Fletcher smiled. “Do it for your research. ”
Heinz was convinced—not completely, but enough to believe Fletcher could be Mr. Maybe He Will after all. He put the steel rod into his mouth. His bulging eyes stared at Fletcher. Below them and above the jutting stylus—which looked not like a lollipop but an old-fashioned fever thermometer—that green bubble of snot swelled and retreated, swelled and retreated. Still pointing the gun at Heinz, Fletcher flicked the switch on the control panel from OFF to ON and gave the rheostat a hard turn. The white line on the knob went from eleven in the morning to five in the afternoon.
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Heinz might have had time to spit the stylus out, but shock caused him to clamp his lips down on the stainless steel barrel instead. The snapping sound was louder this time, like a small branch instead of a twig. Heinz’s lips pressed down even tighter. The green mucus bubble in his nostril popped. So did one of his eyes.
Heinz’s entire body seemed to vibrate inside his clothes. His hands were bent at the wrists, the long fingers splayed. His cheeks went from white to pale gray to a darkish purple. Smoke began to pour out of his nose. His other eye popped out on his cheek. Above the dislocated eyes there were now two raw sockets that stared at Fletcher with surprise. One of Heinz’s cheeks either tore open or melted. A quantity of smoke and a strong odor of burned meat came out through the hole, and Fletcher observed small flames, orange and blue. Heinz’s mouth was on fire. His tongue was burning like a rug.
Fletcher’s fingers were still on the rheostat. He turned it all the way back to the left, then flicked the switch to OFF. The needles, which had swung all the way to the +50 marks on their little dials, immediately fell dead again. The moment the electricity left him, Heinz crashed to the gray tile floor, trailing smoke from his mouth as he went. The stylus fell free, and Fletcher saw there were little pieces of Heinz’s lips on it. Fletcher’s gorge gave a salty, burping lurch, and he closed his throat against it. He didn’t have time to vomit over what he had done to Heinz; he might consider vomiting at a later time. Still, he lingered a moment longer, leaning over to look at Heinz’s smoking mouth and dislocated eyes. “How do you describe it?” he asked the corpse. “Now, while the experience is still fresh?
What, nothing to say?”
Fletcher turned and hurried across the room, detouring around Ramón, who was still alive and moaning. He sounded like a man having a bad dream.
He remembered that the door was locked. Ramón had locked it; the key would be on the ring hanging at Ramón’s belt. Fletcher went back to the guard, knelt beside him, and tore the ring off his belt.
When he did, Ramón groped out and seized Fletcher by the ankle again. Fletcher was still holding the gun. He rapped the butt down 141
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on the top of Ramón’s head. For a moment the hand on his ankle gripped even tighter, and then it let go.
Fletcher started to get up and then thought, Bullets. He must have more. The gun’s empty. His next thought was that he didn’t need no steenkin bullets, Ramón’s gun had done all that it could for him.
Shooting outside this room would bring the ordinaries like flies.
Even so, Fletcher felt along Ramón’s belt, opening the little leather snap pouches until he found a speed-loader. He used it to fill up the gun. He didn’t know if he could actually bring himself to shoot ordinaries who were only men like Tomás, men with families to feed, but he could shoot officers and he could save at least one bullet for himself. He would very likely not be able to get out of the building—that would be like rolling a second 300 game in a row—but he would never be brought back to this room again, and set in the chair next to Heinz’s machine.
He pushed the Bride of Frankenstein away from the door with his foot. Her eyes glared dully at the ceiling. Fletcher was coming more and more to understand that he had survived and these others had not. They were cooling off. On their skin, galaxies of bacteria had already begun to die. These were bad thoughts to be having in the basement of the Ministry of Information, bad thoughts to be in the head of a man who had become—perhaps only for a little while, more likely forever—a desaparecido. Still, he couldn’t help having them.
The third key opened the door. Fletcher stuck his head out into the hall—cinder-block walls, green on the bottom half and a dirty cream-white on the top half, like the walls of an old school corridor.
Faded red lino on the floor. No one was in the hall. About thirty feet down to the left, a small brown dog lay asleep against the wall. His feet were twitching. Fletcher didn’t know if the dog was dreaming about chasing or being chased, but he didn’t think he would be asleep at all if the gunshots—or Heinz’s screaming—had been very loud out here. If I ever get back, he thought, I’ll write that soundproofing is the great triumph of dictatorship. I’ll tell the world. Of course I probably won’t get back, those stairs down to the right are probably as close to Forty-third Street as I’m ever going to get, but—
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But there was Mr. Maybe I Can.
Fletcher stepped into the hall and pulled the door of the deathroom shut behind him. The little brown dog lifted its head, looked at Fletcher, puffed its lips out in a woof that was mostly a whisper, then lowered its head again and appeared to go back to sleep.
Fletcher dropped to his knees, put his hands (one still holding Ramón’s gun) on the floor, bent, and kissed the lino. As he did it he thought of his sister—how she had looked going off to college eight years before her death by the river. She had been wearing a tartan skirt on the day she’d gone off to college, and the red in it hadn’t been the exact same red of the faded lino, but it was close. Close enough for government work, as they said.
Fletcher got up. He started down the hall toward the stairs, the first-floor hallway, the street, the city, Highway 4, the patrols, the roadblocks, the border, the checkpoints, the water. The Chinese said a journey of a thousand miles started with a single step.
I’ll see how far I get, Fletcher thought as he reached the foot of the stairs. I might just surprise myself. But he was already surprised, just to be alive. Smiling a little, holding Ramón’s gun out before him, Fletcher started up the stairs.
A month later, a man walked up to Carlo Arcuzzi’s newsstand kiosk on Forty-third Street. Carlo had a nasty moment when he was almost sure the man meant to stick a gun in his face and rob him. It was only eight o’clock and still light, lots of people about, but did any of those things stop a man who was pazzo? And this man looked plenty pazzo—so thin his white shirt and gray pants seemed to float on him, and his eyes lay at the bottom of great round sockets. He looked like a man who had just been released from a concentration camp or (by some huge mistake) a loony bin. When his hand went into his pants pocket, Carlo Arcuzzi thought, Now comes the gun.
But instead of a gun came a battered old Lord Buxton, and from the wallet came a ten-dollar bill. Then, in a perfectly sane tone of voice, the man in the white shirt and gray pants asked for a pack of Marlboros. Carlo got them, put a package of matches on top of them, 143
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and pushed them across the counter of his kiosk. While the man opened the Marlboros, Carlo made change.
“No,” the man said when he saw the change. He had put one of the cigarettes in his mouth.
“No? What you mean no?”
“I mean keep the change,” the man said. He offered the pack to Carlo. “Do you smoke? Have one of these, if you like.”
Carlo looked mistrustfully at the man in the white shirt and gray pants. “I don’t smoke. It’s a bad habit.”
“Very bad,” the man agreed, then lit his cigarette and inhaled with apparent pleasure. He stood smoking and watching the people on the other side of the street. There were girls on the other side of the street. Men would look at girls in their summer clothes, that was human nature. Carlo didn’t think this customer was crazy anymore, although he had left the change of a ten-dollar bill sitting on the narrow counter of the kiosk.