Finally, topic exhausted, he fell into silence.
Mazzo’s lips moved. He uttered words Barney couldn’t understand. He leaned toward Mazzo, inclining his head.
“I like cars,” Mazzo croaked, voice hoarse and broken.
Barney’s hopes rose at this first response. Mazzo had given him a topic to explore further: cars.
He didn’t really know much about cars, so he pummeled Billy the Kidney with questions about them. Billy didn’t know a hell of a lot, but at least he’d driven a variety of them, knew their names, knew about four-wheel drive and stuff that was too technical for Barney to follow. Barney took a lot of this information to Mazzo, improvising again, spinning his wheels as usual, making up stuff about car races, describing at length a drive he told Mazzo he had taken in a green MG, which Billy said was the best car he ever stole. Barney played games, too, with the information, telling a weird science-fiction tale of how the MG’s joined forces with computers to take over the world, juggling the words, his mind racing and his tongue trying to keep up with it. Having run out of both words and ideas, he stood breathlessly at Mazzo’s bedside, feeling as though he’d just finished a long and arduous run. Mazzo lifted his hand, summoned Barney closer. “You’re crazy,” Mazzo said. But there was no venom in his voice, and his eyes did not have their usual hard glitter. It was as if he had said: “Thanks, Barney.”
One morning Barney was seized by an aftermath as he told a long story about an elephant who happened to wander through a supermarket, a variation of the giraffe in the barroom joke. He paused in midsentence—“The clerk turned around as the elephant raised its …”—as dizziness assailed him. His eyes suddenly could not focus, and he held on blindly to the bed, his fingers grabbing the sheets for support in a world dissolving under his feet. Let the blood flow, rhythm, tempo, holding on, holding on, getting a flash of the nightmare car slanting down the hill, his hands on the steering wheel and the car out of control on the wet street, rain splashing against the windshield and the wipers going back and forth, rhythm, tempo. Then the dizziness receded, his eyes focused again, sweat ran down his cheeks into the corners of his mouth, salty and warm. But he was normal once again. His heart still raced a bit and throbbed in his ears, but that was par for the course following an aftermath.
He looked up to see Mazzo, half propped up on one elbow, studying him, as if Barney was a stranger he’d never seen before.
“A reaction,” Barney said. “From the merchandise they give me. It happens once in a while.”
For the first time Barney saw a look of concern in Mazzo’s face. Barney thought: It’s as if he’s discovering that I’m human too, that you don’t have to be dying in this place to be a good guy.
Then Mazzo lowered himself again and closed his eyes, shutting Barney out once more.
The final breakthrough came one evening as Barney sat beside Mazzo’s bed in one of the wooden chairs. There was not a comfortable chair in the entire Complex, it seemed, and the beds were not exactly luxurious either. Bascam had been annoyed when Barney had showed up at the door to Mazzo’s room.
“You here again?” she said.
Barney didn’t bother to answer. Bascam stole one more secret look at Mazzo and departed without another word. He and Mazzo remained silent. Frankly, Barney didn’t feel like talking. He could still hear the echo of his earlier words coming at him from the corners of the room. Mazzo seemed to be dozing. Then he spoke, said something Barney didn’t understand.
“What did you say?” Barney asked.
Mazzo spoke again, words muffled, unintelligible.
Barney leaned across the bed, turning his head so that his ear was close to Mazzo’s lips.
“Any … more … after … maths?” Mazzo whispered.
Barney couldn’t believe his ears. Mazzo the bastard was not only talking but asking about Barney’s condition.
“No,” Barney said.
Mazzo nodded. “Good,” he said.
“Listen,” Barney said, “the aftermaths aren’t bad at all, really. They come and go and last only a minute. Hell, they’re nothing compared to the nightmare—” He caught himself but too late. Christ, he’d done so much talking in this room that now it was second nature to babble about anything and everything. Even the nightmare of the car. Which he hadn’t wanted to tell Mazzo about, tell anybody about.
Mazzo’s eyes were fixed on him, fevered and blazing.
“Nothing,” Barney said, answering the eyes’ demand. “The nightmare is nothing.”
Mazzo continued that fixed demanding stare.
