Текст книги "Haunted"

Автор книги: Charles Michael «Chuck» Palahniuk

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

And “Merry Christmas.”

As many ways as possible, her grandma said, “Happy Anniversary.”

“Happy Father's Day”

and “Happy Mother's Day”

for a greeting-card company.

Between blowing her nose and stuffing the tissue back into her sleeve, Miss Sneezy says,

“My grandma's job was to interpret what other people had no words to say.”

But every “Happy Birthday,”

really, every card, she wrote with Miss Sneezy in mind.

Her grandma's ideal target audience.

And the card rack is her bank account, her left-behind trust fund of future best wishes

for her granddaughter.

So, after she was dead, her Miss Sneezy could come and find the right “I Love You”

or “Happy Valentine's” for that moment of the distant future.

Long, long after her grandma was dead.

“Still,” Miss Sneezy says, “there's one card, one special occasion she never covered.”

There needs to be a card that says: I'm sorry.

Please, Grandma.

Please, forgive me.

I didn't mean to kill you.

Evil Spirits

A Story by Miss Sneezy

The intercom comes on. First is a crackle of static, then a woman's loud voice, saying, “Good news, girlfriend.” Coming out of the little wire-mesh speaker, it's Shirlee, the night guard, her voice saying, “Chances look good you might get laid in this lifetime . . .”

Just admitted this week, Shirlee says is another Type 1 Keegan virus carrier. This new resident, he's asymptomatic, and, better yet, he has got a huge dick.

Shirlee, she's as close to a best friend as it gets here.

You know that boy who had to live in the plastic bubble because he was immune to nothing? Well, this place is the opposite. The folks who live here, on Columbia Island, the permanent residents, they carry around bugs that would kill the world. Viruses. Bacteria. Parasites.

Me included.

The government types, the navy brass, they call this place The Orphanage. This is according to Shirlee. It's called The Orphanage because—if you're here—your family is dead. Chances are, your teachers are dead. All your old friends are dead. Anybody who knew you, they're dead and you killed them.

You know the government is a little over a barrel. Sure, they could kill these folks—to protect the public interest—but these folks are innocent. So the government pretends it can find a cure. It keeps folks locked away here, drawing their blood every week to test. Providing clean sheets every week, and three square meals each day.

Every drop of piss that comes out of them, the government sterilizes it with ozone and radiation. Their every exhale is filtered and scrubbed with ultraviolet light before that air goes back into the outside world. The residents of Columbia Island, they don't get head colds. They never rub elbows with anybody who might give them the flu. Except for the fact they're each carrying their own personal potentially world-pandemic plagues, they're the healthiest batch of folks you could ever not want to meet.

And it's the navy's job to make sure you never do.

Most of what I know comes from Shirlee, my nighttime guard. Shirlee says being locked up here, it's not much to complain about. She says people in the outside world have to work all day, every day, and still don't get half of what all they want.

These days, Shirlee tells me to order up a set of hot rollers. To pretty myself up, some. For my new groom-to-be. This new guy, the Type 1 Keegan virus carrier.

Here, you just go to the computer and type a list of what you'd like. If the budget allows, it's yours. The biggest hurdle is when you get too much stuff. Books. Music CDs. Movie DVDs. They can shovel it in here, but after you touch it, the stuff is toxic. The bigger problem is how to burn it down to sterile ash.

To get around this, Shirlee has you ask for stuff that Shirlee wants. Shirlee loves old-time Elvis Presley shit. Buddy Holly shit. I put that on the list, and Shirlee pockets the music when it arrives. No muss. No fuss. And no big accumulation of toxic crap in the room.

The navy folks, they say they can't expense poetry books. If some public watchdog saw an item like Leaves of Grass on some Freedom of Information document, there would be hell to pay. So Shirlee buys my books out of her own pocket. And I pay her off with Elvis CDs I order but don't want. Most nights, Shirlee wants to educate me about current events, like who's dropping bombs on what country and who's the new boy singer every girl wants to fuck.

