Every few seconds Orin wiped the steam of his breath away from the thick glass to see what the faces were doing.
His foot really was hurt, and the remains of whatever had made him fall asleep so hard really were making him sick to his stomach, and in sum this experience was pretty clearly not one of his bad dreams, but Orin, #71, was in deep denial about its not being a dream. It was like the minute he’d come to and found himself inside a huge inverted tumbler he’d opted to figure: dream. The stilted amplified voice that came periodically through the small screen or vent above him, demanding to know Where Is The Master Buried, was surreal and bizarre and inexplicable enough to Orin to make him gratefuclass="underline" it was the sort of surreal disorienting nightmarish incomprehensible but vehement demand that often gets made in really bad dreams. Plus the bizarre anxiety of not being able to get the adoring Subject to acknowledge anything he said through the glass. When the speaker’s screen slid back, Orin looked away from the glass’s faces and up, figuring that they were going to do something even more surreal and vehement that would really nail down the undeniable dream-status of the whole experience.
Mile. Luria P-----, who disdained the subtler aspects of technical interviews and had lobbied simply to be given a pair of rubber gloves and two or three minutes alone with the Subject’s testicles (and who was not really Swiss), had predicted accurately what the Subject’s response would be when the speaker’s screen was withdrawn and the sewer roaches began pouring blackly and shinily through, and as the Subject splayed itself against the tumbler’s glass and pressed its face so flat against the absurd glass’s side that the face changed from green to stark white, and, much muffled, shrieked at them ‘Do it to her! Do it to her!’ Luria P-----inclined her head and rolled her eyes at the A.F.R. leader, whom she had long regarded as something of a ham.
Human beings came and went. An R.N. felt his forehead and yanked her hand back with a yelp. Somebody down the hall was jabbering and weeping. At one point Chandler F., the recently graduated nonstick-cookware salesman, seemed to be there in the classic resident-confiteor position, his chin on his hands on the bedside crib-railing. The room’s light was a glowing gray. The Ennet House House Manager was there, fingering the place her missing eyebrow’d been, trying to explain something about how Pat M. hadn’t come because she and Mr. M.’d had to kick Pat’s little girl out of the house for using something synthetic again, and was in a too shaky place spiritually to even leave home. Gately felt physically hotter than he’d ever felt. It felt like a sun in his head. The crib-type railings got tapered on top and writhed a little, like flames. He imagined himself on the House’s aluminum platter with an apple in his mouth, his skin glazed and crispy. The M.D. that looked age twelve appeared with others wreathed in mist and said Up it to 30 q 2 and Let’s Try Doris,[385] that the poor son of a bitch was burning down. He wasn’t talking to Gately. The M.D. was not addressing Don Gately. Gately’s only conscious concern was Asking For Help to refuse Demerol. He kept trying to say addict. He remembered being young on the playground and telling Maura Duffy to look down her shirt and spell attic. Somebody else said Ice Bath. Gately felt something rough and cool on his face. A voice that sounded like his own brain-voice with an echo said to never try and pull a weight that exceeds you. Gately figured he might die. It wasn’t calm and peaceful like alleged. It was more like trying to pull something heavier than you. He heard the late Gene Fackelmann saying to get a load of this. He was the object of much bedside industry. A brisk clink of I.V. bottles overhead. Slosh of bags. None of the overhead voices talking to him. His input unrequired. Part of him hoped they were putting Demerol in his I.V without him knowing. He gurgled and mooed, saying addict. Which was the truth, that he was, he knew. The Crocodile that liked to wear Hanes, Lenny, that at the podium liked to say ‘The truth will you set you free, but not until it’s done with you.’ The voice down the hall was weeping like its heart would break. He imagined the A.D.A. with his hat off earnestly praying Gately would live so he could send him to M.D.C.-Walpole. The harsh sound he heard up close was the tape around his unshaved mouth getting ripped off him so quick he hardly felt it. He tried to avoid projecting how his shoulder would feel if they started pounding on his chest like they pound on dying people’s chests. The intercom calmly dinged. He heard conversing people in the hall passing the open door and stopping for a second to look in, but still conversing. It occurred to him if he died everybody would still exist and go home and eat and X their wife and go to sleep. A conversing voice at the door laughed and told somebody else it was getting harder these days to tell the homosexuals from the people who beat up homosexuals. It was impossible to imagine a world without himself in it. He remembered two of his Beverly High teammates beating up a so-called homosexual kid while Gately walked away, wanting no part of either side. Disgusted by both sides of the conflict. He imagined having to become a homosexual in Walpole. He imagined going to one meeting a week and having a shepherd’s crook and parrot and playing cribbage for a cigarette a point and lying on his side in his bunk in his cell facing the wall, jacking off to the memory of tits. He saw the A.D.A. with his head bowed and his hat against his chest.
