The Passage: A Novel Page 11

  In the dark van, it was impossible to tell where they were going, and a little nauseating. For all Grey knew, they were just circling the airport. With nothing to do or see, they all fell asleep soon enough. When Grey woke up he had no sense of the hour. He also had to pee like a jackrabbit. That was the Depo. He rose from his seat and rapped his knuckles on the sliding panel at the front of the compartment.

  “Yo, I gotta stop,” he said.

  Richards slid the window open, affording Grey a view through the van’s windshield. The sun had set; the road ahead, a two-lane blacktop, was dark and empty. In the distance he glimpsed a purple line of light where the sky met a mountain ridge.

  “I need to take a leak,” Grey explained. “Sorry.”

  In the passenger compartment behind him, the other men were rousing. Richards reached onto the floor and passed Grey a clear plastic bottle with a wide mouth.

  “I gotta pee in this?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  Richards closed the window without another word. Grey sat back down on the bench and examined the bottle in his hand. He figured it was big enough. But the thought of taking his equipment out in the van, right in front of the other men, like this was no big deal, made all the muscles around his bladder clamp like a slipknot.

  “No way I’m using that,” the one named Sam said. His eyes were closed; he was sitting with his hands folded at his lap. His face wore a look of intense concentration. “I’m just holding it.”

  They rode a little farther. Grey tried to think of something that could keep his mind off his bursting bladder, but this only made matters worse. It felt like an ocean sloshing around inside him. They hit a pothole and the ocean crashed against the shoreline. He heard himself groan.

  “Hey!” he said, banging on the window again. “Hey in there! I’ve got an emergency!”

  Richards opened the panel. “What is it now?”

  “Listen,” Grey said, and pushed his head through the narrow space. He lowered his voice so the others wouldn’t hear. “I can’t. Seriously. I can’t use the bottle. You’ve got to pull over.”

  “Just hold it, for fucksake.”

  “I’m serious. I’m begging you. I can’t … I can’t go like this. I have a medical condition.”

  Richards sighed with irritation. Their eyes met quickly in the rearview, and Grey wondered if he knew. “Stay where I can see you and no looking around. I fucking mean it.”

  He pulled the vehicle to the side of the road. Grey was muttering under his breath, “C’mon, c’mon …” Then the door opened and he was out, sprinting away from the rumbling light of the van. He stumbled down the embankment, each second ticking off like a bomb between his thighs. Grey was in some kind of pasture. A sliver of moon was up, wicking the tips of the grass with an icy glow. He had to get at least fifty feet away, he figured, maybe more, to do the thing right. He came to a fence line and despite his knees and the pressure of his bladder he was up and over it like a shot. He heard Richards’s voice behind him yelling for him to stop, fucking stop right now, goddamnit, and then he heard Richards yelling at the other men to do the same. Dewy grass swished against Grey’s pant legs, drenched the toes of his boots. A dot of red light was skipping across the field in front of him, but who knew what that was. He could smell cows, feel their presence around him, somewhere in the field. A fresh surge of panic pressed upon him: what if they were watching?

  But it was too late, he simply had to go, there was no way he could wait another second. He stopped where he was and unzipped his fly and peed so hard into the darkness he moaned with relief. No tepid arc of gold: the water shot out of him like the contents of a busted hydrant. He peed and peed and peed some more. God almighty, it was the most wonderful feeling in the world, peeing like this, like a great plug had been pulled out of him. He was almost glad he’d waited so long.

  Then it was over. His tank was dry. He stood a moment, feeling the cool night air on his exposed flesh. An immense calm filled him, an almost heavenly well-being. The field stretched around him like a vast carpet, creaking with the sound of crickets. He lit a Parliament from the pack in his shirt pocket, and as the smoke hit his lungs he tipped his face to the horizon. He’d barely noticed the moon before, a rind of light, like a fingernail trimming, suspended over the mountains. The sky was full of stars.

