13 1/2 (11 page)

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Authors: Nevada Barr

BOOK: 13 1/2
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As the doctor’s decline became more pronounced, he’d taken to looking at Dylan with piercing need. Every boy in Drummond knew that look. They saw it on the faces of the “girls” who wanted to love them and the users who wanted to fuck them. It was so sharp in the faces of the boys whose folks came to visit that it hurt to look at them. Gangs of kids stared hungry like that when he and Draco peddled the drugs they’d scored. When that kind of naked hunger manifested, Dylan’s hackles rose. Either the beast was fed or there was trouble.
In the ward, in the yard, trouble could be met with fists or knives. Fists and knives wouldn’t work with Kowalski.
They’d work,
Dylan thought with a half smile.
They’d just cost too much.
Kowalski was still lusting after his
New York Times
best seller. That first day Dylan hadn’t known if that was good or bad. Now he knew. It was life and death for Kowalski. Life was when people thought he was a big deal; death was shrinking delinquents in the middle of Piddlesquat, Minnesota.
The “hook,” Kowalski had told him in an unguarded moment, was when Dylan, like Kafka’s cockroach boy, had metamorphosed into a hideous beast. The climax would be when Dylan remembered his transformation and spewed it forth for the delectation of his brilliant and kindly doctor. Right there in Dylan Raines’s brain was fame and fortune
.
And the little psycho fuck wouldn’t fork it over.
Dylan smiled, slumped down until his butt was nearly off the couch and his head at a sharp angle to the backrest, widened his eyes, and stared vacuously at the psychiatrist.
Kowalski knew the Ward C boys called the warren where his office was located the Rat’s Maze. What he didn’t know was that he was their pet rat. They conducted experiments on him. The result of one such experiment, conducted over a period of six weeks with four Ward C boys, was eye movement. The conclusion was that narrowed eyes excited the doc—not sexual excitement, Dr. K. wasn’t AC/DC—but the way a cat gets excited when it sees a bird. The doctor saw a challenge and it goosed up his energy. Avoiding eye contact bored the shrink, and a bored head examiner was a bad thing. He’d start in with the do-you-smell-your-own-shit routine. The way to piss him off most effectively was the idiot stare. All the boys had perfected it.
Maybe Kowalski’s book should be about mental retardation brought on by psychoanalysis
, Dylan thought.
He could have given Kowalski what he wanted, or a facsimile thereof. Under the guise of getting him to remember, he had been forced to study his crimes as assiduously as other boys his age were made to study English, science, and math. He knew exactly what he had done, how he had done it, how long it had taken, where the blood spatters were, and how many steps there were from one body to the next. There probably wasn’t a felon in America who knew as much about himself as Dylan did.
But he wouldn’t
remember
it.
He would remember his mom and dad, weekends at the lake cabin. He would remember school and his friends. His last best memory was of his mother’s lips pressed like butterfly wings against his forehead the night she died, the tiny gold cross falling from her robe onto his cheek, the fresh-out-of-the-dryer smell of her nightgown, how cool her hand felt when she held his chin and spooned the cherry-flavored flu medicine into his mouth, the tired smile as she said, “Sleep tight, and don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
Pseudomedical brain battering had reduced those memories to dull, sepia-toned images. Since he wasn’t likely to be gathering a whole lot more warm fuzzy memories in the near future, it pissed Dylan off that the mental health professionals had pawed over what he had until they were threadbare.
Dylan could have told a hell of a good story, complete with adolescent angst and revelations to get Kowalski off his back, but there was no way he’d let the pompous self-serving fuck make a dime off of him. And he’d gotten to where he kind of enjoyed the game.
So Dylan idiot-stared and Kowalski sat, one knee crossed over the other, hands steepled, fingertips to his lips, pretending he could see through Dylan’s bones.
Dylan opened his eyes a fraction wider and cocked his head to one side. Kowalski recrossed his legs. There was a moth hole in his right trouser cuff. The left lens of his glasses was badly scratched.
