Thrust (8 page)

Their brutality has the quality of ballet.
 
Choreographed, beautiful within a certain framework of style and purpose.
 
These dudes hate your ass, and you know why.

Appears a little like a whirlpool but a whole lot meaner—plenty of shining chrome, insulated cables, and dirty tile around it, a leftover from the 60s when they were trying all kinds of shit to calm the insane down and bring them back into the fold.
 

You can sense the futility of treatment in this room, your own and everyone else's.
 
Insulin shock, electroshock, pharmaceutical therapies.
 
Ginsberg had written about this kind of horror in "Howl."

Sure, you know something about hydrotherapy and water cures.
 
The bath should be about 90 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit, shoulder deep, soothing to the shredded nerves.
 
It's said to be helpful for the bladder and urinary problems, colds, fevers, homicidal tendencies.

The hot bath should last at least 20 minutes.

You're hoping these three guys will hop in, splash around for a while, get themselves well.

Okay, so here it comes.
 

Plant yourself.
 
Get ready.

The two others grab you by the arms and tip you backwards with some difficulty as Barrack lunges and tightens his hold around your knees.
 
You struggle for an instant and then wonder why you're fighting.
 
As a well-trained team they lift you easily and carry you to the tub.
 
The water has a layer of scum and dust on top.
 
You imagine it to be stone, unbreakable, until they ease you into it.
 
You feel arms below, pulling at you, but you're crazy and can't be trusted.

They've got it down to a science.
 
They leave you there only for a few moments, long enough so that you actually begin to enjoy the frigid feel of the icy water against your skin, cooling the heat at the back of your skull.
 
You begin to waft away, and they drag you back out.
 

There's enough time to catch one deep breath, and then you're back in.

Once you were terrified of drowning, when your father took you to the beach, put you on his shoulders, and calmly walked out until his head was under the waves.
 
You thought he was committing suicide and taking you with him.
 
The idea of the two of you dying together has been with you ever since.

Your breath starts to give out and you begin to inadvertently struggle, kind of hoping this will be the end to all your history, the loose ends tying up here in the dirty water.
 

You are nothing if not hopeful.

The tension in your arms is fiery and powerful and you jerk as they shift their weight to get a better grip on you.
 
Barrack hauls your knees higher so you lose the leverage.
 

But still, a deep part of yourself knows you can make a hell of a ruckus and get free if you want to.
 
You're stronger than any one of them.
 
Maybe even two, if you had something you wanted to live for.

You let yourself go slack and wait another couple of seconds until they lug you out again.

Once more, Mr.
Arlo
Barrack says, "How you
feelin
', Killer?"

You form an answer as you gasp, but before you can give it voice they immerse you again.

There's been no time to fill your lungs.
 
You won't last another minute.

Stacy shows up right around then, while you're at the bottom of the tub, looking up into their joyous faces.
 

The bubbles flow from the corners of your mouth like a string of verse for others to follow you down to hell.

The poetry starts up. The fringes of your vision grow red and then white as you slip into death.
 
A fragment of yourself is perplexed by the fact that you're still holding your breath, trying to hang in.
 
Another time this whole set-up would've been a windfall, a lucky break, and you might've simply rolled with it until all the savage aching was gone.

And up there stands
Jez
.

Storming into the room with her face heated, scowling, almost snarling, like she's about to kill Mr.
Arlo
Barrack.
 

But still not reaching down to pull you up and save you from drowning.

You think, these people have got their priorities a touched skewed.

Stacy draws your attention to the left, where she stares at you through the fog of the water, her small face leaking strings of blood that float past your eyes to the surface.
 
Jez
yanks you back up toward your unwanted life.
 

Two minutes later she's fucking you in the tub.

E
verybody
has their defining moments
, Shake Sunshine Jr. once said from behind his sunglasses as the girls looked on.
 
But that minute is always moving away
.
 
Transient, baby, ephemeral, know what I'm
sayin
'
?
 
Know who I'm
layin
'
?
 

The women nodded in agreement as if he'd spoken some unbearable truth, never knowing that Shake's definition of himself pretty much changed depending on his mood.
 

Chase really only had the one.

It had come at him in a roar of tearing metal, among the stink of gin, listening to a child's mewling.

He could still feel the devastating agony shooting up his arms and through his knees whenever he got behind the wheel.
 
His shoulders would begin to hurt, the muscles of his neck suddenly inflamed.
 
Those and other phantom pains would crawl through him even before he turned the key, like old friends coming back for a visit.

He parked in front of Shake's favorite diner over on Broadway and Fifty-fifth.
 
The wait staff sang 50s tunes in between serving the customers.
 
Chase hoped they'd dance across the tables and perform the big numbers, swinging around and doing cartwheels and
backflips
, like in
West Side Story
.
 

But the girls just sang some of the slower love tunes and all the guys tried to play like Frankie
Vallie
, yanking up the high notes from their nuts.
 
