Firestarter (6 page)

“There yourself,” Andy said. He was not comforted.

They were in Room 70 of Jason Gearneigh Hall, upstairs. A dozen cots had been trucked in, courtesy of the college infirmary, and the twelve volunteers were lying propped up on hypoallergenic foam pillows, earning their money. Dr. Wanless started none of the IVs himself, but he was walking up and down between the cots with a word for everyone, and a little frosty smile.
We'll start to shrink anytime now,
Andy thought morbidly.

Wanless had made a brief speech when they were all assembled, and what he had said, when boiled down, amounted to:
Do not fear. You are wrapped snugly in the arms of Modern Science.
Andy had no great faith in Modern Science, which had given the world the H-bomb, napalm, and the laser rifle, along with the Salk vaccine and Clearasil.

The grad assistant was doing something else now. Crimping the IV line.

The IV drip was five percent dextrose in water, Wanless
had said … what he called a D5W solution. Below the crimp, a small tip poked out of the IV line. If Andy got Lot Six, it would be administered by syringe through the tip. If he was in the control group, it would be normal saline. Heads or tails.

He glanced over at Vicky again. “How you doin, kid?”

“Okay.”

Wanless had arrived. He stood between them, looking first at Vicky and then at Andy.

“You feel some slight pain, yes?” He had no accent of any kind, least of all a regional-American one, but he constructed his sentences in a way Andy associated with English learned as a second language.

“Pressure,” Vicky said. “Slight pressure.”

“Yes? It will pass.” He smiled benevolently down at Andy. In his white lab coat he seemed very tall. His glasses seemed very small. The small and the tall.

Andy said, “When do we start to shrink?”

Wanless continued to smile. “Do you feel you will shrink?”

“Shhhhrrrrrink,” Andy said, and grinned foolishly. Something was happening to him. By God, he was getting high. He was getting off.

“Everything will be fine,” Wanless said, and smiled more widely. He passed on. Horseman, pass by, Andy thought bemusedly. He looked over at Vicky again. How bright her hair was! For some crazy reason it reminded him of the copper wire on the armature of a new motor … generator … alternator … flibbertigibbet …

He laughed aloud.

Smiling slightly, as if sharing the joke, the grad assistant crimped the line and injected a little more of the hypo's contents into Andy's arm and strolled away again. Andy could look at the IV line now. It didn't bother him now.
I'm a pine tree,
he thought
See my beautiful needles.
He laughed again.

Vicky was smiling at him. God, she was beautiful. He wanted to tell her how beautiful she was, how her hair was like copper set aflame.

“Thank you,” she said. “What a nice compliment” Had she said that? Or had he imagined it?

Grasping the last shreds of his mind, he said, “I think I crapped out on the distilled water, Vicky.”

She said placidly, “Me too.”

“Nice, isn't it?”

“Nice,” she agreed dreamily.

Somewhere someone was crying. Babbling hysterically. The sound rose and fell in interesting cycles. After what seemed like eons of contemplation, Andy turned his head to see what was going on. It was interesting. Everything had become interesting. Everything seemed to be in slow motion. Slomo, as the avant-garde campus film critic always put it in his columns.
In this film, as in others, Antonioni achieves some of his most spectacular effects with his use of slomo footage.
What an interesting, really clever word; it had the sound of a snake slipping out of a refrigerator: slomo.

Several of the grad assistants were running in slomo toward one of the cots that had been placed near Room 70's blackboard. The young fellow on the cot appeared to be doing something to his eyes. Yes, he was definitely doing something to his eyes, because his fingers were hooked into them and he seemed to be clawing his eyeballs out of his head. His hands were hooked into claws, and blood was gushing from his eyes. It was gushing in slomo. The needle flapped from his arm in slomo. Wanless was running in slomo. The eyes of the kid on the cot now looked like deflated poached eggs, Andy noted clinically. Yes indeedy.

Then the white coats were all gathered around the cot, and you couldn't see the kid anymore. Directly behind him, a chart hung down. It showed the quadrants of the human brain. Andy looked at this with great interest for a while.
Verrry in-der-rresting,
as Arte Johnson said on
Laugh-In
.

