Life on the Preservation, US Edition (12 page)

Ray Preston and another, beefier, man came up the steps and into the house, preceded by Father Jim. The bullet hole in the priest’s head was leaking, the flesh around it proud. Kylie tried to break for the back door but the heavier man ran ahead of Ray Preston and caught her from behind and held her arms pinned against her body, his hands locked in a wrestler’s hold around her waist.

“Let me go! Billy!”

“Don’t hurt her,” Maggie said.

“They’re going to
cut
me,” Kylie said.

“Please don’t hurt her,” Maggie said. “I’ve changed my mind. She’s a good girl, a good girl.”

Father Jim pushed Maggie aside and stood before Kylie. He spoke to Preston without taking his eyes off Kylie. “Raymond, go to the basement. Billy’s there. See that he doesn’t interrupt us.”

Preston headed for the stairs.

Father Jim produced a rag and a glass bottle from his doctor’s bag. Watery, mustard colored fluid seeped from the hole in his forehead. It
did
look infected. Did he use his scalpel to keep it open? Kylie struggled harder to get free. Father Jim touched his finger to the fluid.

“God weeps at your impurity,” he said. He uncapped the bottle. Kylie and the man holding her reacted to the smell, coughing, turning their faces away.

“
My
impurity, what about your impurity what about when–”

Jim slapped her so hard she saw stars.

“When God expelled Adam and Eve from Paradise,” he said, “Eve began to bleed. And so the world was stained.”

Kylie lifted her chin and glared at him.

“This will make you sleep,” Father Jim said.

“Don’t,” Kylie said. “No.”

She struggled helplessly. Maggie grabbed at the priest’s arm. “I’ve changed my
mind
,” she said.

The man holding Kylie said, “We’re gonna make her right.”

“Mommy!”

Father Jim saturated the rag and pushed it into Kylie’s face. She held her breath and jerked her head violently side to side. But the fumes pried into her brain and the world began to soften and blur around the edges. She saw Billy, then, but was he real or just a desperate picture in her mind? He was holding a gun, the big revolver, and Ray Preston was walking ahead of him. Billy spoke in a loud voice that made Father Jim turn around. The man holding Kylie released her.

Kylie discovered that her legs were now made of rubber. They would not support her, and she folded down to the floor and sat there, the chemical stink infiltrating her. Billy was talking, but the words didn’t seem to connect to any meaning.

“–over here,” he said, maybe.

She crawled to him, her head pounding. Up close, she noticed the toes of his boots were scuffed. He touched her head. He kept asking her questions and arguing with the three men. Kylie concentrated until the words came together in proper order.

“Can you stand?” he said.

“Uh huh.”

She got one foot under her, pitched forward, tried again. After a while she was upright. It felt like she was very high off the ground, swaying on stilts, her fuzzy head wobbling on top of her neck.

Billy waved the gun at the men. “You three sit on the sofa.”

They sat shoulder-to-shoulder, Father Jim in the middle, and stared at Billy.

“Okay, Jim, hold that rag over his face.” With the barrel of the gun Billy indicated the wrestler. Father Jim did as instructed, and the man slumped, unconscious. “Now Ray,” Billy said, pointing the gun at Preston, who appeared scared and ready to try something.

“Come on,” Ray said, “we can jump him.”

Father Jim shook his head. “Don’t be afraid.”

“If you let us have guns this wouldn’t even happen,” Ray said, and then Father Jim pressed the chemical-soaked rag to face. Ray held his breath. Jim stroked his head with his free hand. “It’s all right, Raymond.” After a moment, Ray sighed and slumped over.

“Your turn,” Billy said.

Father Jim set the bottle and rag on the coffee table and stared at him. Billy rubbed his temple, pressing his fingertips in hard. Kylie thought he looked on the verge of fainting. “Maggie,” he said, “soak that rag again and hand it to me.”

“Oh, I couldn’t,” Maggie said.

“If you don’t, I might have to shoot Jim, and
this
gun makes bigger holes than the other one.”

Maggie hesitated, then stepped forward, quickly grabbed the stinky rag, upended the bottle into it, then handed the rag to Billy.

Father Jim looked at her and said, “Eve became a vile thing, and Man was lost.”

