Brainfire Page 25

  The woman broke the plastic seal of a new syringe and filled it from a small bottle, then shoved the needle into the old woman’s arm. Koprow winced at the sight of the puncture. Did it have to be done so roughly? with such a lack of care and concern? with such an obvious look of triumph? The old woman continued to turn her head this way then that on the pillow. Watching, Koprow caught the unmistakable scent of excrement. He stepped away from the bed.

  “And for God’s sake, change her sheets,” he said.

  “I’m not a nurse—”

  “Change the sheets,” he said again. He hated it—that trifling defiance, the hard little light in the eye.

  The woman pulled the surface blanket away. Beneath, the white sheet was stained with blood and excrement. She stared at him as though to say, You’d have me do this? He turned—he could look no longer—then went toward the door. When he had reached the corridor he felt he was gasping for air, choking, as if he had stepped into a vacuum.

  4.

  A sense of touching, of feeling: reaching across darkness to the single point of light. Like being inside a camera. If you concentrated on the light the pain would go away and everything would be well but the light was so small, such a tiny hole in space, just an absence of all the dark. Then the pain came back, waves, hot waves, a tide of lava running in every vein, in every muscle, every fiber; then you tried for the small hole again. Dear God. It was only a whisper anyhow and you couldn’t really catch it because it was so weak so thin so faraway, this touching, this reaching

  How can I help

  You don’t know. You can’t help whoever you are because you don’t know and you don’t have the reach

  Reach help me reach

  Impossible

  Help me what do you want

  Pain all the fires all the hideous infusions of blind-hot wires running through me no you couldn’t help me because you don’t have the reach

  The reach?

  It goes on through the mind a picture repeats and repeats you are too young to know if the sweetness of youth dies and it dies at the end of a rope in a barn stinking of old hay and rotted manure only if the sweetness goes will you know and understand but you must close your mind to me

  No

  You must

  Where are you? Who are you?

  There are no measurements for these distances inches and yards and meters they don’t matter you’re too young and you must kill this thing you must kill it inside you the way you would kill any disease do you understand me do you understand me the way you would any disease

  You asked for help

  no there’s no help trapped

  Trapped where? Trapped how?

  no questions answers wouldn’t help you

  Danger?

  danger death please leave leave now you don’t want to be in this room with this pain and know who I am

  Don’t make me leave

  the reach fades

  You’re old, I can feel it

  you don’t feel anything you dream this you dream the wrong dreams for yourself

  Who are

  none of this happens don’t you see

  A friend I could

  you can’t be anything if you listen it’s going already I know listen closely and I know you can hear the sea

  Please don’t make me leave you

  we don’t have those choices you and I none of this is what we choose before it’s too late you must kill it in yourself

  Kill what?

  No more she comes with the needle with the needle the dreams are better when the pain is gone and when you tell them what you can do what you are capable of doing they’ll make you kill and kill and go on killing

  Killing who?

  names names are nothing

  Please?

  no more nothing more nothing more now

  5.

  Fox carried his daughter, saying she needed air, through the kitchen door and out to the lawn, carried her—out of breath, straining—to the willows that hung above the inlet of water. He laid her on the grass, gently stroking her hair with one hand, massaging her fingers with the other. In the light that reached through the open kitchen doorway Rayner watched: cold, a chill rising from the slow water that pierced his clothing, but colder still in ways he couldn’t quite describe, in places he couldn’t exactly name. He heard Isobel beside him. She stood with her arms folded, staring down the slope of grass to where the girl lay.

  Fiona. Fiona. Everything is fine. Fine.

  The father’s voice, filled with an almost hopeless concern, carried up from the water’s edge. Rayner could hear the motion of willow leaves. They were like soft hands dangling in the quiet stream. What happened? he wondered. How would you describe what had happened? In the space of minutes, moments—how could you say? Isobel, shivering, moved nearer to him; he put his arm loosely round her shoulder.

