“How does a man get through Officer’s Candidate School and learn to land an F-14 on an aircraft carrier if he can’t read?”
“F-18. F-14 decommissioned.”
“My bad. How’d you get to be a fighter pilot if you can’t read?”
He snorted and shook his head again, a sullen gesture that said man, this is some bullshit, having to explain this again. He looked out the window, deep in thought. He took a breath, opening his mouth like he was about to say something, then thought again and closed it. His brow furrowed.
“What is it?” I asked.
“This hard,” he replied. Dis hahd. “I a… retard.”
“Take all the time you need.”
“I retard,” he repeated. “Retarded. Can’t think right. Can’t read.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “Just tell me how a man gets to fly fighter planes when he can’t read.”
He looked over my shoulder, and I turned to see a hunched-over old man hobbling past the lounge. Brandon waited for him to shuffle away, then leaned forward and hissed, “Not fighter pilot.”
“Really?” I said it like this was a surprise.
“Here,” he continued, “Retarded. Can’t read. Can’t think. Cloudy.” Cwowdy.
“What do you mean by ‘here?’”
He pointed at the coffee table. Then he pointed everywhere. “Here,” he said. “Here, here, here! Retarded!”
“You mean… when you’re in this place, you’re retarded?”
“This world.”
“When you’re in this world, you’re retarded.”
He nodded emphatically, smiling now, pleased that I understood.
“But you’re not retarded… in another world?”
He drew his lips into a tight grin and shook his head.
“In another world, you’re a lieutenant junior grade in the Navy and you fly F-18s.”
At this point, I felt like I had all the information I needed to make a recommendation to the court. I didn’t need to sit here on the state’s dime talking to a guy so obviously incompetent to handle his own affairs that I could have figured it out if he spoke only Chinese. Professional pride, though—and a desire to not return to the office any sooner than necessary—kept me in my seat. Brandon Cross may have been a mental incompetent, but the nurses and orderlies weren’t. When they saw his lawyer jetting out the door five minutes after he signed in, they’d say, that’s a court-appointed piece of shit right there. Didn’t hardly spend any time at all with the man.
“Why don’t you tell me how that works?” I asked. “Living in two worlds, I mean. Do you just jump back and forth between realities whenever you feel like it, or is it more of a surprise, like you’re sitting on the john on an aircraft carrier one minute and suddenly whoa, you’re in a mental hospital?”
He shook his head energetically. The grin had disappeared.
“No? No what? No, you can’t control it, or no, it isn’t a surprise?”
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Behind him, clouds obscured the sun on their way across the sky and the window turned from yellow to gray.
“No two realities,” he said, pronouncing it weeawitties.
He opened his eyes.
“That real,” he said. “This a nightmare. And I stuck.”
21.
Brandon’s DSS file waited in my email inbox when I got back to the office. They’d pulled him out of his mother’s home at age twelve, when her boyfriend had taken a shine to him. His special education teacher noticed him walking funny at school one morning and when she asked him why, he said that when he walked like that, his butt didn’t hurt as bad. Mama and Boyfriend went to jail, Brandon went into the foster care system. He spent the next five years shuffling from placement to placement until he ran away at seventeen. Nobody saw him again until they found him on the highway up there in Glen Raven.
For the first time in forever, I went more than five minutes without wallowing in my problems. I felt pretty good until I looked on my things-to-do list and saw the notation:
Find neurologist
Right. Because a baseball bat had connected squarely with my skull. Shortly thereafter, I’d popped back up and shot the batter. Yet another miracle. Or not. Neither I—nor Dr. Koenig, for that matter, being a psychologist—knew diddly squat about head injuries. Was that particular aspect of the shooting so miraculous? I didn’t know. But, I’d been thinking, a neurologist probably would.
My father still had a few colleagues practicing at Catawba Memorial, and I decided I would seek advice from one of them. I buzzed Kristin, my secretary, to have her go online and find me somebody, but when the intercom returned only dead air, I looked at the clock and realized it was six P.M. and everybody but the lawyers had left. I could go online myself—maybe I couldn’t type very well, but I could surf the web with the best of the best—but nobody’s office would be answering phones at this hour. So I wouldn’t get this question answered tonight.
I set the receiver back in its cradle and sat back in my chair. On my desk, the folder Craig had brought me from the Burlington Police Department sat beside a stack of credit card statements received from opposing counsel in one of the dozens of marital Vietnams in which I stayed involved all the time. I picked up the folder, opened it. I flipped slowly through the useless sheets of paper until I came to the photocopy of the first video store card.
Ryan’s News and Video. It made sense that Pinnix and Ramseur would not only frequent a pornographic video store, but hold membership cards. They had probably been going there for years, seeking porn that got sicker and sicker as time went on and they became harder and harder to impress. At some point, watching actresses cry out in fake pain during fake rapes didn’t cut it for them anymore. And they’d taken things to the next level.
Note to self, I thought. Check and see if golems like porn.
Given what they’d tried to do, they probably liked it a lot. Which meant that they probably stopped by Ryan’s News and Video frequently. Which in turn meant that the clerk there could probably tell me something about them if I caught him at the right time. I could put my Alamance County Courthouse ID around my neck to make me look official, make him think he had to answer my questions. If he wanted to get cute, if he wanted to pull customer privacy on me, I could threaten to subpoena him to a deposition. Tell him I could make him produce all his business records, all his security tapes, everything. I couldn’t do this—not without filing a bona fide lawsuit first—but he didn’t know that. He would understand, though, that his business depended largely upon discretion. And that if I shined the light on his little store, the cockroaches would stop coming.
The sun was on its way down by the time I stepped out of the building and into the parking lot, but it had dropped entirely by the time I merged onto the Durham Freeway from the interstate. Electric light and the headlamps of a thousand cars beat the night back to the edges of the highway, where it pressed against the guardrails in an effort to collapse the whole works. When I got off the freeway, it suddenly hit me that Ryan’s News and Video probably didn’t rent commercial space in the best part of Durham, and I was going there at night. Evidently, since Pinnix and Ramseur screwed up their chance to kill me, I wanted to give their neighbors a crack at it, too.
This is some stupid shit, Swanson, Bobby warned me. You need to turn your ass around.
“Fuck it,” I growled. I turned onto Holloway Street and followed the directions as the robotic voice of my GPS delivered them. I arrived at the Water Street address on the photocopied card and stopped.