Cages & Those Who Hold the Keys Read online

  Wendy sat at the far end of the second table; Storyteller-Man at the far end of the first; so Martin took a spot more or less equidistant from each of them.

  “You’re not making this easy,” said Storyteller-Man.

  “I get a lot of complaints about that,” replied Martin, trying to figure out what sort of Mystery Meat had been used to make the hamburger.

  Storyteller-Man sighed, shook his head, then picked up his tray and moved down to sit across from Martin. “They’re real.”

  Not looking up, Martin doctored his hamburger with some salt and pepper and said, “Who’s real?”

  “You know. The Onlookers.”

  Now Martin raised his head. “Is that what they’re called?”

  “That’s what Bob named them, yes.”

  “Who’s Bob?”

  “I am. Well, my name’s Jerry, but I’m still . . . wait a second.” He closed his eyes and pressed his chin down against his chest, and for a moment he flickered, becoming a reverse image, a living film negative, but then pulled in a deep, hard breath and re-assumed solidity. “Sorry. It’s getting harder and harder to keep up this ruse.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? What’s happening?”

  Jerry raised one of his large, strong-looking hands, stopping Martin from asking further questions. “Remember how your dad was always telling people to stop yammering and get to the point? That’s what I’m trying to do.”

  “How do you know what Dad used to say?”

  “The same way I know that you had a short but perplexing conversation with your six-year-old self last night. The same way I know that when you tried to lose your virginity to Debbie Carver when you were fifteen you shot your wad all over her left thigh before you even got it in, and from that day on she always called you ‘Lefty’ but never told anyone why. The same way I know that you once stole ten dollars from your mom’s purse when you were sixteen to buy a couple of really rotten joints—and you always felt bad about that, didn’t you? Even though you eventually put back twenty, you always felt bad about it—and remember the way she made such a fuss over finding that twenty? ‘I must have a fairy godmother looking after me, Zeke.’ ‘Zeke’ was her nickname for you, by the way, and no one except her and you knew that. Ever. Do you want more examples or can we assume that you now understand I know things and move on?”

  Martin raised his hands in surrender. “How can you be both someone named Jerry and someone named Bob?” No sooner was the question out of his mouth than he knew the answer:

  R.J. Nyman.

  Robert Jerome Nyman.

  “But you weren’t black,” he said. “You were a short little old white guy with bad teeth, B.O., and shaky hands. I remember the shaky hands because the only time they were still was when they were holding a pencil or brush.”

  “Hooray, his powers of recall aren’t completely in the crapper. Yes, that’s right—Bob is that short little old white guy; I’m the image he invented for his muse, and he calls me ‘Jerry’ because I’m as much a part of him as your right side is to you.”

  “Why’d he make you black?”

  “You got something against black folks?”

  “No. Just curious.”

  Jerry thought about this for a moment. “I guess I believe you. To answer your question: I don’t know. I’ve only been . . . like this . . . real, I’d guess you’d say, for a little while. There’s only so much mental detritus I can sift through at any given time.”

  “What are you, exactly?”

  Jerry picked up his hamburger, looked at the Mystery Meat, then dropped it back onto his tray. “I’m what’s left of Bob’s lucidity, of his reason, of his creativity and intelligence. I’m what managed to escape before Gash started in on the last few courses of his feasting. I can only hold this form for so long—like when Bernie does his bed-check or Ethel comes around with the meds . . . they only think of me as being here for as long as they see me, then maybe for a few minutes or so afterward . . . I . . . uh . . . I can only be this way for short . . . wait, I said that already, didn’t I? . . . I can only be this way for short periods . . . because the closer Bob comes to death . . . .” He stopped speaking, his eyes snapping closed, his whole body locking up in pain; his face began to bulge and swell and discolor; a jagged crack appeared in the center of his forehead and split downward, chewing through his substance like a shredder through sheets of paper, consuming him, bit by bit—his arms and legs became stumps, his eyes seemed to collapse into their sockets, his chest began to implode and he flickered once again, a human film negative, and from somewhere in the center of all this came the echo of a terrified scream, then with a sudden, powerful lurch, he pressed himself against the edge of the table and again was whole.

  Martin shot a panicked glance toward Wendy, who sat facing down at her food with both eyes closed, emitting a low, deep snore, a thin string of drool trailing down from her mouth.

  When he turned back, Jerry was breathing heavily, gripping the sides of his lunch tray.

  “Are you all right?”

  Jerry couldn’t speak just yet, so gave his head a quick shake.

  “I get it, okay?” said Martin. “I understand why you can’t stay like this for very long, why you had to . . . do that television thing like you did.”

  “. . . corporeality’s a bitch . . .” whispered Jerry. “I liked it a lot better when I was just a flight of fancy. It’s easy, being a dream or manipulating electromagnetic waves. Flesh demands too much of the mind and heart. I don’t know how human beings do it.”

  Martin started reaching for Jerry’s hand, thought better of it (how would it feel?), and so started to rise. “Can I get you anything?”

  “Nothing. Please sit down.”

  Martin complied.

