Personal Effects: Dark Art

18

The Brink’s elevator lurched, stopping at Level 5. I might have been puffed up by the footwork Rachael, Lucas and I had accomplished today, but I wasn’t stupid. An hour’s worth of rediscovered confidence doesn’t trump a lifetime of nyctophobia.

I braced myself for the bizarre hallway strobe show.

The doors groaned open. The lights in max were bright and steady.

“Miraculous,” I said, smiling. I walked the hall, whistling and singing the walk-off anthem to Hair, the musical: “Let the sun shinnne… . Let the sun shine… The sunnn shine iiiin.”

Emilio Wallace wasn’t at his post by Room 507’s door. In his stead was Chaz Hoffacker, an impossibly short, unfriendly butterball of a man. He and Emilio were buddies—I assumed it was a watchman thing. I’d tried to befriend Chaz my first week here, but had failed his ironclad compatibility test. He asked me what I thought of Ziggy.

Not Stardust. Not Marley. “Ziggy,” the newspaper comic.

He’d kept his distance ever since. It was for the best, really. His affection for “The Family Circus” was equally boundless.

The man looked up from the comics section of the Journal-Ledger and harrumphed.

“Hey, Chaz,” I said. “Where’s Emilio?”

He shrugged.

“Took a personal day. Said he was overworked, needed some rest. Gig was gettin’ to him. It happens.”

I felt apprehensive about this. Emilio never took time off, he was a Brinkvale legend for that. Then again, he had looked worn down yesterday. Said he needed sleep.

Chaz unlocked the door. Room 507 was dark, as always. But the hallway lights were humming, and I was buzzing, let the sun shine in. I wasn’t afraid. I stepped inside and flipped on the light.

I gasped.

Richard Drake sat silently in his wooden chair, an impish smirk on his lips. Beyond him, to the left, was something new and wonderful and horrible.

I gazed, suddenly punch-drunk, at a floor-to-ceiling mural. Its beauty was eclipsed only by its epic chaos. Vibrant, colorful swirls and manic, jagged lines shimmered on the cinderblocks. There was no message here on this wall, no approximation of form or conscious organization—just zigzags and spirals and broad swooshes. I spotted a scribble-swirl of black up in a far corner, near the ceiling.

I thought of the children in Drake’s photos—the tot-lot ghouls with the vortex eyes—and shivered.

The long box of pastels rested neatly on the table, seemingly untouched. My eyes slid to Drake. His grin widened.

“This is tremendous, Martin,” I said, careful to use his pseudonym and trying not to sound as dumbfounded as I felt. I reached into my pocket and grabbed my cell phone. “I’m going to document this. It’s truly remarkable work, I’m impressed.”

Drake opened his eyes. I snapped a photo of the wall with my phone’s camera.

“Would you tell me what it means?” I asked.

“I would, Mr. Taylor,” Drake replied, “but I can’t.” His voice as smooth and cruel as ever. “Last night, I heard growls, scratches and oily smearings against the stone. It sounded like people fucking. But I did not draw whatever is there. You’ll have to ask the Dark Man what it means.”

He pointed now, with uncanny precision, to the room’s corner.

“He signed his work, did he not?”

I grabbed the room’s other chair and placed it before him. It gave a creaky shriek as I sat.

“Martin, I admire what you’ve done here,” I said. “It’s breathtaking.”

“I’m sure it is. It took everything you had not to wail in terror.”

Two days ago, I would have been alarmed at this “outing” of my fear. But I had a better bead on Richard Drake now. Then, he was an audio engineer, determined to infuriate his therapists. Now, he was a government-trained mindbender, an interrogator, someone who lived to sense weakness and rend wills. I couldn’t match his skill—I wasn’t naive enough to believe that—but I had one important fact on my side.

“The Dark Man did not draw that,” I said, “because the Dark Man doesn’t exist. We both know that. In fact, we both know I can access the security tape for this room if I wanted, to prove that he didn’t. I’d see you in night-vision footage, working on this art project.”

