No Sleep till Wonderland (13 page)

Fresh waves of panic and fear surge over my levees. I won’t be able to recover. There’re too many thoughts of
get up! run! crawl!
stampeding into each other, creating logjams in my neurons and synapses, shutting everything down again. I’ll be the possum playing dead in the road. I’m not playing.

A car swerves past me on the left, tires squealing, and the smell of burning rubber is close and hot, singeing my sinuses. I scream for help again. I scream at myself to move. I lift my right hand and hover it over my face. The fingers are pink with my blood. My hand trembles, and I’m not strong enough to hold it up there, way up above my face.

The bridge under me shakes like a by-the-hour motel’s vibrating bed working on a fistful of quarters. A distant roar is becoming not-so-distant. I manage to lift my head up, and the scene rushes back together. I’m staring at the gleaming grille of an eighteen-wheeler, and it’s almost on top of me. Its twin-sun headlights are already shining their dirty light past me on the road ahead. The truck dives downhill, a great white shark with chrome teeth rushing to a feeding frenzy. My legs are almost in its gaping maw.

It’s going to drive right over me. I pull my arms against my side and my legs together, turning into a lowercase
l
or a sardine. I think flat-as-a-tortilla thoughts and try not to move. Need to keep away from the tires, somehow. My eyes won’t close, and the truck’s engine, that smog-spewing, great-grandchild of the industrial revolution, is infinitely sized as it passes over my head. Below the undercarriage, everything is heat and noise and wind and metal and rubber, then smoke as the wheels to either side of me spin and burn, and the bulk above me drifts left. The idiot is breaking. He can’t break now; he’ll fishtail, and if he freaks out and cuts the wheel I won’t even register as a speed bump as the tires chew a path through me.

Days pass, and I’m still here beneath the truck. I understand the yawning horror that is eternity. I can’t see the end of the truck through the smoke. I can’t see anything. Every molecule in my body wants to go away, to move-move-move. I hold steady, wishing to dissolve and diffuse into the pavement and become part of the road.

The sensory assault ends abruptly, and the truck is past me. I close my eyes and could give in to sleep right now so easily. Sleep is holding its jacket open, and it’d take no effort to slip my arms inside and button up.

Approaching cars make their gluttonous sounds. I can’t get up and walk, or even crawl, but I can pendulum my hips, turning them left and right. I push and strain and swear, until I build up enough momentum to roll on my right side, toward the passing lane. The first roll is always the hardest. I momentarily teeter and almost fall into my original turtle-on-its-back position. My left shoulder pistons forward, and I roll over onto my stomach, then flip up onto my left side. My husky build and the grade and pitch of the highway help to facilitate my roll-out-the-barrel progress. I traverse the passing lane and roll up against the median, leaning facedown.

I close my eyes and listen to cars and their horns, brakes, and sirens. I close my eyes and listen to the shouting. It’s all over, but they’re still shouting.

And I lie there, wondering where Gus is. And I lie there, wondering where George is. Wondering why he left me in the van by myself. Wondering why he disappeared and left me alone to deal with all this.

The sun cuts through the window and blinds, leaving pieces of itself on the linoleum, the dead TV screen, and the breakfast tray littered with crushed-up balls of cellophane. I didn’t eat the scrambled eggs because they melted, filling my green plate with yellow water.

Detective Owolewa sits in a chair next to my bed. I catch him in midyawn and stretch. I’m rubbing off on him. He says, “Are you awake, Mr. Genevich?”

“Maybe. Are you?”

I’m awake enough to know I slept through Sunday. I sit upright with my legs stretched out on the bed. Swaddled in a Johnny and tucked under a thin, noisy sheet as rough as shark skin, I’m in Mass General hospital. No private room for me.

He says, “You’re due to be discharged within the hour.”

“I thought I had this bed booked for the whole week.” Various aches and pains report from the different precincts of my body. My face is a mask, two sizes too big. I need a hat and a cigarette. “I know I look like I was entered in a demolition derby, but they tell me nothing is broken. Shows what they know.”

“Your toxicology screen came back clean, as well, which was a surprise.”

“Don’t be surprised. My body is a temple.”

Detective Owolewa wears a white buttoned shirt, sleeves rolled up. He has work to do. He says, “We have surveillance video of Eddie Ryan leaving you on the Zakim.”

I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am. “I hope you got my good side.” He has a surveillance video, and all I have is the Andre the Giant of headaches.

“You appeared to be unconscious when you were falling out of the car to the road. Then, before the truck passed over you, you were twitching around like you were having a seizure. Do you remember any of that?”

