The Bumblebee Flies Anyway (8 page)

He added his weight: 134.

And his height: 5’6”.

He decided this was enough. It was the kind of information that would spring to his lips if anybody asked him who he was. It was also the kind of basic information he would need to jog his memory into remembering other things if the experiment went wrong.

Satisfied, he folded the piece of paper carefully in half, tore it along the folded edge. Folded it again and tore it once more. Then again, until there remained a small square upon which he’d written the information. He then folded this piece of paper a final time, reducing it to the size of a postage stamp, making it easier to hide.

Next problem: where to hide it?

He looked around the room slowly, considering possible hiding places. The closet? Under the mattress? Wait—the bureau. In the pocket of one of his shirts.…

The absurdity of the situation struck him. If he hid the paper somewhere in this room, how could he remember where if they took away his memory?

Damn it.

He was disgusted with himself. He was slipping, losing his grip.

Forget it, toss the ridiculous little piece of paper away. But he couldn’t.

He didn’t entirely trust the Handyman’s experiments, aware that there was always an element of risk. He had to do something in the face of this latest risk. Leave evidence
of his identity behind, someplace,
someplace
where he could find it if things went wrong. In case they wiped his memory away and couldn’t bring it back.

It would be terrible to wake up and not know your name, not know who you were.

Rhythm, tempo. Let the blood flow.

Come on. Where could he hide the paper? Someplace out of sight but easy to find.

Now a new possibility appalled him. Suppose they didn’t take him back here but kept him upstairs, in isolation? What good would a hidden note in his room be?

And then the solution came. Simple, beautiful.

He’d carry this small square of paper with him. On his person. His body.

Wait a minute, let’s be logical now. Start from the beginning. He’d be wearing certain articles of clothing during the treatment if standard procedure was followed. A green “Johnny” that buttoned in the back and came to your knees. Shorts, no undershirt. No place to hide anything. He remembered spy stories in which secret agents swallowed pieces of paper containing important information. Which was impossible in this case, of course, pointless.

He looked down at his body, a body he had never taken any pride in before he came to the Complex, too aware of his shortcomings, the slightly bowed legs, his arms too long for his height. But here, compared to the others wasting away, whose bodies were deteriorating day by day, he had felt good about himself for the first time, realizing that even beauty, like Mazzo’s, wasn’t any use if you couldn’t live.

Barney drew up his shirtsleeve, saw the array of puncture wounds from the needles. A Band-Aid covered the
most recent puncture. And Barney suddenly saw the perfect hiding place for the small piece of paper: under a Band-Aid. He would fold the paper until it was small enough to fit beneath the small bandage, the feel of the paper certain to call attention to itself when he awoke. There was a chance that the doctor might discover it first, but he had to take that chance. And he’d reduce the risk of discovery by applying the Band-Aid to the inside of his thigh. Or some other place. Between his toes, maybe?

He had a feeling that this act of subterfuge would prove futile, that it was impossible to fool the Handyman. But it was worth trying. Sitting here in this forlorn room, he felt almost as if he didn’t exist. But at least he could cling to his identity, his name, and do something about it.

“I am Barney Snow,” he said aloud, enunciating carefully.

His voice echoed in the air.

There was no answering voice to say: Yes, you are Barney Snow.

H
ERE
she comes,” Mazzo said.

Barney heard heels clicking in the corridor. Ordinarily, the passage of feet in the halls of the Complex was quiet, muted, footsteps like whispers as patients and staff ghosted by in rubber-soled shoes or slippers. But the heels he heard now were like small staccato shouts, alien in this place, threatening somehow.

Barney stood away from Mazzo’s bed, his back to the window. The open venetian blinds laddered the room with sunlight, filling it with a false kind of cheer. Barney squinted, studied the apprehension on Mazzo’s face. He should be happy to see Mazzo looking worried, but Barney himself didn’t exactly feel at ease. He didn’t want to be caught in the crossfire between Mazzo and his sister.

The sound of heels grew closer, a rhythm established, as if she were the drum majorette in an invisible parade. Then the footsteps faltered, became uncertain, and stopped altogether just outside the door. Was she gathering her wits to prepare herself for the meeting with her dying brother? The silence continued, and Barney heard, in the silence, the sound of Mazzo’s quick sharp breaths.

