Black Mad Wheel by Josh Malerman
Arms folded across his chest, half leaning into the empty seat beside his, Lovejoy’s body rocks with the plane and, to Philip, he looks like a judge, deep in thought, considering the final arguments of both sides. A red armband around his left bicep reads:
EVERY GOOD BOY DOES FINE
Philip touches the F key hanging around his neck.
Being the piano player in the band doesn’t mean Philip’s the only member of the Danes to know what that phrase means. It’s the singsongy nursery mnemonic by which kids learn the lines on the music staff, EGBDF, the locations of the notes, the piano and how to play it. Seeing it reminds him of his first recital in Detroit, Mom and Dad in the audience. He recalls how his fingers trembled above the keys.
“He’s not as chaotic as he looks.”
Private Greer is peering over his seat back, his head like a sweaty pumpkin, grinning.
“I don’t know him at all,” Philip says.
“You will,” Greer laughs.
“I don’t know you at all.”
Greer shrugs. Or maybe the slight turbulence made him do it.
“I’m proof that the army has gotten smarter.”
“Yeah?”
“First they sent in soldiers. Now they’re sending a historian.”
“And why is that any smarter?”
“Because history isn’t inactive, Private Tonka. I know your name because I know all your names. I study. I research. And if there’s one thing that stands out above all others in my research, it’s that history doesn’t sit still. Doesn’t sit silent. It makes noise.” He wipes his nose with the back of his hand.
“Sounds chaotic after all,” Philip says.
“I’ll tell you what I believe, Tonka. It’s not a weapon.”
Larry, who has been playing an imaginary bass while studying, his fingers running the scales, leans across the aisle. His long hair hides half his face.
“Bullshit.”
“Can’t be,” Greer says. “It’s been sounding off for close to fifteen months. If it was a weapon, they would’ve disabled it by now. You can’t be smart enough to design a weapon we can’t find and not smart enough to know the sound would draw us in.”
“Maybe they’re confident they hid it well,” Duane, seated ahead of Larry, says. “Maybe they don’t care that it’s loud.”
“Maybe. But consider this.” Greer raises a single finger. “If that sound you heard is the sound of a weapon, we’re certainly too late to put a stop to it.”
“Why?” Philip asks.
“Because that’s not the sound of progress,” Greer says. “Whatever that noise is, it’s a desired endpoint.”
“Bullshit twice,” Larry says, half-confidently. “We don’t know a thing about it.”
Greer smiles.
“Sure we do. We know a thing about it because we know our history. We know what sounds things make. It’s not a horn, buried in the sand, Private Walker. And if it’s a weapon? And they don’t care that it makes noise? Well, then we’re in some trouble. Imagine that.” Greer snaps his fingers. “A weapon so destructive, so deadly, you don’t even mind showing it off to your enemies first.”
“It makes music,” a voice from the back of the plane says. Deep and dulcet, but clipped and quick. “So they’re sending musicians.”
Philip turns, expecting to see Lovejoy staring ahead. But the mysterious sergeant’s eyes are still closed.
Former general. Demoted.
Why?
Greer shrugs.
“So says the sergeant. And so I partially agree. Whatever it is, it’s not afraid to be heard.”
Ross gets out of his seat and crouches in the aisle between Greer and Larry.
“You guys ever hear of the precedence effect?”
Nobody has.
“It’s an auditory trick.” Ross is using his hands to express it. “Wherein the echo is louder than the source.”
“How is that possible?” Duane asks.
“It’s a matter of where you’re standing and what’s obscuring the sound. Imagine you’re in the control room, Duane. Philip sits down at the piano in the live room. There’s a divider, blocking Philip and the piano. And the microphone is set across the room, pointed at the ceiling. Far away. Wouldn’t it be possible for the echo to be louder to you than what Philip played?”
Philip understands immediately.
“A decoy,” he says.
Secretary Mull rises and moves back a row, stumbling with the lilting of the plane.
“That’s exactly why we’re not sending you to the same location the first two platoons explored.”
His face looks different to Philip now. Mull is no longer the man selling the idea; he’s now a superior to the soldiers who’ve already bought it.
“What do you mean?” Larry asks.
Philip looks over his shoulder. Lovejoy’s eyes are still closed. But is he awake?
“You’ll begin your search along the ocean.”
“In the fog,” Duane says, examining the photo in his dark hands.
“Yes. In the fog. You’re certainly equipped with the necessary lighting, the requisite gear.”
“A decoy,” Ross repeats.
“In any case,” Greer says, “source sound or echo or second echo, whatever. We will find it.”
“Why are you so sure of that?” Philip asks.
“Have you considered the point of view of the sound itself yet, Private Tonka? Have you considered that it’s been making a sound for over a year for a reason?”
Philip remembers his conversation with Marla before leaving. Recalls his thoughts by her apartment window. He was trying to find an answer to the very same question.
“Yes. I have.”
“It knows,” Greer says, confidently, with sweaty swagger. “It knows we can hear it. And it’s doing it on purpose. Think of yourself, standing in the fog where the ocean meets the desert. You’re making the same sound for fifteen months. Why?”
