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  "You that worried?"

  Timmy thought about it some. "I can't stand working in a place with such spiritual disharmony." He crossed his arms and settled back on the balls of his feet. He'd been a bartender for half his life and knew when an alcoholic was glowering off the back end of the wagon. Chase didn't want a drink but felt as if he should've been dying for one.

  It was that kind of twice removed emotion that had been playing havoc with him a lot lately.

  "One last thing," he said. "A woman tonight wearing a black dress, dark hair worn up in a twist. Do you remember her?"

  "What did she have?"

  "She wasn't drinking so far as I saw."

  "Then why should I know her, I've been in back of the bar since six. I'm about to give last call."

  Of course, Jez was dead.

  Dawn grinned as if the entire experience had been amusing but might not be worth repeating. She dug into her bag, passing up the book again, searching for her wallet or keys.

  She said, "Thanks for an interesting night." That would've been an insult coming from anyone else, but he realized she meant it. "When are you performing again?"

  "Tomorrow night, if I haven't been canned."

  "I'd like to hear more. Of your work and you just talking. Maybe we can go out for a drink afterwards? I mean, dinner, you know."

  He was silent for so long that Timmy had to lean over and shoulder him out of it.

  "Sure," Chase said.

  He watched her go then, slipping through the others, but wasn't exactly sure of when she was actually gone. One of his other symptoms was time-sense aphasia. An hour could go by and feel like three seconds. Or he could pour himself a glass of water, freefall in his mind for a few hours, and come back before the glass overflowed.

  He always had to be aware of his surroundings, of his place among them, and even then he could never be certain he wasn't already fading away.

  Timmy said, "I think she likes you. Don't let that make you crazy. It's a good thing. Well, sometimes." Hesitating, and frowning a bit. "For some people, anyway."

  "You really know how to set somebody's heart to rest."

  "Yeah, sorry about that."

  Chase backed away from the remaining patrons, sticking to the walls and shadows. As if Nurse Jez might appear from within them, her arms thrusting free, to grab hold and draw him back in with her.

  He got to Isaac Barth's office and knocked.

  The latch hadn't been completely secured and the door wedged open.

  This was the kind of thing that could trap him—that's all it took. A door opening could lead him anywhere down the back corridors. You walk through and instead of Isaac's office you're in a cemetery so broad and wide you can't see any ending to it. The stones hiss. The statues turn to face you. If the door is open, you're being invited into some unmapped circle of hell prepared just for you.

  His father sat at the desk, with a bullet wound in his head.

  Huh.

  Well.

  All right, Chase thought.

  Dad looked up.

  His left eye oozed onto his cheek, watching Chase as he entered. Staring with an accusing glare, the blood still pumping down the side of his face. This is how the man had ended up. A suicide in their den after the cops busted him for raping Doreena and burying the newborn in the woods.

  Chase had found his father's corpse at his desk, a hastily scrawled note propped up against the base of his writing lamp.

  The puddle of gore and brain fluids didn't quite reach the piece of paper, which flapped slightly from the breeze coming in through the open back door. Dad's mouth was open, lips curled as if in the middle of his last word.

  The pistol was a .38 and the smell of gunpowder remained heavy in the room. There was also the stink of burned hair and meat. Chase hadn't touched the note but he'd been able to read three words:

  not my fault

  That had somehow become the creed of Chase's life.

  As he watched, his father cleared his throat, turned his dead head, looked straight at him and smiled.

  But no.

  Isaac Barth sat at his desk reading Shake's latest book of poetry, published by an independent press that had already gone under. Shake had thirty-five collections out and no more than three had ever been released by the same house. And he was actually a success story, so far as poets went.

  Isaac smiled warmly. He saved his page with a cloth marker and gently closed the book. Every movement seemed well-practiced and designed for maximum effect. He gestured to the seat opposite him and Chase took it.

  "Hello Gray, I'm glad you came back. I wanted to talk with you."

