The Placebo Effect (9 page)

He looked to the basement exit but it had already cracked under the assault of the fire. Above him flames licked their way along the joists. He scrambled into the laundry room and yanked against the drier with all his strength. It slowly ground forward, revealing the hole to the Junction's steam tunnels that he'd found when he first bought the house.

He literally fell into the tunnel and then pulled himself along until he got to the main shaft. He sat back, sweat and the smell of burnt hair—his burnt hair—momentarily overwhelming him.

He pulled his shoulder bag to him and tried to catch his breath. As he did he heard approaching sirens, then the heart-wrenching grinding and twisting and tearing of his house as it was eaten by the great fire monster.

“I can barely hear you, Mr. MacMillan.”

“It's the fire trucks and the police.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. So talk to me,” Henry-Clay demanded.

“He's toast,” Mac replied. There was not a hint of a smile in his voice.

“Are you sure? How can you be sure, Mr. MacMillan?”

“I have eyeballs on the back of his house and no one's come out that way and I'm watching the front and not a soul made it out that way either.”

“And the thing's on fire?”

“It's a fireball. Completely consumed. Crossbeams should be coming down any moment now.”

“And he's in there. You sure he was in there?”

“Saw him sleeping myself before I set the devices. He's toast—as I said.”

Henry-Clay felt the sweat from his armpits dripping down his torso, but his breathing was stabilizing. He realized he'd dodged a bullet—a big fucking bullet. “I want you home now, Mr. MacMillan.”

“To finish Ratio-Man?”

“Yes, it's definitely time to tie up that loose end. Come home, now.”

“How do you know he'll come back to Cincinnati?”

“'Cause I know our Ratio-Man, Mr. MacMillan—I know him.”

Twenty-five minutes later Decker pushed open the manhole cover and hauled himself out of the steam tunnel system near the corner of Keele and Dundas. Shortly after that he was on the sidewalk across the road from his house.

Flames leapt from the third-story dormer window. Decker pushed past the crowd that had already gathered to watch the show. Everything was a damned entertainment! Then a support beam cracked, sending the second floor tilting then crashing to the ground, pulling the west wall inward at a sickening angle.

Firemen rushed to the south side of the house, trying to prevent the fire from spreading down the street. The house to the north of his home had been abandoned for years and was already ablaze.

Decker stood there—just stood there—wondering,
What the fuck do I do?
Finally he turned to a police officer and said, “That's my house!”

The officer led him down the street to a patrol car. A senior officer was entering something into the police computer. He turned off the monitor and eyed Decker the way a diner looks at an unopened clam on his plate then said, “Get in.”

After the preliminaries—name, etc.—the police officer closed his flip pad and asked, “So where were you when your house caught fire?”

“Where was I?”

“Yeah, where were you?”

“Asleep, where do you think I was?”

“And before that?” He added an odd hand movement to accent something or other. Decker took a deep breath—another person who learned how he should behave by watching bad acting on TV. Decker let out his breath slowly then said, “You mean earlier in the day?”

“Yeah. Where were you then?”

“Why does that matter?”

“Where… were… you?”

“I was in the States.” For a moment Decker thought of the $36,290 he had in his shoulder bag.

“Just got back?”

“Yeah, around one.”

“Ah, I see, around one,” the officer repeated as if that were important somehow. “Where were you?”

“In the States. I told you. Now what's going on with my house?”

The officer coughed or laughed—Decker couldn't tell which. “Going on? Not much. It's on fire—you may have noticed. How did you manage to get out?”

“Through the steam tunnel in the basement.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really.” Decker took a deep breath and asked, “So, what am I supposed to do now?”

The officer looked at Decker as if he wanted to poke him with a stick. “What do you mean by that?”

“Well, shit, I've never had my house burn down—what do I do?”

“You got a friend? Call. Get a place to sleep. Then tomorrow you contact your insurance company,” he said dismissively and switched on the computer monitor on his dashboard. Then he added, in case Decker didn't get the message, “Do you mind?”

Fuck, he even delivered that line like a cheap actor. Art was supposed to imitate life, not vice versa.

Decker got out of the car and looked up just as the roof of his house erupted in flame. He turned and walked down the street, toward the only real friend he had in the world—Crazy Eddie.

CRAZY EDDIE OPENED THE DOOR BEFORE DECKER RANG THE
bell. Decker was suddenly exhausted. He sagged against the doorframe.

“What the…”

“My house burned down.”

Eddie grabbed Decker by the arm and guided him into his house, past a spare bedroom door that was usually open but was now shut, to the kitchen at the back of the house.

“Sit. I'll make you some tea.” Eddie did his strange hop/hobble to the stove.

Crazy Eddie had begun his voyage to profound craziness on a sunny Sunday afternoon on the playing field of Ledbury Park Junior High School twenty-five years ago. For reasons that few, if any, of the participants could articulate, Decker and a batch of his high school buddies would meet most Sundays in the fall before the Bills game. And before Joe Ferguson and Fred Smerlas took the field to demolish the Freeman McNeil–led New York Jets, Decker and his friends would play middle-class, tackle football—without pads or helmets or protection of any sort.

On that particular Sunday Eddie led a successful blitz that sacked Marty “the Chunker” Steinberg—but despite the crunching of the Chunker, no one had been hurt. Three downs later, he felt something pop and then retract up into his left calf like an overextended elastic band that suddenly snaps. Nothing happened in the play that tore Eddie's Achilles tendon; just Eddie falling to the
ground, screaming in pain, after which he was never able to run again except in his pot-induced dreams, wherein he always ran, then cried.

