On a humid summer night, just before bedtime, Rufus walked into the kitchen of his silent house and poured himself a glass of buttermilk. Then he strolled the narrow hallway between the kitchen and the foyer and unlocked the small door beneath the staircase. As he descended into the basement, sounds of retching and agony emanated from the inhabited cells. He took a seat on the bottom step, the dirt floor cool beneath his feet, and sipped his cold, thick milk.
That would be Andy groaning and Beth sobbing between bouts of nausea. Their heads probably felt like they were imploding. Nothing to do for them really but let them ride it out. They’d be good as new in a few days.
Rufus wiped his milk mustache.
Baby Max was screaming now, fighting mad at having been woken again.
Yesterday, the first of August, Rufus had stopped dispensing drugs. The haloperidol, Ativan, nitrous oxide—it all abruptly ended. Vi had been weaned off the narcotics during the summer leading up to her delivery, but Andy and Beth had, with brief exceptions, been very fucked-up since mid-November. Rufus had never kept anyone on the needle this long, and though he’d anticipated this brutal withdrawal, the payoff would be well worth the risk.
For the last nine months, he’d dedicated a minimum of six hours per day to working with his patients, and their sessions with the mind machine and drug-enhanced hypnosis had been wonderfully productive. In addition, they’d all watched countless hours of home movies, and with the aid of laughing gas, had begun to see the humor and innocuousness in violence.
Andy in particular seemed to be moving beyond the illusions that plagued him.
As Rufus climbed the stairs back up to his bedroom on the second floor, where his angel, Maxine, was already fast asleep, he realized he hadn’t been this excited and hopeful since Orson.
# # #
I woke to a gentle, rocking motion. There was light here, more warmth than that awful darkness. I detected the cry of gulls, slap of water falling back into itself, and the imperceptible whisper of wind moving through open space.
My eyes opened. I found myself sitting in the cramped cabin of a boat, Violet King across from me, a baby in her arms, Beth Lancing at my left.
Duct tape had been applied to our mouths.
Vi was awake, Beth still unconscious, her chin resting against her collarbone. I went to shake her awake but couldn’t move, my wrists, ankles, and torso having also been thoroughly duct-taped to the high-backed chair.
I looked across the table at Vi and raised my eyebrows. She responded with a headshake—she knew as little as I concerning where or why we were here.
We sat there, immobilized, confused, watching the time on the stove clock creep toward noon. Through an ovular window above, I could see the tinted blue of the sky. Sleeping bags and wrinkled clothing had been stowed in the V-berth.
Barely audible voices emanated from the deck.
I tried to think back, to claim some recent memory, but could not.
The cabin door opened. Luther ducked and stepped down inside.
'Gonna need a hand with them, Pop!'
One by one, we were lifted in our chairs and carried up onto the small deck.
The day was brilliant and hot.
Maxine Kite lounged in a beach chair, in unabashed oiled nakedness, her face hidden beneath the brim of a straw hat, so emaciated a breeze could’ve lifted her into the sky like a dandelion seed. She was engrossed in a book called
Our chairs were arranged three abreast and portside on the deck of the twenty-four foot Scout Abaco 242.
The clouds—puffy white monsters—went back innumerably into the horizon, land nowhere in sight.
Luther watched from the cockpit, stretched out in the bucket seat behind the steering wheel and sheltered from the breeze by the wraparound windshield, a bag of Lemonheads in his lap.
Sweat trickled into my eyes.
The pasty chicken legs of Rufus Kite propelled him toward us. He grinned, toothless, his pale, hairless chest exposed by a chaotic Hawaiian shirt. We could see ourselves in the huge mirrored lenses of his sunglasses.
'Been a pleasure knowing you three,' he said. 'I swear it has.'
I thought I sensed our fate in his tone of voice.
'Y’all are sitting there looking at me, cognizant for the first time in months, and don’t think I can’t feel your hatred. You think I’m a monster. That I’m cruel and indifferent. Think I don’t have your best interests at heart.'
The sun beat down from its meridian, the air still, salty, so wet it could choke you.
'Hurts me that you think that. Really does. Can’t you see, I’m letting you operate on free will? I could’ve turned you into little robots. You spent nine months with me. I could’ve kept you in that basement five, seven years. Your minds would’ve gone to mush after two. Think what you want about me, but you can’t say I don’t respect free will. You can’t say it.'
'Sweet-Sweet,' Maxine whined, looking up from her book. 'I’m so hot. Put up the Bimini top, will you?'
'Kind of busy, Beautiful.'
It hit me—Rufus was anxious about something.
'You three,' he continued, 'you see the world through good and evil glasses. Least you did when I found you. I’ve only tried to help you take them off, and now it’s time to see was I successful. I’ll be honest—I’m nervous. Big day for us all.'
Maxine closed her book and took notice.
Rufus approached Vi, her baby grasped tightly to her chest. He reached to rip the tape from her mouth.
'What about the baby, Pop?' Luther asked.
'What about it?'
'If she doesn’t—'
'The baby stays with her, whether that’s back to the house, or down to the ocean floor.'
'But—'
'Luther, please. Deal with it.'
Rufus removed the tape from Vi’s mouth. There was a hardness in her eyes she had not possessed when I’d first met her back in November. She’d grown rough edges.
'Violet, you have a very important choice to make. Will you—'
'I’ll do anything you want,' she said. 'Just don’t hurt my baby.'
'Good girl. But know that I’m gonna call your bluff tomorrow, Violet. And let me say this. Should I find that you’ve lied to me today, it’ll be bad for you, worse for little Max there.'
She pulled a blanket over her son’s head to shield him from the sun.
'I’m telling you this for your own good. If you don’t think you’re capable of doing whatever I ask you to do, it would be better for you both to be thrown overboard right now. Because, if you fail, you’ll see things no mother should ever have to see.'
'Said I’d do it.'
He re-taped her mouth, then pulled the tape from mine.
I drew in a lungful of thick air.
Saying 'no' never even occurred to me. We would get back ashore with our lives and go from there.
Luther got up and came over. He looked down at me, pushed his long black hair behind his shoulders, and spit the white pit of the Lemonhead over my head into the water.
'Well, Andrew?' he said.
'I’ll do it. Whatever you want.'
'That’s right. You know the drill from the desert. I saw the video of you and that cowboy in Orson’s shed. Maybe this time you’ll do it with a smidgen of composure.'
While Luther silenced me with a new piece of tape, Rufus stepped forward and ripped the duct tape off the soft mouth of Elizabeth Lancing.
I turned my head, gazed at Beth. Light nourishment and the havoc of narcotics had drawn her once lovely face into a gaunt suggestion of a skull. I doubted if she were even in her right mind. Part of me hoped she