“’Cause I’ve gone mad,” Duane says.
Greer laughs.
“Maybe,” he says. “But mad or not, you’re making that sound because you want to be heard.” Greer nods in the silence he’s created. Relishes it. Then, “Where we’re heading, there’s something that wants us to come.” He has their full attention. He pauses dramatically and the plane whimpers against the wind. “I’d go so far as to say we’ve been invited.”
13
It’s the day after Ellen showed Philip his reflection. The day after their brief argument. And most important, the day after he moved his head freely.
Dr. Szands is going over notes in the office. Ellen enters.
“Afternoon, doctor.”
Szands doesn’t respond. Ellen looks at him and sees he’s wearing headphones; a tape recorder is rolling on the table in front of him.
Ellen removes her coat and hangs it on the rack.
She can’t help but notice her own handwriting on the papers the doctor is reviewing. But what is he listening to?
Nurse Delores enters the office. Delores usually works the morning shift, Ellen the afternoon. It’s not hard to see the symbolism there: Delores with her morning-sun blond hair, her conservative, company-line demeanor, and Ellen with dark hair, pale, joking the patients into the night.
Szands presses stop. Rewinds. Plays again.
“What’s he up to?” Ellen asks Delores. It’s a futile question and Ellen knows it. Even if Dr. Szands explained to Delores in great detail what he was listening to, she wouldn’t be the one to repeat it.
Delores shrugs. Removes her coat from the rack. Slips it on.
As she leaves, Ellen tries to sneak another look at the papers the doctor is studying. The page on top no longer has her handwriting.
She sees the words GHOST: WORLD WAR II. Circled. Szands is tapping a pencil against the paper.
Whistling one of her favorite tunes, a song she had played on the piano in Philip’s unit often during his six months under, Ellen wants to know what Dr. Sza
But maybe it’s the speed with which Philip is healing. Ellen Jones would be the first to tell someone that Macy Mercy has its mysteries, carries its own kind of uncanny energy, but the fact that Philip is already moving his fingers, his head, is too curious to ignore.
Is the solution to this mystery somewhere on the reels that are rolling? An easily explained and just as easily overlooked concept?
Ellen sees sweat marks on the doctor’s flower-patterned shirt. She’s not moving, she realizes, she’s simply staring at his back, as he’s seated facing the machine.
Then Szands spins in the chair to face her. It’s clear he didn’t know she was in the office with him.
His eyes, distant, listening, are fixed on hers.
Ellen nods, takes a clipboard from the stack on the wooden table beside her and leaves the office.
In the hall, she still hears the whirring of the reel-to-reel machine.
GHOST: WORLD WAR II
She enters Unit 1 and sees Philip is asleep. Quietly, Ellen checks to make sure it’s not too cool in here, places a palm delicately on Philip’s forehead, looking for a fever.
Still whistling, again she studies the uneven features of his face. The right cheek is a full half inch higher than the left. His nose is so crooked it looks as if it’s made of clay. And although both eyes are closed, one eyelid looks wider than the other.
Again she wonders, What did he look like before?
Carl, the orderly, told her he was in a band called the Danes.
Where are they now? The other band members? And why does that name ring a bell?
She should move on, of course, to the second unit, work her way through the permitted rooms. That’s how she begins every shift, every day. But today she doesn’t feel like following the rules, the pattern, the protocol. She crosses the unit and stands close to the door with an ear to the hall. She listens until the whirring of the reels in the office ceases, hears the chair slide from the desk, hears Szands’s shoes on the office floor, then in the hall, coming her way.
Ellen backs up and holds her breath. As if, by exhaling, she might reveal her thoughts.
Szands passes Unit 1 without looking inside.
What is she thinking of doing exactly?
She looks to Philip.
Once the doctor’s footfalls grow distant, she peers into the otherwise empty hall.
She waits.
She waits a little longer.
Then, incredibly, instead of moving on to Unit 2, Ellen crosses the hall, back to the office, and slips inside.
The tape recorder is empty. Szands took whatever reel he was listening to.
Ellen exhales and laughs at herself. What is she doing? Did she think Szands was listening to some sort of evidence of what is happening to Philip, why he’s healing so well, so uniformly, so fast?
She flattens her uniform at her waist and makes to leave. Out of the corner of her eye she sees that the papers Szands was studying are still piled upon the table in front of the machine. On the top page he’s scrawled a question.
She leans closer and reads it.
Why does he care what color the piano is?
Did Philip ask Dr. Szands what color the piano was also? He must have. Yes. He must have. And yet, leaving the office, taking the hall toward Unit 2, Ellen feels the beating of her own frightened heart. It beats that way because, for a moment—silly of her, really—yes, for a moment in the office she believed that Szands had been listening to her and Philip’s conversation, prerecorded, from the day before.
14
Turbulence. The worst Philip has ever known. Feels like the walls of the plane are billowing in, then out, creaking heavy metal, making it hard to sleep.
Philip tries.
