1.
“What happened to your hand?” Mari asks, looking down.
Wade followed her glance, and saw that she was looking at the bandage he'd wrapped around it after dousing the stab-wound with cheap alcohol, which he'd also used to treat the pain.
“I don't really know. I blacked out while on that case with the revivalists.”
Early morning light filtered into the main room of Unreal City. It was early morning, and she had just come in to count money out of the safe in the back room. Wade, who had been drinking his morning coffee until she had questioned him, sat further down the bar from her.
She walked over and grabbed his wrist, turning his hand over and untying the one-handed knot he'd put in the bandage to keep it in place.
“How the hell isn't this infected?” she asked.
“I disinfected it,” he replied, lamely.
She leans down to sniff at it.
“With whiskey? Son of a bitch, Wade. Get your ass to the hospital.”
He shrugged, and picked up his coffee.
“I don't have health insurance,” he said.
“It's in the licensing that Algernon made you do.”
He looked up at her, “What? Really? Awesome. Where's the hospital?”
Mari pinched the bridge of her nose, and sighed in exasperation.
“Come on, I'll drive you.”
2.
GNOSTICS, n. A sect of philosophers who tried to engineer a fusion between the early Christians and the Platonists. The former would not go into the caucus and the combination failed, greatly to the chagrin of the fusion managers.
Wade walked with his shoulders hunched together, and his eyes glancing around, nervously.
Obviously, he didn't like hospitals; they reminded him of his uncle Georges, who had died of pancreatic cancer last May. He carried with him his bag, and in it was his copy of On the Road Georges had given him, almost a decade ago.
He thumbed through it, while they sat in the waiting room:
The car was swaying as Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the [blank tranced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars] that had been lurking in our souls all our lives.
The book told him in delphic typeface.
They waited for the doctor; every now and then, Mari would glance over and read a snippet from the book, shake her head, and stare again at the wall clock.
Eventually, a nervous intern in mint-green scrubs approached them.
“Mr. Larkin?” he asked.
“Yes?” Wade responded, standing, unfolding himself upward.
The intern didn't look at him, but kept his head tilted to the side, presenting a pale left cheek to Wade's straightforward look.
“Your hand is injured? Would you walk this way?” the intern asked, and proceeded out of the waiting room, down the hall. Wade followed.
Wade was sat down in room B72, and left to wait. The sound of people moving around outside filtered into the room, and he examined the shadows of the venetian blinds move across the medical charts and hygiene posters that lined up along the walls, multiracial Dicks-and-Janes for the contemporary world smiling out at him from posters on the walls. The posters encouraged a number of tests, from venereal disease to mammograms to EKG and CT scans.
Briefly he thought about his parents, who were losing their home, but had encouraged him not to burden himself with their problems. He felt sick to his stomach from that, but he didn't let it perturb his face.
He was, after all, going to have to explain the knife wound in his left hand.
A man in a white coat, who looked like nothing so much as a carbon copy of Colonel Sanders wearing a tartan tie, entered the room. The doctor looked at Wade with gray eyes, and smiles congenially, in a way that had been calculated to have a statistically significant calming effect of the patient's mood.
“Now, Mr...Larking,” the Doctor said, his voice disappointingly lacking a southern drawl.
“Larkin,” Wade supplied.
“Larkin. It seems that you have a knife wound in your hand?”
Wade nodded, and looked down at his left hand, cradled in his right.
“That's a fairly nasty cut. For legal purposes, I must ask how you got it.”
Wade was nodding before the doctor finished. He had run through his options, attempting to determine whether there would be legal ramifications or police actions should he tell the truth.
The old stand-byes, “I fell down some stairs,” “I cut myself shaving,” “A kitchen accident,” and “I was drunk and playing mumblety-peg,” were all thrown out, for obvious reasons.
He had no reason to suspect lying was necessary, but it had presented itself to him as an option.
Reaching into his wallet, he laid it flat across his right thigh and unfolded it, producing the card that stated that he was a certified private eye, working with the Heller Agency, and that his insurance was in order. He prayed the insurance was in order, otherwise the trip would be worthless, and he would end up dousing his hand in whiskey every night; last night it had been Jim Beam, in a week, the expenses would force him to downgrade to Wild Turkey, or even Old Grandad.
“I was injured while on the job.”
“On the job, of course,” the doctor said, examining the card, shifting it back and forth before his coke-bottle glasses, “Do you have workman's comp?”
“No. My insurance is in order, though.”