  “What it boils down to is this: right now Bob is lying in a dim little shit-hole of a room in the Taft Hotel in final stages of Alzheimer’s. He’ll be dead soon—maybe a day or two, maybe less—and when he dies, Gash is going to get out. Not as the disease he once was, not as Alzheimer’s, but the thing the Alzheimer’s is becoming.” Jerry closed his eyes and put a hand against his chest, pulling in three broken breaths that obviously hurt like hell. “It’s getting bad. I don’t think this is it, but it’s . . . it’s gonna be an awful one.” He opened his eyes. “You got time for one more question, then I need to go elsewhere and rally my ass.”

  “Why me? Why are you—why is Bob, someone I don’t know—why are you coming to me?”

  “Because you were kind. Because you did more for him that day than you remember. Because he thought of you as a friend. And because, in his last moments of lucidity, before the dementia got its hooks in all the way, he called on some superhuman reserve of will that I still can’t comprehend and managed to do two things: help me to escape, and remember you.” He pressed his hands against his eyes and pulled in a strained breath. “Listen, I gotta boogie-two-shoes for a little while. You stick around here . . . something tells me it’s going to get real interesting . . . .”

  And with a flicker, he was gone.

  When Ethel came out from the nurses’ station five minutes later, she found Wendy passed out at the table and Martin sitting in front of two trays of half-eaten food.

  “My, my, aren’t you the one with an appetite?” she said to him.

  Looking at her, Martin thought: Would she remember Jerry if I said something? Then decided, what the hell, he had nothing to lose: “Jerry couldn’t finish his, so he said I could have it.”

  Ethel stared at him, blinking as if trying to remember something, then gave a slow nod of her head. “Oh, right, Jerry. I guess he’s still not . . . feeling well . . . .”

  “He didn’t look too good to me,” Martin replied.

  Ethel seemed about to say something else Jerry-related, then looked at Wendy, blinked again—I should take care of this, yes, that’s what I came out here for—and walked over to the unconscious girl.

  Martin finished off his food, then what w
as left on Jerry’s tray.

  If things were only about to get interesting, he was going to need all the energy he could store away against the effects of the drugs.

  4

  The rest of the day was torture.

  Shortly before the scheduled second group session, Ethel came out and put a red X through the rest of the day’s planned activities, then Wendy woke up long enough to pitch another fit about being in “. . . this fuckin’ fruitcake factory!” before having to be sedated once again (though Martin had to give her high marks for her alliteration, accidental though it probably was); Martin watched The Best Years of Our Lives (with no ad-libbing from any of the actors, only crying at the very end when he remembered watching this with his dad), read half of a John Cheever short story collection he found on one of the shelves (having forgotten how sad Cheever was—a damned great writer, but depressing as hell), walked around the basketball court a dozen or so times before getting that Waiting for Godot feeling and deciding to shoot a few hoops (he’d sucked at basketball as a kid, and discovered that the ensuing years had done little to improve his stats), taken a second shower, checked out his window to make sure the Onlookers hadn’t decided to come back for an evening performance, and was about to resort to counting the holes in the ceiling when Bernard announced it was chow time.

  Wendy all but inhaled her dinner, never once acknowledging Martin’s presence, then went back to her room. Martin sighed, got himself a tray, and was just removing the cover when Ethel came out to join him.

  “Want some company?” she asked.

  “Yes, please. All this ‘quiet time’ is losing its charm.”

  Ethel sat across from him and smiled. “Things here are usually a lot more structured than this, Martin; but right now it’s just you and Wendy. I’m sure we’ll have more folks in here come tomorrow and things can get back to normal—well, what passes for normal in here.”

  “I’ll try to occupy myself.”

  She leaned forward, her face growing serious. “It must have been hard on you, losing both your folks so close together like that.”

  It didn’t seem like something that required a response, so Martin made none.

  “You took care of them for a long time, didn’t you?’

  “Yeah . . .”

  “You should be proud of yourself; a lot of people wouldn’t’ve done that.”

  “Didn’t change things.”

  “But that doesn’t mean you failed. They were both very sick. Just because they left you, that doesn’t mean they love you any less where they are now.”

  Martin looked up from his Jell-O cup and tried to smile. “I wish I could believe that.”

  “You promised to take care of them, and you kept your word.”

  “I tried.”

  “You’re not God. You couldn’t make them not be sick.”

  He set down his spoon and leaned back. “No, I couldn’t. All I could do, in the end, was watch them die.”

  “At least you were with them; at least they didn’t have to die alone. I know that probably doesn’t seem like much, but it ought to count for something, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know what to think, Ethel. That’s most of the reason I wound up in here.”

  “You’ll be better when you leave. Maybe not a lot, but at least a little.”

  “That might be nice.”

  In the nurses’ station, Amber answered the phone, then called for Ethel.

  “I have to go see who that is,” she said, rising. “I think you should spend the evening out here and not in your room. Watch another movie, or some stupid sit-coms. I’ll make popcorn in a little while, how’s that sound?”

  “Sounds okay.”

  “You strike me as a decent man, Martin. I just wish you saw it yourself.”

  Martin thanked her, finished his dinner, and spent the next few hours in front of the television.

