James Siegel - Deceit

“Which part of the government? The DOE?”

“Let’s just say a part that doesn’t appear in their directory.”

“You became their hired killer. Their plumber . Even after what they did?”

“Learn your history. You know who the worst guards in the Nazi camps were? The most brutal? Not the Nazis. The kapos -the Jews given their very own rubber truncheons.”

“You weren’t being threatened with the gas chamber.”

“No, just with the top floor of this hospital. That was enough. Besides, they didn’t destroy Littleton Flats. The ghost in the machine did.”

“I’m not talking about Littleton Flats. I’m talking about what they did to Benjamin. What they did to you.”

That eerie falsetto. The Italians called it something else, of course.

Castrato.

“They mutilated you. When you were a baby. Just like they did to Benjamin. They castrated both of you.”

That smile again-you could see it for what it was now. Sneer first, and it won’t hurt as much when they sneer back.

“See this ?” He pointed to his face. “Sure you do. Take a good look at it. They thought one of these was enough. They were protecting the gene pool. Hard to blame them.”

I thought his expression was saying something else. Look what they did to me. Look.

“How many survived?” I asked him. “Benjamin, your mom. How many made it out that day?”

“Sorry. I told you. I wasn’t born yet.”

“When the hospital turned VA, they gave them legends,” I said. “The children that survived. The names of MIA vets around the same age. They needed to account for them being wards of the VA-to absorb them into the system. Benjamin Washington became Benjamin Briscoe . He was lucky-he got to keep his first name. And there was one other survivor, wasn’t there? At least one. The one who wandered into Littleton three years ago and went to sleep in the town gazebo. That’s what Wren found out when he went to Washington-why he came back and began to ask questions about the flood.”

“That’s on a need-to-know basis,” he said. “Let me check the list and see if you’re on it. I’ll get back to you.”

“I made copies of everything I have. Everything I know. It’s with the right people.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, looking almost bored. “I don’t think the right people answer your calls.”

“A story’s a story.”

“And you’re a real storyteller. Only your stories aren’t real. They come with grain of salt included. Pound of salt, if we’re being honest. Of course, we’re not. Being honest, I mean. You didn’t make copies of anything. The right people ? Even the National Enquirer won’t take your calls.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I didn’t make copies of anything. No one will believe me. So you can let me go.”

He didn’t bother answering me.

“My legs are going numb. Can you loosen the straps?”

“You have a note from your doctor?”

“Please.”

“Practicing medicine without a license is a crime.”

My dentist once went a little overboard with the gas. Not that pleasant floating sensation-more like I was floating right out of the stratosphere, where the air’s too thin to breathe. It felt like that. The plumber would say something, but it took a while for the words to actually appear. They needed to travel all the way to Mars.

They’d pumped Benjy with the same stuff.

All that mumbling around the psych ward. Maybe he’d mumbled about explosions and floods and doctors wielding scalpels. About his real last name being Washington and him never setting foot in Vietnam. It didn’t matter. It was all sound and fury, a tale told by an idiot.

Get used to it.

When I tried to ask the plumber what was going to happen now-would I live or die or maybe live a kind of walking death like Benjy-I couldn’t form the words. They came out garbled. I felt like giggling.

I was in the same room I’d been in before. I noticed that now.

There was a place on the wall reserved for me. I could post my own letter from Kara Bolka. I am MIA from the world. Call God collect.

This was the worst part of the psych ward.

The place they put the hopeless ones, the ones who don’t even get plastic spoons.

Don’t listen to anything he says-that’s what they’d tell the orderlies. He lies. He’ll say anything. He’ll tell you he’s a reporter; he’ll babble about nuclear reactors and eight hundred dead and horrible coverups and Kara Bolka. What’s Kara Bolka , you say? Who knows? The ravings of a paranoid schizophrenic with homicidal tendencies. They say he killed a gas-station clerk. That he shot a 19-year-old kid in Littleton, California. He cut out poor Dennis’s tongue.

It sounded like a good story. If someone told me a story like that, I would pitch it to Hinch. I’d write it up.

I would.

An isolation cell.

That’s where I was.

No comingling. At least, not yet.

They came in twice a day to give me shots. To dumb me down, send me floating back up to Mars where little blue men can strap you down and put weird thoughts into your head.

There was no window. I stared at the wall a lot. The ceiling had water stains on it that began to resemble things if I looked at them long enough. Like clouds in a dishwater sky. One stain looked like a barber pole with those funny alternating swirls. There was a profile of George Washington up there. Scout’s honor. A ’58 Chevy with cool back fins.

This is what you do when you are locked up and shut away.

When your brain is being slow-cooked.

They were using first-rate narcotics, too; psychotropics must’ve come a long way over the years. Every day, they performed a frontal lobotomy on me. No ice pick needed.

Still.

I learned to concentrate, even though it was like peering through fog. I learned to squint, mentally speaking. To herd those little neurons together and say come on guys, one, two, three. …

I chiseled things into the wall to see if it was actual English. If it was remotely intelligible.

If it made sense, then I did. If it was crazy, then I was. It was a test.

I wrote down names. A kind of mental exercise.

My bowling team. My coworkers. Sam, Seth, Marv, Nate, and Hinch. A folk band, a law firm of disreputable ambulance-chasers.

I spelled them backward and forward and inside out.

I connected them like train cars and took them out for a spin.

I made Belinda and Benjamin the passengers.

I took the train apart, added the names of everyone I knew, mixed the cars up, sent it back down the line. I smashed it to smithereens.

I alphabetized the wreckage.

A before B, which precedes C, which rhymes with D, which sounds suspiciously like E.

I started with Anna.

Okay, you’re probably way ahead of me.

You figured it all out when she first told me her name in the bowling alley parking lot. When she leaned over the fuselage and showed me what a real chassis looks like.

You’ve been trying to scream it at me ever since.

You’ve been wondering when it would penetrate this thick skull, dawn on me with one big resounding duh .

Maybe I just needed a Haldol cocktail and four soft walls to write on.

And time on my hands.

I needed to be relieved of reporting on the latest mall opening and the price of two-headed alpacas. I needed time to muse.

I scratched her name into the plaster, number one on Tom’s Alphabetized List of People who didn’t know I was here and wouldn’t have cared less anyway.

Anna Graham.

I had to stare at it long enough for the letters to blur, for two words to merge and become one.