Instead, I want to know the stuff Shirlee can't say. The stuff I've started to forget—like how does rain feel on your skin? Or stuff I never knew—like how to French-kiss?

We talk back and forth through an intercom. This means pushing a button when you speak, then letting go to hear the other person. Even now, when I try to imagine Shirlee's face, all I can picture is the little wire-mesh speaker on the wall next to the bed.

All the time, Shirlee's asking, how did I get here?

And I tell her: It was all my dad's brilliant idea.

Shirlee's always after me to shave my legs. Order a tanning bed. Ride my stationary bicycle a thousand miles to nowhere. Shirlee tells me, her voice from the wire-mesh speaker says, “You only lose it once.”

Me, I'm twenty-two years old and still a virgin. Until today, it looked pretty certain I'd always be a virgin.

Still, I'm not too much a social retard. Residents get to watch television. They get to surf the Internet. Of course, you can't send any messages out. You can lurk in chat rooms, reading all the action, but you can't contribute. You can read the postings on a bulletin board, but you can't respond. No, the government needs to keep you a National Security secret.

And Shirlee, her voice from the wire-mesh speaker, she says, “How did your old man get you put here?”

It was my senior year in high school when people around me started to die. They died the same way my folks had died ten years before.

My high-school English teacher, Miss Frasure, one day she's holding a paper I wrote, telling the whole class how good it is, the next day she's wearing sunglasses inside. Saying the light hurts her eyes. She's chewing those orange-flavored aspirin the school nurse gives out to girls on the rag. Instead of teaching, she turns out the lights and shows the class a movie called How to Field Dress Wild Game. The movie's not even in color. It's just the only reel of film left on the shelf in the audiovisual room.

That's the last day they see Miss Frasure.

The next day, half the kids I know ask the school nurse for those orange-flavored aspirin. Instead of English class, we get sent to the school library for an hour of quiet study. Half the class say they can't focus their eyes to read a book. Behind a bookshelf, I let a boy named Raymon kiss me on the mouth. As long as he keeps saying I'm beautiful, I let him put one hand up inside my shirt.

The next day, Raymon doesn't come to school.

On the third day, my grandma goes to the emergency room, saying her head hurts so bad that everything looks black around the edges. She's going blind. I skip school to sit in the hospital waiting room. I'm reading a copy of National Geographic magazine, the pages all soft with wrinkles, sitting in a plastic chair crowded around with crying babies and old people, when a man comes into the waiting room wheeling a gurney. He's wearing white coveralls and a gauze surgical mask.

The man has a buzzed haircut, and through the gauze mask he tells the whole room to get out. They need to evacuate this part of the hospital, he says. I go to ask if my grandma's okay, and the man grabs me around one skinny arm. The man's wearing latex gloves. While the old people and crying babies hurry down the hallway, edging past the gurney, this man holds me in the waiting room, asking if I'm Lisa Noonan, age seventeen, currently residing at 3438 West Crestwood Drive.

From the gurney, the man takes a blue bundle sealed in clear plastic and tears it open. Inside is a blue container suit, all plastic and nylon with zippers sewn up and down the front and back of it.

I ask again, about my grandma.

And the man with the gurney shakes out the blue container suit. He says to put it on, and we'll go see Grandma in Intensive Care. The suit, he says, is for my grandma's protection, and he holds it by the shoulders so I can step inside. A container suit is three layers of plastic, each layer sealed with zippers. It has built-in gloves and feet and a pointed hood with a window of clear plastic to see out. The most outside zipper goes up the back and locks, so you're trapped inside.

When I step out of my tennis shoes, the man picks them up with his latex gloves and seals them inside a plastic bag.

At school, the rumor was Miss Frasure's had a CAT scan that showed a brain tumor. The tumor was the size of a lemon, filled with some piss-yellow fluid. According to gossip, the tumor was still growing.

Just before I pull the hood shut, the gurney man gives me a little blue pill and says to let it dissolve under my tongue.

The pill tastes sweet. So sweet my mouth fills with spit I have to swallow.

