Black Mad Wheel by Josh Malerman
When Philip was first brought in, the nurses ogled the X-rays that showed fractures in so many bones of his body, as if someone had intentionally set out to hurt him, premeditating the unbelievable construct of jagged lines, the chaos of fissures, a lack of logic, of plausibility, of survival.
And yet, Ellen is no stranger to the weird. Almost every patient who arrives at Macy Mercy is in an anomalous condition. And as long as Ellen’s been employed here she’s had to juggle the sensibility of a modern woman of 1957 with the understanding that those who run the military hospital know more than she does. It’s part of her occupation, keeping questions to herself. And like most employees the country over, Ellen wouldn’t be here were it not for the money. Living alone in an apartment on Carter Street, she needs this job. And she likes the work. And sometimes, but not always, she even finds herself trying to solve these mysteries that come through the front door of the hospital.
Like this man. Philip Tonka. The one she watches now through the glass of the nurses’ station. The sight of Philip’s X-rays will never be removed from her memory, and it’s difficult, even now, to observe him without thinking of those broken lines, some small, most not, knowing that they exist in some form beneath the incredibly bruised and discolored flesh.
Christ, it’s like watching an episode of that television show Science Fiction Theatre.
Philip blinks.
The skin around his eyes is especially badly bruised, but not too much more so than the rest of his body. Barring a quantum leap in cosmetic surgery, his features are forever distorted. His face is dented, his chest asymmetrical, and yet . . . there is a kind of cohesiveness to him. Ellen wonders if it’s because there’s no one else in the world quite this . . . color.
As she takes notes, minor scribbles marking the blinks, his tongue across his lips, she can’t help but wonder what he once looked like.
Which side of his crooked face is the real him? Is either?
Ellen uses lined paper; a white that rivals her uniform, gives her a sense of illumination here in this nurses’ station furnished with gray filing cabinets, brown drawers, and black desks. Behind her, Nurse Francine is preparing medicine for Philip. She’ll administer it, as she and Delores always do, twice a day. It’s Ellen’s job to mark the physical progress of the freshly woken patient. After an injury such as his, even a blink counts.
But aside from his eyelids and his lips, he hasn’t moved yet. He hardly speaks at all, and when he does it sounds like his throat is sandpaper dry, whether or not she’s just given him water to help.
“Amazing,” Francine says, looking through the glass with Ellen.
“Yes,” Ellen says. “Didn’t think we’d be tracking movement with this one, did we?”
“No, ma’am,” Francine says, her nose less than inch from the window. Ellen sees the older nurse reflected, her black-rimmed glasses superimposed over the heavy wrinkles of her wide face. “Not a chance in hell.”
Then they’re silent. No jokes from Ellen. No hypotheses from Francine. They don’t guess as to what happened to Philip because they’ve already done that, six months of it, leading up to yesterday’s surprise awakening. Some of those speculations were too incredible to fathom, and yet something incredible must have occurred. Delores wondered if it was the work of one man; the patient’s injuries, it seemed, had to be intentional, designed. Francine thought a fall from a cliff could’ve done it. The orderlies, Carl and Jerry, talked about bomb blasts. But Philip’s body is devoid of shrapnel. And there isn’t a surface abrasion on him.
The bruises, the endless spread of purple and orange, mud brown and yellow, are from the injuries within.
Philip lies on his back, stares to the ceiling, his chest, arms, and hands exposed.
For Ellen, the answer lies somewhere in that skin. Sometimes, when forced to touch it, removing or applying the IV, she’s felt a certain falseness there, a rubbery replacement. As though Philip’s skin had been exposed to something powerful enough to change it. Ellen didn’t think it would ever fit right again. The word she didn’t want to use was the same one all the nurses had avoided for six months running.
Nuclear.
In this day and age? Who knew. It was on the cover of every newspaper and magazine, on the mind of every man and woman in America.
Just last week, Ellen woke from a nightmare, an image of Philip removing his skin, a costume, allowing it to fall in folds to the floor.
I’m radioactive, he’d said. Touch me, he’d said.
Now, in the light of the observation room overheads, Philip’s skin looks phonier than ever.
“But life goes on,” Francine says. “For this one.”
The soft click of the door opening and closing behind her lets Ellen know she’s alone in the station. Francine will administer Philip’s shot, then leave to tell Dr. Szands in the office.
Ellen tries not to think about the mysteries here. The host of Science Fiction Theatre was Truman Bradley, a former war correspondent long before he started introducing the pseudoscientific episodes. He was an actor, too. A good-looking one, if Ellen remembers him right.
Did Philip once look like Truman Bradley?
Maybe it’s the way he looks at the ceiling, as though questioning something himself.
Maybe it’s because he’s the first to answer her silent nonreligious prayers.
Philip blinks.
Ellen notes.
As a girl, Ellen saw herself one day walking the streets of New York City, shopping with friends, meeting at ethnic restaurants with complicated names, eating lunch on the benches in the parks.
But then, love . . . a brief, tragic motherhood . . . and here her life has led up to this moment . . .
. . . nursing.
