up is all. She must have better stuff you can take.”
“I just saw her.”
“Well, see her again, because whatever they gave you isn’t working.”
Jack didn’t say anything but stared off into the sky.
“Are you hearing me?”
“I hear you.”
“Well, I’m telling you, it was freaky, man. First I thought you’d had a stroke, then it was like … I don’t know … like you’d turned into a frightened child or something.”
Jack didn’t say anything.
“Whatever, promise me you’ll call and tell her what happened.”
Jack nodded.
“Promise me. I want to hear the words.”
“I’ll call her.”
What Jack did not tell Vince was that he was off the meds—off the Zyprexa because it was numbing his brain, killing the flashbacks.
And he wanted them back.
JACK STILL FELT SCOOPED OUT BY the time he got home.
He changed and got into bed, thinking about taking a triple hit of lorazepam to slam-dunk his head into oblivion. Thinking about packing up again and moving to a different town, a different state, maybe even Canada— just to get away from Carleton, the restaurant, Massachusetts, all the places with pastlife hooks into his psyche. Someplace where he could reincarnate.
In the dark his hand fell on the little amber vial. He shook it. He could tell in the dark which pills they were from the sound of the rattles—at one end the tiny one-milligram lorazepams, little more than grains of sand to the Zyprexa bombs, and in between enough maracas to rhythm out a salsa band. He undid the cap and fingered out two tabs.
He stared up at the ceiling. Just enough light leaked from the windows to cut the total black. If he popped the pills, he’d drain away in under five minutes, wake up four hours later. Then, if his legs began to fuss, pop another tab and a pain pill, send himself back to black until dawn—the pattern of the night.
A stroke would have been a gift. The
He dropped the tabs back into the vial and got out of bed and went downstairs. The kitchen was a small space with very little counter area, filled mostly with ceramic cannisters for sugar, coffee, flour, and a wire spice rack with jars of different powders and herbs, a microwave, a small Mr. Coffee, and teapots. All the utensils were in two drawers.
He cleared a space on the counter and pulled open one of the drawers and dumped the contents onto the counter. Knives of all sizes and shapes, forks, spatulas, pie cutters, and other things tumbled out like pickup sticks.
He picked up one black-handled carving knife with a ten-inch blade of shiny, honed blue steel that came to a stunning point. He slowly turned the knife, and the overhead light arced across the curved honed edge like neon.
Nothing.
He picked up another, a heavier cutter with a thicker steel stock, probably for heavy carving or chopping. He held it in his right palm, felt the heft.
He put it back. Nothing.
He stirred his fingers through the pile looking for some connection, some zap of awareness.
Nothing.
He swept the knives and other utensils into the drawer and closed it. He then tore open the second drawer —handles of rolling pins, serving spoons, barbecue forks, whisks, eggbeater blades, spatulas, and small steak knives, all under a pair of pot holders and oven gloves. He removed the pot holders and gloves to expose the full contents of the drawer.
For a numbed moment his eyes rested on a single object: the heavy-duty wooden-handled stainless-steel mallet, one side tooled flat for pounding thin cutlets, the other a crosshatch of tiny pointed pyramids for breaking fibers of flesh or cracking bone.
Jack picked it up and felt a hitch in his breathing.
He did not gasp in recognition. He did not become assaulted with shakes or break out in a sweat or feel a rush of blood to his head. Just the solitary hitch in his breathing, as if on some level just below the surface the
A MEAT MALLET.
At two-thirty he lay in bed staring into the black as he had for the last two hours. His mind was very alert, as if a bungee cord had been affixed to it and every few minutes that drawer down there would give a yank.
The sickening whacks against bone cap.
He kicked off the covers, pulled on his jeans and shoes, and went back down to the kitchen, tore open the drawer and removed the meat hammer. Still on a weird autopilot, he made his way through the dark to the garage, where he found a shovel, and cut across the lawn to the rear edge of the property by an anchor fence, and under some yews he dug a hole and buried the mallet. He returned the shovel to the garage and went back inside, where he cleaned up and got back into bed.
For another forty minutes he lay in the dark feeling his heart pony around the inside of his chest and trying to shut off his mind. He rolled around on the sheets, concentrating on regulating his breathing, calming his heart rate, and composing his mind to sleep. Several times he grabbed the vial of lorazepams, but he knew they would do little to block the pull of that mallet. It lay under two feet of dirt out back, but it might just as well have been strapped to his head for the way it kept slapping against his mind.
It was a sick, crazy, obsessive compulsion of the purest ray serene, but he could not shake it, and doping himself into slumber would only put off the next assault. And daylight would only make it worse, because the freshly overturned dirt would be glowering at him until he couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Shit”
He kicked off the covers once again, got dressed, and went out back with the shovel and dug up the mallet. He put it in a paper bag so he wouldn’t have to touch it. Then he headed down the driveway in the dark and onto the Mystic Valley Parkway that led to a small bridge over the Mystic River where it drained into the lower Mystic Lake. Because of the hour, no cars were on the road. He removed the hammer, and with all his might he flung it