“Nothing, I said, Mazzo. Nothing.”
Mazzo fixed his face in a don’t-give-me-that-crap expression.
Barney didn’t say anything. And then he thought: If Mazzo wants to know, why not tell him? He’d been trying to get his attention day after day without spectacular results. Now here was Mazzo actually wanting to communicate.
Barney told him. About the car and the slanting street. The rain and the wind. The roaring motor and the wheel in his hand. The girl emerging from the mist, stepping off the curb. The car hurtling toward her. The moment of awakening at the point of collision.
Mazzo pondered the story for a long time, saying nothing, apparently deep in thought. He began to question Barney, wanted to know all the details. How the steering wheel felt in Barney’s hands, the effect of the speed on his body, how fast he thought he was going. Barney did his best to supply the details, surprised finally at how vivid the details of the drive were, brief as it was, dream that it was. Satisfied with the details, Mazzo fell back against his pillow. After a while he said: “Boy, how I’d like one last ride.” Wistful, full of longing.
Barney realized that Mazzo had been living that ride through him, relishing the details so that he could recreate the wild ride in his own imagination.
He looked down at Mazzo, so pathetic in the bed.
“Know what, Mazzo? You’re going to have that last wild ride.”
Even as he spoke, he knew that it was crazy, a ridiculous promise, like telling Billy the Kidney he would get him a telephone. Why do I keep doing things like this? Yet he’d gotten Billy the telephone, hadn’t he?
Mazzo looked at him, confused. Childlike. Then, hopeful.
“You are going to have that one last ride, Mazzo.”
Barney’s thoughts flew wildly. There had to be a way to get Mazzo into a car. Despite all the medical paraphernalia that surrounded him, the doodads connecting Mazzo to the machines. Despite the odds. He pictured a wild scene: dispatching Billy to steal a car downtown and then he and Billy smuggling Mazzo out of the Complex and into the car for a final ride careening the city streets. Make it a green Porsche, he’d tell Billy the Kidney. Ah, ridiculous. Because Billy was in no condition to steal a car, to say nothing of walking out the door. And Mazzo would never leave this place alive.
But it would be beautiful, wouldn’t it?
He looked at Mazzo again and Mazzo had closed his eyes, seemed to be sleeping but Barney knew he wasn’t.
Barney felt somehow that he had let Mazzo down.
His sense of smell returned.
While eating breakfast one morning, he realized he could taste the eggs. One moment he was methodically chewing and swallowing the food merely to satisfy the dull gnawing in his stomach. Scrambled eggs, bland, which he used to douse with ketchup to make them palatable. But he hadn’t bothered to do so here at the Complex after losing his sense of taste. Why bother with ketchup or even salt or pepper or anything else? But now the taste of the eggs came alive in his mouth, flavorful, delicious in fact. He gulped the cold milk, and was surprised to find it tasty. He’d always preferred chocolate milk.
Breathing deeply, inhaling luxuriously, he brought the air of the Complex into his lungs and was instantly plunged into the smell of the place. Not one smell, really, but many of them blurred into a pervasive odor, elusive, hard to pin down, a nameless smell with an undertone of unpleasantness. Maybe the smell of sickness itself.
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Pushing himself away from the table, he decided to drop in on Billy the Kidney and Allie Roon. He had been neglecting them lately because of his concentration on Mazzo. Cruising along the corridor on his way to visit them, he sniffed broadly and comically, his nostrils quivering, and he laughed with delight. Even that peculiar smell of the Complex did not spoil his delight. Maybe that’s what happens when you get back something you thought you had lost forever.
Cassie came to the Complex almost every day, late in the afternoon when the sun began to lose its brightness and a pale ivory light softened the harsh edges of the day. Barney waited for her at the exit, ignoring Old Cheekbones, who did not know she was being ignored, of course, because she paid so little attention to his comings and goings. Barney’s breath quickened when he saw Cassie coming up the walk, arms swinging, head held high, movements fluid and utterly feminine, blond hair catching the failing light. There was always that marvelous moment when she reached the door, saw him there, and smiled. For him alone.