Barney blinked, and as if by magic, Mazzo’s sister stood
in the doorway. Her beauty struck him like a physical blow. Or like a small explosion deep inside him, shifting his bones and muscles and tissues the way earth is moved deep below by a shock wave. His first impression was of blue everything: dark-blue blazer, powder-blue sweater, eyes startling blue, not the cold and distant blue of the sky but a warm melting blue. Those eyes swept the room, resting for a moment on Mazzo, the bedside paraphernalia of basins and tubes, the machine to which Mazzo was attached, and finally Barney. He lost himself in those eyes, felt lifted and exalted. Maybe she was a witch, after all. Her short blond hair, almost boyishly short, caught the sunlight and spun it into gold.

She regarded Barney with a sad kind of amusement, shaking her head slightly. “I know who you are,” she said, her voice surprisingly low and husky.

Barney was startled. His cheeks grew warm, his heart bounced crazily in his chest. He wanted to say: “Who am I?” As if she knew secrets he didn’t know. But he didn’t say anything, felt he’d stammer like Allie Roon if he tried to talk.

Mazzo rescued him. “And I know who you are,” Mazzo said to her. “You’re the same old Cassie. But what did you do to your hair?”

She turned away from Barney and directed her attention to Mazzo. Barney, too, looked at Mazzo, surprised at the tenderness in his voice when he spoke to his sister. A different Mazzo suddenly.

She ignored the question about her hair, shrugging slightly as if an answer wasn’t worth giving. Leaning forward a bit, she studied his wan figure in the bed as if trying to determine whether this was really her brother or an imposter.

“You don’t look so bad,” she said, the sultry voice emerging again, like the voice of a blues singer Barney had heard one time on the radio. “You’ve lost some weight. Your eyes look like you’re on something. But you look pretty good, considering.”

“I’m dying, for Christ’s sake,” Mazzo said. “So it doesn’t matter how I look. How I look has nothing to do with it.” But this wasn’t the old Mazzo talking. This new Mazzo used the same old bitter words, but when he spoke them to his sister, they were softened somehow, gentled.

“I was just trying to cheer you up,” she replied. “Would it make you feel better if I said you look terrible, that it’s hard to believe you used to score touchdowns and hit home runs for good old Stanley Prep?”

Her own voice had a kind of bantering now, matching Mazzo’s new voice—the voice Barney had never heard before—and it seemed to him that Mazzo’s and Cassie’s voices were more important to them than the words they used, the voices like a code between them.

Barney studied them as they talked. They were twins, of course, and bore a certain resemblance to each other. Both blond, fair skinned, Cassie beautiful and Mazzo handsome although the disease had ravaged his flesh and features. Mazzo lay in ruins, like someone beaten and robbed and left abandoned, while Cassie’s beauty was vibrant and compelling. Barney felt younger suddenly than his sixteen years. Mazzo and Cassie were probably twenty or so, but Barney felt like a kid beside them. God, he wished that he was older.

“Time for introductions,” Mazzo said, calling to Barney, summoning him from his thoughts. “Barney, this is my sister, Cassie.”

“Hello, Barney,” she said, glancing at him. Then back to
Mazzo: “Still up to your old tricks, aren’t you, Alberto?”

“What old tricks?”

She laughed, a throaty kind of laugh, as husky as her voice.

Looking at Barney again—God, she was beautiful—she said: “You see, Barney, Alberto’s always needed a buffer. Even as a kid in school. He’d get into trouble and bring some kid home with him.” To Mazzo again: “Remember the time you totaled Papa’s Porsche the day after he bought it? Lucky you weren’t killed. And when you came home that day, you brought home some kid you’d met in the emergency room at the hospital. Your buffer. Like your friend here.”

Mazzo closed his eyes. “God, how I loved to drive,” he said wistfully. “Nothing better, Cassie, than sitting behind the wheel, top down, the motor throbbing, the wind whistling by. The road before me and the car eating it up. The Porsche and the TR6 …”

“You wrecked the TR6, too,” she said, mock-scolding him.

They had forgotten Barney now, caught up in each other, and Barney felt out of place, like a spy eavesdropping, listening to secrets.

“I shouldn’t be dying in bed, Cassie,” Mazzo said. “I should have died before all this happened to me, bombing down the Mass. Pike, ninety miles an hour. And then boom. In a blaze of glory. Not like this.”

