Then she told me about my sister. I hadn’t seen that one coming.
* * * *
“We were just kids.” She said. “That’s no excuse; just an explanation.”
“You used to be friends.” I said.
“You know how my dad’s always complaining about those exams, and you know he’s right. Kids are made to do simple things, however well they do it. But your sister was amazing. A lot like you, of course. You remember how she used to play the piano?”
“She used to pick out tunes and sing them for me.”
“There was this contest for kids who wanted to go to some special music school. Your dad said she should go for the music school. She was kind of aimless, but she was daddy’s little girl. She went ahead with it. In a way, it was your dad that killed her. The bastard should’ve known better. She won that damn contest. All she’d done before that was sing nursery rhymes for her baby brother. Yet all she had to do was pick what she wanted and it was hers. And there was this one girl. Oh, god dammit she hated your sister. Damn it that bitch hated her. That bitch had been raised since the day she was born to play music. It was the one talent her folks invested every last cent in. The contest was supposed to be just one easy step in the master plan. And you know, there’s a rule. We don’t step in each other’s way like that. That’s why your sister had to die.”
I shook my head. I couldn’t imagine it. I’d seen Sam light the fire. I knew it was possible. I knew it was even likely. But just the same, I didn’t wanted to believe it.
Amy went on, “So a group of your sister’s friends got together and threw a party at my house for her to celebrate. I don’t know which one of us did it, but we managed to get some alcohol. We were twelve, I think. Your sister just wanted to try a little bit, so we mixed up the strong stuff with a little juice so she wouldn’t taste the alcohol much. After a couple rounds of that, there was nothing she could do. We held her down and poured the stuff right down her throat. She screamed, but my dad was out. And we lived so far away from the neighbors. She screamed and screamed, and coughed up the liquid and got it all over herself. Once she started to choke and we thought she’d drown on it, so we had to hold back and wait for her to cough it up…”
“Stop it.” I said. “I don’t want to know how it went from there to the way they found her. I really don’t.”
Amy’s head dipped away from the sliver of light, and I couldn’t see her anymore. Then I heard her rough sobbing and muffled shrieks. She’d been on a roll just now, but once I stopped her she remembered just what it all meant, and that broke her all apart. She sucked snotty lengths of air in through her nose, and she went on shaking and crying.
She said, “All I did was have them over my house. I didn’t know they were really going to do it. They talked, they always talked, but then I was there watching it happen. I tried to stop it. Nelson you have to believe me. That day changed my life. That’s why I’m here now.”
As if to answer her cries for mercy, the big metal door swung open again. The man with the pox, the man who had been standing with Commander Willy, raised the hand with the gun in it. Amy screamed and I heard the bang echo through the tiny chamber and I felt the bullet graze the side of my head. And it was all silent after that.
I got to my feet and toppled onto the man before he could point the gun at me. We rolled on the floor and I heard boots coming and Willy shouting. Then I heard Willy stop short. He and the others were all quiet and looking at me because the man I had pinned to the floor wasn’t writhing any more. His eyes were open and he was breathing, but he looked at me with horror. I lifted my hands, and I saw that his skin was smooth. I had taken the monkey pox out of him.
I heard Kane’s voice saying, “Oh god, oh god, oh god. It’s true. You’re that bastard’s son.”
Then I rose to my feet, and a thought struck me. Maybe I could heal Amy, too. Maybe even if she was dead. I turned around.
* * * *
And my memories were all blackness after that. I sucked up the pain and rushed down the hall to the dorm’s bottom floor. There was still a ringing in my ear from the gunshot. And it was strange how with that memory of the gun, I got a voice in my head that insisted, “No. No. That’s not the end of her.”
I walked the halls in my bare feet, and I went to the main hall where Sam had given me that invitation to his father’s house. There was a dim light in each of the trophy cases that surrounded me, and the light reflected off the brass statues. In front of me were the doors that lead out to the porch just below my bedroom window. The last time I had seen them, they had glass windows. But now sheets of white, hard plastic filled the square frames. Outside, bright stadium light shone on the compound’s buildings so that nothing was hidden. I saw shadows against the opaque windows. A shadow of smoke blew across the screen from out of that one cop’s mouth.
I propped the door open. The air was cold that night and blew across my bare feet and open shirt. The three cops towered over me, and they snapped around and starred at me.
“What do you need?” said the smoking man.
I said, “What are you doing here?”
“They brought us here.” He took a drag. “You people know how it is. Everyone thinks the terrorists are after them.”
With those words, all the lights went out.
* * * *
I heard the cop’s boots stomping about in the darkness. Flashlight beams swung here and there all around the campus, and in a moment many more appeared. Each came with a new voice, all of them sounding like cops shouting at the others. I stayed on the porch and watched the lights dancing like a cloud of lightening bugs.
And then I saw a small, slow movement in the middle of that busyness. What I saw was something like a ghost. It was a figure walking across the school grounds. As the cops dashed here and there, sometimes a light beam would spin around and illumine the figure – and then it went away until the next moment when another beam found it. Each time the ghost had come closer to me.