In the bare reception room that she transformed into a place of comfort and ease by her presence, she never asked: “How is he?” No need. She settled into the straight-backed chair, placed her hands in her lap like a dutiful child, lifted her face to Barney as if in supplication, and waited. For that single splendid moment no one else existed in the world but them, in the dying light. Barney had never known such intimacy before, with anyone. He never touched her, dared not get too close, and yet felt closer to her than anyone he had ever known.
At first he tried to fake it, in an attempt to give her encouraging news, dredging through the evidence of his visits with Mazzo to provide an optimistic report, to tell her that yes, he seemed a little better, more comfortable, less resentful of his predicament. Until she said: “Cut it out, Barney Snow.” In that husky wise-guy voice. “I need the truth. I can make up my own fairy tales. But tell me the truth about Alberto.”
So Barney told her the truth, although strangely enough there wasn’t much to tell, really. Mazzo’s condition seldom fluctuated. He never seemed in great pain, although occasionally he was seized by a spasm that glazed his eyes and caused him to stiffen in the bed, his veins bulging like thin ropes beneath his flesh. Most of the time he drifted in a sort of haze, half dozing. Cassie groped for details, relentless in her questioning, sharp eared and pitiless, exact in her demands. Wanting to know, for instance, how pale Mazzo was, the exact shade and tone of his flesh. White, Barney? How white? Bone white? Snow white? Barney searched for the right words—how white was bone white, anyway?—wanting to give her the truth she sought. Spasm, Barney? What kind of spasm? How painful? How could you describe somebody else’s pain? But he tried. For her sake. Wanting to please her, keep her coming to the Complex.
The best moments happened when the questioning was over and they sat in the room across from each other, Barney reluctant to let her go, seeking various ways of keeping her there. Sometimes she rushed off as if late for an appointment, other times she lingered awhile as Barney tried to make conversation. A pathetic kind of conversation, full of stops and starts, pauses and painful silences. He tried to get her talking, asking her about the outside world. Remembering that Mazzo said she was out now—jail? (impossible)—he carefully asked her: “Do you go to college?” And before she could answer, he asked, crazily, another question: “Do you like movies?” Stupid. She hesitated a moment and said: “I’m in between right now.” What did that mean? And: “I haven’t been to the movies for a while.” She looked away from him, avoiding his eyes for the first time. She was holding something back, of course, but he didn’t press her for further information, grateful to be sitting with her, basking in her presence.
The breakthrough, when it came, was sudden and unexpected, not slow and gradual as it had been with Mazzo. It happened the day his sense of smell returned. It added a new dimension to his attraction to her. Mazzo had said she didn’t use perfume or cologne. The scent that she carried was distinct, however. Some sort of soap. She smelled well scrubbed and clean, the way clothes smell when they’ve been flapping in the wind. Drinking in that heady scent of cleanliness, he shared his news with her, how he was able to smell again. Told her that all his senses seemed sharpened, sunlight more dazzling, sounds louder in his ears, not louder but clearer, more defined. Which was crazy, of course.
“Not crazy,” Cassie said. “I read somewhere that a person who wears glasses can’t hear as well when he takes the glasses off.”
For some reason this struck them both as absurdly funny, and they burst into laughter.
“You smell good, Cassie,” he said, carried on the waves of the shared laughter. “No perfume or anything. Just you.”
“Not me,” she said. “What you smell is soap. From the Hacienda. I took some home with me.”
“The Hacienda?”
“Not really a hacienda. I call it that because it’s made of stucco and looks like it belongs in Mexico somewhere and not New England.” Her chin tilted challengingly. “It’s a convent, that’s what it is. And not exactly a convent, either. A novitiate.”
Barney got a flash of nuns praying, candles burning, a memory from school days. Out now … What Mazzo had said.
“Isn’t that a place where you go to become a nun?” Barney asked. Walking a tightrope.
“The others did, I didn’t. I just wanted to get away.”
Barney waited, afraid to say anything else.
“I hated my life,” she said at last. “And didn’t know why. At first I blamed it on my mother and father—the breakup of their marriage. And then Papa dying on us. Dying on Alberto and me. Alberto was luckier. He was always away—summer camps, prep school. I was at home, hated Monument High but also hated that preppie world Alberto liked. I had so much hate in me. I think for a while I hated my mother, too. My mother, you see, is a very private person. Or cold, like Alberto claims. He says all those generations of Yankee blood have turned her into a museum piece.” She seemed to be ruminating now, scarcely aware of Barney’s presence. “They shouldn’t have married in the first place, of course. He was the hot-blooded Italian with a talent for making money. Alberto said it was like that old Robert Frost poem. “Fire And Ice.” Know which is stronger, Barney?”
He leaped a bit at being discovered by her again.
“No,” he said, his voice a whisper.
“Ice, anytime. Papa’s fire went out, but my mother’s ice never melted. Although I heard her crying in her room the night we learned that Papa had died out in St. Louis on a business trip. Heart attack …”
She shook her head, as if awakening from a reverie.
“My God, Barney, this sounds like true confessions. I’m sorry to be going into all this.” She shivered a bit. “This place. It does things to me.”
“I like to hear you talk, Cassie,” he said. Her name on his lips was beautiful. Like music he was composing as he spoke.
“I have to be going,” she said, suddenly in a hurry, as if surprised to find herself still there. And she was gone in a minute or two, gathering her things together, hastening from the place as if some terrible fate would overtake her if she stayed any longer.
A pattern became established after the breakthrough. She’d arrive, usually in a rush, breathless, and settle into the chair, peppering Barney with questions about Mazzo, the same old questions, really, about pain and attitude—Is he still unhappy? Does he say much? Is the pain very bad?—and Barney assured her as best he could. She was insatiable, as if looking for a clue that would give her the secret to Mazzo’s illness when actually there was no secret. Finally she’d sit back, at ease in the chair, almost languid in the gathering dusk—they never put on the light—and then sometimes she’d talk, usually in answer to a question that Barney had prepared beforehand.
Taking a deep breath, Barney asked: “Why doesn’t he talk to your mother on the telephone? He always answers but never says anything.”
Cassie lifted her shoulders and let them fall. Have I gone too far? Ba
rney wondered.
“He thinks he’s punishing her,” Cassie said finally, an air of wonder in her voice as if she was finding out the answer for the first time. “But what he’s trying to do is punish the world by doing that to her.” Crossing her legs, the nylon catching the hallway light, she said: “Oh, Barney, you should have seen Alberto before all this. He was a marvelous athlete. We used to cheer him on, first in Little League and then in football in prep school. The way he swung a bat, or threw a pass. A natural athlete, Papa said. Alberto and I are twins—he was born a minute before me and always called me his kid sister and I didn’t mind—but we’re not alike in many ways. I go around as if I’ve got two left feet, drop things, never was sure what I wanted to be, never sure about life. Alberto was always sure. I’d follow him around like a kid sister should. I used to love it when we were kids and got the flu together or measles and had to stay home. We’d drive my mother or the housekeeper—good old Mrs. Cortoleona—crazy.…”
Barney could have sat there forever listening to that lovely husky voice, becoming for a brief time a part of Cassie’s life, sharing those childhood moments. Often he felt as though she had forgotten his presence and was speaking to herself, expressing thoughts she had never said aloud before, that awe and wonder in her voice. Most of the time she didn’t really answer his carefully prepared question, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that the question touched off one of her monologues, and Barney was a rapt listener, absorbing her words, making them a part of him and recalling them later at night in his bed as the capsule carried him off to sleep.
“Summers were best of all because we’d go riding out in Lunenburg, me on the gelding Papa bought me—Marbles, a marvelous horse—and Alberto on Majestic, his favorite steed—he always called them steeds, never horses—and we had such fun. Or swimming. The summer before the trouble began with my parents was a golden summer. Alberto and I and some kids from town—Sarah Golden and Melanie Brooks and Joey Northrup—we rode and went to the circus and watched the sunrise once from Mount Wachusum and then drove all the way into Boston for breakfast at the Copley. Joey was older, had a license and his father’s Mercedes. Gee, what times.” Her voice trailed off, wistful, a little-girl quality about her again that never failed to move Barney, to make him nostalgic for things he’d never known. “And then my mother and father separating and Alberto going away and …”