Desperation (16 page)

Then the cop suddenly sprang back into the room. He had to duck his head to keep from bumping it on the top of the doorway. He was grinning in a mad way that made David think of Garfield, the comic-strip cat, when Garfield did his impromptu backfence vaudeville routines. Which this was, it seemed. There was an old telephone hung on the wall, its beige plastic casing cracked and filthy. The cop snatched it off its hook, held it to his ear, and cried: “Room service! Send me up a room!” He slammed the phone back down and turned his mad Garfield grin on his prisoners. “Old Jerry Lewis bit,” he said. “American critics don't understand Jerry Lewis, but he's
huge
in France. I mean he's a
stud.
”

He looked at David.

“No God in France, either, Trooper. Take it from
moi.
Just Cinzano and escargots and women who don't shave their armpits.”

He flashed the others with his regard, the grin fading as he did so.

“You people
have
to stay put,” he said. “I know that you're scared of me, and maybe you're
right
to be scared, but you're locked up for a reason, believe it. This is the only safe place for miles around. There are forces out there you don't want to even think about. And when tonight comes—” He only looked at them and shook his head somberly, as if the rest was too awful to be spoken aloud.

You lie, you liar,
David thought . . . but then another howl drifted through the open window in the stairwell, and he wondered.

“In any case,” the cop said, “these are good locks and good cells. They were built by hardasses for roughneck miners, and escape's not an option. If that's been in your mind, send it home to its momma. You mind me, now. That's the best thing to do. Believe me, it is.” Then he was gone, this time for real—David could hear his booted feet thudding down the stairs, shaking the whole building.

The boy stood where he was for a moment, knowing what he had to do now—absolutely
had
to do—but reluctant to do it in front of his parents. Still, there was no choice, was there? And he had been right about the cop. The big man hadn't exactly been reading his mind like it was a newspaper, but he'd been getting some of it—he'd been getting the God stuff. But maybe that was good. Better the cop should see God than the shotgun shell, maybe.

He turned and took two slow steps to the foot of the bunk. He could feel the weight of the shell in his pocket as he went. That weight was very clear, very distinct. It was as if he had a lump of gold hidden in there.

No, more dangerous than gold. A chunk of something radioactive, maybe.

He stood where he was for a moment, back to the room, and then, very slowly, sank down on his knees. He took a deep breath, pulling in air until his lungs would absolutely hold no more, then let it out again in a long silent whoosh. He folded his hands on the rough woolen blanket, dropped his forehead softly onto them.

“David, what's wrong with you?” his mother called.
“David!”

“There isn't anything wrong with him,” his father said, and David smiled a little as he closed his eyes.

“What do you mean, nothing wrong?” Ellie screamed. “Look at him, he fell down, he's fainting!
David!
”

Their voices were distant now, fading, but before they went out entirely, he heard his dad say, “Not fainting.
Praying.
”

No God in Desperation? Well, let's just see about that.

Then he was gone, no longer concerned about what his parents might be thinking, no longer worried that old Mr. White Hair might have seen him filch the shotgun shell and might tell the monster cop what he had seen, no longer grieving for sweet little Pie, who had never hurt anyone in her life and hadn't deserved to die as she had. He was not, in fact, precisely even inside his own head anymore. He was in the black now, blind but not deaf, in the black and listening for his God.

2

Like most spiritual conversions, David
Carver's was dramatic only on the outside; on the inside it was quiet, almost mundane. Not rational, perhaps—matters of the spirit may never be strictly rational—but possessed of its own clarity and logic. And to David, at least, its genuineness was beyond question. He had found God, that was all. And (this he considered probably more important) God had found him.

In November of the previous year, David's best friend had been struck by a car while riding his bike to school. Brian Ross was thrown twenty feet, into the side of a house. On any other morning David would have been with him, but on that particular day he had stayed home sick, nursing a not-too-serious virus. The phone had rung at eight-thirty and his mother had come into the living room ten minutes later, pale and trembling. “David, something's happened to Brian. Please try not to be too upset.” After that he didn't remember much of the conversation, only the words
not expected to live.

It had been his idea to go and see Brian in the hospital the next day, after calling the hospital all on his own that evening and ascertaining that his friend was still alive.

“Honey, I understand how you feel, but that's a really bad idea,” his father had said. His use of “honey,” a term of endearment long since retired along with David's stuffed toys, indicated how upset Ralph Carver was. He had looked at Ellen, but she only stood by the sink, wringing a dishcloth nervously back and forth in her hands. Obviously no help there. Not that Ralph had felt very helpful himself, God knew, but who had ever expected such a conversation? My God, the boy was only eleven, Ralph hadn't even gotten around to telling him the facts of
life,
let alone those of death. Thank God Kirstie was in the other room, watching cartoons on TV.

