Halloween Candy (5 page)

“Oh I think I did already.”

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“Not that, you cad,” she whisper-giggled. “Something to show you care.”

He reached into his pockets, “Christ, I’ve got nothing. No mementos at all. Wait,” he brought up a half-roll of Lifesavers. “There you go. To save your life with.” He pressed it into her hand, and she giggled and told him that until they met again she would treasure each and every tropical fruit flavor.

5

“Where did you get those?” Layton asked. It was a few weeks later, and Angela had not been answering his calls and no one answered her door, and now he was at work feeling the worst heart-ache of his life

– and Nix the Needle had a half-roll of tropical fruit Lifesavers in his hand.

“You going to take those off me?” Nix asked, tugging at the restraints that held his hands to the bed. “Don’t I even have a right to candy?”

53

“Give it to me,” Layton said, plucking the roll from the man’s hands. “Where did you get –“

Nix looked up into his eyes, deeply , soulfully, and whispered in a soft voice, “She’s dying, and I’m just getting started on life. She’s a nightmare at times. I’ve wished her dead with each surgery. For her own sake. I’ve wished her gone. Can’t imagine having a daughter like me. Change the subject, quick. I don’t want to think about it.”

6

“I’m afraid for you,” Dr. Glover said. It was mid-afternoon and Layton was going off-shift soon. “I’m afraid in a way that I was afraid for Molly Sternberg.”

“Please. Molly had a history of –“

“All of us have histories,” Glover said. “None of us is immune to this. You work with mentally unstable people – sociopaths as well – and you become enmeshed. You begin to experience a similar dissociation from reality that they also experience. It is not that unusual. It is somewhat expected.” Glover scratched at the side of his head. “Don’t 54

worry, Conner, I’m not going to put you away. You haven’t identified yourself as insane. But it would not surprise me that you might just need a little distance. When was your last vacation?”

“Three months ago.”

“Perhaps this is just one of those things,” Glover added.

“Those things? You’re a psychiatrist,” Layton nodded his head slightly hoping that the doctor would laugh it off.

“Because I’m trained in a way of handling medical issues doesn’t mean I have all the answers. Sometimes the unexplainable occurs. Sometimes it’s a delusion. Sometimes it happens. I’ve been here long enough to realize that there’s more to the world than has been catalogued in the medical texts. Now, what did Nicholas say?”

“He said exactly what this woman I know said the previous weekend.”

“Precisely?”

“As precisely as I could recall it.”

“You could recall it?”

“Christ,” Layton said. He stood up. “I’d like a few days off.”

55

“Speak to your supervisor; as far as I’m concerned, take any amount of time you want off. Your job is secure.” Glover glanced over to his bookshelf. “You know, Conner, you’ve been here a few years. You know your ward inside and out. You’ve seen a lot. You’ve handled a lot. On the one hand, this could be your mind playing tricks on you.” Glover reached beneath his glasses and rubbed two fingers along the bridge of his nose. He shut his eyes for a moment. “On the other hand, sometimes there are things that come through the patients. I’m not even sure what I mean by that.” He took his glasses off.

“Without my glasses, you are blurred.” He put them back on. “Now I see you clearly. Does that mean that when I see you blurred that you are in fact blurred and that my vision is perfect but your image is in flux?”

“Sir?”

“All I’m saying is, we can’t know everything. Assuming that Nicholas Holland said what you heard, perhaps he did know what this woman said to you. Perhaps he made it up and by some strange coincidence, for the first time in his own history, he said the exact words to disturb you. But I’ve learned in twenty eight years as a psychiatrist 56

handling the more extreme cases of human insanity, that –“ and here Glover leaned forward, and Layton knew he would whisper, and he stepped forward to the edge of the desk, “we know nothing of the human mind. We are still in the Dark Ages of psychiatry. We are fumbling. Do you know what Nicholas said to me when he first entered this place?

He told me that when the night came, the mechanisms changed, and that while I was eating supper the night before with my wife, he had already seen to it that the pie in the kitchen had fallen to the floor.”