  Something wasn’t right. It wasn’t just Ethel’s saying that he and Wendy were the only clients—Jerry hadn’t shown himself for hours, so why would she remember him?—it was this nagging sense that something was about to happen.

  Soon.

  And it bugged the shit out of him that he didn’t know what. Jerry had told him just enough to tell him almost nothing at all.

  Because you were kind. Because you did more for him that day than you remember. Because he thought of you as a friend . . . .

  “Had a friend and didn’t even know it,” he whispered at a re-run of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

  At eleven, he went in to brush his teeth and wash up, then Ethel came out with his evening medications—the ones designed to knock you on your ass inside of fifteen minutes.

  Christ, he wished he didn’t have to take these.

  Ethel handed him a cup of water and his cup of pills, Martin tossed the pills into his mouth, and then—once again—Amber was confronted with some crisis in the nurses’ station she couldn’t deal with, so Ethel went back to check on it.

  Martin turned his head and spit the pills into his hand, then quickly put them in his pocket.

  Ethel never came back out to check with her penlight.

  And so Martin went to bed, wide awake and anxious.

  * * *

  He didn’t have to wait long.

  At 11:20 (according to his watch), something tapped against his window from outside.

  He rose from bed, crossed to the window, and found himself staring into the face on an Onlooker.

  It stared back at him for a few moments, then jerked its head to the left; twice.

  “What?” said Martin.

  Again, it jerked its head to the left.

  “To the left is a wall and a door—this isn’t one of those Lady or the Tiger things, is it?”

  The Onlooker turned slightly to the side, opening one of its eyes and projecting an image into the middle of the room: a basketball.

  Martin almost laughed. “The gym? You want me to go to the gym?”

  The Onlooker nodded.

  “And how, exactly, am I supposed to get past the Better Mental Health Squad?”

  The Onlooker made a small, slumping movement that could only have been a sigh of exasperation.

  A few seconds later, the door to Martin’s room swung slowly open.

  “Did you do that?”

  Once more, the Onlooker jerked its head to the left.

  Martin walked over to the doorway, leaned out to have a look in the hall—

  —except he wasn’t looking into the hall alongside the nurses’ station; not unless they’d put up a backboard and hoop in the last half-hour.

  “Nice trick,” he said, but the Onlooker was gone.

  You were right, Jerry; this just got real interesting.

  5

  Martin slowly descended the four steps leading down into the gym—why the architect who’d designed this building had thought it was a good idea to put the light switch at the bottom of the steps was beyond him, but at least the light spilling in from the upper window offered enough illumination that he didn’t fall and break his neck.

  It struck him as funny that he was suddenly concerned for his own well-being, all things considered.

  As soon as his feet hit the basketball court, the light from the window shrank into a single silver beam, focusing on a spot in the middle of the floor. From the shadows behind the beam, someone coughed.

  Martin froze. “That had better be you, Jerry . . .”

  “I’d really appreciate it if you wouldn’t make fun of me. I’m very sensitive.”

  Jerry stepped into the light. He wore a harlequin’s patchwork costume of blue, red, and yellow triangles, a white half-mask covering the upper part of his face, a mock sword at his side, and a semi-squared hat from which protruded a huge ostrich feather.

  Martin stared, swallowing the urge to laugh. “Well, don’t you look . . . different.”

  Jerry folded his plume-sleeved arms across his chest. “Nothing escapes Mr. Perceptive, does it?”

/>   “Why are you dressed like that?”

  “Because Gash is, for the moment, sated and sleeping. And I’ve been instructed to give you a present.”

  “Okay . . . ?”

  Jerry pulled a whistle from his pocket and blew a long, shrill but not unpleasant note, and the light spilling in from the window snapped off as easily as that from a desk lamp.

  But some light remained; golden, it was, scattered and slitted . . . but widening.

  Perched atop the folded bleachers, crouched on the backboard, standing in the corners, and hanging like bats from the darkened light fixtures on the ceiling, dozens of the Onlookers began opening their brass half-sphere eyes, the golden beams crisscrossing to form a web with a pulsating center.

  “Don’t be afraid,” said Jerry.

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “Shhh . . . watch now.”

  The center of the web grew wider, the intensity of its light almost too painful to look at, so Martin began to close his eyes.

  “Don’t,” said Jerry. “It’s important that you see this. Otherwise you might talk yourself out of believing it later.”

  The glow spread farther, a bit less intense now, flowing across the floor, over the ceiling, and down the walls, swallowing the image of the gym like a slow cross-fade in a movie, and a few moments later Martin found himself standing in the center of a great structure whose interior dimensions were circumscribed by a roof and walls made from brightly-colored tarpaulin—a traditional circus tent, held upright by seven massive wood beams placed at evenly-spaced intervals around the gigantic center pole. The sawdust-thick three-ring floor was surrounded by bleachers that reached so far upward and back Martin couldn’t see the top rows.

  The interior of this tent was easily ten times the size of the gym—hell, it was probably five times the size of The Center itself.

  “What is all this?”

  Jerry shook his head. “Man, you really do have to be slammed in the skull with a sledgehammer sometimes, don’t you? This is—duh!—a circus, Einstein! You told Bob that you’d never been to one, remember?”