Caine's Law (4 page)

“You’re not a very good liar.”

“Huh?”

“Your mom died when you were
my
age? How come she’s in the clinic here, then?”

He looked uncomfortable. “It’s complicated.”

“My dad says if you’re gonna tell lies, you better remember which lies you tell,” I said.

“And he’s right. But you better remember the truth too.” He shook his head again, a little shake, irritated with himself, like Dad would do when he found himself talking off in the wrong direction from whatever he was wanting to say.

“Here’s the gristle. You’re gonna see me again someday. A long time from now. So long that you won’t remember meeting me, or having this talk or anything, right up until you see me. It’ll come back to you. When it does, there’s something I want you to remember, all right? One thing.”

I looked back down at the floor. Somehow I felt like I was in one of those fairy tales Dad liked to read to me off the net—the kind where if you agree to something, it’s a trap and everything goes wrong forever. But still I couldn’t help asking. I had to know. “What’s that?”

“That I’m sorry, kid.” His voice was slow. Heavy. “That I said I was sorry.”

“For what?”

He looked down too, like he wanted to see whatever it was on the floor I’d been looking at. “Everything.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You will.” He shook his head and his lips flattened into a straight line. “I’d make things different if I could.”

I frowned. “Make
what
things different?”

“Nothing. Everything. Fuck it anyway.” He gave a heavy sigh and pushed himself to his feet. “Forget I said anything.”

My ears started to get hot. “I don’t think that’s
right
.”

“Yeah, okay. Whatever.”

He went toward the inner door, and I jumped up, fists trembling against my thighs.

“What’s that even
mean
? You’re
sorry
but you’re not gonna
do
anything.” I felt myself blush, like always when I get mad. The blush climbs my neck like I’m a bottle filling up with angry.
“Everybody’s fucking sorry!”

He stopped like I had him on a leash, but he didn’t look back. I knew I was in trouble, because
fuck
is a bad word even when you say it to other kids, but it’s worse when you say it to a grown-up. Since I was already in trouble, I wasn’t worried about
getting
in trouble, so I stood there and screamed at him.

“People were
sorry
Dad got
soaped
and people were
sorry
we got thrown out of our
house
and Mom is
sorry
I get in
fights
and Dad is
sorry
he beats Mom until all she can do is lie on the floor and
bleed
and
nobody
ever does the
first fucking thing
to make anything
different
!”

Now everybody in the waiting room was looking, and I was shaking and tears were streaming down my face, because I get too angry to do anything but cry, and then I’m crying because there’s nothing else I can do.

“If you were
really
sorry you wouldn’t even have to
say
it and the only reason you
say
it is so you don’t
feel
bad about not
doing
anything! Saying you’re
sorry
doesn’t do anything except make you feel like you’re not such a fucking useless fucking rotten fucking fuck!”

I felt Dad move next to me like a sculpture coming to life, and his hand found my shoulder. “Hari?” His voice had that kinda blurry sound, like I woke him up in the middle of the night and he’s not sure what’s going on. “What’s wrong, Killer?”

But by then I had the full waterworks going, and I couldn’t even tell him because I couldn’t get my breath. So I just stood there and shook and cried and wished I was big enough to beat that old guy the way Dad would beat Mom. Till all he could do was lie on the floor and bleed.

Then Dad looked up and saw the old guy, and his face went white as foam. “
You
 …”

The old guy nodded to him. “Duncan. Guess I don’t have to ask how you’ve been.”

Dad got a funny look on his face, like he was worried and scared and mad all at the same time. “You can’t be here—you
can’t
be here …”

“But I am.”

“You’re supposed to be dead.”

“So I hear.”

Dad’s hand on my shoulder clutched tight so suddenly that it shocked me right out of sobbing, then faster than I’d ever seen a man move, Dad was on his feet and had dragged me behind him to put himself between me and the old guy.

“What do you want here?” Dad growled in his
tell me before I pound you to paste
voice, and he was a
lot
bigger than the old guy and he was younger than the old guy and stronger than a person ought to be and had those hands like bricks, and the old guy didn’t look scared at all. Just kind of sad, again.