  Fiona. Fiona.

  A trance, Rayner thought. But that didn’t do it. You would have to make that one work harder to carry the load. No, not a trance. Then what? I saw a child, he thought. A teenage girl. I saw her suddenly pause in the middle of her guessing game—no, goddam, it wasn’t a game—I watched her fall to the floor and lie there motionless. And then what? Then what did I see? What did I hear?

  Upward, through the branches of the willows, the night was starry and somehow complete. He saw the moon, faceless, a flat anonymous disk, drift. What did I hear? He shut his eyes. Fiona. It’s all right. Everything is all right. Isobel was shivering still, huddled against him. A trance, he thought again. She was talking to somebody who wasn’t in the room, talking in words he couldn’t understand, in meters he hadn’t heard before—a language that wasn’t a language at all, but something else, something more basic, more primitive: as if you were hearing, he thought—amazed by his own sense of the ridiculous—the first forms of communication that had ever been uttered anywhere. A thing comes out of a swamp, rises out of the vapors, and speaks. But it was a language nevertheless because the form was there, the intonations of questions uttered in faint, breathless whispers. Questions. Where the hell were the answers coming from?

  And then. Then what?

  Open your eyes, child. Come on.

  He had heard only the questions, watched the fluttering motion of the eyelids, the grotesque stiffening of the child’s body as she had lain on the floor, the palsied twisting of her hands and fingers and her limbs. She had been in pain, he had no doubt of that. Real? Imagined? Some distinction there; did it matter anymore?

  The real. The fanciful. What did I really see?

  He watched the shadowy outline of Fox, lifting his child up; he watched Fox begin to move slowly across the lawn toward the house. Questions. No answers.

  How did it work? Did it come out of the ether? Was it some magical form of telegraph? News from nowhere? How did it work? Or was it just another kind of deceit? A child playing? How can you think that now? She had stood up in her twisted way, suddenly a grotesque figure, suddenly as white and as awful as some broken Victorian doll; she had stood up and, clutching the edge of the table with her disfigured hands, had opened her eyes. The whites. Nothing but the whites. A travesty of sight, he thought. But how could you say even that? You don’t know what it was she was looking at, do you? You don’t know what she was seeing, do you?

  Then she had lost control again, slipping, clattering downward, broken dishes and bits of cutlery and half of a table linen wrapped, like some haphazard shroud, around her body. Even now he could see the linen stretched out on the lawn by the water where Fox had left it.

  Isobel said she was cold. But he didn’t want to go back inside the house, not yet. Too soon, like everything else. He had the feeling that something intensely private was passing between father and daughter and he didn’t want to intrude. He slipped off his jacket and draped it around Isobel. They stood together in silence and listened to the water touching the willows. He drew Isobel’s face against his shoulder and looked down through the dark, he
aring the sound of her quick breathing. I need to know, he thought. I need to know what I saw and heard. Sometimes you just can’t ask because the time is all wrong. And sometimes the time doesn’t matter. There was a skein of things here, concentric circles of coincidence that stretched back to the impossible death of his brother, to the mystery of Andreyev: too many deaths, too much dying.

  The moon was sucked behind cloud. The night darkened. He turned and looked at the light in the kitchen window. The shadow of Fox passed in front of the glass. He took his arm from Isobel and went toward the house.

  He stepped inside the kitchen. Then he stopped, thinking again of the way the child had spoken, the incomprehensible sounds of that language, and he realized that what it reminded him of now was the broken language of the dreamer, the outbreaks of meaninglessness you heard in the sleep of other people. Conversations that were not conversations, talk that wasn’t talk, cries that could mean something only if you had the ability to step inside another person’s dream.

  Was that what she had done? Was that what he had listened to? He heard Isobel come inside the kitchen behind him. She reached out and touched his arm, as if to delay him, to stall him, as if this were a way of saying, It’s enough, leave it for later. He looked at her apologetically. It couldn’t wait now; not now.