“In order...though you're sure you don't have comp? Too bad. Well, let's look at that hand.”
Wade held it out, and the doctor looked at it closely, moving it back and forth, up and down, before his eyes, just as he had with the card.
“It looks like a clean cut. No damage to the bone.”
The doctor sniffed, crinkling his nose, and making a sour face behind his regal, snowy white beard.
“Have you been drinking?” the doctor asked.
“I attempted to disinfect it with whiskey?”
“With whiskey?” the doctor asked, surprised, “That's only forty percent alcohol. You've been putting carbolic acid in your wound, as well as countless other organic compounds; it's not necessarily the best thing for a sterilization like this.”
He smelled the wound again.
“Is that Jim Beam?” the doctor asked. Wade nodded, “perhaps you should try something with a higher proof. Try rubbing alcohol.”
“It was also an anesthetic,” Wade said.
“Anesthetic? Then Grain Alcohol. You must take better care of yourself, Mr. Larking.”
“Larkin,” Wade supplied.
“Larkin. Now, I'm going to have to inform the police, but we'll get you all patched up and put you on an antibiotic.”
“Great,” Wade said, smiling, “I'm glad it's so simple.”
“Simple? Do you know how many stitches that wound is going to take? It's not simple, by any stretch of imagination.”
Wade nodded.
“Now, when how long ago was your last drink, Mr. Larkin?”
“Larking. I mean last night,” Wade said, momentarily squeezing his eyes shut and shaking his head.
“Last night. Good to know. You're going to have to stay off the sauce while you're on the medication. Either an anti-inflammatory or antibiotics. Drinking with pills isn't a good idea.”
It's fun, though, Wade thought, but didn't voice his opinion on the matter.
“Now, we'll get an intern in here to patch you up in a moment. You just stay right there, while I go and contact the authorities.”
The doctor left the room, and Wade was left on his own, again. He laid back on the bed, and waited.
When they arrived back at Unreal City, Mari proceeded in, and Wade headed to the convenience store to buy a pack of cigarettes. He still wore an ace bandage around his injured hand; the stitches had indeed been an unpleasant experience; less a pain, but more of an itch.
His fingers felt stiff, and meaning that he had to pay using just his right hand; he laid his wallet on the counter, took out the six dollars he needed to pay for his purchase, and depositing everything into his pockets piecemeal.
Returning, he saw a black shape dart into an open window higher up on the building. Examining the window for a moment, he saw it close.
Wade went into the tavern at roughly the same time that there was a crash and he saw Algernon fall down the stairs.
The older detective half-lay, half-sat, grimacing and cursing:
“Son of a syphilitic whore. Jesus. Augh, mother of twelve bastards, goddammit,” he hissed, a long litany of creative invectives intermixed with fairly standard blasphemies.
Wade walked to him, picked up his boss's crutch, and offered him a hand.
“No. No. I think I'm going to just sit here for a while,” Algernon protested.
“Hurt your leg, again?” Wade asked.
“Banged it up, but I don't think it rebroke.”
“Anything else broken?”
“Nah. Mind just setting my crutch down, I think I'll be alright.”
Wade followed Algernon's instructions, and glanced over. Mari was watching the proceedings from her vantage point behind the bar, her arms crossed underneath her breasts.
“Slip?” she asked.
“Nah. I think I tripped over something, but it could be my own damn fault,” Algernon said, before looking up at Wade.
“Mind checking? Nothing seems to have fallen,”
Wade went up the stairs, and Algernon slowly levered himself upright on his crutch, “Can barely take a piss like this,” he muttered.
“Rent's due in five days,” Mari noted.
“Good to know,” Algernon said, hobbling toward the bar and setting himself down, “we've been doing better than usual since Wade got in. Kid works fast.”
Mari smiled.
“But if you didn't injure anything, you should be back up and back to work, soon. Going to keep him on, then?” she asked.
Algernon thought for a moment, as Mari poured him a cup of boiling hot, tar-like coffee. He let it cool for a moment before he took his first, tentative sip.
“Not sure. Probably; he's not registered to carry a gun, but he can take care of himself.”
“Got stabbed on that last job, apparently.”
“Really?” Algernon asked, “might have to give him a bonus. Cover the copay, at least. I've never had an employee, how do you handle it, when they get injured?”
She shrugged.
“Copay would be a good start. A bit of extra cash to soothe the ego, maybe. He actually disinfected and bandaged it, himself. Not sure if it's smart, but he didn't seem too worked up.”