Layton, caught up for a moment, asked, “Did it?”

Glover drew back, laughing. “No, of course not. And we hadn’t had any dessert. It was a complete fabrication. But how was I to know?”

The laughter stopped. “I didn’t even mention it to my wife, I thought it was just a rambling delusion on his part. But a year or so later, I was at a dinner party at a colleague’s home, and some of the doctors were telling tales out of school. The usual – patients who sat up in the middle of operations, the near-malpractice suits that managed to get cleaned up in some hilarious way, the patients who hallucinated bizarre images –

and so I had my glass of wine and told the story about Nicholas claiming 57

to break into the house. I had them rolling mainly because I recalled all the details he added – how he sipped milk from the fridge, how he peed in the sink. And then I mentioned the pie claim, I said, ‘and he then told me that he dropped a pie on the kitchen floor just so I wouldn’t eat it,’

And Layton? I saw it in my wife’s face, out of the corner of my eye, even then I saw that she had gone white as if something dreadful had come over her. She said nothing at dinner, but on the way home she told me that she had bought a pie at the A&P and had warmed it in the oven for a bit before letting it cool on the cutting board by the sink. ‘And,’ I asked, ‘did it fall on the floor?’ She told me it had not, but that someone had broken the crust, a man, she thought, because the handprint was big. Handprint? Yes, she said. It scared her because it was nearly perfect, almost as if someone had baked his hand into the crust. She threw it out, no wanting to even think about it. So, you see, perhaps Nicholas knew something. Perhaps he didn’t. How could he? I am a man of some education and knowledge of science, Layton, but I have no basic explanation for this – or for you. Except to say: take a few days off and let this go.”

58

7

And then, on his day off, he saw her again.

It was just after 9, and the rain began, and he was going to have a late dinner at the Hong Kong Moon restaurant when he saw her walking out of the Quickie Mart with a small bag of groceries. When he caught up to her at her car, she didn’t look happy to see him at all. He wanted to ask about the Lifesavers, but it seemed trivial and stupid now.

“Oh, hi Layton,” she said. “I’m sorry I haven’t been around. My mother died. There was a lot to take care of.”

“God, I’m sorry.”

She got in the VW, rolling the window up against the rain.

He stood there, the blur of the rain on the car window obscuring her features, feeling the shiver of the end of love – not real love, but new love, the moment when it is over.

And then, she began laughing.

For just a second – was it the rain? His tears? –he thought that it all shimmered.

59

Not just her, but the rain and the glass and the metal of the car.

8

It took Layton twenty minutes to get up the hill, flash his badge at the guards, nod to the night nurse who was surprised to see him, and make his way down the ward. He found Nix sitting up on his mattress, his hair soaked. Nix glanced up, then back down to his own upturned palms. “My nerves are all tingly,” Nix said.

“Tell me everything,” Layton said.

Nix didn’t look up from his hands. Then he licked his lips like a hungry child. “You don’t know this for sure, Conner, what you’re thinking. Whatever it is you’re thinking.”

“Do you know who Angela is?”

Nix grinned. “I have known many angels.”

“Angela. She’s the one who gave you the Lifesavers.”

“I have saved many many lives,” Nix said.

Layton rushed over and grabbed him by the shoulders, lifting him to his feet. They stared eye to eye; sweat ran down Nix’s face. “What is 60

it you do? What is it about the baby crying and the woman and the things that you babble about?”

Nix’s grin faded. “It’s the machinery. It’s how it works. It’s how we work. It’s how the world changes in the dark, Conner. It’s how when light particles are lessened, it’s not just about seeing, it’s about how in absolute darkness it can change. We can change.”

Layton pushed him back down on the bed. “Half an hour ago you were a woman in a car.”