The man says to get up on the gurney. He says to lay down with my head on the little white paper pillow, and then we'll go see my grandma.

I ask, is she going to be okay? My grandma, she raised me since I was eight years old. She's my mom's mom, and she came across the country to get me after my mom and dad both died. By then, I was laid out on the gurney, and the man was wheeling it down the hospital corridor. Through open doors, you could see all the beds were empty, the sheets thrown back to show the dents where sick people had been. In some rooms, the televisions still played music or people talking. Next to some beds, lunch trays still sat, steam rising off the tomato soup.

The man wheeled the gurney so fast the ceiling tiles started to blur, so fast that, laying there, I had to shut my eyes or I'd get sick.

The hospital public-address system kept saying, “Code Orange, East Wing, second floor . . . Code Orange, East Wing, second floor . . .”

Still, I was swallowing the sticky-sweet taste of that pill.

That little blue pill, Shirlee says just two of those would be a fatal overdose.

When I woke up, it was here, in this room with this view of Puget Sound, this wide-screen television, this clean, beige-tile bathroom. The intercom in the wall beside the bed. Some of my clothes and music from my room at home, they were packed in boxes sealed with shrink-wrap plastic. A camera had to be watching me, because, the moment I sat up in bed, the intercom said, “Good morning.”

My grandma was dead. Raymon was dead. Miss Frasure, my English teacher—dead. That was four Christmases back, but it might as well be a black-and-white TV rerun I watched a hundred years ago.

At The Orphanage, you lose track of time. According to the chart, I'm twenty-two years old. Old enough to drink beer, and I've only ever kissed a dead boy.

One, two, three days, and my life was over. I didn't even graduate from high school.

You build up a viral load to the point you can transmit the Type 1 Keegan virus, and don't expect you'll get a lawyer. Or a caseworker. Or an ombudsman. You end up on Columbia Island, and you can expect to stay in a decent hotelish room like at a franchise hotel, a Ramada Inn or a Sheraton, but for the rest of your life. The same room. The same view. The same bathroom. Room-service food. Cable-television movies. A brown bedspread. Two pillows. One brown recliner chair.

There's people locked up here, people who did just one wrong thing. They sat next to the wrong stranger on an airplane. Or they took a long elevator ride with another person they never even spoke to—then all they did was not die. There's lots of ways you can spend the rest of your life locked up here. Here being a little island in the middle of Puget Sound, in the state of Washington, the Columbia Island Naval Hospital.

Most of the people here, they arrived when they turned seventeen or eighteen years old. The staff doctor, Dr. Schumacher, says we were exposed to something when we were little, some virus or parasite that took years to build in our system. The day it hit the right viral load or blood-serum level, the people around us started to die.

That's when the Centers for Disease Control would notice a cluster of deaths, and the teams come throw you in a container suit and cart you here for the rest of your natural life.

Each resident at Columbia Island carries something different, Shirlee says. A unique strain of killer virus. Or a fatal parasite or bacteria. That's why they're, each of them, isolated. So they don't kill each other.

Still, Shirlee says, they get heat in the winter. Air conditioning in the summer. They get all their meals cooked for them, fish and vegetables, or ice cream, club sandwiches, anything within budget.

Come the hottest days of August, and Shirlee says the air conditioning alone makes her glad she works here.

Shirlee calls each resident a “blood cow.” In every resident suite, two long rubber arms come through the wall from under a mirror. The arms are this bulletproof kind of long rubber glove. Every couple of days, a light comes on behind the mirror to show a lab tech sitting there, he or she will reach through the wall with the rubber arms and take a blood sample, place the sample in a little airlock, then retrieve it safely on the other side.

It's when the light comes on, when the mirror in your suite turns into a window, then you can see the camera that's always there. Always watching. Recording you.

Shirlee, it's part of her job to herd the blood cows outside for some exercise.

