Black Mad Wheel by Josh Malerman
F for the end of EGBDF and the beginning of FACE. For the end of one path and the start of another.
Maybe, he thinks, desperately, as his finger descends toward the piano, the others will hear me. Maybe they’ll know it’s me playing.
But in the half second it takes for his finger to reach the F, a much more troublesome thought occurs.
It’s the angle of the microphones. The placement of the stands.
It’s the color red, too, in the corner of the room, appearing to Philip suddenly, along with a voice:
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
But it’s too late for that.
Philip is already doing it.
And at the moment his fingertip makes contact with the key, Philip understands wholly and without doubt that this piano is the source of the sound they were sent to find.
But it’s too late for that.
He’s pressing the key.
One note.
And the sound that erupts breaks almost every bone in his body.
At once.
51
That was . . . fantastic.”
This time Ellen is the one on the bed, looking up into Philip’s eyes. The shadows in the unit enhance the unevenness of his face, the incongruent features. But not monstrous now; never again. And despite the reality standing beside her, she sees the face he wore when he graced the cover of the “Be Here” 45.
“Hello, Ellen.”
“They wanted to send you back,” she says.
Philip’s expression doesn’t change.
“I know. And they were close to doing it, too. But I stopped that from happening.”
He crouches to one knee beside the cot. With fingers bent unnaturally, still healing, and healing in the wrong way, too fast, Philip reaches out and touches her hair. He traces the same fingers down the smooth white of her face. He pauses at her lips.
He kisses her.
Then he tells her almost everything. The mission, Lovejoy. The man in the mine.
“Can you imagine?” Ellen, astonished, asks. “Sending someone back to a place that had done that to them? You deserve a medal, Philip.”
Again, no change in expression.
“So where are we going to go?” Ellen sits up. “I was thinking of California. Hawaii. I don’t—”
Philip touches her lips again. The same fingers that just played the most harrowing song she’s ever heard.
“Come with me,” he says.
“Where?”
“I’m going to the one place they don’t think I’ll be.”
Ellen shakes her head no.
“They’ll know you’re in Detroit, Philip. You can’t go home.”
“Not home,” he says.
“Where?”
“I’m going back, Ellen.”
Ellen lifts a hand to slap him. Stops herself.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“The Danes.”
“How do you know they’re there?”
“I learned a lot in the office. The pilot’s report, the chopper that picked me up, said I was the only body on the beach. And the fact that I was on the beach means the man carried me there.”
“Why?”
“Showing off. I don’t know. But I’m gonna ask him. After he shows me where the Danes are.”
“The government,” she finally says. “They’ll know. They’ll follow you there.”
“They already know where it is.”
“What do you mean?”
“Lovejoy knew. He was our sergeant. He knew. And I got hurt nine days before the plane was supposed to arrive. And yet . . . I was picked up. They were watching out there, Ellen. When they ask me where it was, they’re not asking for desert coordinates. They want a map of the mine.”
Ellen can see in his eyes that his decision has been made. And who is she to stop him from going after his friends?
She sees them again, the four of them on the cover of the 45.
She gets up from the cot, makes to leave the unit.
“Where are you going?”
“The drugs are going to wear off,” she says. “And you’re going to need a nurse.”
“I already got them.”
“All of it?”
“All of it. But I used some.”
“Philip. How much did you—”
“Not on me.”
He doesn’t have to say the name for Ellen to know who he used it on. The one face missing from the vault of horrors in the Testing Tank.
She leaves the unit and returns with a number of articles in her hands. A passport. A watch.
“Take this,” she says. “It’s yours.”
She’s holding a single piano key, an F, hanging from a string.
“They analyzed this thing for weeks,” she says. “They thought it had something to do with how you got hurt.”
Philip laughs. But it’s not all humor.
“What?” Ellen asks. “Were they right?”
“I’ll tell you on the way.”
“On the way,” Ellen repeats. “Philip, I think it’s my job to say one thing, one time. If I don’t say it now, I’ll feel it crawling to get out of me the whole time. I understand that your friends may be out there, may even be alive, but I gotta say it and I gotta say it once.” She breathes deep. “I wouldn’t do this if I were you.”
She expects him to get angry. She expects him to go without her.
She doesn’t expect the epiphany in his eyes.
“Jesus Christ,” he says. He looks like he’s dreaming, awake, like Ellen just spoke magic words.
“I’m sorry, Philip.”
“I know where I know that voice from, Ellen.” But Ellen can’t know what he means. Can’t know that Philip has spent many hours in this very unit trying to recall an accent, a voice, a manner of speaking. “That wasn’t a ghost of World War II. That was him.”
He remembers the name Roger Kingman on the dog tags hanging from the naked man’s neck. Naked because his clothes had been taken; taken and worn; the old soldier in the hall; his white beard hidden by a yellow scarf; crazy enough to tell Philip his own story: two musicians in a mine; one strangles the other; one stays below.