“The truck I’ll remember most of all,” I say, then describe cataplexy and narcolepsy and the big bang theory. It’s all about mass, gravity, and black holes, and none of it seems to make an impression.

“We picked up Eddie only an hour after he left you. We found him passed out in the same stolen car, which he parked down by Carson Beach. He was initially nonresponsive, and he had methamphetamines in his possession.”

“He’s a reprobate, that one.”

“Did you know the car was stolen?” He’s reading off a pre-planned script of plays. His cool and collected is more like a simmer, though. He’s not pleased.

I say, “Yes and no. But mostly yes.” If I was interviewing me, I’d hate me too.

“Allow me to rephrase the question. How did you end up in the stolen car with a local meth dealer?”

“The short answer is that me as the late-night bridge delivery wasn’t voluntary. You’d think that’d be clear from the video.”

“Eddie forced you into the car as well as out of the car, then?”

“Beaten, carried, and dragged would be more accurate, but we can go with forced.”

“Did you two gentlemen have a dispute over the purchase or disbursement—past, present, or future—of amphetamines or any of its derivatives?”

I laugh. A garbage can rolling down an alley. “Hardly. Eddie thinks I’m responsible for putting him on your arson suspect short list.”

“I didn’t know I had a short list. Why would he think that?”

“I don’t know. Ask Eddie. Conspiracy theories really aren’t my bag.”

“Where did Eddie pick you up?”

“I don’t remember. I think I was asleep. You know how that is.”

“Here’s what I know, besides you not being truthful with me from the get-go.” Detective Owolewa leans and picks up something from under his chair, and he throws it to me like a Frisbee. My hat lands on my chest.

I say, “You know my hat?” I put it on, and know I’m making a terrible mistake.

The detective says, “The owner had parked the car in front of 74 West Second Street. Does that address mean anything to you? It should. I found your hat in the first-floor apartment. The door was open.”

I sink into the quicksand of my adjustable bed. Suddenly my johnny is too tight. “Maybe it isn’t my hat. Though it does look nice on me.”

“A local resident reported a disturbance in that same apartment and witnessed two men fighting on the sidewalk in front of the building.”

“To be fair, I wasn’t fighting. I was getting my ass handed to me.”

“I don’t know what to do with you, Mr. Genevich.”

“That makes two of us.”

“Who’s apartment is it?”

“A friend’s.”

“Name.”

“Gus.”

“Why were you there?”

“I’ve crashed there before. Sometimes I need to get away from my place, from the rut, the routine. It’s a sleep strategy. Might be hard to believe, but I have trouble sleeping at night, and getting out and going to his place helps sometimes. Change of scenery, greener grass, and all that.” I’m believable, and so is Gus, my good friend who’s close by and takes me in when I’m feeling lonely.

“What time did you go to the apartment?”

“Around two a.m.”

“Was Gus home?”

“No. I assume he was at his girlfriend’s place.”

“Does Eddie know Gus?”

I should just tell the detective everything. I don’t know why I’m resisting, holding back. I don’t know why I continue to protect Gus, if that is what I’m doing. Gus isn’t even real anymore. Maybe he never was. He’s a Snuffleupagus, a secret I keep while continually molding his image to fit a need, fill a purpose. Yeah, I’m saying he’s my imaginary friend.

I say, “I don’t know who Eddie knows.”

“You think Eddie followed you to the apartment.”

“Seems like the likeliest scenario.”

“Is Gus the client who gave you the amphetamines?”

“No.”

The detective shakes his head. “I don’t know what to do with you.”

“You said that already.”

“It’s still true. You’re simultaneously on the outskirts and in the middle of the whole mess. I don’t think you’ve purposefully done anything wrong. I also don’t think whatever it is you’re trying to do is helping anyone. Yourself included. But you’re too stubborn to tell me everything I need to hear.”

His outskirts/middle of the mess spiel is a more than apt description of me. It’s frustrating to be reduced to fifty words or less. I say, “I refuse to accept that I’m stubborn.” His insight is impressive and more than a little scary. Or maybe I’m just that obvious. “What has Eddie told you?”

“Eddie thinks that everyone is out to get him, that he’s done nothing wrong, and that he’s depressed. He admitted to drinking and doing a lot of meth but claims to remember nothing about the time he spent with you.”

Is there a chance that Eddie is telling the truth? The meth would explain his zombie pallor, the ragged speech pattern and behavior. If fully rational, he’d have to understand that dumping me on the highway would not serve his long-term goals.

I say, “He said all that?”

“And more. He was surprisingly compliant.” The detective smiles. He knows more than I’ll ever know.