“I prefer to think of ‘him’ as an ‘it,’” Drake said. He raised a finger. “It’s like talking about God. The Creator is beyond human reason, and therefore beyond gender. So is the Dark Man. Don’t anthropomorphize it, Mr. Taylor. Its teeth are obsidian razors. Its claws are ebony ice. The only human thing about it is its insatiable appetite.”

He folded his hands and stared into space.

I stayed quiet. This was a chess game. I was white, he was black—and black had dominated the board from the beginning, had deflected nearly every advance I’d made, had punished me for trying to play.

It was time to castle.

“I know who you are,” I said.

The blind man kept smiling.

“I know who you were,” I said.

Drake’s eyelids fluttered.

“I know about the CIA,” I said, “and Russia, and Operation Red Show and Alexandrov…”

His face went bone-white. His eyes blinked madly now.

“…land I know about what happened to his family…”

“Stop,” he whispered.

“…and I know you were discharged from the Agency…”

“No.”

“…and that you came back, terrified…”

“God damn you, stop.”

“…and I know you abandoned your son after Lucy and Jenny died, after Ms. Walch’s daughter was killed—”

“STOP!” Drake screamed. A mist of spittle sprayed from his lips. His green eyes flicked back and forth, doing madman’s math. He was a coiled thing now, sliding lower and lower into his chair. Its wood growled beneath him.

His breathing went high and ragged. I watched him closely. If he began to hyperventilate, I’d grab Chaz. We’d take care of him.

“Leave me alone,” he panted. “Don’t. No. Go. You’re going to the black place. You’re tempting the Dark Man. Its wraatttth, oh no, Almighty God, no—”

“The visions you saw, Richard, they’re a manifestation of your guilt-from a terrible misstep you made in Russia. The monster isn’t real, Richard. The monster is you, how you see yourself.”

Drake cringed in his chair, feral. His eyes continued to flit around the room.

“The people who died, they meant something to you, or your family,” I said. “They represented intimacy, happiness, a new beginning, healing. And just as the Dark Man doesn’t exist, neither does your ability to see things before they happen. It was your psyche—acting like a lance, a sword, a thing that sliced at you—that wouldn’t let you move past the horror. Can’t you see? Those people you’re accused of killing were milestones, Richard. Positive roadside markers that led away from what happened in Russia.

“Tell me Richard, please. It’s the only way to break through this. What happened in Russia?”

His eyes flickered. His voice had an edge now.

“‘Eye for eye, pig-fuck American,’” he said. “‘Blood for blood.’ A vow. Curse. It came across the ocean and found us. Killed Lucy and Jenny. I took Danny and ran, and it followed me, getting into my eyes, showing me what it was going to do. Who it was going to do.”

“No, Richard,” I said. “It’s not—”

“And YOU!” he snarled. He clenched his fists. “You. You’d just better shut your fucking mouth, Mr. Taylor. It is real. It hunted, and it’s still here, hungry, because I’m still here. You’ve seen it; I smelled you see it. Why would you possibly want to free it from the cage?”

No. Oh, no. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Confrontation, realization. And then self-forgiveness. So close…

“There’s no Dark M—”

“Yes! There! Is!”

He was out of his chair, rushing toward me, hands flailing in space for only an instant—and then they clamped onto my shirt. He yanked me out of my chair. The thing shot backward, cracking against the wall like a thunderclap.

“GET THE FUCK OUT!” he bellowed, shaking me. My head bounced forward-and-back, forward-and-back, like a boxer’s speed bag. “Get OUT of my LIFE!”

I opened my mouth to scream, but he released me with a shove. I stumbled backward, back slamming into the door. I heard a cry from the other side, and then Chaz was inside, brushing past me, clomping toward a man nearly twice his height.

I’d never see a man so tall go down so fast.

The walk back to my office was circuitous, silent and despondent.

I was shaken by Drake’s outburst—It’s obvious these Drake men must address their rage issues, my logical side had quipped—but I was more depressed that he still believed in his Dark Man delusion. A decade of self-hatred is a hard thing to shake, I knew, but I thought I’d been close. Really close.