“Shut up,” Billy said. He slipped behind the sofa and moved in close, pressing the barrel of the revolver to the side of Father Jim’s head. “Don’t move.” With his other hand he held the rag tight over the priest’s mouth and nose. Father Jim stiffened, and for a moment Billy thought it wasn’t going to work, that somehow Father Jim could resist the fumes. Billy’s finger tensed on the trigger, but Jim finally went limp, and when Billy removed the rag, the priest slumped against Ray Preston and began to snore.

Billy used his shirt sleeve to blot the sweat from his face. “We have to go now.”

“Okay,” Kylie said.

“Maggie?” Billy said.

She shook her head. “I can’t.”

“You have no idea what that lunatic will do when he wakes up. You better come with us.”

Maggie looked at the snoring Father Jim. “What if he’s right?”

“Right about
what?
”

“Everything. The Judgment. God. How do we
know
he’s not?”

“Come with us, Mom.” Kylie was crying. “Please come with us.”

Maggie was crying, too. “You go. You have to now,” Maggie said. “I can give you time. If they come to the door, I can tell them it isn’t over yet and Jim wants them to wait.”

“You’re better off coming with us,” Billy said.

Maggie shook her head.

Kylie felt sick and dizzy. It was the fumes, but it was also her mother. Billy started to say something, but Kylie interrupted him. “Wait,” she said and stumbled to the coffee table. She opened the photo album, flipped over the big clear plastic pages, stopped at one, and took a single photograph from its sleeve. Maggie watched her, tears shining in her eyes. “My baby girl.”

Kylie hugged her fiercely, felt her mother’s sobs shuddering through the older woman’s body. Finally, Billy pulled Kylie away.

They left by the back door and made their way through yards, vacant lots, and the rubble of destruction. Billy could only go a short way before he had to stop and rest. After a couple of minutes they continued. The night sky threatened rain.

“They’ll get us,” Kylie said. “Won’t they.”

Billy shook his head. “Nobody will follow us out of town – at least, I doubt they’ll follow us very far. For one thing, they’ll be on foot, but we won’t. And they’re afraid.”

They arrived at Billy’s house. “Help me open the garage,” he said. “Hurry.”

The night air had cleared her head a little. She helped him shove the garage door up on its tracks, springs squealing. A big Honda motorcycle – a Goldwing – stood on its kickstand in the middle of the floor. The bike had storage compartments and tandem seats. It even had a rifle in a scabbard attached to the side, as if it were a
horse
. “Get on,” Billy said. She swung her leg over the rear saddle. Billy got on in front of her.

“I didn’t even know this was here,” Kylie said.

“I’ve kept it packed and ready,” Billy said over his shoulder. “I knew I’d have to get us out of here eventually. I was stupid to wait so long.”

He turned the key and the bike rumbled to life.

They rolled down the driveway and into the street, where he paused, letting the engine idle. “Okay, here we go,” he said.

She circled her arms around his big waist. He worked the throttle, took the bike out to Main Street.

The street was filled with people, many of them holding burning torches, axes, knives – and Father Jim’s signature corrective action tool: baseball bats. No guns, though. Jim had outlawed them.

A brilliant white flash crossed the sky, followed by a deep rumble.

Billy drew up short, facing the mob. A man in overalls, with a Jim-style Louisville slugger in his fist, pointed the bat at them. There they are!”

“Hold on,” Billy said.

Kylie pressed against Billy’s leather clad back and held on with all her strength. The heavy bike lurched forward.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

SEATTLE, OCTOBER 5, 2012

I
AN THUMBED HIS
sister’s number again, but before it could start ringing he turned the phone off and tossed it on the chair. He felt with absolute certainty that if the call was answered at all it wouldn’t be by Vanessa. The thing answering might
sound
like her, might reply in roughly the way he would expect Ness to reply. But it wouldn’t be her.

“I’d be talking to myself,” he said to the empty apartment. “Which is crazy.”

Ian switched on every light, the docked iPod, the television, filled the apartment with light and sound. He didn’t want to be alone, but there was no one to call. Zach had been his only close friend. And how weird was that, to be twenty-two years old and not have even one close friend other than the guy who just killed himself?

For that matter, did he
really
believe his sister wasn’t his sister, or was he just afraid of the connection?