A bloody hand rose out of the huddle of white coats, like the hand of a drowning man. The fingers were streaked with gore and shreds of tissue hung from them. The hand smacked the chart, leaving a bloodstain in the shape of a large comma. The chart rattled up on its roller with a smacking sound.

Then the cot was lifted (it was still impossible to see the boy who had clawed his eyes out) and carried briskly from the room.

A few minutes (hours? days? years?) later, one of the grad assistants came over to Andy's cot, examined his drip, and then injected some more Lot Six into Andy's mind.

“How you feeling, guy?” the GA asked, but of course he wasn't a GA, he wasn't a student, none of them were. For one thing, this guy looked about thirty-five, and that was a little long in the tooth for a graduate student. For another, this guy worked for the Shop. Andy suddenly knew it. It was absurd, but he knew it. And the man's name was …

Andy groped for it, and he got it. The man's name was Ralph Baxter.

He smiled. Ralph Baxter. Good deal.

“I feel okay,” he said. “How's that other fella?”

“What other fella's that, Andy?”

“The one who clawed his eyes out,” Andy said serenely.

Ralph Baxter smiled and patted Andy's hand. “Pretty visual stuff, huh, guy?”

“No, really,” Vicky said. “I saw it, too.”

“You think you did,” the GA who was not a GA said. “You just shared the same illusion. There was a guy over there by the board who had a muscular reaction … something like a charley horse. No clawed eyes. No blood.”

He started away again.

Andy said, “My man, it is impossible to share the same illusion without some prior consultation.” He felt immensely clever. The logic was impeccable, inarguable. He had old Ralph Baxter by the shorts.

Ralph smiled back, undaunted. “With this drug, it's very possible,” he said. “I'll be back in a bit, okay?”

“Okay, Ralph,” Andy said.

Ralph paused and came back toward where Andy lay on his cot. He came back in slomo. He looked thoughtfully down at Andy. Andy grinned back, a wide, foolish, drugged-out grin. Got you there, Ralph old son. Got you right by the proverbial shorts. Suddenly a wealth of information about Ralph Baxter flooded in on him, tons of stuff: he was thirty-five, he had been with the Shop for six years, before that he'd been with the FBI for two years, he had—

He had killed four people during his career, three men and one woman. And he had raped the woman after she was dead. She had been an AP stringer and she had known about—

That part wasn't clear. And it didn't matter. Suddenly, Andy didn't want to know. The grin faded from his lips. Ralph Baxter was still looking down at him, and Andy was swept by a black paranoia that he remembered from his two previous LSD trips … but this was deeper and much more frightening. He had no idea how he could know such things about Ralph Baxter—or how he had known his name at all—but if he told Ralph that he knew, he was terribly afraid that he might disappear from Room 70 of Jason Gearneigh with the same swiftness as the boy who had clawed his eyes out. Or maybe all of that really had been a hallucination; it didn't seem real at all now.

Ralph was still looking at him. Little by little he began to smile. “See?” he said softly. “With Lot Six, all kinds of funky things happen.”

He left Andy let out a slow sigh of relief. He looked over at Vicky and she was looking back at him, her eyes wide and frightened.
She's getting your emotions,
he thought.
Like a radio. Take it easy on her! Remember she's tripping, whatever else this weird shit is!

He smiled at her, and after a moment, Vicky smiled uncertainly back. She asked him what was wrong. He told her he didn't know, probably nothing.

(but we're not talking—her mouth's not moving)

(it's not?)

(vicky? is that you)

(is it telepathy, andy? is it?)

He didn't know. It was something. He let his eyes slip closed.

Are those really grad assistants? she asked him, troubled. They don't look the same. Is it the drug, Andy? I don't know, he said, eyes still closed. I don't know who they are. What happened to that boy? The one they took away? He opened his eyes again and looked at her, but Vicky was shaking her head. She didn't remember. Andy was surprised and dismayed to find that he hardly remembered himself. It seemed to have happened years ago. Got a charley horse, hadn't he, that guy? A muscular twitch, that's all. He—

Clawed his eyes out.