It’s not lost on her that her profession could be seen as a way of atoning for the loss of her daughter, a need to heal, a need to ward off those black fingers in the halls of Macy Mercy, arriving herself at the doors before they do, perhaps this time with the right dosage of medicine, or a miracle joke to make.
Even here, forty miles outside of Des Moines, Ellen has friends who act as armchair psychiatrists.
You should get away from the hospital, some say. You should get away from sadness, others.
Ellen thinks they’re right, of course, all of them. And yet she can’t bring herself to go. Can’t bring herself to walk away from men like Philip Tonka, who was most certainly left in a basket at death’s door, and now blinks in rhythm with a beating heart.
As Francine gives him his shot, Ellen spins in the seat of the office chair and rolls to the small cooler kept in the corner. She takes a can of soda, wheels back.
She likes her job. She does. She takes pride in the fact that she’s helping others, even if most of those others aren’t conscious of her help. She’d rather be here, marking the progress of a man who has life yet inside him, than spilling cocktails with friends in the big city.
Yes? Isn’t this true?
Ellen shouldn’t ask herself questions like these.
She looks to the clock on the wall.
She notes the time on the paper.
When she looks up, Philip is looking back at her.
Ellen, middrink, gasps, spills some of the grape soda onto the front of her white uniform.
Philip is looking at her out of the corner of his eye.
And he’s moving the tips of his fingers.
“Oh my God,” Ellen says, standing up, then sitting down. She wipes the soda from her uniform, starts to make a note, writes messily, looks through the glass again. Francine has already left. “Oh my God, he’s moving.”
She’s too excited to write. She gets up instead, turns to leave the station, then rushes back to the glass.
Through it, their eyes meet, momentarily.
The bent fingers of his right hand, all five, are moving. It may be slight, but it’s movement.
From a man who broke almost every bone in his body.
Ellen smiles. She can’t he
She rushes from the station with the news.
8
For his three hours to think, Ross heads home. Mom is home. And as far as Ross can remember, Mom knows best.
He’s got the data, his copy of the papers, folded and stuffed into his coat pocket. It’s an important feeling, walking the streets of Detroit with a secret in his coat. On a different day, he might find it thrilling, like espionage on television. But right now his enthusiasm is tempered by the crystal memory of the sound he listened to in the control room.
Ross brings a hand to his belly as he crosses the grass on Indiana Street and takes the steel stairs that lead to the back door of the duplex he shares with Mom.
Mom.
And how’s he going to ask Mom about this one?
If there’s one person Ross knows who is unimpressed by the United States Army, it’s Mom. Hell, back during World War II, when the other Danes were getting praise and encouragement from home, Mom would send Ross letters beseeching him to go AWOL. War is embarrassing, Mom would say. And none of this fighting will mean anything in ten years.
Of course she was both right and wrong about that. Twelve years removed from the war, it did feel a lot less important. And yet . . . the world had changed. In many ways for the better. And if Ross were given the chance to contribute like that again . . .
. . . shouldn’t he?
He finds his keys in his pants pocket and unlocks the back door.
“Ross?”
Right away. Ross doesn’t even get the chance to take a deep breath. It’s like Ruth Robinson can hear it when her son’s got a big decision to make.
Can hear it. Like a sickening sound, eh, Ross?
“Hey, Ma. Home.”
“Why?”
Mom doesn’t miss a beat. She may be fifty-eight years old and walk around the house in her pajamas all day, but Ruth is as sharp as she’s ever been. Ross knows this better than anybody else.
“Session was canceled.”
He reaches into his jacket pocket and fingers the document that he’s already read.
“Why?”
Ross looks up and sees Mom is already standing in the kitchen doorway. Glasses on a band around her neck. No hiding from her now, she’s already seen his face. She already knows something is on his mind. Still . . . he’ll try.
“Oh, you know . . . kids. We got any chicken?”
Mom pauses an unnatural beat before answering him.
“Sure. In the fridge.”
Ross is trying to act cool, but at thirty-one years old, it’s harder to deceive Mom than it used to be.
And isn’t he going to have to tell her? Isn’t he planning on saying yes?
For a hundred thousand dollars each, aren’t all the Danes planning on saying yes?
“Thanks, Ma,” Ross says, pulling a plate of chicken from the fridge and placing it on the kitchen table. Mom is wearing a blue bathrobe, her hair as curly as her son’s. She’s leaning against the doorframe. Studying him.
Ross sits down at the table and looks at the chicken and suddenly feels ill. As if the sound from the control room was made of chicken, too.
“Take your jacket off,” Mom says.
His jacket. Ross hasn’t taken it off. Why not? He knows why not. Because there’s something to hide in one of the pockets. A piece of paper explaining why he should fly to an African desert and put his life on the line. For America.
Again.
“What is it, Ross?” She doesn’t mince words. She doesn’t wait on things long.
Ross shakes his head.
“Nothing, Ma. Just . . . nothing.”
He jams some chicken in his mouth and for a second he thinks he’s going to vomit it right back up. The initial taste is stunning to his system. He looks to the plate again, half expecting to see gray meat there; something bloated, something bad.