He sat at his desk and pulled Zach’s crumpled suicide letter out of his pocket. Ian had been messing around with a Dell Notebook he bought for twenty bucks at Value Village. He could figure out any mechanism, taking devices apart and putting them back together again in working order. Half the time he didn’t even know what he was doing. It was some kind of intuitive genius, Zach had told him, and asked, “Why the fuck are you working in a kitchen, man?”

Ian shoved the Notebook aside and spread the suicide letter flat. He could decipher any mechanism, but he couldn’t decipher the meaning of this death, or of himself, or even figure out what this day meant to him, minute by minute.

He read the letter again. “You crazy asshole.” Ian wiped his eyes roughly. “
Why?
” Unable to stand himself, Ian grabbed his phone off the chair, turned it on, and called Vanessa one more time. It went to voicemail, which didn’t mean anything. He left a message to call him back, texted the same thing, and closed the phone. A weird idea lurched drunkenly in front of him, grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him:

What if Zach wasn’t dead?

“He’s dead, all right,” Ian said.

Audioslave tore out of the iPod, TV people barked at each other.

But really. What if Zach wasn’t dead? What if Ian hadn’t seen his body at all? The whole day had felt surreal. And Ian hadn’t been right in a long time. He had drifted further and further into estrangement, to the point where even going to his crappy restaurant job was an effort. What if this whole day was some kind of
Twilight Zone
dream or hallucination? There was obvious precedent. It wasn’t that long ago that Vanessa had been lost in her own delusions. It required some powerful meds to balance out the chemical equation in her head. And his mother had been delusional when she killed herself. She must have been. Maybe the nut
didn’t
fall far from the nut tree. It’s what he’d always feared.

Ian turned the sound off on the TV, dialed the music low but left it on, and waited for his sister to call back. If she didn’t call back that would be significant. Or it wouldn’t be. After a while he got up for a beer. There wasn’t any. He thought about going down the street to buy some but couldn’t bring himself to do it. Saturday night on Capitol Hill, all those people out there. On bad days (and what day was badder than this one?) the world seemed populated with automatons. A society from which he felt mortally separated. Or maybe
he
was the robot. Like the way he felt out in the hall after Ness hypnotized him. On bad days, on
particularly
bad days, the world fractured into puzzle pieces that he couldn’t rationally arrange into a picture that made sense. He thought of Zach holed up in his condo with paranoid suicidal delusions. Was he, Ian, going the same route?

He stood abruptly and started pacing; he needed to get
out
of himself.

In the kitchen he ransacked the cupboards until he found the bottle of white Zinfandel he’d bought months ago to share with Sarah. They had never opened it. Now Ian held the bottle in his hands like a dead baby. Tears seeped from his eyes. He put the bottle down hard on the counter. He needed to be out of himself, but he didn’t really want to be drunk.

His black canvas backpack slumped in a corner of the closet. He grabbed it by a strap, spray cans clunking together, slung the pack over his shoulder and bombed out of the apartment.

On the sidewalk he ran. Saturday night and there were too many people. Ian ran as if he could leave the fearful part of himself behind.

They were going to tear down the old Greek Orthodox church on 17th. There was still some white space begging for WHO. But standing before the wall he encountered another Wall. He was standing still but he was still running. Maybe it had always been that way. But before, it hadn’t mattered. Before he hadn’t known it was running – running from the body in the tub, from his old man in the garage with his beer and tools and distance. From
himself
.

So do the wall or don’t do the fucking wall.

Ian hunkered over his backpack and unzipped it. His mind wouldn’t stop talking to him; he couldn’t see what he was supposed to paint. Slowly, he drew the zipper closed again. Graffiti was just sex misspelled. If you couldn’t do it without thinking, then you couldn’t do it.

Z
INFANDEL SLOPPED OVER
the top of a water glass. He slurped down enough to make it safe to carry. On the bed, back propped against the wall, he watched TV and didn’t think. He drank, though – the entire bottle. It took that much to blur the picture in his head of Zach’s head-blown body. And even then it wasn’t blurred enough.

He stumbled to the closet, rummaged a handful of markers from his backpack and began writing on the wall beside his bed. It was crap. He killed the TV and continued making crap on the wall. Rain blew against the window. Ian lay on his side, writing, shaping his paranoia, and the rain entered into his mind...