“What if …” he said slowly. “What if you could take back the worst thing you ever did?”

“What?”

“Would you? If you could unring a bell, just one time. Would you?”

Dad kind of leaned toward him and bent his knees a little. “Stay away from me. Stay away from my family.” I could hear the clench in his jaw. “If I ever see you again—”

He didn’t say
I’ll kill you
, but he didn’t have to.

“I wasn’t exactly expecting to bump into you two today,” the old guy said. “It won’t happen again.”

He leaned around Dad’s shoulder and met my eyes. “Remember what I said. And always kiss your mother good-bye, kid. Don’t forget. Always.”

“What you
said
?” Dad’s voice went all thick, like he was getting mad so fast it was choking him. “You … were
talking
? With my son?”

His hands went for the front of the old guy’s tunic and I knew what was coming next: Dad would lift him up and shake him, hard, and if that wasn’t enough, he’d hold on to the tunic with one hand while he used the other to beat the old guy bloody, because that was what happened when Dad got angry enough to put his hands on somebody. Except this time.

Before Dad could grab the guy’s tunic, the old guy said, “Don’t.”

And Dad didn’t.

The old guy looked about as harmless as an old guy can look without being actually broke-down, but there must have been some magic in that one quiet word because it stopped Dad cold—
real
cold, frozen, hands in front, close enough to grab or hit or whatever. But he didn’t.

“Duncan. Pull your shit together,” the old guy said. “You’ve got problems more serious than me.”

When I think about that moment …

Dad and the Social Police. Dad and the Studio. Dad and the Board of Governors. Dad and the Leisurefolk and Investors who rule the Earth, and the Businessmen and Administrators who run it. Dad and Mom. Dad and me.

Dad.

Because now, all these years later, I understand what I saw that day.

In the book Kris Hansen wrote about me, he had Tan’elKoth tell the Board of Governors how to beat me.
We must teach him to think of himself as a defeated man
.

My father had been more than defeated. He’d been crushed. He had poked his head up out of the grass, and the boot of human civilization had stomped him flat.

Slowly.

And through it all, his degenerative neurological disorder had been inexorably transforming him into exactly the kind of man he had given his life to fight: stupid, erratic, and violent. And he
knew
it.

He never even got to forget.

All those years … every time he looked at me, he remembered every time he had hurt me. He remembered choking me. Remembered hitting me with his hands, or other things. Books. Chairs. Frying pans. Once, memorably, a pipe wrench.

Sometimes he had blackouts. Not many.

I’m pretty sure he remembered beating Mom to death.

We never talked about her. Never. But you could see it in his eyes. The memory would hit and his eyes would go empty. Wet marbles. Nothing there at all. Not sadness. Not even regret. He’d lose the thread of whatever we were talking about, and he’d be just gone. Gone like he used to be after one of his rages. Not like he’d go dead. Like he’d been dead all along, but once in a while he’d forget long enough to dream he was still alive. Or maybe the dream was that he’d died the way he wished he could have: that he’d given his life to protect her.

I have failed people I love. Failing them
destroyed
me. What it did to Dad … I can’t even imagine. I don’t want to imagine.

I know why he took it, though. Why he didn’t kill himself and skip forty years of living death. I figured it out a year or two after I got him sprung from the Buke and moved him into the Abbey with Shanna and Faith and me. I figured it out from seeing how he looked at me.

Mom would come to him like Banquo’s ghost, and he’d go dead … and when he’d come back, there’d be this look. When he looked at me. After a
while I realized where I knew it from. I recognized the look because when I think about Faith, I see it in the mirror.

Every time he’d drag himself back from that dead place, he was making a promise. Not to me. That look in his eyes came from silently reminding himself that no matter how crushed he was, how helpless and sick and
guilty
he was, even if I denied him and spit on him and cursed his memory … there was still the thinnest shaved-bare chance that someday there might be something, no matter how small, he could do to help me. There might even come a day when I’d actually need him. The look was him swearing to himself that if such a day should ever come, he would be there. No matter what it cost him.