It’s all broken up, pieces, fractured images. A huge desert. Diamond mines. Turn-of-the-century Germans. Impenetrable buildings filled with sand. Desert wasps and spiders. The wasp paralyzing the spider. The wasp egg surviving off the paralyzed spider. Shimmering diamonds underground. The banks of the Kuiseb River; incredible vegetation splitting the picture of so much sand. The Namib’s life-vein. The life the river attracts. Miners. Snakes’ patterns, but no visible snake. All underground. All either avoiding the heat or averting other eyes.
Men obsessed with diamonds, with digging.
Wasps digging, too, burying paralyzed spiders three times their size.
Holes in the desert.
There is no sound in the desert, the packet said, except wind.
All life in the desert, the packet said, hides.
Other images, too, here, between the groaning walls of the aircraft, as Philip undulates between sleep and wakefulness.
One image is of Lovejoy standing at the head of the plane, ducking his head beneath the low ceiling. Another sees Lovejoy crouched in the aisle, eyeing Larry, then Ross, as they sleep.
Philip blinks and the former general is staring at him.
A pocket of smooth air and Philip sleeps again, dreaming unsettling pictures of a poorly quilted desert, as though it is barely held together by twine.
15
Philip wakes to find Dr. Szands sitting in a chair beside the cot.
His smile looks new, and Philip wonders what face the doctor was making before he woke.
“Philip,” Szands begins, “there’s a man here to see you. He’s with the United States government. I’ve informed him that you’re available for a brief interview.”
“Interview?” Philip is hardly sharp, not yet fully awake.
“He wants to talk to you about Africa.”
Szands says “Africa” as if he wouldn’t go there in a thousand years.
“Interview?” Philip repeats.
“He’s going to see you now.”
United States government.
“We’ll just be a moment,” a voice says. It comes from the area of the room Philip can’t quite turn to see.
Szands rises and exits the unit. Philip hears the door lock for the first time.
United States government.
Silence. The man is not speaking, not showing himself, not yet. Philip tries to roll over, to see back by the piano.
The man is coming toward him.
“Hello, Philip. Mind if I sit down?”
Philip smells cologne. Soap. He isn’t surprised by this. Military men, high ranking, take their cleanliness seriously.
“I’m sorry we have to meet under these circumstances, Philip. I’m sure we’d both rather it weren’t happening.”
Philip doesn’t respond. Not yet.
“My name is Scott Malone. I have a particular interest in the events that brought you here.”
“Are you an army man?”
A pause.
“Well, no. I’m not an army man in the way you’re asking. I never served. I directly represent the government.”
“Are you with the CIA?”
“No. Not that either. Mind if I ask you some questions?” An inhale. “Do you remember what happened to you?”
“I have an idea.”
“I’ve read the account you gave Dr. Szands. Has your opinion changed on the matter?”
“My opinion?”
“Your memory.”
“No. What I told Dr. Szands is all I remember. A room.”
“Indeed. And do you remember the events leading up to you entering that room?”
“Yes.”
“Very good.” Hesitation. Then, “Tell me about that first encounter with the first dead body you found.”
“I told Dr. Szands all about that, too.”
“Yes. But I’d like to hear it from you. Sometimes, when you hear it in person, you unearth new information.”
Unearth. As if Scott Malone is digging. Digging in the sand.
“Lovejoy spotted it. Greer dragged it wherever we went.”
Philip blinks. In the moment his eyes are
Malone continues. “Let’s try a different course here, okay? I’d like you to meet someone, Philip. An artist. Len?” Philip hears movement behind him. Back by the piano. Papers shuffling. The squeaking of leather soles.
A bearded man with thinning black hair leans into Philip’s field of vision. His argyle sweater and significant belly do not look army. He slides a chair beside Scott Malone’s.
“Why don’t you describe the body for Len, Philip,” Malone says. “Tell him what you found. What Lovejoy found.”
The artist clears his throat.
“I’m ready when you are,” he says.
Philip closes his eyes. Sees the body again.
“Have you ever seen a flounder out of water?” he asks.
“No. I have not,” Len politely answers.
“Flounders are a flatfish. They’re born with eyes on either side of their head but by the time they’re adults, one of those eyes migrates to the other side. So they can lay flat on the ocean floor and keep both eyes looking up.”
Len looks to Malone. Back to Philip.
“And?”
“Can you draw a man like that?”
“Excuse me?” He looks to Malone again. But Malone is not smiling. He’s already heard this description. He nods to the paper.
Len begins drawing. Philip tells him more. And as he speaks, the artist’s expression changes from friendly to confused until he’s actually looking at Philip with suspicion in his eyes. Len turns once more, possibly expecting Malone to put a stop to this absurdity.
“Is this him?” Len asks, holding up the paper, the finished drawing.
Philip opens his eyes and stares for a long time.
“Yes,” he says. “But older.”
“Older . . . wrinkled? White hair?”
“No. Not that kind of old.”
Malone leans forward, closer to Philip.
“What kind of older, Philip?” he asks.
Philip breathes deep.
“The desert wasn’t linear,” he says. “The desert wasn’t in chronological order.”