Pulse Page 6

  “Relax, Daniel. Remember when I told you about internetworking.”

  Daniel nodded.

  “Well, it allows me, among other things, to research people. There will be much more information available in the future, of course, but if you know what you’re doing, it’s a place to start.”

  Daniel put his cup down. Simon’s face was cast in darkness, but he could see the smooth curve of his forearm in the flickering light as he held the bowl of his pipe and the soft glow as he puffed and the twist of his smoky exhale as it lifted and wreathed around them.

  “How could you have researched me? I didn’t even know I was going to come here until I saw the sign on your front door.”

  Simon’s shadow nodded on the far wall, but the man said nothing. Daniel continued to think out loud.

  “You knew I was going to come here?”

  “In a way.”

  “Are you saying you pushed me here? Entangled me? Is that possible?”

  Simon dipped his face into their shared light. “I read about your brother in the newspaper, but I knew about you before that. Hospital records. Letters. A couple of phone calls. Don’t leave, Daniel. What happened to you makes you who you are. Makes you perfect for this. If you truly felt something today, you know that to be true.”

  Daniel was standing, staring down at the wooden floorboards, striped in ribbons of moonlight from the windows.

  “Stay, Daniel. Find out about the rest.”

  Daniel found himself sitting again. Simon offered, and Daniel allowed him to refill his cup with the fragrant tea. Then they began.

  “The first rule is this.” Simon held up a finger. “I will never lie to you. And I’ll do everything I can to keep you out of harm’s way.”

  “Who would want to harm me?”

  “You already know the answer to that. What time do you leave for school tomorrow?”

  “It’s a shorter commute from here. I’ll probably leave about seven.”

  “You have your appointment.”

  He knew about that. How did he know about that?

  “You think this is about pushing other people,” Simon said. “Affecting their behavior. Control.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “You think I can sit here and concentrate and get you to do whatever I want?”

  “I’m in this apartment, aren’t I?”

  “Only because you wanted to be. Entanglement is a two-way street, Daniel. You won’t be able to affect every person you meet. Others will be an open book. At times you might not even have a choice in the matter. The point is this. You’ll be pushed even as you push someone else. Take on another’s pain while you unearth your own. It’s part of the price paid for opening up oneself. In fact, I suspect it’s the whole point.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “Once we get past the power trip, the ego trip that seduces with the idea we might be able to affect someone else’s actions, it inevitably comes back to us. Who’s willing to peel away the layers of himself and evolve? Who isn’t? Who lives, who dies? Darwin, of course, had it right all along.”

  “So you’re saying I can’t make someone do something?”

  “Probably not against their will, no. When you feel that push, it’s just you bumping up against them, allowing them to feel what was already there, maybe learn a little about themselves. Maybe learn something they don’t want to know.”

  “Is this thing dangerous?”

  The room filled with a soft hiss as Simon drew on his pipe and the tobacco glowed and crackled and burned.

  “Of course it’s fucking dangerous. Now, go get some sleep.”

  * * *

  Daniel crawled between a set of unfamiliar sheets, resigned to a night of staring at the ceiling and listening for strange sounds. Almost immediately, however, reality began to fray, his mind melting, body sloping down the slippery hallways of his dreams. Nurses came. Nurses went. Doctors stood at one end of an impossibly long bed, arguing over shadows on an x-ray before turning to stare at their patient. Words dripped down into his consciousness—

  HEAD TRAUMA, COMA, DISASSOCIATION

  Some wanted to stimulate his cerebral cortex. Others preferred to let him sleep. Let him heal. The others held sway and so Daniel lay in his coffin, in the absolute zero cold of his mind, watching as they fed him through clear tubes, emptied his bowels, and pored over their endless medical tests.

