He was scared now, though, that was for damn sure. All gloved-up like he was handling nuclear waste, Kowalski was poking the blue square of paper at him on the end of a pair of tweezers he’d probably used to pull his nose hairs out that morning.
Street shit. Even that didn’t put the fear into him. It was Kowalski’s eyes. The doctor looked crazy, bug-shit, a kind of hungry, desperate crazy. The monkey on his back-the addiction, the need, the lust, the whatever-had been working the doctor over.
For half a second Dylan thought of refusing the acid, of getting up and running out. He was bigger than the doctor. Kowalski couldn’t stop him.
He couldn’t stop Kowalski. Doctors were gods at Drummond. They did what they wanted with the kids, whatever they wanted. Dylan pinched the paper from the tweezers and popped it in his mouth. What the hell? It had to be better than electroshock.
He dry-swallowed, smiled slowly, and said, “Thanks, Doc. The warden know you’re my drug dealer now?”
Kowalski sat down on the edge of his chair, hitched it a couple of inches closer to the couch, and leaned forward.
The doctor was out; the man on the chair was not a psychiatrist or a medical professional. He was scarcely even a man. He was a big fat zero waiting for something to come make him count, fill up the hole.
Welcome to monster world, Doc.
“You are going to fucking remember,” Kowalski said, the obscenity jarring not only because it was the first time Dylan had heard him use anything stronger than “heck” or “darn” but because the word was uttered with the same smooth, pseudocaring voice Kowalski used when he was shrinking kids in front of visitors.
“You are going to fucking remember every whack,” he said, then leaned back and waited.
“Eighty-one,” Dylan said.
“Is the LSD taking effect?” Kowalski checked his watch, as if he genuinely thought he could time street-drug reactions.
“Forty, done. Father, forty-one,” Dylan said to remind Kowalski of the Lizzy Borden poem.
“It’s starting,” the doctor said.
What a stupid fuck. Dylan could say or do anything he damn well pleased, and the fool would write it off to the acid. “Your beard’s on fire.”
“Ahh,” said Kowalski with satisfaction.
“You ever drop acid, Doc?”
“I… I have taken it experimentally.”
Kowalski was lying again. He wanted to seem cool for some reason, wanted to impress a teenage axe murderer. How pathetic was that?
“Good thing you got lab stuff. That street shit’s got some kinky side effects. A kid in detention over in St. Paul got hold of some. His brother said it was pure angel dust. This kid, he’s like Superman all of a sudden. Ripped the door off its hinges. Then ripped the face off a guard.”
Kowalski’s skin paled.
Be scared, you piece of shit, Dylan thought, and enjoyed his petty victory. Meanness and fear were the only kind of power left to Drummond’s inmates.
The doctor pushed his chair back the three inches he’d infringed upon.
“Okay, Dylan, we’ve got work to do. Today, we’re going to go back year by year until we get to the night of the murders. Are you ready to start?”
He was talking in the voice of a TV hypnotist, dreamy and smarmy. It didn’t strike Dylan as funny. It creeped him out. The whole thing, saying fuck, threatening-and there was no way it wasn’t a threat; people on the outside might mistake it but a kid in juvie, never-then acting like everything was normal, was majorly creeping Dylan out. Anxiety, the scalp-crawling, bone-breaking kind he’d learned in the courtroom, started pouring into him, freezing his blood.
Shit. Not on acid, he begged the cosmos. This crap on acid, and a guy could live in la-la land for good.
“You don’t fuck with me, I don’t fuck with you,” Dylan said desperately.
The doctor had no idea what he was talking about. “That’s right,” he said soothingly, doing Dr. Kildare now instead of a hypnotist on Ed Sullivan.
Kowalski’s left eye snapped from gray to green, then flashed red. It was happening. “Jesus,” Dylan breathed and wondered how many hits were on that scrap of blue.
“Close your eyes,” the doctor crooned.
Dylan did, not because he was told to but to shut out the red eye and whatever else was to come. It didn’t help. The colors were in his mind.
“Go back.” Papers rustled like snakes uncoiling. One began to uncoil in Dylan’s skull. He didn’t see it; he felt it. Great scaling scales sliding over one another. Then he saw it: blue sparks in the black, sparks struck from the snake’s back as the huge metallic sheets of its skin slid over each other. He opened his eyes.
“Close,” Kowalski murmured.
“Fuck you.” The last letters of the word “you” trailed out of Dylan’s mouth in smoke rings and broke apart around the doctor’s face. Around the still-red left eye. Dylan closed his eyes. Better the snake within than the one without. Panic was growing inside him along with the snake. Eventually it would be too big for his cranium and the bones would shatter, splatter out.
“Good boy,” Kowalski said. More rustling. Then the doctor began to read from his notes. “You remember going to trial. Go there now. Go back to your trial. Are you there?”
“No.” Dylan forced his eyes open. Stared at the doctor’s eye. It cooled to gray. He was going to be alright.
Before the thought could stop the rising storm of panic, the psychiatrist’s face melted and reformed into that of the judge but wrong, pulpy; bits of it could fall off and drip onto the floor. “Shit,” Dylan whispered, then said, “I’m guilty,” because that was what he’d said when he was eleven.
Judge Kowalski smiled. The snake rustled and sparked. “Gooooo oooood,” the judge said with the o’s flowing out of his mouth in pinks and greens. “Go back to the night it happened.”
“Murder,” Dylan said. The word was red, blood red. It was such a cliché, he laughed. The wall behind Judge Kowalski, the one with the bad painting Dylan had grown familiar with during years on the couch, leaned in until it was almost touching Kowalski’s head. “Duck,” Dylan said.
“You’re seeing ducks?”
“I wasn’t.” But now two of them flitted past the corner of his eye.
“Forget the ducks.” The judge was annoyed. He looked around, maybe for a gavel. Grabbed up snake pages instead. They slithered through his hands, making blue sparks.
Spawn of the snake coiling in Dylan’s brain. The wall came closer. The door on the adjacent wall leaned in to meet it. Dylan put out his hands to hold them back.
“You had the flu the night before. Remember?” The judge sounded peevish, and the peeve scoured the judginess from Kowalski’s face. He was just Kowalski again.
“Goooooooood,” Dylan said and watched his own o’s flutter out and break like bubbles against the wall.
“Go back,” Kowalski intoned, remembering he was on television.
Dylan sank into the couch. The worn cushions rose up to embrace him, pushing his outstretched arms forward into the position of a man about to do a half gainer. “Diving in,” Dylan said and looked down. The floor rippled wetly. He wasn’t far gone enough to jump. “I don’t think I can fly yet,” he said seriously. To him this was a good sign.
“Go back,” the judge ordered. “Your mom put you to bed. She put you to bed. Can you see the bed?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Dylan tried to explain. Acid wasn’t like that. It did what it did. “I’m just along for the ride.”
“Your mom put you to bed,” Judge Kowalski went on inexorably. “You had on”-rustle, spark, slither-“flannel pajamas with cowboys and Indians on them.”
Dylan remembered those pajamas. Really remembered them. He hadn’t thought about them, not ever, and now they were on him, soft, and warm, and smelling like home. Like soap and fresh air. Cowboys on horseback, little and perfect, galloped across his thighs and his chest. He didn’t so much see as feel them. Flannel and soft and purring. Ginger the cat, purring. She was on the bed. A ginger-colored cat, she purred like a machine gun rattling. He reached out and put his hand on her. No cat. Couch.