  He turned to look in the direction he’d come. He could see the headlights of the van where it was parked by the side of the road, and Richards waiting there in his tracksuit, something bright and shiny in his hand. Grey climbed the fence in time to see Jack emerging from the field as well, then spied Sam crossing the roadway from the far side. They all converged on the van at the same instant.

  Richards was standing in the conical glare of the headlights, his hands on his hips. Whatever he had been holding was gone from sight.

  “Thanks,” Grey said over the sound of the idling engine. He finished the last of his cigarette and tossed it on the pavement. “I really had to go.”

  “Fuck you,” Richards said. “You have no idea.” Jack and Sam were looking at the ground. Richards tipped his head at the open door of the van. “All of you, in. And not one more fucking word.”

  They took their seats in chastened silence; Richards started the engine and pulled back onto the roadway. That was when Grey realized it. He didn’t have to look at them to know. The other two, Jack and Sam: they were just like him. And something else. The thing Richards had been holding, which Grey guessed was now tucked away inside the waistband of his tracksuit or stashed in the glove compartment; that little dancing light in the grass, like a single dot of blood.

  One more step, Grey knew, and Richards would have shot him.

  Once a month, Grey took a shot of Depo-Povera, and every morning a little dot of a pill, star-shaped, of spironolactone. Grey had been following this regimen for a little over six years; it was a condition of his release.

  And the truth was, he didn’t mind. He didn’t have to shave as much, there was that. The spironolactone, an antiandrogen, decreased the size of the testicles; since he’d begun taking it, he could shave every second or third day, and his hair was finer and less coarse, like when he was a boy. His skin was clearer and softer, even with the smoking. And of course there were the “psychological benefits,” as the prison shrink had called them. Things didn’t get to him the way they had, the way a feeling could twist inside him for days at a time, like a piece of glass he’d swallowed. He slept like a rock and never remembered his dreams. Whatever it was that made him pull over the truck that day, fifteen years ago—the day that started the whole thing—was long gone. Whenever he sent his mind back there, to that period of his life and all that came after, he still felt bad about it. But even this feeling was indistinct, a picture out of focus. It was like feeling bad about a rainy day, something no one could have helped.

  The Depo, though, played hell with his bladder, because it was a steroid. As for not wanting anybody to see him, he guessed that was just part of the way his mind worked now. The shrink told him about this, and like everything else, it had come to pass exactly as he’d said. The inconveniences were slight, but Grey spent a certain amount of time looking away from things. Kids, for one, which was why he’d taken so well to rig work. Pregnant women. Highway rest stops. Most of what was on television—programs he’d watched before without a second thought, not just sexy things but things like boxing or even the news. He wasn’t allowed within two hundred yards of a school or day-care center, which was fine by him—he never drove if he could help it between the hours of three and four and would go blocks out of his way just to avoid a school bus. He didn’t even like the color yellow. It was all a little weird, and certainly nothing he could explain to anyone, but it sure beat the hell out of prison. More than that: it beat the way he lived before, always feeling like he was a bomb that was about to go off.

  If his old man could see him now, he thought. With the way he felt on the meds, Grey might even have been able to
see his way to forgiving him for the things he’d done. The prison shrink, Dr. Wilder, had spoken a lot about forgiveness. Forgiveness was just about his all-time, number one favorite word. Forgiveness, Wilder explained, was the first step on a long road, the long road of recovery. It was a road, but sometimes it was a door; and only by going through this door could you make peace with your past, and face the inner demon, the “bad you” inside the “good you.” Wilder used his fingers a lot while he was talking, making little quotation marks in the air. Grey thought Wilder was basically full of shit. Probably he said the same crap to everybody. But Grey had to admit Wilder had a point with the “bad you” stuff. The bad Grey was real enough, and for a time, most of his life in fact, the bad Grey was really the only Grey there was. So that was the best thing about the meds, and why he planned to go on taking them the rest of his life, even after the court-ordered ten years were over: the bad Grey was nobody he ever wanted to meet again.

