Shift: A Novel

time.” Chandler expected him to inject the man on the bed, but instead he swabbed his own arm. “I give myself the Thorazine now,” he continued, “lest I suffer poor Agent Logan’s fate.”

Chandler closed his eyes against the rippling walls, but the vision continued to dance behind his shuttered lids. Only—only it had shifted slightly. To the right. It was as though he was seeing the room through the eyes of the man on the bed beside him. When the man turned his head toward Chandler, he had the disconcerting experience of seeing himself with his eyes closed.

“Talk about mise en abyme,” the man beside him said. “I feel like I’m inside an Escher drawing. You don’t know what you’re missing, Doc.”

There was a grunt and then a click as the door locked behind Keller. The sound echoed in Chandler’s ears like cathedral bells, so loud that he almost missed the other man’s question.

“How’d you kill him anyway?”

Chandler squeezed his eyes tighter, but still he saw everything. The man on the bed turned his head from side to side and Chandler saw the room swirl and melt before his eyes.

“Whoa. Heavy.” The man’s head continued to turn, the room fracturing into a kaleidoscope of colors and sounds. “Miss Haverman struck me as one tough cookie,” he continued in a voice that was somewhat distracted, but not confused or overwhelmed. The only other person who’d reacted like that had been Naz—everyone else had been terrified, but this man was excited by what was happening. “But I’m pretty sure she couldn’t’ve got the drop on Eddie, let alone stabbed him in the chest. And Leary Malarkey just ain’t the type. Which leaves you. So fill me in. Did you really stab him? Or”—he turned back to Chandler, and once again Chandler saw himself repeat and retreat in an endless, diminishing stream of reflections—“did you use your mental powers?”

Chandler opened his eyes, turned to the man next to him.

“Please. I don’t want this. Not anymore. Not again.”

The man’s head jerked forward, back, as if he’d fallen asleep and snapped himself awake. His eyes widened, in fear at first, then wonder. “Jesus H. Christ. I have smoked some serious shit in my life, but this …!” He looked back at Chandler, wiggled his hands. “I told Keller not to let me out no matter how much I scream. Somehow I don’t think he would anyway. So come on, Chandler. Do your worst. Show me how you got Eddie to kill himself.”

But Chandler didn’t know what he was doing, and all he could do was repeat his first question.

“Who are you?”

The man’s eyes floated around the room, sparkling wildly, and a rapturous smile spread across his face like a miser opening the door to his vault and basking in the glow of his gold.

“Talk to me, Chandler. Is what I’m seeing what you’re seeing? Is that how it works?”

Chandler thrashed at his bonds helplessly. He turned on his tormentor, shot daggers with his eyes. The man smashed his curly locks into his pillow.

“Yowza!” he said, wincing and laughing at the same time. “Fuck!” He shook his head gingerly. “Do that again.”

But Chandler didn’t know what he’d done. He stared at the man. His face—the man’s face—glistened with sweat. Not as if he were scared or exhausted. No. It was a sexual sheen. The face of a man in a brothel. A Cuban brothel. A slender brown back bent over a pillow, a pair of buttocks thrust in the air, the man’s face hovering over it. He saw it in all its disgusting detail, and he saw the man—Melchior, that’s what he called himself—see him seeing it.

The smile on Melchior’s face grew rapturous.

“What was her name?”

Again Chandler thought of Naz. That’s what she’d said to him, in his apartment in Boston. What was her mother’s name.

“Saba,” he whispered. “A gentle breeze.”

“You’re not trying hard enough, Chandler,” the man said, his voice turning ugly. “Tell me her name.”

Chandler tried to shake the image of the naked woman out of his mind, but it wouldn’t go. Instead it was joined by others. The mutilated body of a man, his skin covered with festering sores—no, not sores. Burns. Cigarette burns. A barn. Gunfire. A machine of some kind. Cracked seams, tangled wires. Was it a—

“Chandler! Concentrate!”

“Carmen,” he whispered. “Her name was Carmen.”

The man’s eyes flashed wildly.

“Oh my fucking God. Can you see this, Keller? It’s all there! Everything! C’mon, Chandler! Dig deeper! Show me how far it can go.”

The man’s excitement had a tang like a match lit under your nostrils. It was as if he wanted Chandler to see him in all his grotesqueness, to wallow in the filth of the things he’d done. But Chandler didn’t want to see that. He didn’t want to see anything, but he couldn’t keep the images out of his head. So much violence, so many ways people had died. So many different kinds of people: black, white, brown, yellow, like a National Geographic issue devoted solely to war and misery.

Since he couldn’t keep Melchior out of his mind—or keep himself out of Melchior’s—he tried to push past those horrific images. Or, rather, before them. Before Melchior would have been old enough to serve his country. He was surprised how far he had to go. He knew Melchior was thirty-three, but though he pushed back a decade, a decade and a half, still, all he saw was war. There was another man in a lot of these pictures, an older round-faced fellow with an alcoholic nose and eyes that managed to be both jolly and mean at the same time. Frank. Frank Wisdom. The Wiz. He glowed in Melchior’s thoughts like a father—like the kind of father you wanted to kill but, in killing, would become. Chandler followed this man back in Melchior’s thoughts, all the way through his teens, through firing practice, language training, essays in coding and code-breaking and the hundred different kinds of stealth, and then suddenly he broke through to the other side.