful eyes.
“So morale is good, huh?” Van said.
They walked past a picture window looking into a space that resembled a dentist’s examining room. Donna was on a reclining
tan leather couch, her mittens locked to the armrests. A black microphone dangled directly above her, mounted on an articulated
steel arm. An IV bag had been wheeled alongside the chair. Joe Valentine stood over her, dabbing the inside of her arm with
an alcohol swab.
Van’s escort led him into the examination theater. Mr. Francis was there, at a desk in the corner, in a revolving chair twisted
halfway around so he could watch the rest of the room. Dr. Patrick was there too, her arm across the back of another reclining
exam couch, showing all her teeth in a ferocious grin that Van thought looked less like an expression of enthusiasm and more
like a manifestation of madness.
“Good morning, good mornnnning,” she sang, swaying a little. Van looked, and then looked again. She had missed a button on her silk blouse and it gaped
to show the bridge between the pink cups of her bra. The buttons above the gap were lined up wrong. Panic was like an open
wound, everyone saw you bleeding.
“What’s this?” Van asked.
“They’re going to poison us,” Donna said.
“Would we do that?” Dr. Patrick cried, still half singing. “Sit down, sit down!” As if Van had a choice. His guards manhandled
him onto a second couch. There were steel rings on the armrests. They tightened them on his wrists and buckled them in place
with brass padlocks. He and Donna had matching microphones, dangling above their recliners. It struck Van that autopsy rooms
were designed along much the same lines, with a microphone hung above the corpse, so the medical examiner could narrate his
findings as he sliced and diced.
Donna’s chair was turned so he could see her in profile. She struggled and squirmed while Joe Valentine pushed a needle into
the exposed vein on her right arm and used some white tape to hold it down. A few weeks ago Valentine would’ve had a nurse
to do that for him. Apparently good help was getting hard to find.
Valentine didn’t look so good. His chewed right ear was bent at the wrong angle, sticking out from the side of his head. His
shirt was wrinkled, his tie was too loose, and his silvery-blond hair was a mess, as if he had rolled out of bed and walked
into work without giving it a comb.
“This’d be the way to do it,” Valentine told Donna, while he fixed strips of tape in place. “One part saline and three parts
bleach. I wonder how long it would take you to die.”
“I know how long it would take you to die,” Francis said, from the desk. “As long as it took me to unholster my weapon. There’s a priceless military asset in
this room, Valentine, and it’s not you.”
“What are you sticking her with?” Van asked.
“Sodium thiopental—Sodium Pentathol, under its brand name. Truth serums are out of fashion in first-world countries. Doctors
are squeamish about pumping prisoners full of barbiturates. But elsewhere it remains a trusted method of extracting intel
from difficult subjects.”
“Let’s prep Donnie, Nurse,” Valentine said, turning to Van’s chair. He pushed Van’s sleeve up and dabbed the inside of his
arm with alcohol.
Nurse Lansing widened the opening at the top of Donovan’s Henley and slipped the cold stethoscope in against his chest. Van’s heart was thumping along in a series of sketchy, galloping jags.
It happened so frequently, he hardly noticed anymore.
Lansing listened for a while, then frowned and gave Van an accusatory look.
Van said, “I know, I know. It’s been doing that all day.”
“Doing what?” Valentine asked. He had brought the needle of a syringe close to Van’s inner arm, but hesitated now, fixing
Lansing with a sharp, cold stare.
“He’s arrhythmic,” Nurse Lansing said.
Valentine’s thin lips whitened. “You’re telling me this now? Why didn’t you take his vitals back in his room?”
Lansing said, “Why didn’t you tell the thuds not to haul him out of the room right away? Was I supposed to examine him while
they dragged him down the hall, kicking and screaming? You are aware I don’t have any help down here.”
“Wait, wait. I feel grossly misrepresented here. There was no kicking and only a little squealing.” Van played back in his
mind what Lansing had just said, and added, “What do you mean, you don’t have any help down here? Where’s Nurse Dover?”
“Bitch fucking ran for it,” Lansing said. “Just fucking—”
“All right, Lansing,” Francis said, from the other side of the room, and Lansing bit down on his lower lip.
Valentine turned his back on Donovan and Nurse Lansing both. His movements were jerky, uncoordinated. Donovan wondered how
he was sleeping.