But what did it matter, really?

Hand rising out of the huddle of white coats like the hand of a drowning man.

But it happened a long time ago. Like in the twelfth century.

Bloody hand. Striking the chart. The chart rattling up on its roller with a smacking sound.

Better to drift. Vicky was looking troubled again.

Suddenly music began to flood down from the speakers in the ceiling, and that was nice … much nicer than thinking about charley horses and leaking eyeballs. The music was soft and yet majestic. Much later, Andy decided (in consultation with Vicky) that it had been Rachmaninoff. And ever after when he heard Rachmaninoff, it brought back drifting, dreamy memories of that endless, timeless time in Room 70 of Jason Gearneigh Hall.

How much of it had been real, how much hallucination?
Twelve years of off-and-on thought had not answered that question for Andy McGee. At one point, objects had seemed to fly through the room as if an invisible wind were blowing—paper cups, towels, a blood-pressure cuff, a deadly hail of pens and pencils. At another point, sometime later (or had it really been earlier? there was just no linear sequence), one of the test subjects had gone into a muscular seizure followed by cardiac arrest—or so it had seemed. There had been frantic efforts to restore him using mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, followed by a shot of something directly into the chest cavity, and finally a machine that made a high whine and had two black cups attached to thick wires. Andy seemed to remember one of the “grad assistants” roaring, “Zap him! Zap him! Oh, give them to me, you fuckhead!”

At another point he had slept, dozing in and out of a twilight consciousness. He spoke to Vicky and they told each other about themselves. Andy told her about the car accident that had taken his mother's life and how he had spent the next year with his aunt in a semi-nervous breakdown of grief. She told him that when she was seven, a teenage baby-sitter had assaulted her and now she was terribly afraid of sex, even more afraid that she might be frigid, it was that more than anything else that had forced her and her boyfriend to the breakup. He kept … pressing her.

They told each other things that a man and a woman don't tell each other until they've known each other for years … things a man and woman often never tell, not even in the dark marriage bed after decades of being together.

But did they
speak
?

That Andy never knew.

Time had stopped, but somehow it passed anyway.

He came out of the doze a little at a time. The Rachmaninoff was gone … if it had ever been there at all. Vicky was sleeping peacefully on the cot beside him, her hands folded between her breasts, the simple hands of a child who has fallen asleep while offering her bedtime prayers. Andy looked at her and was simply aware that at some point he had fallen in love with her. It was a deep and complete feeling, above (and below) question.

After a while he looked around. Several of the cots were empty. There were maybe five test subjects left in the room. Some were sleeping. One was sitting up on his cot and a grad assistant—a perfectly normal grad assistant of perhaps twenty-five—was questioning him and writing notes on a clipboard. The test subject apparently said something funny, because both of them laughed—in the low, considerate way you do when others around you are sleeping.

Andy sat up and took inventory of himself. He felt fine. He tried a smile and found that it fit perfectly. His muscles lay peacefully against one another. He felt eager and fresh, every perception sharply honed and somehow innocent. He could remember feeling this way as a kid, waking up on Saturday morning, knowing his bike was heeled over on its kickstand in the garage, and feeling that the whole weekend stretched ahead of him like a carnival of dreams where every ride was free.

One of the grad assistants came over and said, “How you feeling, Andy?”

Andy looked at him. This was the same guy that had injected him—when? A year ago? He rubbed a palm over his cheek and heard the rasp of beard stubble. “I feel like Rip van Winkle,” he said.

The GA smiled. “It's only been forty-eight hours, not twenty years. How do you feel, really?”

“Fine.”

“Normal?”

“Whatever that word means, yes. Normal. Where's Ralph?”

“Ralph?” The GA raised his eyebrows.

“Yes, Ralph Baxter. About thirty-five. Big guy. Sandy hair.”

The grad assistant smiled. “You dreamed him up,” he said.

Andy looked at the GA uncertainly. “I did what?”

“Dreamed him up. Hallucinated him. The only Ralph I know who's involved in all the Lot Six tests in any way is a Dartan Pharmaceutical rep named Ralph Steinham. And he's fifty-five or so.”