Philip recalls the costume, horns and hooves, hanging in a room some thousand years behind him.
He imagines a troubled, deceitful man. A man who likes to dress up.
A costumed loon.
And how close was he, then, to having him? To finding his friends? To ending this before it went too far?
“My car is outside,” Ellen says. She puts an arm over his shoulders. “Are you sure you can handle this?”
“Yes.”
And for the first time in a long time, Philip feels beneath him the strong soil, the abundant, rich dirt, the unmistakable footing of the Path.
52
Flashlights, sleeping bags, knives, headphones, earplugs, water, bread, canned goods, boots, blankets, long underwear, socks, tape, hunter earplugs, hunter earmuffs, and guns.
Just in case.
The girl behind the register stares at Philip’s face like he’s a monster. She smiles nervously. Philip is kind but quiet. Ellen pays for what they’ve got.
In the parking lot, behind the wheel of the New Yorker, Ellen points to an envelope Philip is opening and asks, “What’s that?”
“Government notes,” he says. “More information than Secretary Mull gave us about the previous platoons who were sent to the desert. Got ’em in the office. I’m looking for Lovejoy’s name.”
“What does it say about him?”
“Nothing yet. Still looking.”
“But you believe he knew what was down there.”
“I believe he knew who was down there. But not what. And maybe he was just as curious as anybody would be.”
A demoted general. Stays within the military. Why? Was he waiting for, vying for, this very mission?
“Greer’s Wheel,” Philip says.
“Well, let me tell you about Ellen’s wheel,” Ellen says. “It needs some air.”
She exits the lot and crosses the street, pulls into the gas station there. Philip helps her fill the tire, and maybe it’s the sound of the air or maybe it’s the buzz of traffic passing on the road, but he thinks about the sound. Thinks about it a lot.
Asks himself if he’s returning to Africa for the right reasons.
Is it all about the Danes?
Or, like the man who’s lived down there for over twenty years, gone mad for it, lost reality for it, lost decades for it . . .
. . . is Philip drawn by the sound?
53
The next flight to Johannesburg isn’t until tomorrow morning. Early. 5:10 A.M. Tonight, at 9 P.M., Philip plays the sound for Ellen.
She’s lying in the hotel bed, still fully dressed. Arms folded across her belly.
“I think you’re gonna need to sit up,” he says.
Ellen, some fear in her eyes, sits up.
Using reels taken from the control room of the Testing Tank, Philip threads the handheld tape recorder/player he found in the office. He imagines government men throwing up on each other as they listened.
Now, when it’s ready, he crosses the room and kisses Ellen. They’ve talked about this at length, on the drive to the airport, in line for tickets, on the way to the hotel. If Ellen is going to go with him to the desert, she needs to know what it sounds like.
“Two minutes,” he says. “And it’s going to hurt.”
Ellen nods. She looks exceptionally pretty. Pale and smooth.
“Are you ready?” Philip asks.
“No.”
“No?”
“Do it. Press play.”
“I love you,” Philip says.
“Wait. What?”
“I love you.”
“You’re saying that now? Right now? Then you’re gonna make me throw up?”
Philip smiles. But he’s worried about her.
He presses play.
He leaves the hotel room.
Outside, on the balcony, he looks at the plane tickets. Two layovers. It’s five hours to Baltimore, with a three-hour stay in the Baltimore airport. From there it’s two hours to Atlanta. They won’t leave America until close to 7 P.M. tomorrow.
Philip looks out across the parking lot. Studies the cars.
Any of them could be government.
Any of them could be tracking him.
From Atlanta it’s fifteen hours to Johannesburg. A commercial flight, it will be different in almost every way from the one he took six and a half months ago.
Philip brings the tickets closer to his eyes and this time studies the fingers that hold them. Badly bruised, dented, forever changed. Below him, in the hotel courtyard, is a newspaper stand. Philip can read the headline from here.
SOUNDS LIKE WAR
He turns to face the hotel room. The drapes are drawn. He studies his reflection in the glass. There’s something fitting about the new face that looks back.
Beyond his reflection, Ellen’s muffled moan penetrates the closed hotel room door.
He hears her gag, hears her throw up. She’s speaking, too; muffled syllables, low pitch, as if she’s been slowed down, quarter speed, unnatural.
He recalls the sound of stairs creaking, his mother coming to fetch him for dinner.
Philip, she once said, her hand upon his shoulder. You’re going to be a great musician someday.
How can you tell? He desperately wanted it to be true.
Because you care about the sound it makes.
Philip pockets the tickets and enters the hotel room.
Ellen is on the carpet, bile and vomit between her hands.
Philip presses stop.
He waits.
When she sits up again, she wipes her mouth with a tissue. It’s some minutes before she speaks.
“Can’t wait,” she says. But the joke is only half funny.
Philip sits beside her, puts his arm around her, tells her he loves her again.
Later, they make love for the first time. Ellen administers the drugs before they do it. Without them, he can’t move. Without them, his body is a breathing X-ray.