How long before Eddie will tell him about his relationship with Gus or my visit to Jody, if he hasn’t told him already? I’m digging a hole where no one really needs one, and I’m more than likely going to be the only one to fall in and have dirt kicked over me.

I nod out, lose more time that I can’t ever get back. Detective Owolewa stands in front of his chair, arms across his chest. Maybe I should worry about what was said while I was out, but it couldn’t be any worse than what I said while I was in.

I say, “I wasn’t sleeping.”

“Eddie is going to be charged with possession of a controlled substance, aggravated assault, kidnapping, and perhaps attempted murder.”

“I noticed you didn’t say arson.”

“No, I didn’t say arson, Mr. Genevich.”

“I don’t suppose you’d tell me about your investigation. How the fire was started, for instance.”

“We haven’t decided what you’re going to be charged with yet, Mr. Genevich.”

“I guess that’s a no,” I say and smooth out the lumps in the bedsheet with my hands. It doesn’t work. “I hate Eddie like poisoned poison, and maybe this doesn’t make sense, but I don’t think he was trying to kill me. He was frustrated, angry, and scared. Not in control. Not methodically taking out a perceived threat or loose end. I might be projecting my issues with discerning reality on a meth addict, but I’m not convinced he started the fire on H Street either, at least not consciously.”

I blink my eyes, and he’s not in my room anymore, the quantum detective. I don’t know if Detective Owolewa heard my closing remarks or if he offered a rebuttal. I could lie here and fret about how he left, if he said anything, what he thinks of me, what kind of expression he had on his face, if he looked over his right or left shoulder before leaving, if he walked backward, skipped, crawled, or floated out the goddamn door.

Ultimately, his mode of exit doesn’t really matter. The result is the same: he’s gone, and I’m alone.

That night the ER hospital staff resuscitated and saved my sports jacket and its contents, namely my wallet and cell phone, but they cut up my shirt and pants and peeled me like a banana. Now I’m stuck leaving the place wearing mismatching scrubs, sports coat, and my fedora. Dressed for success on a Monday.

The cab ride back to my building is not good for my health. It’s violent and herky-jerky, a mechanical bull ride. The driver doesn’t believe in smooth acceleration or stops, bouncing me around the backseat like a ball bearing in a spray paint can. My kingdom for inertia. I think about going home and crawling into my bed, or better yet, seeking a safe port on my couch for a few weeks, go all Rip Van Winkle until people forget my name.

The cabbie leaves me and a hubcap on my corner. The bright midmorning sun is an insult, and I scurry inside, a vampire Jonesing for his coffin or a cup of black coffee. Instead of going directly upstairs, I circulate the air in my office.

Let’s take inventory. Eddie is in custody, Gus is in Narnia, and Ekat is probably still sleeping or at the gym. Jody and Rachel are hiding in plain view, no one in Southie knows who Aleksandar Antonov was, Timothy Carter wants to sue me, and Detective Owolewa wants to arrest me.

I run through some investigative calisthenics. I check both phones, no messages, and no e-mails that I want to read. Maybe
no messages
is a message. Being paranoid is a given, but it’s hard not to be a narcissist as a detective, attributing weight and meaning to the meaningless. Maybe someday, if I work hard and I’m lucky, I’ll achieve irony and paradox.

On the local news Web sites there’s no word of Eddie’s arrest, but there are brief reports about a yet-to-be-named schmuck being dropped, middle lane, on the Zakim Bridge. The stories refer to the existence of a surveillance video, but there’s no sign of it online yet. Something to look forward to.

I call the Nantucket hotel owner, Midge Peterson, again and actually get her on the phone. She talks softly, like the world is a library. She doesn’t have any new information for me. No names or addresses of Boston-area friends or acquaintances of Aleksandar and no knowledge of how Wilkie Barrack went about obtaining his services.

The phone call ends, and I intend to creep upstairs to the bat cave, hang upside down for a few hours. As I’m shuttering up and locking the office, I look out my front door and across the street. Sitting on a cement bench is the first person I saw when I came to after the fire: my occasional lunch date, Rita.

She’s wearing a green baseball hat, a black sweatshirt with the sleeves cut at her forearms, and acid-washed jeans. Her head falls forward and body leans to the left. She catches and corrects her posture, but the cycle repeats. She’s nodding off, falling asleep. I’m familiar with the process.

She and I need to trade notes about the night of the fire. I dash into the Greek pizza joint next door and pick up a couple of slices. Cheese, no pepperoni. I part a sea of pedestrians and wade across the parked cars and traffic of West Broadway. Everyone lets me pass. The power of my hospital scrubs compels them.

“Hope you like pizza, Rita.”