I heard the generators spinning and coming to speed. The emergency lights flashed on and blinded me. And then I opened my eyes, and I could see all the students of Adams School standing around. The cops were frozen in the midst of the crowd.
And there was the ghostly figure, as resolute as before. And I knew who she was. I saw the woman who had been parked in the car outside the school. The woman with the cold eyes and the steely hair and the calm voice who spoke to me before I left for Sam’s house that night. Her eyes were now looking into mine, and with each step she looked neither right nor left.
It took the cops ten seconds to find themselves again, and then to turn around and see the woman. She was now closer to me than anyone else. Each cop lifted his weapon. The smoking man was standing closest to her now, and he said, “Get down! We will open fire if you do not get down. Lay on the ground and put your hands on your head.”
She walked on. Her feet were on the brick path that led up to the door where I stood. The emergency light beat on this path, but the students around it were a little in the darkness, and I was a little in the darkness, and the woman was alone where she stood. She opened her mouth,
“Nelson.”
I stepped off the porch and onto the brick path. The surface felt dirty and rough under my bare feet. The cops looked at each other, and the smoking man ordered me away from the woman. I was now close enough to hear her speak in whispers.
“I had to.” She said. “Forgive me, but it was my last chance. They’ll be coming soon. I don’t want them to, but they’ll be coming soon. Take this.”
She reached into her jacket and began to pull something from it. That was the signal for the smoking man to fire a round into her. Her head snapped up and she fell. I kneeled down to her, and I found that the object in her hand was a piece of paper. I took it and hid it in my clothes, and the cops pushed through students and four or five of them threw me back.
* * * *
“They’ve got my sister.”
; Sam had found me in the front hall after the cops started herding the students back inside. Students ran back and forth through the halls, calling to each other and gathering in groups. Sam had appeared at the hall’s far side, and then crossed the mayhem to me just as the woman had done. We were standing in front of his trophies just as we had before.
He said, “Are you coming? I thought you had a thing for her.”
“Who?” I said. “Who’s got Amy?”
Sam poked his chin up. “The guys who put out the lights. And the guys who blew up the train. They called me this morning and told me to look them up on the Internet. I’ll show you if you don’t believe me. They’ve got picture’s of Amy tied up with tape.”
“Where are they?”
“They’re coming here, you idiot. What do you think? So I’ve got some guys coming with me to Lafayette Park. How about you?”
A student near us shattered one of the glass cases and dragged the trophies out. Sam took the kid by the arm.
The kid said, “Sam. Forget about them. We need things to throw at them. The cops are out there making barricades to keep us in. Don’t you know those cops are monkey meat?”
Sam said, “Keep your damn head on.”
Sam lifted the kid and tossed him on the ground. The kid slid across the glass on the floor and cut up his face, but he got back up again, and Sam leveled him again, hard against the floor so that the kid’s face made a loud thud against it.
“Why don’t you just stay down there?” Sam took one of his trophies and reached through the broken window to put it back.
I thought, he’s not so stupid. He’s not stupid at all.
* * * *
I sat in the senior lounge. There were chairs and couches, and TVs hanging from the walls, but there were no other people and only a quiet blizzard of static blew across the screens. Outside were Sam’s voice, and the sound of a crowd of students starting to gather together like a storm. Sam was at his very best. He hadn’t rallied his friends like that since the day he took us to set fire to his laundry lady.
I unfolded the paper I had snatched from the woman, and I found another letter addressed to me.
“You know you’re not one of them. I believe in my heart that you’ve known this all your life. You are one of us, and you are my son. Your father and I gave you up because we were afraid. I feared letting you go into that world in which you now live, but the doctors said that because of what you were, no one would know the difference. I never told your adoptive parents that you weren’t one of them. You should know from where you came, and you should have nothing to fear. And you should know that not a drop of it comes from alteration. You are a freak of nature, and not of science. You are natural born, and nothing will change that. You are our son, and not theirs, and nothing will change that.
“Your father is still alive. A doctor Kane came to him and told him where to find you. I came to watch you because your father could not risk being caught. However, that doctor Kane turned your father into the police and so he went into hiding. You must find your father now, and I will tell you how…”
I paused and looked up from the letter, and my eyes and my muscles froze where they were, because of what I saw there. Instead of static, the screens now displayed a blue background with white letters. Each screen had the same words:
“THIS IS SO THAT YOU KNOW WE CAN STRIKE AT ANY TIME.”
* * * *
They were burning again, but this time it wasn’t my memory or my dreams. I was lying on the ground in Lafayette Park. I was running and I was out of breath and my heart jumped and I hit the ground. Just then a gust of burning fumes and glass flew over my head. I had run down to the Park because that was the only way to get there now, but I had this problem. For all my strength, I couldn’t run very fast for very long. So I lay there with cinders in my hair and aching lungs.