Somebody overhead asked somebody else if they were ready, and somebody commented on the size of Gately’s head and gripped Gately’s head, and then he felt an upward movement deep inside that was so personal and horrible he woke up. Only one of his eyes would open because the floor’s impact had shut the other one up plump and tight as a sausage. His whole front side of him was cold from lying on the wet floor. Fackelmann around somewhere behind him was mumbling something that consisted totally of g’s.
His open eye could see the luxury apt. window. It was dawn outside, a glowing gray, and birds had plenty to say out in the bare trees; and at the big window was a face and a windmill of arms. Gately tried to adjust the vertical hold on his vision. Pamela Hoffman-Jeep was at the window. Their apt. was on the second floor of the luxury complex. She was up in a tree right outside the window, standing on a branch, looking in, either gesturing wildly or trying to keep her balance. Gately felt a rush of concern about her falling out of the tree and was preparing to ask the floor to maybe please relax its hold a second and let him go when P.H.-J.’s face suddenly fell and exited the bottom of the window and was replaced by the face of Bobby (‘C’) C. Bobby C raised a slow two-finger salute to his temple in an impassively mocking Hello as he scanned the evidence of serious bingeing in the room, through the window. Eyeballing Mt. Dilaudid with special attention, nodding down to somebody down under the tree. He edged forward on the branch until he was right up flush with the window and pushed up on its frame with one hand, trying to open the locked window. The rising sun behind him cast a shadow of his head against the wet floor. Gately called out to Fackelmann and tried to roll and sit up. His bones felt full of busted glass. Bobby C held up a six-pack of Hefenreffer and waggled it suggestively, like wanting in. Gately had just managed to sit partly up when C’s fist in its fingerless glove came through the window, spraying double-pane glass. The fallen TP screen continued to show shots of small flames, Gately could see. C’s arm came through and groped for the latch and raised the window. Fackelmann was bleating like a sheep but not moving; a syringe he hadn’t bothered with removing hung from the inside of his elbow. Gately saw Bobby C had glass in his purple hair and a vintage Taurus-PT 9 mm. jammed into his spike-studded belt. Gately sat there dumbly as C clambered on in and kind of tiptoed through the various puddles and rolled Fackelmann’s head back to check his pupils. C clucked his tongue and let Fackelmann’s head fall back against the wall, Fax still softly bleating. He turned smartly on his boot’s heel and started across toward the apartment door, and Gately sat there looking at him. When he got to where Gately was sitting on the floor with his wet legs curved parenthesized out in front of him like some sort of huge pre-verbal rug-rat C stopped as if to say something he’d just remembered, looking down at Gately, his smile wide and warm, and Gately noticed he had a black front tooth just as C caught him over the ear with the Taurus-PT and put him back down. The floor got the back of Gately’s head worse than the gun-butt did. His ears belled. It wasn’t stars he saw. Then Bobby C kicked Gately in the balls, S.O.P. to keep your man down, and Gately drew his knees up and turned his head and was sick out onto the floor. He heard the apartment door opening and the leisurely sound of C’s boots going down the stairs to the complex’s door. Between spasms, Gately urged Fackelmann to go for the window as rickety-tick as he could. Fack-elmann was slumped back against the wall; he was looking at his legs and saying he couldn’t feel his legs, that he was numb from the scalp on down and climbing.