Algernon shrugged, “I suppose I'll have to do something nice for him.”
3.
The statue of the healer-god stood before the VCU medical building; raindrops clung to its marble head and its chest, and it was lit with the cool white glow of the street lamps that lined the concrete paths of the campus. A lone figure stood before it, gazing up at the statue. Horn-rimmed glasses reflected the figure, and a stout cane rested on the ground.
Victor turned, and stared down the steep hill, down toward where the inky band of the river, ribbed with mud that held the seasonal dwellings of Valley city's poorest of the poor. His face held an expression of great disdain.
His eyes darkened, and his tone became accusatory.
“...And as for you, River, there will be a day when you will flow with blood more than water.
“And dead bodies will be stacked higher than the dams. And he who is dead will not be mourned as much as he who is alive...”
He turned to the statue, and whispered: “Asclepius, why are you weeping?”
For a long, drawn out moment, Victor stared up at the statue, his dark hair becoming plastered to his forehead with rain and sweat. His face faltered, his eyes became frightened, and he licked his lips before releasing a similarly long, drawn out breath.
“Must I be damned? Must I? Through no fault of my own--?”
He stopped speaking, when he became aware of the figure approaching him, head down, hands in pockets. A man speeding from one subjectively important point in space and time to one of greater personal import.
Victor did not know him, but hated him on the spot. He smiled.
“Good evening,” he said, “Do you know who this is a statue of?”
Cincinnatus looked up, and stops.
“Er...I think it's Hippocrates. Some ancient Greek doctor.”
Victor shook his head, unbelieving.
“It's Asclepius,” Victor said, in mock wonder, “the greek god of healing.”
Cincinnatus looked up at the statue, considering. He thought back to his reading, and nodded, realization showing up on his face.
“He was mentioned in one of the books I read today. The Nag Hammadi. A gnostic text.”
Victor looked at him, a calculating look in his eye.
“It's in Codex VI,” he said.
Cincinnatus stared back at Victor, a questioning look in his eye.
“Do I know you?” he asked.
His question went unanswered; Victor's cane met with his right temple. Cincinnatus fell to the ground, moaning. Victor struck him again, stilling him.
Checking the fallen man's pulse, Victor nodded, satisfied, and reached into his jacket. He produced and uncapped a syringe filled with a luminescent liquid. It was marked “53/72.”
“Caim rhymes with chime,” Victor muttered to himself, kneeling by Cincinnatus, “and that means your time is up.”
He rolled Cincinnatus onto his side, and inserted the syringe into the other man's neck, where it met with the bulge of his cranium. The needle slid in, meeting resistance as it went between the first and second cervical vertebrae.
He jabbed it into the spinal cord, and angled it upward, toward the pyramidal decussation. When the long needle was in as far as it would go, he pressed the plunger in.
Cincinnatus moaned as the liquid was injected into his brain.
4.
Unreal City was almost empty, that evening. No customers were left by ten; it seemed that there was an odd propensity for stools to break, for glasses to shatter when picked up, and for the patrons to sneer at each other.
Bad luck of the worst sort.
But sometimes, when Wade was considering the second shadow he'd acquired somewhere along the way, he would see something flit through it. A shadow like a large bird, which would be invisible until it passed through, and invisible after, but was disturbingly real when he caught it from the corner of his eye.
When he watched for it, the shape would never materialize.
Eventually, he went to sit at the bar with Algernon, who was eating a dinner of lentil soup, rice, and stuffed sopaipilla. Behind the bar, Mari was cleaning the remaining glasses; almost a third of them had broken during the evening.
“Something weird's going on,” he noted.
“Tell me about it,” Algernon replied, pulling a chicken bone from his sopaipilla, “normally, Mo puts the bones in my soup.”
Wade glanced around.
Mari finished with the glasses, and upended the large pickle jar that she kept behind the counter into the sink; the last one had been sold earlier that day, and it was time to recycle the glass.
“I've been seeing something out of the corner of my eye.”
“Are you sure it isn't a side effect of the prescription?” Mari asked him, finishing her cleaning, and stepping around the bar with a broom to collect the shattered bits of glass.
“I haven't taken any, yet,” Wade informed her.
“Look” Wade said, pointing at his second shadow, “it's always inside there.”
Algernon picked up the sopaipilla and tore a bit of the fried dough free and chewed it for a moment. Wade conspicuously looked away.
After a count of almost thirty seconds, Algernon jumped.