  Grey trudged to the barracks through the snow and ate a plate of tacos in the commissary before returning to his room. Tuesday was Bingo Night, but Grey couldn’t work up a head of steam over that; he’d played a couple of times and come up at least twenty dollars down, and the soldiers always won, which made him think it was rigged. It was a stupid game anyway, really just an excuse to smoke, which he could do for free in his room. He lay on his bed, propped a couple of pillows behind his head and an ashtray on his stomach, and flipped on the television. A lot of the stations were blacked out; no CNN, no MSNBC, no GOVTV or MTV or E!—not that he ever looked at those stations anymore—and where commercials would have been the screen went blue for a minute or two until the program came back on. He surfed through the channels until he came to something interesting, a show on the War Network about the Allied invasion of France. Grey had always liked history, had even done pretty well in it back in school. He was good with dates and names, and it seemed that if you kept these straight in your head, the rest was just fill-in-the-blank. Stretched out on his bed, still wearing his coveralls, Grey watched and smoked. On the screen, GIs were tumbling onto the beaches by the boatload, blasting away and dodging shells and hurling their grenades. Behind them, out to sea, huge guns poured fire and thunder onto the cliff sides of Nazi-occupied France. Now that, Grey thought, was a war. The footage was jittery and out of focus half the time, but in one shot Grey could clearly see an arm—a Nazi arm—reaching out from the slotted window of a pillbox that some nice American kid had just used a flamethrower on. The arm was all burned up and smoking like a chicken wing left on a barbecue grill. Grey’s old man had done two tours as a medic in Vietnam, and he wondered what he would have said about a thing like that. Grey sometimes forgot that his father was a medic; when Grey was a kid, the guy hadn’t so much as put a Band-Aid on his knee, not once.

  He smoked a last Parliament and turned off the television. Two days ago, the one named Jack and the one named Sam had up and left, not a word to anyone, so Grey had agreed to take a double shift. This would put him back on Level 4 by 06:00. It was a shame, those guys leaving like they had; unless you worked the full year, you forfeited the money. Richards had let it be known in no uncertain terms that this development did not make him one goddamn bit happy, and if anybody else was thinking of skipping, they had better think about this long and hard—very long and hard, he had said, giving the room a long, slow scan, like a pissed-off gym teacher. He gave this little speech in the dining hall during breakfast, and Grey locked his eyes on his scrambled eggs the whole time. He figured what happened to Sam and Jack was none of his business, and in any event the warning didn’t apply to him: he, for one, wasn’t going anywhere, and it wasn’t like he’d been friends with those guys, not really. They’d talked a bit about this and that, but it was really just passing the time, and their leaving meant more money for Grey. An overtime shift was an extra five hundred; you pulled three in a week, they gave you an extra hundred as a bonus, too. As long as the money kept rolling in, filling up his account with all those zeros lined up like eggs in a carton, Grey would sit there on the mountaintop until the last cat was hung.

  He peeled off his coveralls and doused the light. Pellets of snow were blowing against his window, a sound like sand shaking in a paper sack; every twenty seconds the blinds flared as the beacon on the west perimeter swung across the glass. Sometimes the drugs made Grey restless or he got leg cramps, but a couple of ibuprofen usually did the trick. He sometimes got up in the middle of the night to smoke or take a leak, though usually he slept straight through. He lay in the dark and tried to calm his thoughts but found himself thinking about Zero again. Maybe it was the burned-up Nazi arm; he couldn’t seem to push the image of Zero from his mind. Zero was a prisoner of some kind. His table manners weren’t anything to brag about, and it was nothing nice to look at, the business with the rabbits. Still, food was food and Zero wasn’t having any of it. All he did was hang there like he was sleeping, though Grey didn’t think he was. The chip in Zero’s neck broadcast all kinds of data to the console, some of which Grey understood and some of which he didn’t. But he knew what sleep looked like, that it looked different from being awake. Zero’s heart rate was always the same, 102 beats per minute, give or take a beat. The technicians who came into the control room to read the data never said anything about this, just nodded and checked off the boxes on their handhelds. But 102 seemed mighty awake to Grey.