“No,” David had said. “It's a
good
idea. In fact, it's the
only
idea.” He thought of adding something heroically modest like
Besides, Brian'd do it for me,
and decided not to. He didn't think Brian
would
do it for him, actually. That didn't change anything, though. Because he had vaguely understood, even then, before what had happened in Bear Street Woods, that he'd be going not for Brian but for himself.

His mother had advanced a few hesitant steps from her bastion by the sink. “David, you've got the dearest heart in the world . . . the
kindest
heart in the world . . . but Brian . . . he was . . . well . . .
thrown
 . . .”

“What she's trying to say is that he hit a brick wall head-first,” his father said. He had reached across the table and taken one of his son's hands. “There was extensive brain-damage. He's in a coma, and there are no good vital signals. Do you know what that means?”

“That they think his brain turned into a cabbage.”

Ralph had winced, then nodded. “He's in a situation where the best thing that could happen would be for it to end fast. If you went to see him, you wouldn't be seeing the friend you know, the one you used to have sleepovers with . . .”

His mother had gone into the living room at that point, had swept the bewildered Pie into her lap and begun to cry again.

David's father glanced after her as if he'd like to join her, then turned back to David again. “It's best if you remember Bri the way he was when you saw him the last time. Understand?”

“Yes, but I can't do that. I have to go see him. If you don't want to take me, that's okay, though. I'll take the bus after school.”

Ralph had sighed heavily. “Shit, kid, I'll take you. You won't have to wait until after school, either. Just don't for God's sake say anything about this to—” He lifted his chin toward the living room.

“To Pie? Gosh, no.” He didn't add that Pie had already been into his room to ask him what had happened to Brian, and had it hurt, and what did David think it was like to die, did you go somewhere, and about a hundred other questions. Her face had been so solemn, so attentive. She had been . . . well, she had been absolutely Pie-eyed. But it was often best if you didn't tell your parents everything. They were old, and stuff got on their nerves.

“Brian's parents won't let you in,” Ellie had said, coming back into the room. “I've known Mark and Debbie for years. They're grief-stricken—sure they are, if it had been you I'd be
insane
—but they'll know better than to let a little boy look at . . . at another little boy who's dying.”

“I called them after I called the hospital and asked if I could come see him,” David said quietly. “Mrs. Ross said okay.” His dad was still holding his hand. That was okay. He loved his mom and dad very much, and had been sorry this was distressing for them, but there was no question in his mind about what he was supposed to do. It had been as if some other power, one from outside, were guiding him even then. The way an older, smarter person might guide a little kid's hand, to help him make a picture of a dog or a chicken or a snowman.

“What's the matter with her?” Ellen Carver asked in a distraught voice. “Just what in hell is the
matter
with her, that's what I'd like to know.”

“She said she was glad I could come say goodbye. She said they're going to turn off the life-support stuff this weekend, after his grandparents come to say goodbye, and she was glad I could come first.”

The following day, Ralph took the afternoon off from work and picked his son up at school. David had been standing at the curb with his blue
EXCUSED EARLY
pass sticking out of his shirt pocket. When they got to the hospital, they rode up to the fifth floor, ICU, in the world's slowest elevator. On the way, David tried to prepare himself for what he was going to see.
Don't be shocked, David,
Mrs. Ross had said on the phone.
He doesn
't look very nice. We're sure he doesn't feel any pain—he's down much too deep for that—but he doesn't look very nice.

“Want me to come in with you?” his father had asked outside the door of the room Brian was in. David had shaken his head. He was still powerfully in the grip of the feeling which had more or less swallowed him since his pallid mother had given him the news about the accident: that feeling of being guided by someone more experienced than he was, someone who would be brave for him if his own courage faltered.

He had gone into the room. Mr. and Mrs. Ross were there, sitting in red vinyl chairs. They had books in their hands that they weren't reading. Brian was in the bed by the window, surrounded by equipment that beeped and sent green lines rolling across video screens. A light blanket was pulled up to his waist. Above it, a thin white hospital shirt lay open like cheesy school-play angel's wings on either side of his chest. There were all sorts of rubber suckers on him down there, and more attached to his head, below a vast white cap of bandage. From beneath this cap, one long cut descended Brian's left cheek to the corner of his mouth, where it curved up like a fishhook. The cut had been sutured with black thread. To David it had looked like something out of a Frankenstein movie, one of the old ones with Boris Karloff they showed on Saturday nights. Sometimes, when he slept over at Brian's, the two of them stayed up and ate popcorn and watched those movies. They loved the old black-and-white monsters. Once, during
The Mummy
, Brian had turned to David and said, “Oh shit, the mummy's after us, let's all walk a little faster.” Stupid, but at quarter to one in the morning,
anything
can strike eleven-year-olds funny, and the two of them had laughed like fiends.

Brian's eyes had looked up at him from the hospital bed. And through him. They were open and as empty as school classrooms in August.

