Ben Winters - Countdown City

There’s a thrumming out there. What is the noise? The ship must be back, or a new one is coming, a fresh engagement threatening on the horizon line. The image of the dead and dying from the boats returns, as clear and detailed as a photograph. I try to lift my head but cannot. I stay inside the hole I’m in, close my eyes to what I’ve seen and instead return to considering my case, piecing it together.

When Brett found his wife’s diary page he reacted not with anger but with fierce and secret joy. He tore out that page and took it like a ticket, because this was permission to go and do what he wanted to. He made arrangements with the thief Cortez and off he went; by the grace of God his wife had been unfaithful, their contract had been abrogated, and he felt himself released and he left. He ripped out that page and held it to his heart and ran off to his seaside tower and his righteous crusade.

The thrumming is getting louder. I raise my arm and it lifts slow, dense, like it’s made of bundled sticks. Please don’t be another ship. Please . I don’t want to witness any more.

It’s a beating of wings, out there. Close by, much closer than the water. A motor.

I have to move then, I have to drag myself, and I do. I use my legs but not to walk, to launch myself forward like a worm across the small room and into the doorway and stick out my head and there it is—there she is—the great green-sided helicopter hovering in the sky above the blockhouse, rotors beating, the noise a great thundering rush.

I raise my working hand in the threshold of the blockhouse and wave it, feebly, and I’m trying to scream but there is no noise escaping my throat. It’s not necessary, though, because she’s already seen me. Nico leaning from the doorway of the helicopter, clutching the frame, laughing, shouting: “Hank! Hank!”

I can’t really hear her, I can just see her lips moving, just make out the words—“I told you so!”

Martha, oh Martha, you hid your heart from me .

Martha, oh Martha, oh why?

So here I am, I’m crouched with Martha Milano and the door of the Easy-Bake oven is slightly ajar, and together we’re feeling the warmth of the one little bulb on our faces. I’m lying in the shadow of the blockhouse staring at Brett’s blasted skull. I’m slouched slack-jawed in a helicopter and my sister is slapping me, trying to keep me awake. I’m awake. Strange smells are drifting out of the Easy-Bake oven. There are low murmurs somewhere in the back of my brain, people talking in another part of the house.

I open my eyes. The strange white room is dim and candlelit, but my corneas burn with the brightness. I shut my eyes.

Martha, oh Martha, oh why?

She lied. A sin of omission, at the very least.

Where am I? What happened to Nico? The helicopter—the fort—the dog, where’s the dog?

She had a lover—Martha did. His name was N. Who was N.? She was untrue. She was the one who broke her marriage vow, who abrogated the contract, who risked her own salvation. There was a man who came into Rock ’n’ Bowl just as I was leaving. Norman. Wasn’t it? “Mr. Norman is here.” “No kidding? Already?”

I’m floating through textured air, bobbing and dipping. The smell is bad now, strong and acrid, like disinfectant, like maybe Martha and I are baking a mop head. Where am I? My God, and how?

Is there anything else you need to tell me, Martha—didn’t I say that? Didn’t I ask her? Anything else about your husband, your marriage? I try to peer from this distance into Martha’s secret heart: She must have felt that it didn’t matter, whatever she had done and with whom. She must have thought it irrelevant to the task at hand: her husband had gone, it didn’t matter why, and she just wanted him back.

But Martha, oh Martha, he’s not coming back .

I see Brett’s face again, the empty cratered space and the sharp sickly clean odor is all around me now. I sniff gingerly, my eyes still closed, like a newborn bunny rabbit, tasting air with the dew of the womb still drying on my nose. Bleach? Cleaning fluid?

More murmuring, more quiet voices.

And then suddenly a giant has got hold of my right side and is squeezing, huge brutal fingers digging into my flesh, trying to yank my arm off my torso like a flower petal. I writhe, remembering my injury. I feel like a broken toy, like I’ve been hurled from a height down onto cobblestones.

“Hank.” One of the voices, clear and loud. “Hank.”

I’ve never noticed before how sharp and clinical that name sounds, HANK , how curt and cold, HANK , onomatopoetic for the clink of a metal chain on a metal desk. My mind is moving, fast and strange. “Hank,” says the voice again, and it’s real; there’s a voice in the room. I’m in a room and there’s a voice in it, a person in it, standing close by me, saying my name.

I decide to go one eye at a time. I crack the right eye, and the light floods in. Silhouetted in the glare is a face I recognize. Two eyes, each encased in a glass circle, peering down at me like an amoeba on a slide. Above the pair of glasses a slash of bangs, a skeptical irritated face.

“Dr. Fenton?” I whisper. I open the other eye.

“What happened to you?” asks Alice Fenton.

“I was shot.”

“Thanks,” she says. “That’s literally the only part of the story I already know.”

“You’re upstairs,” I tell her.

“Yes. I quit the morgue,” she says. “Not enough doctors. Too many people who need help. Plenty of idiots getting themselves shot.”

I try to banter back at her but our conversation thus far has already exhausted me. I let my eyes drift closed again. Alice Fenton is a legend. She is or was the chief medical examiner of the state of New Hampshire, and for a long time I idolized her from afar, her technical mastery and perspicacity. A few months ago I had the opportunity to work with her for the first time, and her forensic skill helped me figure out who it was that killed some people. Naomi Eddes, for example, whom I loved. She is—Fenton is a legend.

“Dr. Fenton,” I say. “You’re a legend.”

“That’s great,” she says. “Go to sleep. We’ll talk later.”

“Wait. Hold. Wait.”

“What?”

“Just one second.”

I inhale. I get my eyes to open. I prop myself on my elbows and look around. The bedsheets and blankets are yellow-green in the pale light of the room. I’m in a flimsy powder-blue gown. I’m home. There’s an iron arm that once held an in-room television, now angling uselessly out of the wall like a metal tree branch. I need to go to Albin Street. I have to check in with my client. Hey, Martha? I’ve got a couple questions for you .

Dr. Fenton stands at the side of the bed, a stack of clipboards under one arm, her short compact form quivering with impatience.

“What?” she says again.

“I have to get going.”

“Sure,” she says. “Nice to see you.”

“Oh,” I say. “Great.”

She waits as I shift my legs toward the edge of the bed and my stomach heaves and thickens inside my body. Visions roll across my brainpan, double time: Martha crying; Brett staring; Nico smoking; Rocky in his office with his feet up. Naomi Eddes unmoving in the darkness where they found her. I stop moving my legs and tuck my chin down into my neck and manage not to vomit.

“Ether,” says Dr. Fenton with the barest trace of merriment. “You’re coming down out of a cloud of ether. My colleagues and I are down to the dregs of our pain meds. The DOJ promised a shipment of morphine and MS Contin by Friday, along with new fuel for the generators. I’ll believe it when I see it. In the meantime, ether. Everything that’s old is new again.”