  And the other thing was, Zero felt awake. There Grey went again, thinking about how Zero made him feel, which was nuts, but even so. Grey had never had much use for cats, but this was the same kind of thing. A cat sleeping on a step wasn’t really sleeping. A cat sleeping on a step was a coiled spring waiting for a mouse to totter along. What was Zero waiting for? Maybe, Grey thought, he was just tired of rabbit. Maybe he wanted Ding Dongs, or a bologna hoagie, or turkey tetrazzini. For all Grey could tell, the guy would have eaten a piece of wood. With choppers like that, there pretty much wasn’t anything he couldn’t bore right through.

  Ugh, Grey thought with a shudder, the teeth, and that was when he knew he had to do something else to make himself sleep besides just lying there, stewing in his thoughts. It was already midnight. Six A.M. would jump out at him like a jack-in-the-box before he knew it. He rose and took a couple of ibuprofen, smoked a cigarette and emptied his bladder again for good measure, then slid back between the covers. The spotlights grazed the windows once, twice, three times. He made an effort to close his eyes and imagine the escalator. This was a trick Wilder had taught him. Grey was what Wilder called “suggestible,” meaning he was easily hypnotized, and the escalator was the thing Wilder had used to do this. You imagined being on an escalator, slowly going down. It didn’t matter where the escalator was, an airport or mall or whatever, and Grey’s escalator wasn’t anyplace in particular. The point was, it was an escalator, and you were on it, alone, and the escalator went down and down and down, headed toward the bottom, which wasn’t a bottom in the ordinary sense of being the end of something but a place of cool, blue light. Sometimes it was one escalator; sometimes it was a series of shorter escalators that descended one floor at a time with turns in between. Tonight it was just the one. The mechanism clicked a little under his feet; the rubber handrail was smooth and cool to the touch. Riding the escalator, Grey could feel the blueness waiting below him, but he didn’t avert his gaze to look at it, because it wasn’t a thing you saw; it came from inside you. When it filled you up and took you over, you knew you were asleep.

  Grey.

  The light was in him now, but it wasn’t blue; that was the funny thing. The light was a warm orange color, and throbbing like a heart. Part of his brain said, You are asleep, Grey; you are asleep and dreaming. But another part, the part that was actually in the dream, took no mind of this. He moved through the pulsing orange light.

  Grey. I am here.

  The light was different now, golden; Grey was in the barn, in the straw. A dream that was a memory, but not exactly: he had straw all over him fr
om rolling around in it, sticking to his arms and face and hair, and the other boy was there, his cousin Roy, who wasn’t his real cousin, but he called him that; and Roy was covered too, and laughing. They’d been rolling around, fighting, sort of, and then the feeling of it changed, the way a song changed. He could smell the straw, and his own sweat mixing with Roy’s, all of it combining in his senses to make the smell of a summer afternoon as a boy. Roy was saying, quietly, It’s okay, take off them jeans, I’ll take mine off too, ain’t nobody coming. Just do like I do, I’ll show you how it’s done, it’s the best feeling in the world. Grey knelt beside him in the straw.

  Grey. Grey.

  And Roy was right; it was the best feeling. Like climbing a rope in gym class only better, like a big sneeze building inside him, starting from down low and climbing up through all the hallways and alleyways and channels inside him. He closed his eyes and let the feeling rise.

  Yes. Yes. Grey, listen. I am coming.

  But it wasn’t just Roy with him, not anymore. Grey heard the roar and then the footsteps on the ladder, like the song changing again. He saw Roy one last time from the corner of his eye and he was all burned up and smoking. His father was using the belt, the heavy black one, he didn’t need to see it to know, and he buried his face in the straw as the belt fell across his bare back, slapping and ripping, again, again; and then something else, deeper, tearing at him from the inside.

  You like this, is this what you like, I’ll show you, be quiet now and take it.