Every few days, the staff lets the cows put on container suits. Inside the suit, all you can smell is powdery latex. Pick a flower or lay down in the grass, and all you can feel is latex. Inside the sealed hood, all you can hear is your own breathing. The other hospital residents, they throw around a Frisbee, always knowing the exact number of minutes they have left before Shirlee herds thems back inside. They're always aware of the sharpshooters with rifles, in case a resident wades into the water to make a break for freedom. Wearing a container suit with its self-contained oxygen system, you could walk the mucky bottom of Puget Sound all the way to downtown Seattle. The dark-blue shapes of ships crisscrossing the water, high above your head.

In case you're wondering how I got out . . .

“After that long underwater walk,” Miss Sneezy says, “my sinuses have never been the same.” And she wipes her nose sideways with one sleeve.

Out on Columbia Island, all of them outside on the hospital lawn, throwing a Frisbee back and forth, wearing their baggy blue container suits, they could've been a gang of stuffed animals. All blue, from head to foot. Sweating inside the layers of rubberized nylon and latex. Running and catching, all the time framed in the scope of some navy guy's rifle. It doesn't sound fun, but you want to cry when it's time to go back inside, to spend your life alone in your room.

The other residents, one girl has green eyes. A guy has brown eyes. With the container suits on, all you can see is somebody's eyes. The boy with the brown eyes, Shirlee says he's the other Type 1 Keegan carrier.

The new guy with the huge dick. She's seen it through his two-way mirror.

Shirlee says, next time I talk to Dr. Schumacher, I should ask about starting a breeding program. To see if we can give birth to a generation of babies immune to Type 1 Keegan. Another scary possibility is, this boy and me, we have different strains of the virus, and we'd just kill each other.

Or we'd have a healthy baby . . . and we'd kill it with our germs.

“Slow down,” Shirlee says. “Forget babies. Forget dying.” She says what's important is getting me deflowered.

This boy and me, the two of us locked up in a room, together. Both of us virgins. The video camera behind the mirror, watching, the staff hoping we'll breed a cure the government can patent. Those crafty drug-company people. Still, a cure wouldn't be bad.

And sex, that wouldn't be bad, either.

Shirlee says sometime The Orphanage should have a dance for the residents, but just the image of those baggy blue container suits, clutching each other and swaying to some pop music on a dance floor . . . nobody wants to see that.

Most times when I see Dr. Schumacher, I don't tell the doctor jack shit. The way I figure, I only have so many memories, and I don't want to use them up. Most of my best memories are of saving the world from evil space aliens or escaping on a jet boat from sexy Russian spies, but those aren't real memories. Those were movies. I forget how the girl doing that is a movie star.

Framed on the wall in my room, a sign says: Busy = Happy.

Shirlee says this same sign is in every resident's room. The lightbulbs in each room are full-spectrum lightbulbs that simulate natural sunlight, generating vitamin D in people's skin and keeping their mood up. Shirlee says the official term for each room is “resident suite.” Mine, for example, is “Resident Suite 6-B.” On all my charts and records, officially, I'm known as Resident 6-B.

As a parallel study, Shirlee says the data collected on residents here will be used to predict how people might live better in isolated, self-contained outer-space colonies.

Yeah, some days, Shirlee is full of useful information.

“Think of yourself,” Shirlee says, “as an astronaut living in a Ramada Inn on a planet only six miles southwest of Seattle.”

Shirlee, her voice coming over the intercom at night, she'll ask about my dad, how did my father get me put here. Then Shirlee will let go the button on her side, waiting for me to speak.

My old man, he didn't know enough for a college degree, but he knew how to make money. He knew guys who'd wait until the day you left on a week's vacation, then they'd move in with a crew and cut down a two-hundred-year-old black-walnut tree. They'd limb it and section it, right there in your front yard. They'd tell the neighbors you'd hired the work done. By the time you got home, your tree would be cut and milled and curing in some factory a dozen states away. By then it might even be black-walnut furniture.

This is the kind of smarts that scares the crap out of college people.

My old man, he had his maps. His treasure maps, he called them.

