something else in the sack.
It was funny that he hadn’t seen what had happened to her though. He’d missed a few things, chief among them Melchior’s real name, and Caspar’s. Who knows, maybe it was because it’d been so long since he’d thought of himself as anything other than Melchior, or thought of Caspar as anything other than Caspar. Or maybe Chandler was so overwhelmed by his newfound abilities that he couldn’t fully control where they took him—if Melchior’s brain was a city, then it was a labyrinth on the order of Venice or Paris, and Chandler lacked a map and could only fumble about blindly, looking for beacons or signposts that stood out in the maze. That day in the orphanage was certainly a landmark. It was the day the Wiz gave him a chance at a life that mattered. But the name he’d had that day, that name hadn’t meant shit. If someone called it out on the street, he wouldn’t even turn around. Caspar, of course, still had to go by his real name, but it was a hollow symbol at this point, as unreflective of the man who bore it as the dog-eared copy of Marx he carried into boot camp.
The love, though. That had been real. Melchior had loved pale, pudgy, defenseless Caspar more than he’d ever loved himself, and, too, he knew Caspar’s first loyalty would always be to him, no matter how much Joe Scheider fucked with his head.
If all was going to plan, he should’ve been back in the States, an American “defector” having been “doubled” by the KGB. He wondered if Drew Everton or whoever the hell debriefed him would put any more stock in his intel than they had in Melchior’s, or if Caspar would end up out on his ass. In which case, who knows? Maybe the friendly ghost was looking for a new job.
The thought of Caspar reminded Melchior of BC. The two men shared a quality of naivete and misplaced trust in authority figures. He’d done his best to destroy Beau’s faith in men like J. Edgar Hoover and John F. Kennedy during their train ride, but he doubted he’d succeeded. The young FBI agent was simply too much of a momma’s boy, and it sounded like his mother had been a piece of work. But who knows what kind of effect Millbrook had had on him? Melchior couldn’t help but wonder if BC had found the ring he’d hidden in the cottage wall, and, if so, if he’d taken the bait. In a way, Melchior almost hoped he hadn’t, because if he did manage to track down Melchior, Melchior would have to kill him. BC may have been a suit without a soul, but he was no Drew Everton. Drew Everton was someone Melchior wouldn’t mind killing. Not at all.
Just then a stewardess came down the aisle. She refilled his drink and plumped a pillow behind his head, leaning so close that Melchior could’ve bitten her tit if he’d wanted to.
“Do you need anything else?” the stewardess asked, then, almost reluctantly, added, “Sir.”
“No thank you, darling,” Melchior said, and anyone looking at his smile would’ve thought he’d already banged her. “I’m pretty sure I got everything I need.”
San Francisco, CA
November 8, 1963
Again the prick, again the swimming to consciousness. Chandler felt like a fish irresistibly drawn to a fisherman’s hook yet thrown back each time for being too small. When would he be big enough to keep? Which begged the question: when would he be big enough to kill?
Keller stood over him with the usual array of tools. His movements were slow but precise, and Chandler knew even without trying to push into the doctor’s brain that he’d dosed himself with Thorazine already. The drug turned Keller’s brain into something soft yet impenetrable. Chandler had pushed at it last night but had never been able to get inside. Now, with the LSD gone from his system, all he felt was a staticky void where Keller’s consciousness should have been, and, pulling once against his restraints, he closed his eyes and waited for the next shot. But this time Keller had something to say to him first.
“Mr. Melchior was nice enough to provide you with some company. I think you will find him very interesting.”
Chandler opened his eyes, looked around the little room again. All he saw was Keller, preparing the shot of LSD as he had yesterday, the empty bed where Melchior had lain, the dark window beyond. But at the edge of his perception he felt a tingling. Not Keller’s brain, but someone else’s. A friable consciousness that seemed to crumble when he pushed at it, glinting like dust motes in a beam of sunlight. It was like no other mind he’d ever felt before. He found himself wondering if it was an infant’s, or a monkey’s. He was almost eager for the shot, to find out what kind of brain this was.
Keller injected him and left the room. A moment later light erupted from the other side of the dark window. A disheveled—decrepit—man stood in the middle of a room about the size of the one Chandler was in, though in lieu of hospital accoutrement it was filled with stacks and stacks of sagging shoe boxes. The man was clearly itinerant —his clothes bedraggled and filthy, his hair unwashed in so long that it hung off his head in tangled ropes an inch thick. A beard as coarse and matted as a sheet of felt covered his mouth and fell halfway down his chest. His features were so lost inside filth and hair that he could have been twenty-five or fifty-five.
A crackle, and Keller’s voice came over a speaker mounted on the wall.
“This is Sidewalk Steve.”
Chandler felt a flush spreading over his skin, knew it was from the amphetamines Keller had used to wake him up. But the itch underneath the flush was the acid, working its way toward his brain.
“Sidewalk Steve is a literary man, like you. He is a great fan of Kenneth Kesey.”
The acid filled him with a nervous energy, and Chandler tried to fight the twitching in his arms. A pink slit had appeared in Sidewalk Steve’s beard: a smile. His grubby fingers were snatching at invisible shapes in the air.
“One
“He claims to have taken more than a thousand acid trips,” Keller continued. “He is also a diagnosed schizophrenic. The line between reality and fantasy ceased to exist for him long ago, so if you’re going to make an impression on him, you’re going to have to try harder than you have before. Nothing you can pull from his mind will scare him. You will have to supply something of your own.”
Chandler closed his eyes, which brought out Sidewalk Steve’s visions more clearly. Polychromatic bubbles floated in the air around him. When he touched them, they popped, revealing naked, shockingly nubile pixies, who flitted away from his fingers.
“What about … an image of … your face?”
“Sidewalk Steve is a bad man. He needs to be punished.”