“Get him some orange juice, for fuck’s sake,” Valentine said. “And we’ll see if his heart has calmed down in ten minutes.”
“I’ll get it!” Dr. Patrick cried, as if Valentine had said it was time to bring out birthday cake. Patrick leapt to her feet
and sashayed to a mini fridge in the back of the room, dancing to music only she could hear. She returned with a cup of orange
juice, a straw pushed through the tinfoil top. She held the straw to Van’s lips and Van sipped a mouthful of cold sweetness.
He felt so grateful to her he murmured, “Your blouse.”
She looked down and trilled with nervous laughter. “My apologies! I didn’t mean to give everyone a free show.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That it’s so scary. I wish that wasn’t part of it. It’s bad enough that he’s after you, I don’t know why he has to terrorize you first.”
Dr. Patrick blinked, her eyes suddenly bright with wetness. She jerked the straw away from his mouth. She fought for a grin
and didn’t win.
“Don’t try and pretend you’re a nice guy,” she said, in a shaking voice. “And don’t imagine you can manipulate me. I have
a PhD in psychology. I know every trick in the book.”
“If you think empathy is a trick,” Van said, “then I’m even more sorry for you.”
“Dr. Patrick,” Valentine said, without looking at her. “I’ll be handling this interview.”
The lights gave another flicker, stammering like Donovan’s unsteady pulse. No one paid it any mind except Mr. Francis, who
lifted his chin and considered the lights on the ceiling.
“Nurse Dover, your maintenance men,” Van said. “Seems like anyone with any sense is hoofing it. Looks like they’re more afraid
of King Sorrow than you, Mr. Francis.”
“The difference between me and your dragon,” Francis said, “is that I don’t wait till Easter to deal with people who make
problems.” And gave Van a flat look.
“Breathe deeply and steadily, Donna,” Joe Valentine told Donna. He had rolled a stool to the side of her bed. “Just like you’re
filling your lungs before diving under water.”
“Fuck you,” she said, but there was a dreamy quality to her voice now.
“Maybe later,” Valentine said, and Donovan thought he sounded almost his old chipper self. “Deep, slow, calming breaths. We’re
getting ready to dive down now. We’re going to dive down into thought, you and I. You don’t have to be afraid. I’ll be with
you the whole way. I’m going to ask you some questions, and every time you give me an honest answer, you’re going to feel
better about yourself. Lighter and easier. You don’t have to keep any secrets anymore. You can be free of them. Light and
free and easy. Are you ready to tell me the truth, Donna?”
“All right,” she sighed. “I guess it doesn’t matter what I tell you. You’re going to die soon.”
There were spots of color in Joe Valentine’s very white cheeks, the only sign this last statement had got to him. He had a
clipboard on one knee and a pen ready to take notes, though Van was sure the microphone would get everything. Dr. Patrick
offered him the straw once more and he sipped, watching Donna with fascination.
“This is all light and easy stuff, Donna,” Joe Valentine said. “What’s your name?”
“Donna Mehitabel McBride,” she said. “Allie says my middle name is my secret eighteenth-century lesbian spinster name. Allie
is gay for me, isn’t that sweet? The one time we did it as roommates I was just experimenting, but she’s still hung up on
me.”
Van coughed orange juice up his nose, choked, coughed again. Nurse Lansing came over with a cloth to pat his face dry.
“And where were you born?” Valentine said, and the lights stammered again—and blinked out.
A strip of emergency lighting along one wall came on, casting a dull, golden glow that lit faces and hands, and left most
of the rest of the room in suffocating darkness. The distant steady throb of the generator—it was less a sound than a kind
of constant vibration—trailed off into stillness.
“Goddamn it,” Valentine cried. “Can nothing go right? I lose my power now?”
“Your mistake,” King Sorrow said from Donna’s mouth, his voice a good-humored, reverberating rumble, “was believing you had
any power to begin with, Norman Barclay. You want to know where I was born? I hatched in the cauldron of Mount Hekla, five
thousand years before Christ. Upon my birth, the volcano erupted and choked the world with so much darkness and ash your ancestors,
a gang of pitiful and incestuous monkeys, believed the time of judgment was at hand. And they were right, mate. It’s been
a time of judgment ever since . . . and I am the judge.”