These treasure maps, they were from the 1930s, from the Great Depression. What people called the Works Project Administration, the government hired folks to go around and take notes about every abandoned cemetery in every county. Every state. Back when lots of these little cemeteries were going under the plow or about to be forgotten under blacktop. These old pioneer cemeteries, they were all that was left of towns that had disappeared from maps a hundred years before. Boom towns now crumbled and blown away. Or burned to ashes by forest fires. Gold mines that played out. Railroad spurs that shut down. All's that would be left is the little cemetery, a patch of weeds and fallen-down old headstones. The old man's treasure maps were the WPA maps, showing where to find each patch, how many graves it held, how the headstones would look.

Every summer I was out of school, me and the old man would follow these maps up into Wyoming or Montana, into the desert or the hills, where whole towns had vanished. Towns like New Keegan, Montana, where nothing's left except the tombstones. It was the kind of stuff that garden stores paid big money for in the city. In Seattle or Denver. San Francisco or Los Angeles. A load of hand-carved granite angels. Or sleeping dogs or little white marble lambs. People wanted something old and crusted with moss to put in their brand-new garden, to make their place look ancient. To look like they'd always had tons of money.

In New Keegan, not one of the tombstones had writing you could still read.

“Shaving cream,” my Dad told me. “Shaving cream or chalk. Goddamn fucking graveyard freaks.”

He told how people who loved to study tombstones, to read a faint inscription worn away by time and acid rain, they'd wipe shaving cream across the face of the tombstone. They'd shave off the extra with a piece of cardboard, leaving just the white in the engraving. This made the words and dates easy to read and photograph. What sucked is, shaving cream contains stearic acid. The residue these people left would eat the stone. Other tombstone junkies, they'd rub chalk on a tombstone, coloring the whole surface so the faint, engraved epitaph would stand out as darker. This chalk dust was plaster of Paris or gypsum, and rubbing it worked the dust into the invisible cracks and fissures of the tombstone. The next time it rained . . . the gypsum dust would soak up water and swell to twice its original size. The same way ancient Egyptians used wood wedges to split stone blocks for the pyramids, the swollen chalk dust would slowly explode the whole front off a tombstone.

All that stuff about stearic acid and gypsum and the Egyptian pyramids, it proves my dad wasn't an idiot.

He'd tell me, all these well-meaning cemetery folks, all they did was destroy what they claimed to love.

Still, it was nice, that last, best day with my dad on that hillside that used to be New Keegan, Montana. The hot sunshine baking the dead grass. The kind of brown lizards that would leave their squirming tail behind if you caught one.

If we could've read the headstones, we'd see how almost the entire town had died in one month. The first cluster of what doctors would call the Keegan virus. Rapid-onset viral brain tumors.

My dad sold that load of angels and lambs to a garden store in Denver. Driving home, he was already chewing aspirin and swerving the pickup truck all over the road. Him and my mom were both dead in the hospital before my grandma arrived.

After that, life calmed down for ten years. Until Miss Frasure and her brain tumor the size of a lemon. Until my viral load built up to make me infectious.

These days, the government can't kill me and they can't cure me. All they can do is damage control.

That new boy, with the dick, he's going to feel how I did when I first arrived: His family dead. Maybe half his school dead, if he was popular. Sitting alone in his room every day, he'll be scared, but full of hope for the cure the navy promised.

I can show him the ropes. Calm him down. Help him adjust to life here at The Orphanage.

That last good day of my life, my dad drove his pickup all the way from Montana to Denver, Colorado, where he knew a store that sold antique garden shit. Cast-iron deer and concrete birdbaths crusted with moss. Most of this stuff was stolen. This store guy gave him cash, and helped unload the angels off the truck. The store guy had a kid, a little boy who came out the back door of the store and stood in the alley to watch the work.

Talking to Shirlee over the intercom, I would press the button and ask if this new resident . . . did he have curly red hair and brown eyes?

Was he about my age? I'd ask if he was from Denver, and did his dead folks use to run a garden-antique store?