  He was suddenly tense, tense as he had been when the child had—language, where was the goddam language—when the kid had just slipped away from things. Slipped away from things, he thought. It could never be enough. Okay, he thought. A time comes, Rayner: either you do a thing or you don’t. Either you go ahead or you hang back, and sometimes you hang back too long and the clock has moved on and all at once you’re in another place. The Land of Lost Opportunities. The Plaza del Might Have Been. He stepped away from Isobel, thinking of the darkness outside, of how, without her, there was only the cold isolation of knowing that nobody much cared if you lived or died. A man with a gun, smiling faces in the mad room of some company hospital—it was the same card, the same deck.

  He crossed the kitchen. The child was stretched out on an old velvet sofa. Fox stood over her, turning his face when Rayner came into the room. The huge eyes were like those of some staring night bird accustomed to the crazy predatory things that lie in the foliage.

  “She’s going to be all right,” Fox said, answering a question that hadn’t been asked. “I think she’s sleeping naturally.”

  Rayner stood beside the sofa and looked at the girl. He had seen her face before in a million places—drive-ins, fast-food outlets, supermarkets, catching yellow school buses; it was an ordinary teen-age face and sullen in sleep. Then he gazed at the father. “You want to explain?”

  Fox took off his glasses. The eyes, without magnification, were like tiny stones you might find on a beach. He rubbed his eyelids and sighed. “Isn’t it obvious, Mr. Rayner? Isn’t it obvious to you what happened? Can’t you overcome your limitations?”

  Fuck my limitations, Rayner thought. I am sick and tired of hearing about them. Especially from you, Jack. Especially out of your mouth. He tried to be patient; he tried to catch his patience like a swimmer coming up from a deep place and lurching for air. “Obvious to me? Uh-huh. You tell me, Mr. Fox. You explain it.”

  “It’s happened before,” Fox said. “Not often. But it’s happened.”

  “What’s happened?” Rayner asked.

  Fox, like a priest who alone has had revealed the arcane name of the deity, smiled benignly. “She had an encounter.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I could explain for days and you still—”

  “I don’t have days, Fox.”

  Fox put his glasses back and said, “I tolerated you because you’re a friend of Isobel’s. I don’t have to put up with your rudeness—”

  Rayner thought: A velvet glove, something soft. “I don’t mean to be rude but I don’t understand, that’s the problem.” Slow and nice and a snow job: the brown-nose route.

  “Understanding isn’t always easy,” Fox said. “It was hard for me too, Mr. Rayner.”

  Good, Rayner thought. Now we have established a common denominator. “What’s an encounter? That’s what I don’t get exactly.”

  “She talked with somebody, that’s all.”

  “Talked with somebody. Okay. But not somebody in this house.”

  Patiently Fox shook his head. “Somebody elsewhere, of course.”

  “How? How does that happen?”

  Fox stared a moment at Rayner. Rayner thought: This isn’t my world. Processing Eastern Europeans through intelligence computers and security data: Is Herr Folweiler really a stonemason from Dresden? You pressed a button. Decoded a telex or two. Checked birth certificates. Records were available; information could be turned up. This is some other place and I don’t believe I like it.

  “I could throw words out, Mr. Rayner. I could talk of telepathy. But that would only be a beginning—”

  “Okay. Let me see if I’ve got it. The kid had a telepathic encounter? That’s what you’re saying?”

  “An encounter of minds, yes—”

  “Then what about the things she was saying?”

  “I could talk about a kind of linguistic overflow, if you liked. I could tell you that even though she wasn’t communicating in any way you could understand—she was using channels of mind—nevertheless she’s a creature of the habit of speech—”

  “Speech? That wasn’t speech. I didn’t hear—”

  “You heard, Mr. Rayner. You just didn’t understand.”