I sometimes imagine Rita’s previous lives. She was a laid-off bus driver and an undiagnosed schizophrenic. She suffered serial physical and mental abuse at the hands of emotionally barren men. She was a runaway from the western, nowhere part of Massachusetts and quickly succumbed to heroin and a bipolar disorder. The past lives I conjure, those caricatures of a twenty-first-century victim, are supposed to be reassuring because it couldn’t possibly happen to me.

I sit next to her and give her a slice. A brittle, papier-mâché tree shades our bench. Rita nods and says, “Pizza doesn’t suck. Nice pants.” She eats her slice dutifully, and I feel guilty inhaling mine.

I ask, “Where’d you stay last night?”

Rita finishes her pizza and wipes the grease on her pants. Her painted-line thin legs are hidden somewhere inside the faded denim. I’m not sure if Rita approves of my deviating from our usual topic of Charlton Heston movies. We have an unspoken deal. I don’t ask for details about her everyday hell. I can’t handle it, and she won’t have to relive it; her suffering is a safe abstraction for me and a recurring bad dream for her.

She talks softly, and I have to lean in so she isn’t buried beneath the avalanche of lunch hour on West Broadway. “I have a new spot. It’s been safe. It’s been good. So far, so far. No one trying to take my stuff or rubbing their dirty cocks on my face when I’m sleeping. Over by Gate of Heaven, in the back, facing Fifth Street. Between the Dumpster and a stairwell. Don’t go telling anybody.”

I hate myself for asking her about where she stayed, and I hate myself for not asking her about it before today. I say, “I won’t tell anyone, Rita.”

Okay, she’s been sleeping at Gate of Heaven. I know that Dumpster, too. Jody’s burned-down H Street apartment is visible from it. I ask, “The night of the fire on H Street, were you staying at your usual spot?”

“I was making my way there when I saw the fire. Smelled it before I saw it.” Rita pauses, cranes her head in real close to mine. That dry laugh of hers plumes out, and she says, “You know, everyone knows it was you.”

I say, “It wasn’t me. You can’t prove it.” My denial is rote, something I do on autopilot, but as I pull a cigarette out of my coat like it’s a passport, what she said sneaks up on me and flicks the panic switch. “Wait. What are you talking about?” Is she talking abut the fire? Was Detective Owolewa telling me not so cryptically that I was the arson suspect?

“Give me one of those.” She grabs my hand and takes the cigarette. Her skin is an autumn leaf. “The word is out. That was you lying in the middle of the Zakim Bridge the other night.”

My color-coded alert system changes colors and mixes them together, going chameleon. How the hell does she know? Who did she talk to? I check myself; maybe I did pull a Rip Van Winkle. I’ve emerged weeks later and with everyone laughing at me.

“It wasn’t me. It was Charlton Heston.”

“He’s dead. I know it was you.”

I know when I’m had. “All right. I’m guilty. How did you know?”

“I see things. I hear things.” Rita pauses to blow a cloud of burned air into my face. “I know things.”

Great. Somebody told her, and I’m sure she’s hardly the only person swinging on that grapevine. The half gainer onto the bridge isn’t going to win me the respect and admiration of the locals, who are already abuzz with the news apparently. So Fred the friendly neighbor gets newspaper credit for saving Jody’s JT from the fire, and I’ll be a back-page joke and a YouTube legend.

I say, “What do you know? Besides Soylent Green is people.” Everyone walking by our bench looks at me and knows what happened and knows who I am.

Rita absorbs my bitchy verbal jab with remarkable dignity. A dignity I clearly lack. She pats my shoulder, which aches and is made of cracked balsa wood. There, there.

She says, “There’s something seriously wrong with you, my friend.”

“Can’t argue with that. Let’s get back on topic.”

“Didn’t know we were off topic.”

“We were. Trust me.”

“If you say so.”

“The night of the fire, who did you see there?”

“I saw you run in and then stumble out a little later, then timber! to the sidewalk.” Rita stretches our her
timber
call like a lumberjack. “That was real good of you to try and help those people.”

“I did help. I got the kid off the second floor before the smoke got to be too much, but no one will listen…”

Rita nods, then says, “Other than you and the hero guy who went in after you, I didn’t see anyone else go in or go out. I already told this to the cops. I only got there when you did.”

I try not to let toxic disappointment ooze out of my pores. “Did you know the guy who was killed? He lived on the first floor. His name was Aleksandar.”

Rita fiddles with her cigarette and her baseball hat. Leftover pizza grease darkens the brim. “Saw him around town but didn’t really know him or talk to him.”

She is as patient and gentle smoking as she was with the pizza. I have no patience and want to empty my pack, stack each cigarette on the bench like kindling, light a fire, and thrash around in the smoke like a greedy parasite in blood.