  He was eight years old, buried alive in a coma, and entirely alone. Well, not entirely. Harry sat at the foot of his bed during the day. And then there was Daniel’s special visitor. He came late at night, when the ward was dark and the only sounds were the drowsy beeps of machines that charted the pump and push of heart and lungs. Larry Rosen worked as an orderly at Boston City Hospital. Curly black hair, narrow-shouldered, crooked and skinny, with a protruding Adam’s apple that was creased in the middle and teeth that crowded up into the front of his mouth. On the first night he dragged a chair close and studied Daniel as he slept. On the second night he played with Daniel’s face, lifting an eyelid and opening his mouth, giggling furiously while Daniel sat up high in a corner of the room and watched. On the third night Rosen brought out the needle. The orderly took his time, toothy grin washed in moonlight, eyes hungry for any hint of pain as the steel sank into the pocket of Daniel’s hip. Rosen got nothing for his trouble, not even a flicker as the needle pierced muscle, fascia, and bone. The next night he was back. And the night after. Different-size needles. Different parts of Daniel’s body. Never a twitch along the expanse of skin. Never a murmur on Daniel’s lips. Still, the eight-year-old watched everything Larry Rosen did. Watched and took notes.

  Daniel felt his eyes flutter and open. He was back in the narrow bedroom above Kenmore Square, the fire inside his head dimmed to a scalpel’s edge of light that reached across the wooden floor toward the foot of the bed. He’d closed the door before going to sleep, but now it stood ajar and something was crawling hot and funny on his skin, feeling here and there at the soft parts of his face. Daniel dared not move, dared not look directly at the door, and when he finally did there was nothing to see but an exhale of air stirring the golden fill from the corridor.

  He stole out of bed and into the hall. Daniel was committed now and didn’t think about it, lest he think better and jump back under the covers. At the end of the hallway the door to Simon’s workroom was cracked an inch. Daniel made a pretense of knocking even as he pushed in. A cold slab of mirror hung on one wall and he jumped at his own startled reflection, mobile skin stretched over a rack of bones, brown hair wild and tufted, fists clenched on either side, his attempt at ferocity more likely to elicit sympathy than fear. Such was the lot of a sixteen-year-old, or at least this sixteen-year-old.

  He moved around the cage of a room, dominated by a large desk scraped clean of paper, book, and pen. A window gazed out over Kenmore Square, empty at three in the morning and shivering under twitching sheets of rain. A breeze, fresh and wet and full of the night, drifted across his feet and up the legs of his Latin School sweats. The draft was coming from beneath a door that connected this first room to Simon’s bedroom. Again, Daniel didn’t pause. Simon’s bed had not been slept in and the only window was flung open, the storm tugging at the shades and casting a fine spray of mist across the floor. Daniel moved closer and saw a boot print limned in wet drops of silver on the sill. He climbed out onto the fire escape.

  The weather was fiercer than he’d imagined, a rake of wind pushing him to the iron railing where he stared down at the roof of a green VW bus and a skull-cracking expanse of sidewalk. The squall pivoted again, turning his shoulders and pulling him back toward the building. Simon was standing in the storm’s blind spot, waiting. He seized Daniel by the shirt, sucking him close and lifting him clear so he dangled out over the city. Daniel looked down at his legs, bicycling in midair, then back at Simon, who tossed him into the night.

  I never seen you looking so bad my funky one

  You tell me that your
superfine mind has come undone

  Daniel dropped headfirst, Steely Dan ribboning his brain as he split the roof of the VW and plunged through a translucent pool of water—layers of warm salty greens, fading to blues, fading to blacks. He fell until there was nowhere left to fall, and then he floated, unable to speak, unable to think, unable to see his hand in front of his face. He was in the place where thoughts got shredded and Plato went to die, the place where the unconscious found its shape and its form. Moon-skinned demons with eyes on stalks and heart-shaped tears. Snakes in circles, feeding on themselves as they fed on one another. Clocks running around and around like a Chuck Berry song gone mad. And Daniel. He felt his heartbeat in his tongue and wondered what it might be like to consider. To ponder. To choose. From somewhere below a watery lamp was lit. Daniel dove, the current fierce and cold, fighting him as something inside impelled, pushed him onward, willed him to be. The last ten feet were a mad, blind struggle. And then Daniel reached for the light, ripping the sheets off his face and sitting straight up in bed.