Feeling more than ever as if he were not moving but being moved, David had walked into the magic circle of the machines. He observed the suction cups on Brian's chest and temples. He observed the wires coming out of the suction cups. He observed the oddly misshapen look of the helmet-sized bandage on the left side of Brian's head, as if the shape beneath it had been radically changed. David supposed it had been. When you hit the side of a brick house, something had to give. There was a tube in Brian's right arm and another coming out of his chest. The tubes went to bags of liquid hanging off poles. There was a plastic doodad in Brian's nose and a band on his wrist.

David thought,
These are the machines that are keeping him alive. And when they turn them off, when they pull out the needles—

Disbelief filled him at the idea, buds of wonder which were only grief rolled tight. He and Brian squirted each other at the waterfountain outside their home room at school whenever they thought they could get away with it. They rode their bikes in the fabled Bear Street Woods, pretending they were commandos. They swapped books and comics and baseball cards and sometimes just sat on David's back porch, playing with Brian's Gameboy or reading and drinking David's mom's lemonade. They slapped each other high fives and called each other “bad boy.” (Sometimes, when it was just the two of them, they called each other “fuckhead” or “dickweed.”) In the second grade they'd pricked their fingers with pins and smooshed them together and sworn themselves blood-brothers. In August of this year they had made, with Mark Ross's help, a bottlecap Parthenon from a picture in a book. It turned out so well that Mark kept it in the downstairs hall and showed it to company. At the first of the year the bottlecap Parthenon was slated to travel the block and a half to the Carver house.

It was the Parthenon that David's mind had fixed upon most firmly as he stood by his comatose friend's bed. They had built it—him, Brian, Brian's dad—out in the Ross garage while the tape player endlessly recycled
Rattle and Hum
on the shelf behind them. A silly thing because it was just bottlecaps, a cool thing because it looked like what it was supposed to look like, you could tell what it was. Also a cool thing because they had made it with their own hands. And soon Brian's hands would be picked up and scrubbed by an undertaker who would use a special brush and pay particular attention to the fingernails. No one would want to look at a corpse with dirty nails, David supposed. And after Bri's hands were clean and he was in the coffin his folks would pick out for him, the undertaker would lace his fingers together like they were a pair of sneakers. And that was how they'd stay, down in the ground. Neatly folded, the way they had been supposed to fold their hands on their desks back in the second grade. No more bottlecap buildings for those hands. No more waterfountain nozzles for those fingers. Down into the dark with them.

It was not terror this thought had called up in his mind and heart but despair, as if the image of Brian's fingers laced together in his coffin proved that nothing was worth anything, that doing never once in the world stopped dying, that not even kids were exempted from the horror-show that roared on and on behind the peppermint sitcom facade your parents believed in and wanted you to believe in.

Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Ross spoke to him as he stood by the bed, meditating on these things in the shorthand of children. And their silence was all right with David; he liked them just fine, especially Mr. Ross, who had a sort of interesting crazy streak, but he hadn't come here to see them. They weren't the ones with the food-tubes and breathing machinery that were going to be taken away after the grandparents got a chance to say goodbye.

He had come to see Brian.

David had taken his friend's hand. It was astoundingly cool and lax in his own, but still alive. You could feel the life in it, running like a motor. He squeezed it gently and whispered, “How you doin, bad boy?”

No response but the sound of the machine that was doing Brian's breathing for him now that his brain had blown most of its fuses. This machine was at the head of the bed, and it was the biggest. It had a clear plastic tube mounted on one side of it. Inside the tube was something that looked like a white accordion. The sound this machine made was quiet—
all
the machines were quiet—but the accordion-thing was unsettling, just the same. It made a low, emphatic noise each time it went up. A
gasping
noise. It was as if part of Brian
wasn't
down too deep to feel pain, but that part had been taken out of his body and penned up in the plastic tube, where it was now being hurt even worse. Where it was being pressed to death by the white accordion-thing.

And then there were the eyes.

David felt
his
eyes drawn back to them again and again. Nobody had told him Brian's eyes would be open; until just now he hadn't known your eyes
could
be open when you were unconscious. Debbie Ross had told him not to be shocked, that Brian didn't look very nice, but she hadn't told him about that stuffed-moose stare. Maybe that was all right, though; maybe you could never be prepared about the really awful things, not at any age.

One of Brian's eyes was bloodshot, with a huge black pupil that ate up all but the thinnest ring of brown. The other was clear and the pupil appeared to be normal, but nothing else was normal because there was no sign of his friend in those eyes,
none.
The boy who had cracked him up by saying
Oh shit, the mummy's after us, let'
s all walk a little faster
wasn't here at all . . . unless he was in the plastic tube, at the mercy of the white accordion.

David would look away—at the stitched fishhook cut, at the bandage, at the one waxy ear he could see below the bandage—and then his gaze would wander back to Brian's open, staring eyes with their mismatched pupils. It was the
nothing
that drew him, the
absence,
the
goneness
in those eyes. It was more than wrong. It was . . . was . . .