The Last Bender, Chapter 21

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

          There’s no straight road from Spartan Co. to Guernsey. You can take the Cross Island to the Crane Bridge and pick up the Cyrus Van for a mile north before cutting west on Rt. 6, which links up with the Hart Parkway just outside of Brill. You wanna avoid downtown Brill if possible; the bypass is poorly marked but easy to do if you know the way. Take Park St. to the third blinking light and make a hard left. That circles through a marshy area, past the Ruth Snyder Memorial Stadium (if there’s a game on this is no good) and along an industrial park area full of sea gulls and beached garbage scows. Watch out for the speed trap after the underpass. This merges with the Hart Parkway which has split from Rt. 6 and heads west. Once you’re on the Hart things go by fast. North or south it’s a straight shot to the Guernsey Turnpike; and it falls in with the east/west trunk of the PaCificATolL Road a mile beyond that.

          I couldn’t shake Braque out of my hair. He had put a lot together. It bugged me. And what if Helen had married Pechardine up with our Lab snatch? So I pulled off the City Bypass and headed for the station house. If Helen had made it in as far as Braque, then Linda and I were fucked. Cause Laraby would try to use me to gag the cops. And if it didn’t go right, he’d order me to hit her. Linda had to know. And it was her own good now to try to stop Helen. It wouldn’t be Laraby’s doing, or even mine.

          The radio scratched and crackled. A middle-aged guy crooned to twangy guitars about a bad marriage. I didn’t blame her. If I had to fuck his sorry ass night after night I’d run off with the pool guy too. Then I was expecting some more short head thinking on marriage when the broadcast broke for news. It was Helen Stark being interviewed at the scene of another bloodbath, this time in a high-rise. The Yak asked what she thought was going on. “Whoevuh did this, is gonna die. Cause I am gonna do it.”

          Holy fucking shit. It was a smart pill gone bad. The precinct house didn’t look half so good to me then. I tore out to Guernsey. There were just too many on it now. It was like having a crowd on my back. I could feel Helen’s collar burning on the radio. Now Linda, she stayed cool, even when pissed. But she didn’t have to make a mark. It was like Helen said, if she can crack these nuts, she gets a name in Homicide.

          I started thinking about her naked. I was trying to fuck her in my head. I couldn’t do it yet. It’s easy after the first time. Now drinking was another thing. I could run that one through in fine detail. After going shot for shot with her, I wake up yellow. Oh no. She pushed the crowd off my back and had me to herself in the front seat.

          I tuned in more news. It was a high-rise apartment in upper midtown. That was near to Clara Turback. Every kind of cop was on it. After a while, they’d be chasing each other around.

          Then Evalyn St. Claude and I played ping-pong with the one-liners. She didn’t want me. I hadn’t a dime and all my smarts were for not stepping in it. She could bench press any gym boy she wanted and when she got tired of the muscle heads she had a seven-course meal of nothing but brain waiting in the fridge.

          What would the smart pill be then? Did it make you high? Was thinking so fast ecstatic? Did you feel it in your nerves? the gut? or was it all mental? Like you just never got out of your head. A treed animal maybe. It would be like peering out at the world through little caged eyes. That couldn’t be it. It had to be air. Or glass.

          The typical stimulant experience is one of euphoric illusion, omnipotent ego, until the mirror turns to water and crashes on your feet. But this was supposed to be real. That our calculations could be accelerated to machine like speeds. I got a rush from the root of my spine to the top of my head just thinking about it. It was the opposite of Tranzidene.

          Tranzidene works by eliminating fear. You just aren’t capable of feeling any fear at all. Then, after a while, you lose your fascination with death, because you don’t fear it anymore. It becomes totally meaningless. Someone pisses you off, you kill them, just like that. Who would punish us there?

          You lose your fear of death and the world is its true color. You lose your love, your empathy. We were the ideal fighting force, incapable of identifying with our enemy. It was a monstrous side affect. I could commit any act without regret. And since it was war, we were ordered to act. We were told to believe. They say some did. Maybe that’s true, but I didn’t meet them.

          At first we were an automated army, indifferent, remorseless, cruel. Our deeds were robotic, carried out efficiently, without protest or enthusiasm. But soon we became a real army, an entity, an army of the dead. We went over to the other side. We were patriots of death. We were death’s dream incarnated on the earth to rid it of its foe.

          Since no one had forced the drug on us–after all they outlawed it almost as soon as it was introduced–all our guilt was private. Each individual had chosen to survive that place by becoming its whore. We knew who had put the little white pills there and why, but no one ever said to take them.

          After I had purged myself of Tranzidene life returned. And with life, conscience. And with conscience came the hundred eyes arrayed against me from the other side. The recruits were angry. I had abandoned them in retreat. Now their only purpose was to remind me of my work. Life was just an interlude from a debt that would never die.

          We were one kind of puppet army. So then, what kind of puppet army would an unlimited human intellect try to create, and to what purpose?