Shift: A Novel

Sidewalk Steve’s brain was like a cross between a magnet and quicksand. It seemed to suck Chandler in and down, into a soup of chicken broth and breasts and rainbows. Chandler opened his eyes and concentrated on the bare wall in front of him, tried to pull his brain from Steve’s.

“I—I don’t understand.”

“He has shirked his duty to class and country, just as you have. I want you to punish him the way you know you deserve to be punished. In return, Miss Haverman will not be harmed while she remains in custody.”

“Naz!” Chandler felt his heart beat faster, and in the other room Sidewalk Steve jumped backward, as who knew what apparition appeared in front of him. “Naz is alive?”

There was a pause, and Chandler could have sworn he heard Keller curse under his breath.

“Is she alive?” Chandler demanded again, jerking uselessly at his restraints. “Where is she? You have to tell me where she—”

“I want you to show Sidewalk Steve how bad you think he is,” Keller’s voice practically shrieked from the loudspeaker. “I want you to devise his punishment. Do you understand me, Orpheus? Don’t take something from Steve’s mind. Make it up yourself, and show it to him.”

“Where—is—Naz?” Chandler demanded, and in the other room Sidewalk Steve jumped again, whirled around, jumped back one more time, his hands batting at the air.

“The only way you will see Miss Haverman again is if you do as I tell you. Punish Steve, Chandler. Punish him as you deserve to be punished, and I will make arrangements for you to see Miss Haverman again.”

“Please,” Chandler hissed. “Don’t hurt her. I’ll do anything, just don’t hurt her.”

In the other room, Sidewalk Steve was swatting at the air, squinting and ducking as though a swarm of bees were buzzing out of the sky around him. He smacked at his skin, danced from one leg to the other as though snakes or crocs snapped at his legs.

“It’s your fault we have her,” Keller said implacably. “If you’d done what you were supposed to, you would’ve never ended up here. Never would have dragged Miss Haverman into it with you.”

Keller’s disembodied voice had acquired an echo, and an outline as well. Pink, puffy clouds came out of the speaker like particolored smoke. In the other room, Sidewalk Steve was tossing himself from one wall to another. The shoe boxes stacked in the room added their flimsy shape to whatever imagined terrors attacked him, and he grabbed them and ripped them to pieces, but whatever was attacking him wouldn’t be kept away. His mouth was open, but no sound penetrated the window.

“Please,” Chandler whispered, “don’t hurt her.”

“Oh, but she is hurting,” Keller hissed through the speaker, the pink smoke coiling out like a serpent, “and it’s all your fault. Now the only way for you to save her is to punish Steve. Create a hell for him and drop him in it. Do it, Chandler. Do it!”

“LET HER GO!” Chandler screamed, and from the other room came the faint echo of a reply.

“No.”

But there was no stopping it now. It walked through the door of Sidewalk Steve’s room like a flaming ghost. Chandler remembered it from Millbrook. From the cottage, right before Naz had been taken. The boy made of fire. But who was it, and why did it keep coming back? Was it friend or enemy?

But the apparition had no time for any of these questions. It swept Sidewalk Steve up in blazing arms and engulfed him in a corona of flames. Sidewalk Steve writhed in the inferno for two or three agonized seconds, then fell to the floor, his brain as blank as a freshly washed blackboard. Only his twitching fingers and feet gave any sign that he was alive.

But it wasn’t quite over yet. The flaming boy turned toward Chandler and stared at him through the window. Its eyes were empty, dark sockets, its mouth an open, questioning O, but what it was asking, what it offered, Chandler had no idea.

“Who are you?” he whispered.

But the boy just stared at him for another moment, and then, sputtering like a pilot light, he disappeared.

Washington, DC

November 8, 1963

The linoleum floor of the Salvation Army was coated with a layer of dirt that crunched beneath the soles of BC’s shoes. A mildewy tang floated through the moist air, over which came the faint sound of Christian Muzak and the hum of innumerable fluorescent tubes.

BC had never set foot in a thrift store before and was amazed at how big it was—a gymnasium-sized space filled with clothes that had been worn by other people. Not just worn. Worn in. Worn out. Though the silver-wigged old lady at the counter assured him all the clothes were washed before they were put on the racks, BC saw innumerable sweat-stained armpits and yellowed collars and any number of faint and not-so-faint bloodstains. There was even an entire rack of used underwear: limp boxers and listless jockey shorts, their leg bands stretched and flaccid from being pulled on a thousand times, their flies sadly puckered from who knew what kind of fumbled or fevered gropings. Though BC felt that it was somehow violating the industry standard not to take a disguise all the way down to the skin, there was no way in hell he was putting on another man’s skivvies.

Which still left him with the dilemma of trousers, shirt, jacket, hat. It was reasonable to assume Charles Jarrell’s house was being watched—at any rate, it was not unreasonable to assume. And, too, he wasn’t sure how Jarrell would react to a particularly G-man-looking G-man showing up on his doorstep. He might run, and BC would lose the closest thing to a lead he had to Melchior. BC had to get Jarrell to open the door. After that, he would worry about getting him to talk.

Many of the shirts had names sewn over the left breast—bowling shirts mostly, but also mechanic and gas jockey and repairman’s uniforms, the thick, shiny threads of their embroidered names often in better condition than the threadbare garments onto which they’d been stitched. That was American job security: your name, on a shirt. You knew you were there for a while. The names flashed by like index cards until: