That was the longest speech Barney had ever heard from Mazzo’s lips, although he didn’t seem to be speaking to Barney at all.
“You say she’s out now,” Barney said. “Where’s she been?”
“Let her tell you if she wants,” Mazzo said, turning to Barney as if just discovering his presence here. “The point is that she’s coming here. To soften me up for my mother. And that’s where you come in, Barney. Where you keep your end of the bargain.”
“What do you want me to do?” Barney asked, genuinely puzzled.
“I want you to be here. I don’t want to be alone with her. I don’t want to give her a chance to work me over, give me the business. I want you here, standing right where you’re standing now.”
“What good will that do?”
“Let me worry about that.”
“What if she doesn’t want me here?”
“It’s what I want that counts,” Mazzo said, the old Mazzo once more, all gentleness gone. “This is my place, not hers. Okay, I have to let her in here. She’s my twin sister. I owe her that much. One visit. One shot at me. And then no more.” He sank down on the bed, shriveling himself into the sheets, as if trying to make himself disappear. “But I’ve got to get through that one visit.”
“And what do I do?” Barney asked, reluctant to get involved. Especially in a family thing. He wanted to stay in his own compartment and stay out of other people’s compartments.
“Just be here. Be here and follow my lead. When she starts getting to me with the old magic, I’ll start talking to you. Answer me back. Agree with anything I say. Pretend she’s not here.”
“This is crazy. I’ll feel like a nut.”
“It doesn’t matter how you feel,” Mazzo snapped. “And it isn’t crazy.” Then slowly, craftily, tauntingly: “Don’t you want Billy to use the phone, make his phone calls?” Talking as if Barney were seven or eight years old.
The telephone rang and Mazzo leaped in the bed, as if someone had applied an electric shock. He placed his hand on the phone and held up his other hand to Barney in a traffic-stopping gesture. His lips moved and Barney could see him counting silently: one, two, three … Finally he lifted the receiver, pressed it to his ear. Listened grimly, eyes half closed, lips tight, cheeks taut. Then he slowly took the receiver away from his ear and replaced it on the hook. Sank back down on the bed, tugged the sheet up to his neck.
“What was that all about?” Barney asked.
“You ask too many questions.”
“I didn’t ask to come in here,” Barney said. “Talk about spooky. That was spooky what you just did. Answer a phone and not say anything.”
“My mother, that’s who it was,” Mazzo said. Pausing, then: “I told her she could call me once in a while. Only if she didn’t say anything. No conversation. She can listen to me breathe. That’s all she wants to know, anyway, that I’m still alive.”
Mazzo, you bastard.
“Answer me something, Mazzo,” Barney said. “How come you get all this special treatment? A telephone in your room. Your mother calling. Your sister coming to visit. Nobody is supposed to have visitors here. What’s going on, anyway?”
“Haven’t you heard, Barney?” Mazzo asked, the old nastiness back in his voice. “Money talks. And my mother has the money. This place exists on grants, bequests, stuff like that. When she knew I wanted to get in here, she bought my way in. Sat down and wrote a check. Money buys everything.”
Barney didn’t say anything.
“Well, almost everything,” Mazzo amended.
For a moment there Mazzo had seemed like a nice guy, someone you could like.
“Why the hell did you want to buy your way into this place?” Barney asked. “It’s not exactly the Ritz.”
Barney remembered the Handyman’s explanation about why patients came to the Complex. To help mankind, he said. To serve a useful purpose. He had never questioned Billy the Kidney or Allie Roon about their reasons for coming here, not wanting to invade their private compartments, but he sensed a kind of nobility about them, even though they seemed helpless and pathetic most of the time. At least they didn’t gripe or complain or bitch the way Mazzo did. What was Mazzo doing here?
“Look, Barney,” Mazzo was saying. “Don’t worry about me. All you have to worry about is being here when my sister comes. You do that and I’ll let Billy use my phone for a week. Every day.”
Barney squirmed. Damn it, he had his own problems.
“A week, that’s a long time in a place like this,” Mazzo said. “A lifetime, maybe.”
He knew he couldn’t disappoint Billy.
“What time is your sister coming?” Barney asked, giving in.
“At three thirty. After my trip upstairs.”
Barney blew air out of the corner of his mouth. “Okay,” he said. And wanted to get out of there. He realized that he had a tendency lately to flee from places, from the Handyman’s office and the junkyard and his own room and now Mazzo’s room.
“What’s her name?” Barney asked from the doorway, over his shoulder.
“Cassie,” Mazzo said, lifting his head with effort. “We’re not identical twins. She’s not at all like me.”
“Good,” Barney said. “That’s the best news I’ve heard all day.”
Barney chewed the pencil, frowning, looking down at the pad of paper on the table before him, one of those blue-lined paper schoolroom pads. He wrote his name carefully on the paper, printing the letters, using capitals. BARNEY SNOW. He studied his name for a while and then looked up, contemplating this room that was his home in the Complex.
Not much of a home. Dull green walls, bare of decorations. Venetian blinds admitting slashes of light in an uncurtained window. Steel bed with a gray blanket turned down to reveal part of a once-white sheet. The table at which he sat, a sort of improvised desk, was unadorned, and the single drawer was empty. The brown tile floor had no carpet.
The bureau standing beside the window had been painted a lackluster gray and contained his few possessions—a couple of shirts, socks, underwear, a striped tie, a few paperback books whose titles he couldn’t remember, a wristwatch that didn’t work anymore. Two jackets—one zippered, the other a sports type of jacket—hung in the closet along with two pairs of trousers. He had arrived here traveling light, bringing very little from that other place. That other place. He didn’t want to think about it. Tempo, rhythm. Think of here and now.
There’s so little of me here, he thought, and realized how easily his entire existence could be obliterated along with his memory.
He fumbled in his trousers for his wallet and didn’t find it, remembering now that he had turned the wallet and his money—four one-dollar bills and some change—over to the Handyman for safekeeping on his arrival. No need for money here, the Handyman had said.
A wallet, however, would provide proof of identity. He remembered filling in the identity card that came with the wallet. But without it he had nothing to prove who he was. Suppose he woke up somewhere upstairs, his memory wiped away, not knowing his name, not knowing who he was?
Chewing the pencil again, imprinting his toothmarks on the yellow surface, he thought: Maybe I’d better write down my age, too. If they wiped away his name, they’d probably wipe away other things as well. Barney printed his age: 17. Well, not really his age. He wouldn’t be seventeen until July, but this was close enough.
He added his weight: 134.
And his height: 5’6”.
He decided this was enough. It was the kind of information that would spring to his lips if anybody asked him who he was. It was also the kind of basic information he would need to jog his memory into remembering other things if the experiment went wrong.
Satisfied, he folded the piece of paper carefully in half, tore it along the folded edge. Folded it again and tore it once more. Then again, until there remained a small square upon which he’d written the information. He then folded this piece of paper a final time, reducing it to the size of a postage sta
mp, making it easier to hide.
Next problem: where to hide it?
He looked around the room slowly, considering possible hiding places. The closet? Under the mattress? Wait—the bureau. In the pocket of one of his shirts.…
The absurdity of the situation struck him. If he hid the paper somewhere in this room, how could he remember where if they took away his memory?
Damn it.
He was disgusted with himself. He was slipping, losing his grip.
Forget it, toss the ridiculous little piece of paper away. But he couldn’t.
He didn’t entirely trust the Handyman’s experiments, aware that there was always an element of risk. He had to do something in the face of this latest risk. Leave evidence of his identity behind, someplace, someplace where he could find it if things went wrong. In case they wiped his memory away and couldn’t bring it back.
It would be terrible to wake up and not know your name, not know who you were.
Rhythm, tempo. Let the blood flow.
Come on. Where could he hide the paper? Someplace out of sight but easy to find.
Now a new possibility appalled him. Suppose they didn’t take him back here but kept him upstairs, in isolation? What good would a hidden note in his room be?
And then the solution came. Simple, beautiful.
He’d carry this small square of paper with him. On his person. His body.
Wait a minute, let’s be logical now. Start from the beginning. He’d be wearing certain articles of clothing during the treatment if standard procedure was followed. A green “Johnny” that buttoned in the back and came to your knees. Shorts, no undershirt. No place to hide anything. He remembered spy stories in which secret agents swallowed pieces of paper containing important information. Which was impossible in this case, of course, pointless.
He looked down at his body, a body he had never taken any pride in before he came to the Complex, too aware of his shortcomings, the slightly bowed legs, his arms too long for his height. But here, compared to the others wasting away, whose bodies were deteriorating day by day, he had felt good about himself for the first time, realizing that even beauty, like Mazzo’s, wasn’t any use if you couldn’t live.
Barney drew up his shirtsleeve, saw the array of puncture wounds from the needles. A Band-Aid covered the most recent puncture. And Barney suddenly saw the perfect hiding place for the small piece of paper: under a Band-Aid. He would fold the paper until it was small enough to fit beneath the small bandage, the feel of the paper certain to call attention to itself when he awoke. There was a chance that the doctor might discover it first, but he had to take that chance. And he’d reduce the risk of discovery by applying the Band-Aid to the inside of his thigh. Or some other place. Between his toes, maybe?
He had a feeling that this act of subterfuge would prove futile, that it was impossible to fool the Handyman. But it was worth trying. Sitting here in this forlorn room, he felt almost as if he didn’t exist. But at least he could cling to his identity, his name, and do something about it.
“I am Barney Snow,” he said aloud, enunciating carefully.
His voice echoed in the air.
There was no answering voice to say: Yes, you are Barney Snow.
6
HERE she comes,” Mazzo said.
Barney heard heels clicking in the corridor. Ordinarily, the passage of feet in the halls of the Complex was quiet, muted, footsteps like whispers as patients and staff ghosted by in rubber-soled shoes or slippers. But the heels he heard now were like small staccato shouts, alien in this place, threatening somehow.
Barney stood away from Mazzo’s bed, his back to the window. The open venetian blinds laddered the room with sunlight, filling it with a false kind of cheer. Barney squinted, studied the apprehension on Mazzo’s face. He should be happy to see Mazzo looking worried, but Barney himself didn’t exactly feel at ease. He didn’t want to be caught in the crossfire between Mazzo and his sister.
The sound of heels grew closer, a rhythm established, as if she were the drum majorette in an invisible parade. Then the footsteps faltered, became uncertain, and stopped altogether just outside the door. Was she gathering her wits to prepare herself for the meeting with her dying brother? The silence continued, and Barney heard, in the silence, the sound of Mazzo’s quick sharp breaths.
Barney blinked, and as if by magic, Mazzo’s sister stood in the doorway. Her beauty struck him like a physical blow. Or like a small explosion deep inside him, shifting his bones and muscles and tissues the way earth is moved deep below by a shock wave. His first impression was of blue everything: dark-blue blazer, powder-blue sweater, eyes startling blue, not the cold and distant blue of the sky but a warm melting blue. Those eyes swept the room, resting for a moment on Mazzo, the bedside paraphernalia of basins and tubes, the machine to which Mazzo was attached, and finally Barney. He lost himself in those eyes, felt lifted and exalted. Maybe she was a witch, after all. Her short blond hair, almost boyishly short, caught the sunlight and spun it into gold.
She regarded Barney with a sad kind of amusement, shaking her head slightly. “I know who you are,” she said, her voice surprisingly low and husky.
Barney was startled. His cheeks grew warm, his heart bounced crazily in his chest. He wanted to say: “Who am I?” As if she knew secrets he didn’t know. But he didn’t say anything, felt he’d stammer like Allie Roon if he tried to talk.
Mazzo rescued him. “And I know who you are,” Mazzo said to her. “You’re the same old Cassie. But what did you do to your hair?”
She turned away from Barney and directed her attention to Mazzo. Barney, too, looked at Mazzo, surprised at the tenderness in his voice when he spoke to his sister. A different Mazzo suddenly.
She ignored the question about her hair, shrugging slightly as if an answer wasn’t worth giving. Leaning forward a bit, she studied his wan figure in the bed as if trying to determine whether this was really her brother or an imposter.
“You don’t look so bad,” she said, the sultry voice emerging again, like the voice of a blues singer Barney had heard one time on the radio. “You’ve lost some weight. Your eyes look like you’re on something. But you look pretty good, considering.”
“I’m dying, for Christ’s sake,” Mazzo said. “So it doesn’t matter how I look. How I look has nothing to do with it.” But this wasn’t the old Mazzo talking. This new Mazzo used the same old bitter words, but when he spoke them to his sister, they were softened somehow, gentled.
“I was just trying to cheer you up,” she replied. “Would it make you feel better if I said you look terrible, that it’s hard to believe you used to score touchdowns and hit home runs for good old Stanley Prep?”
Her own voice had a kind of bantering now, matching Mazzo’s new voice—the voice Barney had never heard before—and it seemed to him that Mazzo’s and Cassie’s voices were more important to them than the words they used, the voices like a code between them.
Barney studied them as they talked. They were twins, of course, and bore a certain resemblance to each other. Both blond, fair skinned, Cassie beautiful and Mazzo handsome although the disease had ravaged his flesh and features. Mazzo lay in ruins, like someone beaten and robbed and left abandoned, while Cassie’s beauty was vibrant and compelling. Barney felt younger suddenly than his sixteen years. Mazzo and Cassie were probably twenty or so, but Barney felt like a kid beside them. God, he wished that he was older.
“Time for introductions,” Mazzo said, calling to Barney, summoning him from his thoughts. “Barney, this is my sister, Cassie.”
“Hello, Barney,” she said, glancing at him. Then back to Mazzo: “Still up to your old tricks, aren’t you, Alberto?”
“What old tricks?”
She laughed, a throaty kind of laugh, as husky as her voice.
Looking at Barney again—God, she was beautiful—she said: “You see, Barney, Alberto’s always needed a buffer. Even as a kid in school. He’d get into trouble and bring som
e kid home with him.” To Mazzo again: “Remember the time you totaled Papa’s Porsche the day after he bought it? Lucky you weren’t killed. And when you came home that day, you brought home some kid you’d met in the emergency room at the hospital. Your buffer. Like your friend here.”
Mazzo closed his eyes. “God, how I loved to drive,” he said wistfully. “Nothing better, Cassie, than sitting behind the wheel, top down, the motor throbbing, the wind whistling by. The road before me and the car eating it up. The Porsche and the TR6 …”
“You wrecked the TR6, too,” she said, mock-scolding him.
They had forgotten Barney now, caught up in each other, and Barney felt out of place, like a spy eavesdropping, listening to secrets.
“I shouldn’t be dying in bed, Cassie,” Mazzo said. “I should have died before all this happened to me, bombing down the Mass. Pike, ninety miles an hour. And then boom. In a blaze of glory. Not like this.”
And now he was the Mazzo that Barney knew. Bitter and resentful. But why not? “This rotten place with its stink and crap. And I’m part of the stink and the crap.”
“Take it easy, Alberto,” she said. “Take it easy.” Moving to his bedside, removing her jacket at the same time. Her movements were thrillingly sexual to Barney, the way she raised her arms, the fullness of her breasts, the lips wet and slightly parted. He had not been aroused, had not felt a longing for a girl, for such a long time that he couldn’t remember when. Sex was absent from the Complex; no place here for love or lust or desire. Cassie Mazzofono brought it all back, however. The old stirring again, but the stirring mixed with an aching, because a girl had never loved him. He had a dim memory of kissing a girl at a party, but he’d never really held a girl in his arms, never caressed a breast or darted his tongue between parted lips to meet another tongue. In his bed at night, yes. Vivid images conjured up. Playboy centerfolds recalled. But never in reality. Looking at Cassie now, he felt the old aching, along with a new sadness. And wasn’t sure why. But did know, really, although he hated to acknowledge it. The why: knowing he could never attract a girl like Cassie Mazzofono. Not a girl like that. He meant nothing to her: why should he? He was only a buffer, a stooge. She’d barely glanced at him. Probably wouldn’t recognize him if she met him in the hallway tomorrow.