  Here would either come the ax or the thoughtful please-tell-me-more-about-your-sickness speech. Isaac actually did care but he was easily enthralled by any kind of character swing that went to the dark end of the bell curve. He was the kind of guy who wanted you to try to put your weirdness into context, as if you could just give him a run-down, a simple answer.

  "Okay," Chase said. He had some trouble not adding "Dad."

  Isaac barely broke five two, and behind the large desk he looked like a kid playing among an adult's belongings. The tiny, liver-spotted hands almost too awkward to be touching a grown-up's things. His nose twisted left and right, broken several times during his adolescence in Brooklyn, one of the few Jews in a mostly Italian neighborhood.

  That's where it had started, Isaac's need to know. Why they hated him, why the world didn't kick open the doors to the death camps years earlier. Where the unrelenting frenzy came out from, and the passion and the lunacy.

  His steel-gray hair was wiry and unkempt, and it swirled around his head to cover and uncover bald patches. Revealing a blueprint of scars and sun cancers. His pants rode a little too high and he always wore suspenders and cufflinks, with his shirt buttoned to the collar.

  His eyes held a pleasant humanity about them that was married, somehow, to an awful melancholy. They checked his wrists for a Holocaust victim's tattoo, and felt a useless and unearned guilt. Isaac had never been closer to Germany than a hot dog vendor's sauerkraut tray on Cassina Boulevard.

  The pain came from being a caring man who'd seen seventy years of the world and had understood almost none of it. An artist at heart without outlet.

  As usual, Chase scanned the room and became lost among the titles sitting packed on the floor-to-ceiling crammed shelves. Hundreds of volumes of poetry, classic novels, books on philosophy, religion, and history cluttered the walls.

  Isaac occasionally offered to lend him anything he might ask for, but Chase never borrowed anything. Only friends stole books.

  Now Isaac showed his small yellow teeth, trying to appear disarming and only managing to seem scared. Chase did that to a lot of people. You made your own reality. One of these days he was going to have to build himself a world where he put other folks at ease.

  "It's all right, Isaac," he said. "I know I screwed up tonight. I'm sorry. I don't know what happened, except that I had a bad episode."

  "Were you drinking?"

  "No, nothing."

  "Hallucinating?" Isaac sat forward, concerned and intrigued. Already enticed. "You were speaking about your father again."

  "I thought I saw somebody I once knew. It threw me off track."

  "So the episode was triggered by something as innocuous as that?"

  "Yes. It happens."

  Chase could see the unflagging interest simmering in the man's eyes. Is that why Isaac kept him around? Just to watch him do the nutjob flop all across the stage?

  The old jumpiness was cornering him again. Chase chewed his wounded tongue and looked away, angling his neck so he could read more book titles, get back some of his ease. He had to watch his streak of paranoia, the feeling that he was at the heart of some grand but closely-knit conspiracy. His cheeks flushed. Isaac wouldn't miss that.

  "You're angry with me."

  "No," Chase said. "I just want to know if I still have a job."

 
"Certainly. You're a performance artist. Acting out before an audience is what you do. They enjoyed the presentation tonight. We sold quite a number of yours and Shake's books. You gave the fans something to talk about tonight. Guaranteed we'll have standing room only the next time you go on."

  That stabbed at him too, the idea that they were only coming to watch him lose his mind. Maybe he'd attack somebody or jump through the plate glass window. Swallow his own tongue.

  "Glad I could stir up the crowd," he said.

  Isaac squared his shoulders, placed his palms on the desk in the same display that Chase's high school principal used to do before laying it out, threatening to expel him. Isaac had to try to rein him in, for Chase's own good if nothing else—it was the only fair thing to do for everybody's sake.

  "I know you have quite a burden to carry, Gray. I want you to understand that I'm always here to help you if you ever need me for any reason."

  "Thank you."

  "I mean it."

  "I know you do."

  Taking a breath, dabbing his top lip with the tip of his tongue, Isaac didn't quite have it in him to play hardass. "And, well, normally I wouldn't dare discuss the nature of an artist's work with the artist himself."