“You're right,” he muttered, and reached into his jacket. He pulled out his gun, and cocked it.
“Not insi--!” Mari yelled. Algernon fired, and hit something; Wade grabbed the large pickle jar from behind the counter, and lunged at where he had heard the thing hit the wall.
Landing on his knees, he slid the last few feet and slammed the jar down on top of the thing.
“What the hell is it?” Algernon asked.
“Look at what you did to my floor!” Mari yelled.
Wade looked down at the trapped figure; it was roughly the size of an infant or large cat, but was shaped more like a monkey with bat-wings. Its human-like face stared up at him with malevolent yellow eyes.
“It's a refugee from the land of Oz,” Wade deadpanned.
Algernon got up and shambled over, his crutch “clunk”ing on the ground repeatedly. Mari came over as well, and both looked at it; a hole had been torn in one of its wings by Algernon's gunshot.
“Mari, go get me those big tongs Mo uses for removing platters from the oven,” Algernon said, “and a newspaper.”
“What?” she asked, before remembering herself, “hey, fuck you! I want that thing out of my bar!”
Algernon looked at her flatly.
“That's what the newspaper is for. Wade's holding it down, and I don't have enough free hands.”
Dubiously, she left to retrieve the items. The thing in the jar hissed at them, revealing needle-like teeth.
“Let me go!” it screeched.
“Shit! It can talk!” Algernon said, jumping.
“Apparently,” Wade replied, examining it.
When Mari returned, they tried to slip the newspaper underneath the jar, still folded into as thick as it could go without making it awkward to hold.
The thing resisted, but then Algernon showed it his gun again, and it cooperated.
“Take it up to the office, Wade. I want to ask this thing a few questions,” Algernon said, clacking the tongs in view of the creature.
Its eyes took on a look of strangely human terror.
5.
“What are you doing here?” Algernon shouted at the strange creature. As instructed, Wade plunged it into the sink again and held it under for a count of five.
He was holding the tongs apparently used in the kitchen to remove pans from the back of the oven. Wade hadn't known that Unreal City served enough food to warrant such tools.
When he pulled it above the water, it slumped there, looking for all the world like a half-drowned monkey with a pair of cheap bat wings glued to it.
“Answer me, or you go in the toilet,” Algernon said, lighting a cigarette. He sat on the aforementioned toilet, his crutch laying against the wall.
“This is making me feel like a real bully, Algernon,” Wade said.
“What? This bastard flies in here, trips me up on the stairs, and breaks some of Mari's glasses, and you're worried about getting it wet?”
He produced his gun, and pointed it at the creature, who screamed and struggled.
“Don't shoot him,” Wade protested, moving it out of the way, but Algernon tracked it with the barrel of the gun, and Wade had to keep moving it.
Eventually, the creature released a thin jet of urine on the tile floor.
Algernon and Wade watched it splash down to the ground and it watched them staring.
“You're cleaning that up,” Algernon said.
“Oh, goody,” Wade muttered, in reply. He looked at the monkey-thing, “are you going to answer any of our questions?”
“V...V...V...” it began.
“What's that? Wade, bring it over here, but not close enough to bite me or piss on me.”
He pivoted, bringing the tiny, bat-winged thing over to orbit Algernon's head.
“Victor...” the thing hissed.
“Who's Victor?”
“Ca...” it began to cough. The skin around its earlier gunshot wound was red and puffy, making that wing a useless burden instead of a means of conveyance.
“What?”
“Caver. Changed me...”
Algernon looked at the small creature, who was slumped and struggling to breathe.
“Wade, let up a little bit,” he ordered, and then turned back to the impish thing, “Changed you?”
“Made me this. Gave me this stupid, useless body.”
Algernon looked it in the face, a serious expression on his own.
“What were you before?”
“...Who...”
“Who were you before?”
“San...chez. Sayid San...”
It stopped moving, and urinated again. Algernon had shifted, and he watched as it dripped down onto his foot. His expression was unreadable, solid as if carved from oak.
“Well. Isn't that a mindfuck?”
Algernon took the body, and dropped it in the small trashcan, with a handful of beer cans and used adhesive bandages, pulled it out and tied it shut.
“There. That's your responsibility, now.”
“What? We're just going to throw him out in the garbage?” Wade asked.
His employer shrugged.
“That's your choice. Not my responsibility,” he levered himself up, and stumped out into his office, “I'm going home. See you in the morning.”
He turned the light off, leaving Wade in the bathroom, holding the garbage bag full of dead imp.