Lost Girls

And cold. A flashing current of electricity that stops the heart for the space of four beats before it resumes, making up for lost time at double speed. Working to move the blood to my arms and legs, now kicking and circling in a heavy breaststroke. A glance back shows that I'm already a hundred feet from shore and heading farther out.

It's quiet out here. Just the ruffle of air passing my ears, the pant and spit of my mouth. All of me below the water's purple line except the top half of my head. So small a thing, it could dip under without any sound at all.

You're drowning.

An exhausted man just stepped out of a car wreck, fully dressed in clothes now ten times their normal weight. But I don't turn back to give myself a chance. Keep lunging forward, pulling my body out to the deeper place. Drifting lower so that with each breath more water comes in than air.

You're under.

And I am. Kicking my way down deeper to where the water is dense as stone. To where the slime of lake bottom weeds licks my arms. Swaying tentacles that are easily pushed aside at first but in another second have slipped a noose around my neck, tied my hands together in a tight knot.

The panic now. A final choking cough before taking the water in but there is no sound, only a teasing veil of bubbles over my face. The rest of me struggling at the weeds, flipping like a hooked fish, but they only bind me farther inside their swaying body.

Then the muscles finally yield and I can do nothing but absently pull at each slick arm, one by one. And one by one they give way, wrenched from where they grow to be collected in my fists. Then I'm pulling my way up, chin first, squeezing my lips shut for one more second, just hold on until I'm out, until--

The air.

Dog-paddling back the way I came, the range of motion allowed my arms and legs now so limited, I'm capable only of wriggling forward just below the surface. Watch the dark rocks of the shoreline approaching. Keep my eyes on them in the hope that so long as I can see them they won't go away.

And they don't. I pick the nearest one. Pulling myself onto its flat surface with my knuckles, my fingers still clamped shut around two handfuls of weeds. Lurching to my bare feet, from the rock to the mud shore, into the trees, and back up to the road.

When I get there I collapse into the Lincoln and turn the key. The engine hacks and there's a knocking like someone trapped under the hood, but it starts.

Go. Get out of here.

But as I raise my clenched hands to the wheel I see something in the dimness of the car's overhead light that freezes a scream in my throat.

There, gripped tight in my hands, I hold not green weeds pulled from the lake's bottom but a thick clump of human hair, light and dark.

chapter 40

The Lincoln makes it back into town--it must--because the morning finds me pulled into a ball under the sheets, damp footprints leading from the door to the bed. I don't remember the drive back, climbing the stairs, pulling off clothes. Or the package that sits next to me on the bedside table. A loose roll of pages from the latest Murdoch Phoenix with a bundle of hair sticking out at both ends and leaving droplets of water on the varnished wood. I don't remember wrapping it up like that and leaving it there so close, but it all must have happened.

Pull back the sheets and haul myself into the shower, the hot water assaulting shoulders and chest. Bend to scrub the dried mud from my feet and it comes off in black clumps and liquid strings. My back burns.

When I'm done, the effort of lifting my legs over the side of the tub sends dark stars popping before my eyes. Water rushes down over my skin to an instant pool on the floor. There's the thought that I should really wipe it up and then in the next second I'm on the floor myself, splayed out like an unmanned puppet under a circulating cloud of steam. In a minute I'll raise my hand to the door handle and crawl out into the cool of the bedroom, wait for the fluttering hitch of my breathing to clear. But for now I just stay where I am, sinking and floating at once.

They say madness runs in families. Like cancer, obesity, hair loss, or rotten teeth, it's handed down to descendants who have the bad luck to inherit the loony-tunes gene from some straitjacketed uncle or granny banished to the attic in the days when such measures were considered nothing more or less than good manners. I don't know my lineage well enough to say for sure, but I always thought the Cranes were relatively free of crazies swinging off the limbs of the family tree. So where did it come from?

It wouldn't be so bad if all I had was an uncomplicated disease of the body. Something slowly debilitating and pitiable, a dystrophy or sclerosis maybe, something with a high enough sympathy profile that it gives rise to television commercials and annual charity telethons. I could lend my services to the cause as a role model, a man - who - continues-to - function-despite- his - handicap story that would feature yours truly being wheeled into courtrooms to ensure the rights of able-bodied misfits and misunderstood thieves. It would be great exposure for my practice, and besides, I don't have much use for my body anymore anyway. But my mind! It seems that I'm losing one of the few things I value in the world, and all because the Crane semen-and-ovum trail can be traced back to some long-forgotten lunatic.

Or maybe it's all just the drugs. Building up, hiding in the brain cells I have little need for anymore, such as those responsible for erections or kindness to strangers. Teenage acid, wicked college weed, the purified cocaine of the salaried adult--all finally organized in a unified attack. Not madness, but betrayal from within.

Well, then. It's war.

I will lay siege to my enemy! Cut off the supply lines! Call the sentries to the gate!

In this combative spirit I forgo my usual wake-up line and instead light up one of the cigarettes Flynn gave me. It's not nearly the same effect at all, but I'm glad to find that a few good hauls are at least enough to permit me to remain standing and dress in the normal sequence. Still, somewhere between tucking the shirt in and finding my socks I'm stopped by the pictures on the wall.

Ashley Flynn.

Krystal McConnell.

Too real to be strip-club schoolgirls. Too easily imagined crossing the street with hair storing up the glittering heat of the sun or yawning in a rain-pelted bus shelter to function as fantasies. It's never been real youth I've desired in my entertainments, but youth played out as a predictable game. This requires low lights. A few drinks. The anonymous company of similar-minded consumers. Without these the people onstage only remain people.

Fatigue, paranoia, some major chemical overindulgence over the last several weeks leading to a full-blown anxiety attack. The more reasonable explanation. God knows I've called upon the pacifying effects of Valium on several hundred occasions over the last few years, so it's no surprise that under my current stress I should experience some nervousness. My doctor, therefore, is ultimately to blame for last night. Failing to automatically prescribe me a refill on my last bottle of tranquilizers is, now that I think of it, tantamount to malpractice.

I make a mental note to write him a terse letter of vaguely legal threats when this is all over.

Make a further mental note to get my hands on one of the local physicians and secure an order of calm pills.

Then I finally pull my gaze from the walls, hunch over to the bedside table, and cut myself a line of the powdery white just long enough to get me to lunch.

I decide to take a new route up to the Murdoch Prison for Men, slip off Ontario Street and into the mixture of postwar apartment blocks and low-rent retail located behind it. Three-story buildings with shared balconies, stolen shopping carts parked on the crabgrass yards, and all with names like Champlain Towers, Huron House, and the Algonquin set like gravestones over the doors. Between them the soft-core video store and coin laundry with a single old man stooped low to watch his tumbling undershirts, the small appliance repair shop (SPECIALIZING IN VACUUMS), the convenience store with a poster over the whole of its window announcing that it was only five months ago that they issued a $2,400 winning lottery ticket from their machine. On the sidewalk, nobody but the very young and very old: two boys popping BBs off at each other with air rifles half their height, a pair of shrunken ladies walking in silence beneath crumpled fancy hats. I move past them all but none turn to look. None but me lift