That night, asleep, Ellen dreams of Philip standing in the hotel room in the dark. She dreams he’s ghastly; the bruises are black; the bones have split his skin open. In the dream she gets up and rushes to the bathroom, gets him more of the drugs, injects him. Then, slowly, his body and face return to how she knows him to be. When he’s feeling himself again she says,
One day we’re going to run out of this.
He nods.
I know.
54
On the flight to Baltimore, everybody smokes. The haze reminds Philip of the fog where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Namib sand. If he squints, he could be there. He can hear Ross talking about a hundred thousand dollars, can hear Duane complaining about the mess of wires and the best way to wrap them. Stein takes a photo of Larry, who holds up the catch reel and says, We’re hunting sound. This is our trap! Greer studies the landscape, talking about how there’s evidence here that the Namib Desert was home to “earliest man,” and how a place so empty, so exposed, must keep secrets.
And Lovejoy.
Lovejoy, who was always standing apart from the others, staring off into the distance, but possibly never at random.
Philip has been thinking a lot about Lovejoy.
When they land, and after they’ve claimed their packs, Philip tells Ellen he’ll be right back. He leaves her in the waiting area for their connecting flight and heads toward the bathrooms. Beyond the bathrooms are the pay phones.
Philip calls home.
Mom answers.
“Mom,” Philip says. “I’m alive.”
55
Because Philip talks a lot about the past, about residual hauntings and the fact that the sound, the frequency, is capable of “rattling ghosts,” Ellen is thinking of her daughter.
She can’t help it. And she doesn’t want to help it. The flight from Atlanta to Johannesburg is over fifteen hours and Ellen has consciously chosen to spend her time thinking about Jean. Upon boarding, each passenger was issued a postcard. The stewards suggested everybody write about their experience on the plane. They could easily mail it from the Johannesburg airport. Make your friends back home jealous, one of the pilots said, before winking at Ellen.
Now many of the passengers are doing just that; lost in thought, occupied by their own observations, what to say, how to describe the food (lobster), the seats (they don’t recline back as far as they used to!), and the other passengers (a lot of smoke! And the man next to me snores!).
Ellen writes her daughter.
Jean—
On a flight to Africa, if you can believe that. Falling in love. Wish you were here. Wish you were everywhere.
Philip is asleep in the seat beside her. His fingers are moving silently upon his knee. Like he’s playing the piano in his sleep.
Ellen looks up to the other seats, sees a little girl is looking back at her. Smiling.
Ellen waves.
It’s silly, but Ellen almost thinks she can hear the song Philip is playing. Outside the window the world is only clouds, then the world is only water. Both proper settings, Ellen thinks, for a ghost.
Maybe Philip plays the music for them.
Jean.
In the hotel room, Ellen experienced the sound. It made her sick and she doesn’t want to hear it ever again. And yet, she knows she will.
Maybe it’s that moment that Philip plays for, a soundtrack for the day he was changed.
She looks out the window and hears a gorgeously dark melody. It sounds like the clouds. Sounds like the ocean. Sounds like two people traveling toward something terrible, powerful, and true. When she looks ahead again the little girl is no longer looking at her.
Ellen finishes her postcard to Jean.
Philip says he saw ghosts in the desert, Jean. To s
Ellen writes, Philip plays, and the world outside becomes night then day again.
By the time they land in Johannesburg, Ellen is no longer scared of Philip’s story about disorienting halls in a dark, subterranean lair.
She is ready.
56
By the time they cross the border into the Bechuanaland Protectorate Philip isn’t doing well. He’s feeling aches everywhere. Something as simple as adjusting his position in the bus seat is enough to make him cry out. Because he’s badly bruised and visibly dented, the other passengers, mostly Africans, observe him, then politely avert their eyes.
This is good.
It gives Ellen cover to administer the drugs.
“You know,” she says, “I’m pretty sure I was fired for not giving you these and now look at me, the first to pull them out of the bag.”
“It’s bad,” Philip says.
“Well, not for long.”
Under his coat, Philip unbuttons his pants and slides them down. This action is excruciating.
Ellen injects him.
The effect isn’t instant, but it’s soon enough that Philip relaxes, inside, and understands once again the strength of the drugs he’d been receiving at Macy Mercy. It’s the second longest he’s gone without, and he doesn’t want to do it again.
But their supply is finite.
“How long of a hike is it?” Ellen asks, obviously concerned.
“The bus is going to drop us off at Walvis Bay. It’s on the coast. From there? Three days. We’ll buy food and water in Walvis,” Philip says.
“You know,” Ellen says, “sometimes I feel like I can already hear it.”
“The sound,” Philip says. This is not a question.
“Yes.”
“That’s how it works,” he says, feeling stronger, sitting up. “I haven’t stopped hearing it since it was played for us in the studio.”
“Great,” Ellen says. “So you’re saying you’ve ruined my life?”
Philip smiles.
“Come here,” he says.