  Of course he dared, that's why he owned the Palace in the first place. So he could get down to the muscle and find out how it worked. He would erase all the layers of Jacques-Louis David's masterpiece Marat in order to get to the canvas, and see what David had originally seen there. In the murder, the dripping arm draped out of the bathtub. What the first line drawn had been.

  Chase felt a sudden swelling of pity for the old man. He probably thought this was some kind of fun to be had.

  "But I feel the need to do so now," Isaac said.

  "Okay. What do you want to know?"

  "If you're all right."

  "Sure."

  "Are you certain?"

  "No. Is anybody?"

  "Well—"

  Isaac didn't seem to realize he'd played the entire thing backwards, first complimenting Chase on the situation and now about to slap him across the nose. Get your mind right, boy.

  But the rage was back in place, mewling and whispering. Chase said, "You've had other readers do all kinds of funky stuff at the mike before. Hell, Conrad Rice once brought a porta-potty and a can of chili beans and bottle of castor oil on stage with him. You think that making statements about art and shit being the same thing is new?"

  Isaac grimaced and had to shake off the memory of Conrad tooting along to a love sonnet. Good ole Conrad made a lot of things acceptable for the other slammers.

  "I'm only thinking of your well-being, Gray."

  Mostly true, but not entirely. Isaac wanted to find out where the inspiration came from, as if Chase could ever tell him. Or would want to. "Look, I just went into a skid for a minute there. I'm out of it now."

  "I understand that. But what occurred tonight?"

  "Nothing I want to talk about right now."

  "Oh."

  "Sorry if that annoys you."

  "It doesn't. However, I am concerned about you."

  "I know, and thanks for that."

  Isaac wasn't quite done yet. He slid his chair back to the wall and drew a thin chapbook from a stack heaped to elbow level. It was Chase's first collection A Student of Hell.

  "I agree with the critics, you know. I believe you're ultimately a much better poet than Shake is. He draws inspiration from Garden Falls. You, on the other hand, seem to—"

  So it was going to be like this.

  Chase let out a chuckle and said, "I've had more hours of analysis than you have books, Isaac."

  But the old man had to push, the compulsion owned him. He would've gotten along in some of the therapy groups on the fourth ward. He loved Chase, in his way, and kept trying to help him through his life, as if there might be someone else under his skin Ike could invite home to meet his daughter.

  "You found greater fears there, Gray."

  It made him smile and he was thankful for that. You took what you could get. An odd giggle escaped before he could clamp his teeth down. "You don't know the half of it."

  "What happened to you?"

  He didn't want to think of the girl. Stacy.

  He never wanted to think of her, not even when she showed up standing beside him, dead as Jez, tugging on his shirt sleeve to thank him for trying to save her. Warning him about her father, the maniac. The killer con. While the others dunked him in the hydro-therapy baths like an eighteenth century witch sinking to the bottom.

  Chase's dead Daddy stared at him, the flow of blood slowing but not stopping. It wasn't his fault. Chase walked out.

  5

  Sometimes it didn't take much effort on your part to read exactly how it would unfold.

  You'd look into somebody's eyes and in half a second you could see all the ugliness of their history swirling inside there. The rapes, the benders and the crack-ups. The motherless kids and the brush with drugs, shower room hurts, Uncle Bobo's belt buckle, and the stone cellar stairs stained with piss.

  So you're in your jammies and the group therapy session is breaking up, the other mooks, the latent homos, the mama's boys and the fried brain cases skittering off in every direction while you sit in the too bright white chair staring at your comfy slippers. You've never worn slippers in your life, before the Falls. They remind you of your grandfather.

  You start to ruminate on granddad, the old guy a former champion bantamweight who got his clock cleaned so good one night that everything from 1957 on was slapped out of his head.

  Now he's on a porch of some retirement home, talking to the wheelchair-bound palsied mummies like they're his manager, his corner guy, the fight promoter. Everybody is Freddy. "Don't worry, Freddy, I can take Roundhouse McClusky in five. Lay the bet heavy when it hits 9-2 against." The old guy hacking at his wrists because he always thinks he's cutting his glove laces. "Fred, don't be mad, Freddy…"

  You contemplate the diseased face of Arlo Barrack as he comes up behind, bends over your shoulder to look into your eyes.