Kowalski was in debt, broke, Dylan realized. Wednesdays and Saturdays the loser parents of loser JDs came to visit. Poverty oozed from their pores, leaked onto their clothes; they stank of it. Kowalski was stinking of it now.
Psychiatrists were rich; they didn’t go broke unless they were owned by something—gambling, coke, heroin.
Heroin had been the hot item in Ward C a few years back, but Dylan laid off the stuff. The first time it was offered him, he’d turned it down.
Draco asked, “Saving your virginity for the big house?”
Dylan missed Draco. He’d gotten out when Dylan was thirteen or fourteen, but they still heard from him occasionally. He was doing time in a California state prison for getting caught in a men’s room trying to peddle a dime bag to a cop.
Big-time drug dealer, going to “go ‘to the coast’ and sell coke to the stars.” Dylan smiled.
“I’m glad to see you’re in such a gay mood,” Kowalski snapped from his preshrink silence. He recrossed his legs and checked his watch—the signal that the session was to begin. “I won’t be able to come back to Drummond as often as I’d like,” he said in his reserved, we-both-know-I’m-God sort of way. “I have other commitments—a new job, better.”
Kowalski was lying.
In Drummond, lying wasn’t a sin; it was an art form. Guys in for more than a six-month vacation got to where they could tell when the shit was being shoveled. There was some natural talent nobody could see through. The retard Dylan had been in psych with was too stupid to know whether he was lying or not. Herman, a big Swede kid, dragged off the family farm for raping a ten-year-old girl—nobody could tell when Herman was lying. He’d learned it young, like a second language. Herman probably dreamed in lies.
Kowalski was an amateur.
“There’s no job,” Dylan said bluntly. “You screwed the pooch didn’t you?” Mostly he didn’t call people on their lies. What would be the point? He wasn’t sure why he’d done it this time. Maybe because Kowalski was so fucking full of himself. Whatever the reason, the instant it came out of his mouth Dylan knew he’d joined old Kowalski in the pooch-screwing department.
Kowalski hadn’t come to Drummond to bid his favorite psycho boy good-bye; he’d come to do something or not do it. Dylan’s mouth had just decided Kowalski to do it.
“We’ve gotten nowhere with your . . . amnesia,” the doctor said. He leaned back and the frayed cuff of his trouser rode up over his sock exposing a white, nearly hairless calf. “Given that our time is limited, we’re going to have to take a more aggressive tack.”
The last time Kowalski had taken an aggressive tack, about a zillion volts of electricity had been pumped through Dylan’s head. Talk about amnesia. After that, he’d had a hell of a time remembering his own name, let alone what happened when he was eleven.
Rich had put a stop to it. Dylan was just a kid; his brother wasn’t all that much older. Vondra Werner was still driving him. The Saturday after Kowalski strapped Dylan down and fried his brains, Rich came to see him like he did every Saturday.
Not wanting to be a pussy, Dylan tried to suck it up, not let his brother see what a mess he was. He thought he was pulling it off until Rich started yelling, “What did you do to my brother? What the fuck have you done to my brother?”
Draco said it was the coolest thing he’d ever seen. Dylan sitting flopped over the table, limp as a noodle, drooling and babbling, and Rich standing on his chair doing the avenging angel thing. After that Rich got his adopted mom, Sara, to lean on real doctors, and one leaned on a senator, or judge, or cop, or somebody, and Kowalski had backed down.
Until now.
“There’s a new experimental drug we’ve been having some success with,” Kowalski said. “It’s called lysergic acid diethylamide.” He paused as if to let the momentous cutting edge of his intellect crash into Dylan’s consciousness.
Dylan had dropped acid three or four times, once with his algebra teacher, Phil Maris. They’d lain on the floor of the math lab after lights out and watched formulas take wing and mate. The first couple times it made the pictures in his head of the things he built more vivid. The last time, though, numbers came alive—not in a good way, but like people were alive—with emotions, likes and dislikes. Dylan hated the rational world of mathematics infected with the stuff of humanity. After that he’d stuck pretty much to dope.
