Bruce woke up. He vomited down his chest. If his pancreas came tumbling out his mouth in the next heave, he wouldn’t mind; he’d never felt worse in his life. The most profound hangover he’d ever had — twenty-two grasshoppers plus a fifth of tequila the night Rita said she was pregnant — was Disney compared with the variety of afflictions at work in his body. The guillotine leg drop strikes again. He’d been head-traumaed, which did not even come with the benefit of amnesia. His thoughts perseverated. Where was Norman? Was he okay? He tried to sit up. Rolled back his eyelids just enough to case the room. Empty but for the bed he was on. A woman at the door in a nurse’s uniform. She peered at a chart and whispered, “You’re going to be fine. Let me help you change out of that mess.” Where was Norman? Was he okay? He slurred out the words as best he could — Christ, he was slurring. She said, “I’ll be back to check on you in a little bit,” and left the room. There were flowers in a corner. He eased himself off the bed to read the card. Who’d send him flowers with a card? It said, I’m sorry. Best wishes, Fred Spitalowitz, a.k.a. the Orca. It was hard to make out in the dark, but the O appeared to double as a smiley face, which brought to mind the Orca’s real face coming right at him, so that he threw up all over again. It seemed to Bruce he threw up more than anyone he knew. He crawled back to bed and had nightmares.
Someone was tapping his shoulder. Norman? It was not Norman. Not the nurse, either. He thought for a second it was Rita, but only because whenever he saw a beautiful woman, it put him in mind of Rita.
The woman, satisfied that Bruce was awake, took a seat opposite his cot, which seemed to have turned into a queen. He was sure there’d been no chair there before and now, suddenly, a La-Z-Boy? Also, the bedding seemed to have improved. She offered him a box of tissues, which had also materialized out of nowhere. Maybe he should ask for a Porsche, because, quite obviously, he was dead, and here was the genie to prove it.
“How are you feeling?” she said.
“Who are you?” He sat up and swung his feet off the mattress, only they didn’t reach the floor, which was so infantilizing, he drew the blanket to his chest and scurried for the headboard. In brighter news: the pain behind his ears had subsided, and he even felt interested in food. How long had he been knocked out?
“If you’re hungry, I can have something prepared for you in no time.”
A mind reader. Wonderful.
“Anything in particular? The doctor says you are cleared to eat whatever you want.”
He patted himself down. Was there surgery? What had the Orca done to him?
“No surgery,” the woman said. “Just a concussion. And I know how you feel. I just had one myself.”
Bruce looked at her warily. She really was reading his mind. She picked up a phone and said, “Roast beef on rye. Muenster, bacon, avocado, honey mustard.”
“What’s going on?” Bruce said. “Only my wife knows I like that sandwich.”
“Maybe I’m your wife.”
“That’s not funny.” Unless — wait, did he have amnesia? He looked at his body. Mole on his knee he’d had removed twice — once for vanity, once for prudence — to no avail. Rubble heels, because he would not put cream on them at night, and the one time Rita had persuaded him to sleep in socks filled with Lubriderm, he’d had a wet dream that embarrassed them both. Pale swath of skin on his ring finger because he was the world’s biggest loser. Nope, he remembered everything.
The woman smiled. “I’m just saying I can be anyone. We’ve met before.”
Bruce did not have enough ex-girlfriends from which to pool the one crazy whose likeness he’d blotted out. A colleague? Maybe one of the homeless from Trial by Liar? He shook his head and said, “I’m sorry, I don’t remember. I just want to go home. I miss my wife. Probably she’s going to leave me, but I still want to see her before it happens.”
Someone came in with a trolley bearing a giant sandwich under a stainless steel dome. A can of Dr Pepper, a basket of hard pretzels, and possibly the greatest and most counterintuitive pleasure on earth, carrot cake. He wanted to ask more — Where am I? — but the food was Svengali in its hold on him. He felt ligatures of beef fat wedge between his teeth and rejoiced.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Fred got a little overzealous with my instructions.”
He shook his head. He preferred not to dignify the man with a name. He was the Orca. Now and forever, the Orca.
“I don’t understand. Are you saying you run that show? Is that it?” He’d finished his sandwich and pretzels and was scraping the frosting from the carrot cake to save it for last. If this woman had come to silence him, fine. Unless she wanted to buy his silence, which was even better. “I was with a guy in there, a short black guy — any idea what happened to him?”
She crossed her legs. And only now did Bruce notice she wore some kind of military uniform.
“Norman, yes. He’s fine. I got him on a plane to someplace nice. I’ve always liked him. He’s had a rough life, but he’ll be all right now.”
Bruce had the first coherent thought he’d had in a while. The feds. Good grief, he was a moron. Someplace nice. Like Guantánamo. Why the feds and the Mob were always talking in this arcane patois everyone understood anyway was beyond him. Still, the feds had hired the Orca? To do what?
“Apprehend you,” she said. “But the feds didn’t hire him, just me. I’ve got people all over the Sub. But no one was supposed to hurt you.”
“Can you stop with the mind reading?”
“Maybe if your thoughts weren’t so primitive, I wouldn’t keep guessing right.”
“So now you’re going to insult me? You’ll have to do better than that. My wife calls me a caveman ten times a day.”
“Oh, right,” she said. “I almost forgot,” and she retrieved from her pocket Bruce’s wedding ring.
He snatched it and shoved it back on his finger and felt greedy and fearful and gnomish.
“Are we on better terms now?” she said. “I did you a favor; now you do me a favor?”
He made for the door. It wasn’t locked, but on the other side was a guard with his arms folded across his chest. He made for the curtains, and though he expected they were trick curtains behind which was a concrete slab, he was still shocked to see the concrete slab.
He didn’t know what to say, and anyway, she’d say it for him: We’re just a few miles from the Helix House. Outskirts of town. But no one’s going to find us.
He was exhausted. He pressed his forehead to the slab.
“What do you want?” he said, and then aired every question he had: “Is it that you need me to go along with some story for the press? Whatever you tell me to say is fine. It’s not like I have any answers of my own. Why send me and the others to the Helix House to begin with? The four of us? Why send a psychotic to play hero and break my neck? Why give me the most amazing and tragic documentary story ever and then take it away?” He closed his eyes and pictured Norman’s face in the instant he’d lost the Orca’s punishing rage to Bruce — the disappointment and resignation writ into his every pore — and said, “Just leave me alone.”