It was ten a.m. and Chase had only slept two hours.

Shake was already inside and seated, doing his black
mofo
death gaze thing to everybody in the place. He'd combed out and reshaped the twin prongs of his goatee so that they came to perfectly spiked points.

They were all aware of him but nobody dared to look.

Cotton balls, Chase wanted to shout to them, protect yourselves with cotton balls.

"This is a little early for you, isn't it?" Chase asked.

"Yeah, but I'm having lunch with the ladies."

"Now which ladies are these?"

"The ones from the Learning Annex.
 
Remember I told you about them?"

"The
Jane Eyre
fans."

"That's right."

"They wanted to know if Victorian literature pissed you off because it had no black folks in it."

"And it does," he said, slowly chewing his bacon.
 
He had to nibble every mouthful 32 times and sometimes he counted along.
 
If he messed up his count, he had to start over.
 
"But I don't hold those nice ladies accountable.
 
They're taking me out for tea.
 
I'm going to meet their bridge club members later.
 
They've already helped me sell sixty, sixty-five books."

"Think they read passages to their grandkids at night?
 
Give the wee ones sweet dreams?"

"They don't read them at all, just set them out on the shelf for all the other upper tax bracket folks to notice.
 
But I don't mind, I need to pay my rent.
 
And I like to play Bridge too."

Shake had something on his mind but he was having a hard time getting it out there and saying it.

"Just drop the bomb and run," Chase said.
 
"It'll be easier for both of us.
 
What's on your mind?"

"I wanted to tell you something, but I don't want you to flip."

"Okay."

"Don't just say okay.
 
I want you to mean it."

"I do mean it."

Shrugging his massive shoulders, Shake had to finish his mouthful of food before he could go on.
 
Chewing 30, 31, 32.
 
"Isaac got mugged early this morning, about three a.m., on his way home from the Palace."

"But—" Chase said and hit the wall.
 
That couldn't have been more than twenty minutes after Chase walked out of the club.

"Somebody knocked him over from behind, beat him on the head and kicked him around the curb.
 
He said it happened so fast he didn't see much of anything at all."

"He called to tell you?"

"Yeah."

"When?"

"After he stumbled home."

"And he's okay?"

"Yeah, pretty much.
 
Says he's got a goose egg on the back of his head and broke an upper crown.
 
He had to make an emergency dental appointment."

"Why didn't he call me?
 
I was up then.
 
He knew that.
 
I'd just left him."

"Guess he figured you needed a rest."

Chase had to control his breathing, the impotent anger swarming through him.
 
He felt his scalp prickle with sweat.
 
"How much did they get off him?"

"Nothing.
 
They didn't take his wallet or his watch.
 
Must've been somebody trolling, looking for a fight."

"With a seventy year old man?"

One of the waitresses came by, started singing
Leader of the Pack
, smiling emptily as she nodded into the microphone.
 
She had a couple of steps she did as she sang, tap
tap
slide tap, competent and meaningless.
 
Shake waved her off and she slipped among the other tables.

A young couple were arguing quietly a few booths away. Both in their late teens, with that tired look like they'd been up all night, out in the scene, and now were ready to put it behind them.
 
Get to bed by noon and sleep the entire day.
  

The boy fumed as he gripped his fork and knife in his right hand, maybe thinking about where he could stab her with them.
 
In the arm, in the neck.
 
The girl wearing a black skirt, nervously fiddling with the hem, tugging it down towards her knees.
 
But it would slip back up.
  

Chase saw shadows on her upper thighs, bruises the shape of fingers.

"What is it?" Shake asked.
 
"What are you seeing?"

He had his back to them, unaware.
 

The girl looked over at Chase and mouthed the words, Stop him, please stop him.

"You seeing your daddy again, Gray?
 
Do you want me to help you go over that whole thing one more time?"

"No."

"Isaac is going to be fine.
 
He's not dead.
 
He wasn't murdered.
 
You understand?"

"Yes."
 

"You're slipping," Shake said without judgment.

"Yes."

"You should see a doctor.
 
You need to get back on
Haldol
.
 
The mood
stablilizers
."

"I can't take the muscle spasms."

"They'll give you one of the new muscle relaxant or anti-spasm meds to go along with it."

"I see and feel more weird shit with that than without it."

"For serious?"
 
Not quite a question, more a statement.
 
Saying, you're full of shit.

"Yes."

"You don't have to commit yourself.
 
A voluntary admittance. You'll roll through and be discharged in two weeks."

Chase looked at him until Shake glanced away.
 
Shake was trying to help but he should've known it wasn't the right thing to say.
 
Going back to the Falls was as bad as going back to prison.

In state facilities, it was all about discharge, moving the patients in, out, and on. Medicaid only paid for a certain amount of treatment, and the hospitals were geared to getting the patients back to where they started. After three weeks or so, they begin losing money on the cases.