He’d be there to save me.

Even if I never needed saving. Even if all his endurance, all his suffering, if the rot chewing away his brain and the guilt clawing through his heart turned out to be for nothing. Even if there was never one goddamn thing he could ever do.

Because there would always be that chance …

Dad in the Mission District Labor Clinic, on his feet, a barbwire tangle of fury and terror. Because he saw in front of him a bad man. A casual killer who takes lives the way most people take showers. Dozens of lives. Hundreds. A man who could slay faster than Dad could blink, and for less reason. Knowing that any slightest twitch might, without warning, drop his bloody corpse on the waiting room floor, he had something he thought was worth dying for.

He got in front of me.

In that one long stretching eyeblink of violence gathering like a thunderstorm around us, the clinic’s inner door opened behind the old guy, and one of the practitioner’s aides stuck his head out. “Laborer Michaelson?”

The old guy turned like he thought the aide was talking to him, but of course the aide was talking to Dad. And me. The old guy just pushed the door a little bit farther open and walked on through. I’m not sure Dad even noticed him go.

Like the old guy said, we had problems more serious than him.

“Yes? I’m Prof—Laborer. I’m Laborer Michaelson,” Dad said. “How is she?”

“Can you come with me, Laborer?”

All the anger drained out of Dad and didn’t leave anything behind to hold him up. He swayed a little and caught himself by grabbing my shoulder. “I’m here with—this is our son …”

“It’s very crowded back here, Laborer. Your son has to stay in the waiting room.”

“You can’t let … we can’t even go in together …?”

But I knew the look on the aide’s face. I shrugged out from under Dad’s hand and sat back down on the bench, because I could already tell what was coming next.

“Maybe after you come out, Laborer,” the aide said. “Sorry.”

Sorry. Yeah.

It is only now—
literally
now, as I compose these words on the far side of decades that feel more like centuries—that this finally strikes me as incongruous. That Dad could stare violent death square in the eye without so much as a blink, but couldn’t stand up to a goddamn nurse’s aide. At the time, it was obvious. Natural. It was the primary lesson of my life.

You can fight a threat. You can’t fight the way things are.

That’s what got us buried in the Mission District Labor ghetto. Because Dad had tried to fight the way things are. By the time we stood together in the clinic, the scars he carried from that brutal beat-down had him too broken to even raise his voice.

So I went to the bench and sat, and waited for Dad to come out and tell me Mom was dead.

And the old guy? He was right. I forgot all about him until I saw him again.

Which was—to the surprise of absolutely fucking nobody except my own dumb ass—in a mirror.

The mirror was an old mirror, almost as old as I felt when I dragged myself out of bed that morning. Bent nails clipped it onto a splintered wall over a rust-crusted washbowl in a crappy village wayhouse where everything was damp and the whole place smelled of mildew. Including the mirror: half the silver had peeled off the back, and black stains rimmed the patches remaining.

Every week or two I’d hit one of these crappy wayhouses in whatever crappy village we happened to be closest to, so I could pick up any supplies we needed, and then spend the evening in front of a fire wherever the locals gathered to jawbone, buy a lot of drinks, and find out if the world had blown up yet. And sometimes the horse-witch would come with me, because even she liked a bed once in a while. As a change of pace.

And because, as she never gets tired of reminding me, I’m not getting any fucking younger.

That particular morning, I woke up alone even though I hadn’t gone
to bed alone. And she’d been gone awhile even though it was barely dawn; her side of the bed was cold as a tombstone in the rain. And I hadn’t felt her go, which was kind of weird just because of who I am, but also because I hadn’t slept well. At all.

I had finally drifted off sometime midway between midnight and dawn, and even then I wasn’t resting easily; I had a nightmare. Well, not really a nightmare. By then I could tell the difference. It was a sending.

I should say, a Sending.

In the nightmare/sending/whateverthefuck, I was Orbek. I was up in the Boedecken and I blew the brains out of some old hunchbacked ogrillo named Kopav, then adopted his son into the Black Knives. I mean, Orbek adopted him.