What did I think I was going to do? The Adams kids where everywhere, and they had been joined by hoards of others with urine colored eyes. They were taking the place apart.
Who was I looking for? I was looking for Sam. Or maybe my real father.
I tried to stand, but then a foot put me back down and an arm flipped me over. I looked into eyes like my own.
The stranger said, “I thought you were one of them.” He held out a hand. “Here.”
I took my bag and stood. This piss-eye thought I was like him, but I wasn’t. I took the drug that shaded my eyes, but for no reason. And I guess that anyone could shade their eyes if they wanted, and maybe some monkeys already had.
The stranger ran off, and I surveyed the bodies in the road and hanging from doors and windows. Most were dead. Across the street, some kids lay near the pond. Maybe they had been fishing the last time I came here. Maybe not. I couldn’t see their faces, which had been trampled in the mud. Those were my people. But they’d never see me that way. Not ever.
I stepped among the fallen as though they were muddy puddles, and took my refuge in the alley between Kane’s barbershop and the pizza place. Kane’s lights were out, and the pizza place had its metal doors pulled down. I watched Adams kids pull yelping toddlers from their homes and beat them until little spurts of blood flew up from their broken faces. For all their manufactured smarts, those Adams kids could never understand the horror that had just dawned on me. Like I said before, Lafayette Park was a perfectly normal place. These weren’t the monkeys that had destroyed the train. Willy wasn’t out there, and he was never going to show up that night. He was holed up in his basement and watching this all happen on TV. He’d even used me by telling me that he was coming. He knew us all too well.
I heard Doctor Kane screeching from behind me. I went back there, and I saw Kane’s crippled feet sticking out from behind a dumpster stuck halfway between the kitchen’s back door and the barbershop. A single low watt bulb cast its orange glow over a patch of weeds and rough dirt. Bits of half-buried broken metal glinted in the light. The place stunk with the smell of eggs, and hoards of flies zoomed around the dumpster.
I went behind that dumpster, and I saw Sam standing over his victim. At some point his little army had got out of his control, and he had wandered off to do some damage by himself. He held a broken fence pole, and when he saw me he rushed at me. I don’t know what he was thinking, but he came at me and swung the shiny pole and I caught it and ripped it from his hands.
He stood still for a second, and I thought of him standing in the freshman shower room with a bucket full of mud. He said, “Nelson, what…”
“Shut up.” I said. “You damn well know you can’t stop me. I’m going to kill you.”
Sam reared a fist, but I grabbed his arm and turned him around until it was locked behind his back. Then I raised a foot and planted it there – so hard and so fast that I could hear Sam’s arm pop from its socket.
I heard police sirens back at the street, and the blue-red flashes reached us in our back corner. The cars came to a screeching halt and I heard the machine fire tapping on the pavement. They were sending warning shots to the ground. But for everyone today who’s seen the news videos of that night, I don’t need to tell you that the cops didn’t stop at that.
I let Sam go and I watched him writhe and flip over. Now his wailing was bursts of air grinding against vocal chords at full volume. They started low and got high and went on until the air stopped flowing. Then Sam gulped and began again. I hit his face hard enough to make it bleed, and I thought,
Nelson you bastard, you just want to take it all away from him.
The thought boiled away my rage, for just a moment. Then the answer came,
Well, he didn’t exactly earn it, did he?
With that thought, I reached for him. Sam’s eyes filled with terror; he knew what I could do. His eyes looked the way Willy’s second man did when I covered his face and took away the pox. I don’t know what Sam though when, instead of curling my fingers and sending my knuckles to his brains, I stretched my palm and covered his face. I felt hurricane winds
surging though me, and in my mind was the face of the man who’d shot Amy. I had his disease inside my body, and now it was leaving me.
I lifted my hand, and I saw Sam’s face covered with sores and scars. Nothing could restore to him what I’d taken. He slumped to the ground, still breathing. I bent over and panted as though I’d run another mile. Kane’s shadow stood over me.
I said, “I need you to help me find my father.”
I heard the sounds of cops and their dogs coming down the alley. Kane grabbed me and started yelling out to them, “Over here! I’ve got two of them that attacked me!”
A pack of cops rushed in, and I broke free of Kane’s grip. I grabbed my bag and scaled the fence at the back of the small space. They shot me when I reached the top, and I came to the ground with a slump and a slug in my arm. I was spilling all over, but I just got up and kept going. The Park was crowded with houses and a maze of yards and fences and stone walls that meandered through them. I lost the cops somewhere in there.
* * * *
You can’t go back. I had to tell myself that, even though I knew it was true. I couldn’t go back. And I couldn’t stay here. I was face up in some garden, watching the stars. I had one hope, of finding my father, and I don’t even know why I held on to it. Maybe because it was all I had.
* * * *
As I finish writing these words, my train is pulling into the station. I’m hoping that I’ll find my father here. I’m hoping for lots of things. There are people who think of me as some kind of hero. Now that you know my story, you know I’m no kind of hero. Maybe that’s about to change; I don’t really know.
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