And that was what truly troubled me: Drake’s unyielding belief in the Dark Man. He hadn’t killed those people—the empirical evidence of his alibis was enough for me to trust that—and yet he welcomed the chopping block. He was a self-appointed whipping boy, ready for the flaying, gleeful for blindness and banishment. It didn’t make sense… but then again, as my inner Spock had said this morning, madness defies the microscope.

I trudged the halls of The Brink. It was brass tacks time, as Rachael would say. “Come to Jesus” time, as Lucas would say.

When Dr. Peterson assigned me this case, his instructions were clear: Deduce if the patient was mentally competent to stand trial. Nothing more. But I’d taken up a crusade to fix the blind man. Yes, looking back now, it had been my intent from the beginning. Even my clever mantra had been a road map for this case: Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound… he’s blind, but help him see.

How fair was that for my patient? For me?

Drop it, Zachary, my father had said.

Practically speaking, I should have—should’ve saluted and done the uncomplicated thing. But I couldn’t, and damn it, that was infuriating.

What was the purpose here? What was powering this thickheaded quest?

Was it ego? Was I like that haughty pissant Dr. Xavier? Someone anonymous was feeding the press inside information, all of which was designed to make my life—and my father’s—more and more miserable. I reckoned he was behind that. And me? Was I fueled by ambition, focused on some invisible, mythical scorecard that’s somehow supposed to define me and my reputation? Was this about job security?

Was this about defying my father? A bohemian urge to clash with the control freak, The Man? Rage against him and the secrets he’d kept from Lucas and me?

Did I want to impress my girl? Prove my worth to a woman who was out of my league, a woman who could pick damned-near any man—or hell, probably any woman, for that matter—but chooses to settle for me?

I held back a bitter chuckle here. I had no mother. Wasn’t I just high-maintenance enough with my broken mind and nyctophobia and rabblerousing and checkered past to evoke a maternal instinct in my empowered geek goddess? Was I expecting her to fix me? Had she? My God, was I that fucked up?

I turned corners and passed doorways and looked inside myself for the answer. I was brutal, and I was honest.

Yes.

There were slivers of truth to all of those things. But those slivers, as small and shiny as they were, were dwarfed by No.

No.

I wanted to save Richard Drake because he deserved to be saved. We all do. We all deserve a chance to forgive ourselves for a pitch-black past, and pick up the shattered pieces of ourselves to start anew. I’d lived that, after the accident, the soul-grinding wrong place, wrong time catastrophe that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been on the wild ride with my giddy-giddy pardner. But I’d clawed my way out. The paintbrushes, papers and pencils that my father mocked… that Xavier mocked… that Drake himself mocked… had saved me.

Perhaps that was an impossible thing to want for Drake, but damn it, that’s what I wanted.

But it isn’t up to you, my rational self said.

This was true.

Perhaps Drake was too far gone to be helped by me or anyone else. Perhaps he and his Dark Man were forever entwined, conjoined, inseparable. And if that were true, then he was fundamentally broken. Psychologically unsound.

Unfit for trial.

I knew where Drake would go, were I to sign that form and pass his lawyer an insanity plea. His destination would probably be a place different from prison and cosmetically better than The Brink. But it would be more hellish than either.

Drake’s essence—his brilliance—would be obliterated by a system that cared for neither breakthroughs nor progress. It cared only for status-quo pacification. He would rot in a room, unliving a ghost-life, gazing through a miasma of pharmacological cocktails and solitary confinement.

That’s not treatment. It’s barely existence.

It was no way for a man to live. And that’s why I couldn’t let it go.

I walked the final hallway on Level 3, reflecting on my session with Drake, replaying his confession, his outburts, his absolute insistence on the Dark Man’s existence.

Eye for an eye, he’d said.

I stopped, five feet from my door. There was something odd about that bit, something itchy, like a scab. I gave it a scratch. My exhausted, sleep-deprived mind said no more.

I shrugged, closed the gap, fished for my keys.

An eye for an eye.