  For a moment, he imagined he was alone in his bedroom, safe in his cocoon of darkness, listening to the black drumbeat of rain outside and tasting the intimacy of all that lived within it. Then he saw him. Simon was standing by the room’s only window, long face bathed in wet blues and wetter whites.

  “You were screaming.”

  “Sorry, just a bad dream.”

  “Do you dream a lot?” His voice lived on the end of a string, swinging free in the night, measured and even like a ticking watch.

  “It was nothing.”

  “Dreams are windows, Daniel. Windows into streams of time.”

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  Outside the storm tightened, lashing against the cracked New England brick and rattling all around the apartment. Simon leaned forward, allowing a brushstroke of light to play across his face. “Have you ever heard of something called ‘deep time’?”

  “No. Should I?”

  Simon shrugged. “Get some rest. We can talk later.” And then he left, closing the door behind him so it clicked.

  Daniel lay back in the darkness, trying to determine where his dreams ended and his bedroom began. It was all a woolly jumble, his brain sodden with sleep. Daniel’s last thoughts were that the whole thing was a trick and the stuff he imagined at night would look far different in the skeptical light of day. He wanted above all to open his eyes, just to make doubly certain his door was still shut. Then he was gone, tumbling into the abyss, this time failing to stir until morning.

  9

  FAIRY RINGS.

  Barkley cracked an eye, letting the fevered carousel of his dreams slow to a stop. His alarm clock showed five minutes to seven, which meant he’d gotten four and a half hours of sleep. Plenty.

  The black-and-white TV was still on in the kitchen, but Columbo was long gone, cigars smoked, case solved, bad guy in cuffs. Barkley snapped off the set and filled a kettle with water. He liked his coffee hot and strong in the morning. Black with two sugars.

  He drank that first cup like he always did, sitting at the kitchen table, eyes fastened on a pair of boots he kept by the stove. When he finished, he washed out the cup and put it on the sideboard to dry. Then he pulled on the boots, lacing them tight, and shrugged into an overcoat he kept on a hook sunk into the wall.

  Next to the kitchen was a pantry with a window that let onto a fire escape. Barkley cranked open the window and stepped out. His apartment was on the sixth floor of a walk-up overlooking Sullivan Square in Charlestown. The building was old and tired and the fire escape creaked under his weight as he moved to the center of the grated floor and peered through the cold iron at the concrete below. Then he began to jump. Two hundred fifty pounds, cracking hard, cracking mean, cracking fast. The rods that anchored the fire escape shifted in their moorings, separating a good six inches from the brick face of the building as the fire escape bucked and swayed. Barkley planted his palms against the exterior wall and started to rock. The building groaned in its bones and scrapes of red rust floated in the air. Still, the goddamn thing held.

  Barkley sat down on the windowsill and pulled out a pack of Marlboros, lighting up the one he allowed himself every morning and staring out at the dark buildings and bright sky. By his boot was a small container of potting soil. Barkley dug in a thumb, breaking through the frozen crust and turning up the bones of old ghosts. Twelve years ago they’d lived wrapped in a cloud on the top floor of a Roxbury tenement. He was just out of school. Unformed clay. She was everything anyone could ever be and never feared it ending. People like her never did. That’s why they had people like him. He’d told her to stay off the fire escape. More than once. But he’d never nailed the window shut, had he? And Jess loved her flowers. She kept a half-dozen different kinds all around the apartment, potted plants stuck in every available chink of light. She told him the apartment was magic, how the sun flooded their space and the rain dripped off the roof in cold, clean streams, all of it conspiring to feed their life and their love, sanctifying, purifying, keeping them safe and whole. She told him morning sun was best. And nowhere was it better than in the east-facing window off their kitchen, the one that let onto the fire escape.

  He’d even bought nails, long silver ones, and a hammer. They were sitting in a drawer on that Sunday morning in June while Barkley slept in. He smelled the flowers first, hints of them floating through the apartment. He recalled smiling in his sleep. He thought about that smile often, the luxury of it, the arrogance of it, and wondered if he hadn’t been so lazy. So fucking lazy. The scent of the flowers lived on a breeze and the breeze came from the kitchen. She’d opened the window. And if the window was open, she was out on the fire escape. Feeling the magic. Living in its light.