And now he was the Mazzo that Barney knew. Bitter and resentful. But why not? “This rotten place with its stink and crap. And I’m part of the stink and the crap.”

“Take it easy, Alberto,” she said. “Take it easy.” Moving to his bedside, removing her jacket at the same time. Her movements were thrillingly sexual to Barney, the way she
raised her arms, the fullness of her breasts, the lips wet and slightly parted. He had not been aroused, had not felt a longing for a girl, for such a long time that he couldn’t remember when. Sex was absent from the Complex; no place here for love or lust or desire. Cassie Mazzofono brought it all back, however. The old stirring again, but the stirring mixed with an aching, because a girl had never loved him. He had a dim memory of kissing a girl at a party, but he’d never really held a girl in his arms, never caressed a breast or darted his tongue between parted lips to meet another tongue. In his bed at night, yes. Vivid images conjured up. Playboy centerfolds recalled. But never in reality. Looking at Cassie now, he felt the old aching, along with a new sadness. And wasn’t sure why. But did know, really, although he hated to acknowledge it. The
why
: knowing he could never attract a girl like Cassie Mazzofono. Not a girl like that. He meant nothing to her: why should he? He was only a buffer, a stooge. She’d barely glanced at him. Probably wouldn’t recognize him if she met him in the hallway tomorrow.

“I suppose Mother sent you here,” Mazzo was saying. “What is it, a plot of some kind?”

“We’re not in a conspiracy, if that’s what you mean. She told me to tell you that she loves you. But you already know that.”

“Do I?”

“Yes. You should. She doesn’t want to interfere in your life. What you’ve got left of your life. She finds it hard to let you go. She finds it hard to accept what’s happening to you. But if you keep giving her the cold shoulder, she’ll find it impossible, Alberto.”

Alberto. To Barney he’d always been Mazzo, always
would be. As if nobody in the world but Cassie had the right to call him Alberto.

“Don’t try to con me, Cassie. Don’t try to soften me up,” Mazzo said. “It won’t work.”

Red blotches had appeared on his face, angry blotches, as if the anger in his words was being expressed by his body, the way pictures in a book illustrate the text.

“Where was she when we needed her?” Mazzo said. “Caught up in her own little world of the country club. What she did to Papa, who wouldn’t hurt a soul on earth. She killed him, Cassie.”

“He died of a heart attack,” Cassie said.

“Screw the idea of a heart attack. He died because he was stabbed in the heart. By what she did. Divorcing him like that.”

Cassie blew air out of the corner of her mouth, patient, as if she were saying words she’d said a thousand times.

“We can’t be the judges, Alberto,” she said. “We don’t know what it was like for them. Somehow the marriage fell apart. And then Papa died. Nobody can prove there was a connection. They were like night and day. Maybe they shouldn’t have married in the first place. But they did. And we were born. She’s our mother. We’re her children. Twins, for God’s sake. And we almost killed her when we were born. I found out later that she almost died.”

“There’s no
almost
in my case, kid,” Mazzo said. “Look, I was a good son to her for a long time. But the rules are changed now. I don’t want her around for my final moments. I don’t want anybody around.”

“Does that include me?” Cassie asked.

“Yes,” Mazzo said, the word no louder than the sound a leaf makes touching earth after tumbling from a tree.

I’ve got to get out of here, Barney thought. I don’t want to be listening to this.

As if she had read his mind—a touch of the witch, maybe—Cassie Mazzofono turned toward him and said: “Why don’t you go?” Not a question, not a suggestion, but an order. Delivered gently but an order just the same.

Barney looked at Mazzo, but Mazzo was up to his old trick, studying the sheet as if he could find answers there, as if the world didn’t exist outside the bed he occupied. In the absence of any protest from Mazzo, he felt free to go, having kept his end of the bargain.

Yet as he moved toward the door, he felt a sense of loss. And something else. He didn’t want to leave without saying something to Cassie Mazzofono, anything, establishing himself as a person in her eyes. As Barney Snow. Not just a stooge, a buffer.

He waited for something to happen as he arrived at the door. An intervention. Mazzo calling back or Cassie curious about him:
What did you say your last name was?
But he knew that nothing would happen. He was a cipher in their lives, zero, nothing. He took a good long look at her. But her eyes were on Mazzo. He left the room without saying good-bye. They probably wouldn’t have heard him anyway.