When a new kid, Purvis Something, was moved permanently to psych after dropping a hit of Window Pane, Dylan swore it off completely. His brain was nothing to fuck with. People learned that the hard way.
“Ell-ess-dee,” Kowalski said, playing Timothy Leary’s best pal.
“Cool,” Dylan said and again thought of Draco:
You get, you share.
If he got a chance, he’d score a few hits for pocket money.
“You seem to be looking forward to it. We shall see . . . ” the doctor said with more than a hint of malice. “I have cleared the remainder of the afternoon.”
Explaining that the drug had been formulated in a lab at the National Institute for Mental Health to be used for experimental purposes, Kowalski took a vial from his briefcase. There was no label on the glass container. Inside was a square of blue paper with a slight discoloration in the middle. Dylan had been medicated, overmedicated, and eternally messed with; he knew the rituals of medical protocol from the inside. Kowalski was bullshitting him. The hit had been bought on the street. It could be cut with anything—speed, Drano—whatever the cook thought would give more bang and save him a buck.
Kowalski hated him. Dylan read the certainty of it in the set of his mouth, the aggressive jut of the bearded jaw, as he plugged in a tape recorder and arranged the microphone on his desk.
Dylan was unimpressed. Most people hated him. Regular people would have to be crazy not to hate him. He slid down on the couch another six inches, his long legs, strong from ice hockey and Drummond’s stone stairways, taking up more room than Kowalski liked.
“Sit up,” the doctor ordered peevishly.
Dylan didn’t move. His idiot stare grew more vacuous.
Dr. Kowalski flipped the tape recorder on and held out the blue square of contaminated paper.
14
Dylan’s last acid trip hadn’t been all that great, but it hadn’t freaked him out. And though he remembered the look in Purvis Whatshisname’s eyes after he’d dropped and hit the wall—like something had reached in through his nose with red-hot tongs and tried to pull out his soul—he’d never been particularly scared of the stuff. Most of the guys did it, and, other than Purv, who was determined to go nuts one way or another, nobody seemed too busted up by it.
He was scared now, though, that was for damn sure. All gloved-up like he was handling nuclear waste, Kowalski was poking the blue square of paper at him on the end of a pair of tweezers he’d probably used to pull his nose hairs out that morning.
Street shit. Even that didn’t put the fear into him. It was Kowalski’s eyes. The doctor looked crazy, bug-shit, a kind of hungry, desperate crazy. The monkey on his back—the addiction, the need, the lust, the whatever—had been working the doctor over.
For half a second Dylan thought of refusing the acid, of getting up and running out. He was bigger than the doctor. Kowalski couldn’t stop him.
He couldn’t stop Kowalski. Doctors were gods at Drummond. They did what they wanted with the kids, whatever they wanted. Dylan pinched the paper from the tweezers and popped it in his mouth. What the hell? It had to be better than electroshock.
He dry-swallowed, smiled slowly, and said, “Thanks, Doc. The warden know you’re my drug dealer now?”
Kowalski sat down on the edge of his chair, hitched it a couple of inches closer to the couch, and leaned forward.
The doctor was
out
; the man on the chair was not a psychiatrist or a medical professional. He was scarcely even a man. He was a big fat zero waiting for something to come make him count, fill up the hole.
Welcome to monster world, Doc.
“You are going to fucking remember,” Kowalski said, the obscenity jarring not only because it was the first time Dylan had heard him use anything stronger than “heck” or “darn” but because the word was uttered with the same smooth, pseudocaring voice Kowalski used when he was shrinking kids in front of visitors.
“You are going to fucking remember every whack,” he said, then leaned back and waited.
“Eighty-one,” Dylan said.
“Is the LSD taking effect?” Kowalski checked his watch, as if he genuinely thought he could time street-drug reactions.
“Forty, done. Father, forty-one,” Dylan said to remind Kowalski of the Lizzy Borden poem.
“It’s starting,” the doctor said.
What a stupid fuck
. Dylan could say or do anything he damn well pleased, and the fool would write it off to the acid. “Your beard’s on fire.”

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