  Barkley jumped from their bed just as the first bolt sheared. Caught the tail end of her scream as he reached the window. He might have called her name as she fell, a carousel of bolts and broken steel, plants and clods of dirt and Jess in the middle, staring up at him, reaching for him, telling him with her eyes that it would be all right and don’t be angry, don’t withdraw, don’t let it fester, don’t let in the wolf. Don’t, don’t, don’t. Then she turned to face the pavement, extending her hands as if they could somehow break the fall.

  He ran down six flights and found her, fine traces of potting soil patterned on her cheek and throat, a scattering of blossoms all around, still fragrant, no longer magic. He covered her body with his and groaned into the earth, wanting nothing more than for it to swallow them whole, leave them to lie together and feel everything or molder. A couple of neighbors came out and stared, then the police and an ambulance. It wasn’t until three days after the funeral that they told him about his unborn daughter, eight weeks along. Then his education was complete and the circle closed itself.

  Barkley promised himself he’d never live in the ghetto again. White-people buildings only. They might not look him in the eye and cross to the other side of the street when they did see him, but white folks were also less likely to die for nothing. And he’d had enough of that. Or so he thought—until he picked up the badge and gun and became a merchant of death, until he moved into the oldest building he could find in the white person’s world, until he started playing Russian roulette with his ghosts on yet another creaky fire escape.

  He took a pull on his cigarette and flicked the butt into the breeze. Then he stepped back through the window and hung up his coat. Boots back in their spot by the stove. He took a long shower, letting the water run as hot as he could stand, and got dressed—brown suit with a soft stripe, blue shirt, and mocha tie. Barkley shined his shoes slowly, nagged by a feeling that this day wouldn’t be like every other. Today was a day to lay traps for one’s demons. And see what the fuck was what.

  10

  HARRY FITZSIMMONS picked his way through the early morning bead sellers and bookshops, sidestepping a long-haired guy strumming a guitar in front of the Coop and a couple of girls in low-slung bell
-bottoms buying postcards off a rack. The chunky smell of weed was already hanging thick over Harvard Square, mingling with a waft of cheap beer as the front door to the Wursthaus burped open and a Puerto Rican in a white apron popped out, lugging a crate full of empties. Next door every stool in the Tasty was taken, locals scarfing down two eggs, home fries, and white toast for a buck and a half. And that included coffee.

  Harry jogged across the street and bought a Rolling Stone at the Out of Town newsstand. A fleet of commuters swept past, two or three breaking off like fighter planes to buy their papers before disappearing into the wooden shack that marked the open mouth of the Red Line. Harry rolled up his magazine and tucked it in his back pocket, dodging between a couple of cars stopped at a light and angling for a set of wrought-iron gates. Harry enjoyed Harvard Square, a collection of odds and ends that marched to its own beat, a talisman of what was hip and what was about to be, even if it never was. Harvard Square, however, was not Harvard. Maybe its schizophrenic stepchild, or some demented relation, but not the pristine, unsullied image most folks had of America’s premier university. To get that, to feel that, to smell that, one needed to dip into the oldest part of the past, the adult drinking tea in the parlor—Harvard Yard.

  He entered off Peabody Street, slipping inside Johnston Gate and past the freshman dorms—Mass Hall where the president of Harvard had his office, Weld where JFK once slept, Wigg in all its various and sundry forms, a handful of others, each with its own history and rites of passage for its wet-behind-the-ears, wide-eyed residents. Harry ventured a little deeper, doubling back through the Old Yard and into the beating heart of the place—also known as Tercentenary Theatre. For him, this would always be the best part of Harvard and the only place, besides the football field, where he felt at peace. Along one side of the quadrangle was University Hall, its white granite defiant among a forest of Georgian brick. Across from it crouched Sever, impossibly heavy with its round bay windows, hipped roof, and whispering archways. Closing off either end of Tercentenary were the twin idols of religion and reason. Memorial Church seemed almost quaint, like a poor relation invited to peal its bells in celebration of its soaring cousin, the Widener Library.