Rita passes and twirls the lit cigarette between her fingers. The pinwheeling ember is hypnotic. Then she switches hands. It’s a trick I’ve never seen before. I don’t know how she’s doing it. She starts talking without dropping the minibaton made out of tobacco.

She says, “What’d you say his name was, again? Didn’t know that. Didn’t see him around all that much. Seen him walk to a Laundromat maybe, or to the Hub, not that I followed him around, right?” The spinning cigarette is a turbine on her fingers. It’s a blur. “Used to see this well-dressed guy going into that first-floor apartment. I saw him like three times, a month ago, maybe less, walking down H, always walking real fast. Young, good-looking guy, never stayed for more than a few minutes, always dressed in a suit, shiny black hair, wearing big, fat, dark sunglasses.”

I see Timothy Carter’s face, the face that filled my office once, and I want to take a swing at him; I see myself throwing a compact, three-inch punch. Then I’m falling from a great height, from the top of the Tower of Babel, and my arms flail and spin like her cigarette. I land in a tree. The thin trunk is a fist between my shoulder blades, all knuckles. The shaking leaves complain and let scalding sunlight pass through the canopy to punish me.

My legs are still in contact with the concrete bench, and my ass hangs a few inches above the ground. I figure out my previous few moments even though I wasn’t there. Yeah, I’m an instant archaeologist or an archaeologist of instants. My findings: I passed out, fell backward into our shady tree, and the Mayan calendar has doomed us all. The spindly little tree will never be the same.

Rita paces in front of the bench, wearing out the sidewalk. She yells, “What’s going on? What the hell, Mark?” She’s looking around for help, for someone to commiserate with, but the people walking by are doing their best to ignore her. They don’t have to try that hard.

I say, “Easy, easy, Rita. I fell off. I’m clumsy. I’m fine. I’m sorry. Help me up, will ya? I smacked the back of my head again. I’m seeing stars right now.”

She’s scared and won’t look at my face. I don’t blame her on either count. She crouches next to me and grabs an arm. I push off the tree and, with her help, wiggle back up onto the bench.

“Thanks, and I’m sorry about that, Rita. Didn’t mean to scare you.” The apology disappears into my lower register, where words go to die.

Rita stands next to the bench, arms folded across her chest. She’s host to a raging internal debate; the pro and con arguments about her continued association with me bubble underneath her skin.

I don’t know how much of what I remember her saying about a well-dressed man was real or a dream. Was she telling me about seeing Timothy Carter visiting Aleksandar? And holy shit, I’m in a lot of pain again and don’t think I’ll be able to move for a day or so.

Not sure of what tack to take, I throw out some phrases decorated with question marks. “You were saying? Young guy? Well dressed? Big sunglasses, too? At that apartment?” I light two cigarettes, keep both for myself, and give her the rest of the pack.

She says, “Yeah. That’s what I said. Saw him a bunch of times.”

I need time to process this. Maybe she saw Timothy Carter, and maybe she didn’t. And Timothy Carter visiting Aleskandar by himself, in and of itself, proves nothing. Nothing except that I really want him to be the person to take the blame for the fire, take the blame for everything that’s ever gone wrong anywhere, to be the mythical bad guy we all need and maybe even deserve.

I ask, “Did you tell the police about the well-dressed man?”

“I told them everything I know. Why wouldn’t I? I’m not stupid.”

“Right. Of course. That’s very sensible of you.” I bring both burning cigarettes to my lips. In with the bad and out with “Thanks, Rita. That helps me out a lot.”

Rita says, “I was lying.”

I look up, and she’s covering a smile with a shaking hand. The smile repairs me, but her shaking hand tears me back down. I say, “Lying about what, Rita?”

She says, “I didn’t know that was you who fell on the bridge. No one’s talking. I guessed.”

“You guessed?”

“Yeah. I saw your hospital scrubs, and you looked like you got the shit beat out of you. Flopping around the bridge sounded like something you’d do.”

I laugh, but Rita stops laughing. We weren’t supposed to share that. I stand up, and my body, that flawed bag of meat and bones stuck carrying around my consciousness, doesn’t like the standing. Tough shit.

I say, “All right, Rita. Sorry again for the scare. I gotta go. Next lunch we’ll take it easy and swap
Planet of the Apes
lines. Okay?”

Rita nods, and neither of us knows what I meant by
we’ll take it easy
. She hitches up her pants and says, “My favorite line is, ‘It’s a mad house. A mad house,’” and walks away, into the bank lot behind our bench and loses herself in the maze of gleaming metal and glass of the cars parked tightly together.