Decker had known Eddie for years, and although there was a passing respect—as only bright high school boys can have for each other—there was no real connection between the two until both young men found themselves streamed to be doctors. Fourteen hundred students at Bathurst Heights Secondary School, and only thirteen of them—all male—were deemed likely to enter premed programs and hence forced to take four years of physics, four years of chemistry, four years of biology, four years of Latin for some reason, two of trig, two of calculus and a year of German.

Of the thirteen, only Decker and Eddie had absolutely no desire to ever see the interior of a hospital, but both found themselves ten days from graduation and about to fail a course because they had not finished the requirement to complete an original piece of research in physics.

So the fates—in the guise of the board of education—shoved the two young men together. And, necessity, fueled by some very good blond hash, allowed them to complete, in a mere three hours, the world's only definitive research into the effects of both speed and acceleration—on taste.

Decker drove his mother's convertible Mustang while Eddie licked a chocolate ice cream cone. At ten miles an hour Decker turned to Eddie and demanded, “Flavour?” Eddie responded, “Still chocolate,” and noted on a graph that chocolate—at ten miles an hour—maintained its intrinsic chocolateness. The same occurred at fifteen miles per hour, twenty miles per hour, twenty-five miles an hour and thirty miles an hour. But at thirty-five miles an hour Eddie noted the slightest movement in the taste towards vanilla—away from strawberry. However, this deviation was not evident at any of the upper speeds. Their speed versus taste chart looked this way:

They named the anomaly at thirty-five miles per hour the Aviday/Eddylay variation and postulated that this deviation from chocolateness was part of the same series of godly incongruities that gave the world the missing link and the Bermuda Triangle—and possibly Communism.

The physics teacher, Mr. Gallanders, grudgingly accepted their project, probably because he was anxious to get Eddie's anarchic spirit out of his classroom.

So they both graduated.

In late August, Eddie's grandfather died and left him an annuity that amounted to about fifty dollars a month. Two weeks later, Decker went to university on a scholarship. Eddie went to Afghanistan.

For two years Decker heard nothing from Eddie—then a postcard arrived. It had only ten words on it.
YOU'VE NEVER BEEN STONED TILL YOU'VE BEEN STONED IN KABUL
. No signature. No need for one.

While Decker was breaking into the theatre and trying to find as many soul mates as possible, Eddie was in active pursuit of his god—or gods.

Years later, the pursuit led him to San Francisco and a daughter who was taken from him in a vicious custody dispute in which his common-law wife claimed he had sexually molested the
child—an untrue accusation that Eddie did not have the funds to fight.

All of which tilted both men toward a cold January afternoon on Yonge Street just north of Sam the Record Man, where Decker heard from the sidewalk, “Hey, cheapskate, slow down before the chocolate tastes like vanilla.”

It was the winter of 2003 and Decker had just returned from twelve years in New York City, two failed Broadway shows, a son and a desperately ill wife—and an interesting sideline in a business he called “truth telling.”

“You have a place to stay, Eddie?”

Decker repeated his question.

Eddie brushed some snow off the brace on his left leg, pointed at the sidewalk, and said, “Nothing wrong with this place.”

“A bit chilly.”

“You get used to it.”

“We have an extra room; you're welcome to it.”

“Maybe you should check with your significant other before you make that kind of offer.”

“She won't object.” Before Eddie could question that statement, Decker added, “She hasn't objected to anything or moved from her bed for over a year.”

Eddie's left eyebrow lifted slightly.

“ALS,” Decker said, “Lou Gehrig's disease. I've been told we're almost at the end.”

“Long road?”

Decker nodded.

“Just another path,” Eddie said.

Decker checked for a note of sarcasm. There was none. Eddie reached into his cavernous coat pocket and tossed a baby football at Decker. Decker caught it. “Consider it my rent,” Eddie said.

Eddie moved in that night and proved himself to be as conscientious and kind a caregiver as there was on this earthly plane.

Decker's wife died in Eddie's arms, more in love with Crazy
Eddie than she had ever been with Decker—and all three of them knew it.

Three months after the funeral, Crazy Eddie waited up for Decker after one of his increasingly popular acting classes and said, “Lend me five thousand dollars.”

Decker was genuinely shocked by the request. “Why?”

“I want to go back to school. I never really went to school.”

“And you want to go now?”

“Yeah, I'm thirty-seven, mechanically inclined and digitally ignorant.”

“You want to study your digits?”

“Ha, ha, ha—Luddite! Lend me the money and I'll devise a system that will keep you safe. You think you're so clever with this “pay me only in cash and no drives to the airport.” Any fool who hired you could find you, Decker. I'm not sure what it is that you do when you disappear for a day or two every other month, but I know you come back with a stack of cash, and people who can afford to pay that kind of money—well, they can certainly afford to track you down if they want to, and they could be dangerous.”

“Wealthy people are dangerous?”

“Think about it, Decker.”

Decker did—and understood that Eddie was right. More important, he understood how much he needed this crazy man in his life. “I'll transfer five thousand dollars to your bank account.”

“No you won't. I don't have a bank account. I don't trust white people with my money.”

Decker stared at him—Eddie was definitely a Caucasian.

Again Decker nodded, then headed toward the basement. Eddie followed and watched as Decker opened the small floor safe and counted out five thousand dollars.

Eddie took the proffered cash and said, “And we're moving. Too many people already know how to find you here.”