  Linguistic overflow. Crap, Rayner thought. You could smell it around Fox and it was yards thick and highly fermented. What could he extract from this nut? He had to get the girl. He had to wake the girl. He reached down and shook her quietly, repeating her name over and over.

  “Leave her,” Fox said. “She needs to rest after her experience.”

  Isobel had come around the sofa and was staring at Rayner in an alarmed way. She doubts my mind too, he thought.

  “John, please. The kid’s exhausted.”

  “I want to talk with her, that’s all.”

  “No,” Fox said. He tried to step between Rayner and the girl. Rayner, angry, impatient, shoved him aside.

  “John, for Christ’s sake,” Isobel said.

  Fox’s glasses slipped down his nose. Preposterous, upset, he tried to push his way back between Rayner and the kid.

  “Look, Fox. I want a couple of minutes, okay? I’m not going to hurt her.”

  Fox looked at Isobel and said, his voice a whine, “I don’t know why you brought this man here, Isobel. For the sake of our friendship, I must ask you to take him away from my house. I offered him my hospitality—”

  The girl had opened her eyes and was looking up at Rayner. There was a faint smile on her mouth, as if she had come out of some pleasant dream. Pleasant, Rayner thought: stuck in this house with the harp-playing madman, poor kid, stuck here with his mysticism, forced to perform her mind tricks for all and sundry, dragged around psychic research circles like some freak, probed and prodded by idiot professors—Jesus Christ, he hoped she had some pleasant places of escape, even if only in dreams.

  “Are you tired?” he asked.

  “A bit,” she said. “I guess I flaked out, huh?”

  “Fiona, you should rest,” Fox said.

  She sat upright, hugging her knees, looking at Rayner. “I don’t want to rest.” She glanced at her father. It was a defiant Screw you look. “I swear, I’m okay.”

  “Can you tell me what happened?” Rayner asked. “Can you remember?”

  She watched him a moment. She had a plain face; only the eyes suggested something other than plainness—light, alert, alive now.

  “What do I remember?” she said. “Let me think. Let me get it straight in my head.”

  Rayner saw: she was playing a little game with him, a form of teasing, a vaguely coquettish thing. He had the absurd feeling that he had just invited her to the high school prom and she was st
alling her answer. I gotta check my calendar first. He was trying, desperately, to hold on to his patience again: a matter of nerve, of doing that strange thing people described as steeling yourself. He leaned down, a supplicant, and smiled at her. Bait, he thought. Play her little game. Please come to the prom with me, only me.

  “A woman,” she said.

  “What woman?”

  “She was trying to lose me. I can’t explain that. She was like trying to say something but she was trying to lose me at the same time. She wanted to fade me out.” The girl paused. “She was having a real hard time. That’s what I got. A lot of stuff about killing.”

  Killing, Rayner thought. He had the unsettling feeling of having stepped through some curious barrier, of having drawn aside a curtain, expecting daylight, but finding instead a black window, a world suddenly without sunlight.

  “Killing who?” he asked.

  The girl shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “What did you mean when you said something about a broken frame of wood?”

  “I don’t remember saying that,” the kid said. “She was too much, whoever she was. She was about the heaviest thing I ever ran into. All this power, I mean.”

  “What power?”

  “She was strong, I mean. I couldn’t reach her. She could block me out anytime she liked.”

  Rayner paused, looking at Isobel. This conversation, he thought—the underlying absurdity of it touched him strongly. What the hell are we talking about? A faulty telephone connection? All this power, I mean.

  “What else?” he asked. “What else do you remember?”

  “I know she was bleeding—”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I just know it. It wasn’t like she was cut or anything. She was bleeding. Not a period.” The girl blinked at him: I’m older than you think. He could feel it, the undertow of teasing, of how she was coming on to him, the casual reference to menstruation. Okay, he thought. You’re a big girl. You’re a big girl, love.

  “If it wasn’t a period what was it?”

  “It was from inside, I guess.”

  “Like how?”