A hot desert wind blew in through the shattered door. Looking out, I realized that the power failure had killed the garden’s sprinkler system, so the plants were doomed, too. But it wasn’t the fruit trees I was worried about.
“We blew it, didn’t we?” I said, as Wise came up behind me. “They’re all going to thaw out.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in the resurrection.”
Wise crouched down, pulled the hood off Carlton’s moon suit, and laid a pair of fingers on Carlton’s jugular. “God damn it! I told you we wanted him alive!”
“He is alive. He’s just sleeping.”
“Yeah, sleeping like those corpsicles back there.”
“No…I had it on stun, see?” I turned the gun to show him, but the dial was on the MI setting. “Oh shit…”
“Oh shit what?”
“This must be his gun. I picked it up back there, and…Christ, I must have confused it with mine.”
“Good job.”
“Look, I’m sorry. It was an accident.”
“Yeah, you’re prone to those, aren’t you?” He stood up. “All right, let’s get out of here.”
“What about him?”
“Leave him. He’s useless to us now.”
“And what about…?” I gestured in the direction of the cryostasis rooms.
“Nothing we can do.”
“The organization doesn’t have some kind of crack repair team that could get the power back online? What about the Good Samaritans, isn’t this right up their alley?”
“Nothing we can do,” Wise repeated. “Now come on.” He stepped through the door into the dying garden. “We can’t stay here.”
white room (vi)
“ARE YOU READY TO TALK ABOUT what happened to Phil?” the doctor asks.
Yet another evidence folder lies open on the table, turned so she can read the top page of the police report inside. But she refuses to look at it. She hunches back in her chair, keeping her eyes downcast, fixed on the cuffed hands in her lap.
“Jane,” the doctor prompts her.
“It’s a free country,” she finally says. “You talk about whatever you like.”
“All right…Let’s start with what didn’t happen. Your brother wasn’t swept up in some comical marijuana raid. And despite what you seemed to be suggesting in our last session—”
“I didn’t suggest anything.”
“—he wasn’t in an accident. Your mother thought you had done something to him—that’s what she told the 911 operator when she first reported him missing, and it’s why she attacked you in the police station. But she was wrong, too. According to witnesses, your brother left the community garden in the company of a man whose description matched that of a recently paroled felon, a convicted child molester and suspected child murderer named John Doyle.
“A child molester,” the doctor says. “But I doubt the police would use that expression in front of a fourteen-year-old girl, particularly one who was wracked with guilt. They’d probably just refer to him as a bad man…or a bad monkey.”
She still won’t look up, but her lips curl in a bitter smile. “Theory number 257,” she says. “Jane’s psychotic break begins with euphemism.”
“Well you tell me, Jane: is it just a coincidence that all your missions for the organization somehow involve threats to children or young men?”
She doesn’t answer.
“Something else I found interesting…” He lays a hand on the folder. “The reporting officer: Buster Keaton Friendly. That really was his name…But you’ve been lying about yours, haven’t you? Or at least, not telling the whole truth. Charlotte is your middle name. Your full name is Jane Charlotte—”
“Don’t,” she says, at last raising her eyes to meet his. “Just don’t. That’s not my name. She made that very clear.”
“She?”
“My mother. Last thing she told me before she sent me packing, I wasn’t ever to use that name again. Which was ridiculous, since it wasn’t her name either, it was my goddamned father’s, and she hated him almost as much as she hated me…But that didn’t matter, she said. What mattered was it was Phil’s name, so it couldn’t be mine. She said she’d kill me if she ever caught me using it: ‘I’ll choke the life out of you,’ quote unquote. So no, I wasn’t lying.”
“OK. But the story you first told me about your brother and the marijuana patch. You do acknowledge now that that was false.”
Sighing: “Yeah, I acknowledge it.”
“And the other encounters with your brother over the years—his visits with you in Siesta Corta, and your relationship once you’d returned to San Francisco—”
“That stuff was all true.”
“Jane…”
“I mean, OK, he wasn’t really there, but the conversations we had, the advice he gave me…Look, I knew Phil. I might not have liked the little shit, but I knew him, he was my brother, and I know what kind of person he’d have grown up to be, if…So those conversations I told you about, they were genuine. They were accurate.”
“But he wasn’t really there.”
“Yeah, all right, no.”
“Because he’s dead.”
“No!” She bristles. “That’s not true.”
“Jane…”
“Even the police could never say that. They never found a body. They never found anything, and Doyle—”
“Jane, the man was implicated in the killing of two other children. I’m sure you want to believe your brother survived, but—”
“No! I mean, yes, I wanted to believe that, and for years belief was all I had, but now, now I know. Phil’s alive.”
“How do you know that?”
“For Christ’s sake,” she says, “what do you think this whole story I’ve been telling you is about?”
“You found your brother?”
“Yes.”
“In Las Vegas.”
“Yes…Only I didn’t find him, exactly, I mean I haven’t seen him, but I know he’s here. And I know what really happened to him.”
“And what did happen to him?”
“Well, Doyle took him. That part’s true. And it’s probably also true that Doyle wanted to kill Phil, the same way he killed those other kids. But he wasn’t allowed to.”
“Who stopped him?”
“The other bad monkeys, of course.”
“The other bad monkeys.”
“The ones who put him up to it,” she says. “The anti-organization. The Troop.”
Bad Monkeys, Inc
TRUE WAS WAITING FOR US AT A roadside diner just outside the Vegas city limits. A waitress with a name tag that read HI THERE! I’M JANE! took us to his booth, then hovered while Wise decided between the blueberry and the chocolate-chip pancakes. I spun my wheels, impatient to ask the question that had been gnawing at me for the past three days; but when the waitress finally left us alone, True beat me to the punch.
“It’s time we had a talk about your brother,” he said.
“Fine. Let’s talk. Let’s start with the fact that you know about him. You’ve known all along, haven’t you?”
“Of course.”
“And you never thought to mention it? Like when you were recruiting me, maybe? ‘By the way, one of the reasons we think you’ll be really good at hunting down scumbags is because one of them took your brother.’”
“That is one of the reasons we thought you’d be good at it, as a matter of fact.”
“Then why not say anything?”
“If I’d told you we knew about your brother’s kidnapping, you’d have wanted to hear what else we knew. Then I would have had to lie, which I don’t like to do, or put you off, which would have made us all unhappy. You’re a difficult enough person to deal with when your wishes are being granted.”