“Nothing,” Mom repeats. And the way she says it, Ross has no choice but to look at her.
So he does. And the two hold each other’s gaze for a full thirty seconds before Ruth shakes her head.
“The army,” she says.
“Yes.”
“What do they want?”
Ross reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out the folded paper. He holds it for her to take. Ruth looks at it like it’s a spider, like something she isn’t sure she wants to put her fingers on. But she crosses the small kitchen and takes it from her son. She slides out the second chair at the table, sits, unfolds the paper, and places her glasses on the bridge of her nose.
Ross, feeling better for having eaten after all, eats the rest of the chicken as Mom reads. When she’s done, she doesn’t turn the paper over, doesn’t crumple it up, doesn’t toss it away.
“Don’t do it,” she says. Flat. Three syllables.
“I’m going to, Ma.”
“Don’t.”
“Why not?”
Ross feels a rush. He’s decided to do it after all.
Ruth places her elbows on the table and leans closer to him.
“Mystery,” she says, “is bad enough on its own. But mystery with the army?” She shakes her head. “Means they’re hiding something.”
“They don’t know where it is. Somebody’s hiding it from them.”
“Uh-huh.”
Dismissive. But even now, with Mom saying no, Ross feels the swell of yes.
It all comes down to a single word, doesn’t it, Ross? he thinks. A single word that propels you and your bandmates, your best friends. One word that got you guys in the army in the first place, got you into a band, gets you into trouble three or four times a week. One word that weighs more than one hundred thousand dollars apiece.
“Adventure,” Mom says, shaking her head. “You can screw your adventure.”
Ross nods. Of course, she’s right. And yet . . . that is the word. Always has been.
Philip calls it the Path.
“They need us,” Ross says.
“Who’s they?”
“America.”
Mom scoffs and slams both hands down on the table. Hard enough to rattle the chicken bones on Ross’s plate.
“America doesn’t need you, son. America needs a psychiatrist.”
“We know sound. We can find it for them.”
“And then? Then what? You just point to it and . . . presto . . . you’re back home?”
Ross hasn’t thought this far ahead. It scares him, briefly, that he hasn’t thought this far ahead.
“Well . . . yeah. Something like that.”
Mom shakes her head again.
“That’s not even mystery, Ross. That’s ignorance. Don’t go.”
“Ma.”
“I don’t like it. Don’t go.”
“Ma.”
Ross is smiling. Peacefully. Any red rush has left his cheeks and he looks the part of the grown man he is.
Adventure.
The Danes.
And the popularity and esteem he and his friends have received from being both veterans and musicians. How can they say no when they get so much out of saying yes?
“Did you read what happened to the other two platoons?” Mom asks.
Ross nods.
“Of course I did.”
“Did you?”
“I did. They all came back home safely.”
“No,” Mom says. She slides the paper in front of her son and points to the part she’s talking about. “Read.”
“Ma, I read it.”
“Read again.”
Ross sighs and looks down. He feels a pang of fear, embarrassment, like he’s about to see a whole new paragraph that states clearly the first two platoons were sentenced to death by hanging.
But that’s not what Mom is pointing at.
“All members of the previous platoons returned home safely. Empty-handed and flummoxed, but safe.”
“That’s it,” Mom says.
Mom shakes her head for the last time.
“Flummoxed, Ross. You know what that means?”
“Of course.”
“No you don’t. Flummoxed doesn’t just mean they couldn’t solve the mystery. That would be ‘unsatisfied.’ Flummoxed stays with you the rest of your life.”
“Ma.”
“These men, they’re gonna wonder about that sound . . . forever.”
“Ma.”
“They’re gonna hear it in their sleep. They’re gonna hear it awake . . . on the streets.”
“Ma.”
“Don’t do it, Ross.”
Ross places his hands over hers.
“A hundred thousand dollars,” he says. “Each.”
Mom gets up from the table. She takes the plate from in front of him, holds it sideways over the small silver garbage can so that the bones slide into the bag. Then she places the plate in the sink.
“Flummoxed,” Mom repeats, leaving the kitchen. Then she appears again in the doorway. “Two weeks?”
“Two weeks,” Ross says. “In and out.”
Mom nods.
“Bring me back some sand.”
DUANE AND LARRY hit the bar. Where else are they going to go to make a decision like this? Duane takes the stool facing the door. He always faces the door, wherever they go. World War II did that to him. Larry doesn’t mind. Duane faces the crowd, too, sitting at the drums.
Together they’ve got this corner of the bar covered. An old bluesman, Swoon Matthews, sits alone at the other.
“You know Philip is gonna want to do it,” Larry says. “He doesn’t say no to anything.”
“Doesn’t mean we have to.”
“No, it doesn’t mean we have to.”
They order White Russians, the drink they drink when they’re trying to mellow out. Both of them can easily recall the sound of the air in the studio splitting apart . . . the sound of scorched space, and the image of a black mad trail behind it.
“What do you think?” Larry asks, already knowing what Duane thinks.
Duane shrugs.