“Was I?” Nix asked, almost slyly. “Was I? Well, then, Nurse Conner, you have already begun your journey. Do you remember being inside her, this Angela? How you pushed in, how she opened, how she made those little noises that made you push to greater and greater heights, how she turned twenty one week and how she told you all about her dying mother and how you fell in love and how she broke your heart one night in the rain? Do you remember playing with her body, or asking her to do something that you find in your heart of hearts to be repulsive and lowly but which brings you great pleasure? Do you remember when she told you all her secrets, even the one about her 61

uncle, or the time you both laughed at once over something you seemed to think of at the same time, as if you had so much in common, Nurse Conner, that this might just be the girl for you, this might just be Miss Right and you just might be the luckiest man in the world? And then you told her that awful secret, the dark secret, the one you thought you could trust her with, the one about your father’s madness, about how it pushed you to the edge and how one night you--”

Later, when two psych techs pulled him off Nix, Layton could not remember raising his fists, let alone bringing them down near forty times over Nix’s head, nor could he remember through the trial that even after he’d begun to break the skin of Nix’s face, long after the patient was dead, particles of bone from the patient’s jaw and nose had splintered and some had gone, needle-like, into the palm of Layton’s hand.

9

Nearly a year later, Layton tried to sit up in bed, but the restraints held him fast. He wanted to shout for the night nurse, but whom could 62

he trust? He knew them all, he knew they thought he was one of the many criminally insane, but he knew the staff well, and he didn’t understand why they should restrain him when he had only tried to kill himself once, and had botched the job anyway.

It was the whisper of night coming up under the barred window, the last light of day was nearly vanished, and he still felt drowsy from the last med administered at two. The nights were the worst, because of the people who moved through it, who came and went and he watched in horror as they did what had to be done. Even Nix, even he came through, his face sometimes a bloody tangle, a forest of twisted flesh and bone, sometimes it was just his face, beads of sweat on his forehead, that trollish look, that milky complexion. The machinery hummed and if he could just believe strongly enough, he could slip through the restraints and join them, he could go and be anywhere and anyone, but it never seemed to happen. Some of the other patients came and went; the walls rippled like a flooding river; the air itself became vivid with the movement of nearly invisible molecules as they went like clouds of mosquitoes, forming and splitting apart again.

63

Layton, in restraints, tried to pray to what he could not see for freedom. His heartbeat raced as he watched a swollen bubble of glass move along the window.

“It’s belief,” he whispered. “Belief makes it move. It’s absolute belief,” but it wasn’t coming for him, the molecules weren’t changing, the mechanism of darkness was not clicking into place. “Please let me go. Please,” he begged, and then, as happened nightly, his voice became louder, sobs and screams. One of the nurses came by with another med, and as she wiped the sweat from his forehead, he told her how they left nightly, how when the sun went down the machinery of night made it happen and their molecules swirled and how even the two men he had killed in his life, his father and Nix, sometimes came to him and made him do terrible things in the dark. “And the woman who spoke to the courts? Her name was Angela, but she’s really one of the men I killed, only you can’t ever really kill anyone, you can’t, it’s just a rearrangement of molecules and at night they can change again or if they want they can stay as they were that night for a whole day and they can even come to your trial and talk about you and things you told them and 64

how you seemed to be going slowly mad only you never ever went mad, if anything it’s complete sanity, it’s the kind of sanity that’s like the sun at noon all bright and sharp and please don’t turn off the light, that’s all I ask, when you leave and I get sleepy from the pills, please leave the lights on,” his voice softened, and the nurse nodded. When he awoke later –-when the meds were beginning to wear off –-the room was dark and he felt the brush of a thousand particles that whispered with the voice of his father.

65

“265 and Heaven”

by Douglas Clegg

1

What do we all live for? the bird asks.

This.

A glimpse of heaven.

2

The town at night seemed all crumbling brick and leaky gutters, alleyways washed clean by the summer rain, the stink of underground swamp, and grease from burger joints in the air. He was always on shift at night, and so it was the town he grew to know: the rain, the steam, the smells, the red brown of bricks piled up to make buildings, the hazy white of streetlamps. The same haunted faces downtown at night--the 66

lonely crowd, the happy crowd, the people who went from diner to movie to home without walking more than a few feet, the kids in their souped-up cars, the old men walking with canes, the brief flare of life in the all-night drug stores.