  You think, Jesus Christ, this dude here is seriously whacked. The doctors are losing the battle with this one, somebody's got to do something radical, and fast. He's got the killer glare, ought to be in the joint, in solitary.

  He touches your elbow and gently but firmly pulls you up from your seat. He's there to help, he says.

  Then you notice he's an attendant, dressed in the loose white khakis and v-collar cotton shirt. Sneakers blindingly white except for the toes, where they're darker from having gotten wet. Where two long black hairs stand out. Three or four drops of blood.

  He's there to take you to your next appointment, he says.

  Sometimes it doesn't take much effort on your part to read exactly how it will unfold.

  You can feel the tightly twisted malevolence inside Barrack. You don't know his name yet but you will. He's got a soft voice. He says, I'm Mr. Arlo Barrack. Please come with me.

  You pick up on the way he says "Mister." Like the word itself is foreign when applied to himself. You feel the same way most of the time.

  His G.I. Joe kung-fu grip stays locked on your upper arm. He leads you step by step through the halls. The farther he gets into the recesses of the hospital, the more his true self oozes free from the confines of his assumed demeanor. He's breathing heavily now, his canines clicking together to the internal rhythm of his hate. It's a sound you know and understand. He seems to have forgotten you're even there, just glowering at everything in front of him. It takes a minute or two before he gives you a sidelong glance and sees you again. The reality of your presence disturbs him for an instant, and then he lets loose with a sneer.

  You do not have a good feeling about this.

  You get to the hydrotherapy room and spot the tiles and tubs, smell the mildew and the stagnant odor of human fear. Nothing good happens to a man in a group shower setting.

  There is no steaming Jacuzzi or bathtub with overflo
wing rose-scented bubbles.

  You were sort of hoping for a couple of pretty girls holding loofah sponges.

  Mr. Arlo Barrack says, "How you feelin', Killer?"

  The answer's easy. Especially when you see the two other attendants over there, smoking beneath the no smoking sign, wearing their T-shirts because they don't want to get the front of their uniforms dirty.

  They have an indistinguishable appearance, as if they're merely extensions of Barrack's affliction and basic unsoundness. If they have names, you'll never know them. You try not to sigh.

  Perhaps today is the day someone will finally be beaten to death.

  The three of them exchanging looks now, chuckling with adolescent but real menace.

  Sometimes it doesn't take much effort on your part to read exactly how it will unfold, as Barrack presses you forward into the room, picking up some speed, thrusting you into the arms of the other guys.

  Their brutality has the quality of ballet. Choreographed, beautiful within a certain framework of style and purpose. These dudes hate your ass, and you know why.

  Appears a little like a whirlpool but a whole lot meaner—plenty of shining chrome, insulated cables, and dirty tile around it, a leftover from the 60s when they were trying all kinds of shit to calm the insane down and bring them back into the fold.

  You can sense the futility of treatment in this room, your own and everyone else's. Insulin shock, electroshock, pharmaceutical therapies. Ginsberg had written about this kind of horror in "Howl."

  Sure, you know something about hydrotherapy and water cures. The bath should be about 90 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit, shoulder deep, soothing to the shredded nerves. It's said to be helpful for the bladder and urinary problems, colds, fevers, homicidal tendencies.

  The hot bath should last at least 20 minutes.

  You're hoping these three guys will hop in, splash around for a while, get themselves well.

  Okay, so here it comes.

  Plant yourself. Get ready.

  The two others grab you by the arms and tip you backwards with some difficulty as Barrack lunges and tightens his hold around your knees. You struggle for an instant and then wonder why you're fighting. As a well-trained team they lift you easily and carry you to the tub. The water has a layer of scum and dust on top. You imagine it to be stone, unbreakable, until they ease you into it. You feel arms below, pulling at you, but you're crazy and can't be trusted.