JOE MEARS slumped against an alley wall and heard police dogs converging a block away. Mears was gut-shot from when the cop nailed him in the bedroom and his hand was mangled. He wiped blood from his palm and saw the bones of his hand, a sickening glimpse as the gash refilled with red. The tenements seemed to curve and meet in the sky above his head. He closed his eyes and went into shock.
He was in a hospital bed. A tall man in a lab coat sat by the window. The man seemed handsome or perhaps just calm. Mears got out of bed and fell, buttocks spreading on the cold tile floor through the hospital gown. The man helped him up. Mears shuffled to a mirror on the wall. His head was shaved. He had twin half-dollar-size scars, silver-pink, just above the temples. He ran his stubby fingers over the scars. He looked out the window, which was bolted shut and covered with iron mesh. Snow fell on a patch of brown grass. Sailors in peacoats walked in twos and threes. It was cold enough to see their breath. A car passed and made no noise.
He listened for the dogs and heard none.
The man in the lab coat said, “You’re in the secure wing of the United States Naval Hospital, Portsmouth. You’ve been with us almost a year.”
Mears sat on the bed.
“I’m Dr. Seth Zimquist,” the man said. “Do you remember coming here?”
Mears shook his head.
“You were a very sick man, Joe. Mentally, I mean. You’ve undergone treatments. We have, in effect, erased the old Joe Mears and built a new one in its place. Don’t be afraid.”
A second doctor joined them, closing the door. Mears noticed that it locked, a muffled click. The new doctor said his name was Lemuel Childs. He asked Zimquist if Mears remembered anything. Zimquist made a zero or an okay with his hand.
Childs opened a fat folder on his knee. “You are ten years old,” he said. “A family farm. Ohio. Winter. Dawn. Crows skim over a bare cornfield. Your father is named Nimrod Mears. He’s a lay preacher, reformed Mennonite. He’s cold and distant, like the fields.”
Mears knew what a farm was, but he knew he had never lived on one. He heard the dogs somewhere outside. He tried to get up, but couldn’t.
“You enlisted in the Navy to get away,” Childs said. “Your father objected, Mennonites being pacifists. You did it to spite him, probably. You served on cruisers and destroyers. Your principal home ports were Subic, Guam, and San Diego.”
Mears knew what Guam and San Diego were, but only as words on a map. He had never been to sea.
“You had a girlfriend in San Diego,” Childs said. “She was tall, a swimmer. She’d worked as an extra in Esther Williams movies. Very pretty, this girl. Do you remember her long brown hair?”
Esther Williams he remembered. She dived into water for Hollywood. He knew what water was, what movies were. But he’d never been to San Diego.
“In 1956, she told you she was pregnant. You raped her to induce a miscarriage. Other things came out at the trial. There was a suggestion that you had raped a girl in Los Angeles, one in Manila, two in Hawaii. There was also an unsolved rape-strangulation in Ashtabula during one of your Ohio leaves, but the evidence was weak. Do you remember?”
He’d never raped a girl to kill his own kid, never raped the others. Had he?
“You were found guilty of the San Diego rape,” Childs said. “You served six years in a Navy jail before escaping. The shore patrol found you working on the docks in Boston. They brought you here. For your own good. Do you remember?”
Mears sobbed. The dogs were wailing, on his scent, closing in.
“You are violent,” Childs said, closing the folder. “Accept that you are violent.”
Zimquist spoke up, softening the tone. “Don’t believe your head, Joe. Accept that you are Mears. Accept that you are violent. If your head says otherwise, it’s lying to you.”
The rest of what Zimquist said was drowned out by barking. The dogs were in the next street, dragging him back from Portsmouth. He found his feet and forced himself to move. The alley opened on a courtyard where laundry hung on a line. He grabbed a workshirt, buttoned it up with one hand, and took a pillowcase to wrap the other. He went through the basement of the next building and fell over something in the dark. He lay on his side, and pain overwhelmed him again. In his head, Zimquist said: Accept that you are Mears. Accept that you are violent. He struggled to one knee, then both knees, then stood up, feeling his way along a mortar wall.
He came out of the basement on a street by the Ship Channel, which was fifty yards across. He could swim it, but he had to shake the dogs. He saw a car at a stoplight up ahead. He snuck behind it, duck-walking, staying low, and unwound the pillowcase from his hand. The light turned green. Mears looped the pillowcase around the bumper, and stayed low as the car pulled away. He could hear barking in the basement of the building just behind him. He dove over the bank into the channel as the dogs rounded the corner. The baying of the pack grew fainter as the dogs followed the pillowcase on the bumper of the car and Mears started swimming away.
THE Secure Wing of the Portsmouth Naval Hospital had a lounge. The doctors called it a solarium. It was the only place in the nuthouse that Mears remembered fondly. He liked the big glass ashtrays and cheap paintings of famous naval engagements on the wall. On Mears’s first day out of his locked room, maybe a week after he woke up, he found a woman sitting alone in a corner of the lounge. She wore a housecoat and galoshes and lipstick, deep red and crookedly done.
She smiled at him as he sat down. “I’m going to church today.”
Her name was Mrs. Shepard. Her hubby was some kind of admiral. “He loves me very much,” she said. “They tell me I’m nearly cured.”
Mears watched a patient get wheeled into a room at the end of the corridor. Mrs. Shepard told him this was where the electroshock happened.
Mears said, “Electroshock?”
She leaned over and touched one of Mears’s fading silver-pink scars. An odd gesture. They were just a couple of mental patients in an empty lounge, strangers to each other, yet she was touching the scars on his head. For some reason, he never forgot that.
“They’ll heal,” she said.
The head guard, Harlan Poole, shackled them together and marched them to the base chapel, where they sat through early mass. The chapel was empty except for Mears, Mrs. Shepard, Harlan Poole, and the priest, who sang, “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti…”
Mears knew the correct response: “Amen.”
“—Introibo ad altare Dei…”
Mears said, “Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam…”
Juventutem meant “youth,” and youth was a gang of boys, orphan boys, and a nun standing with them, catechism in one hand, ruler in the other. The orphans fell into line in the street and marched up a hill to church. Mears saw himself. He was the smallest boy. The nuns kept moving him from family to family, telling him as they dropped him off: “This one will work, this will be home now forever….” But he always wound up back in line sooner or later, marching up the hill to early mass. He saw a priest and heard Latin echoing everywhere. He could see this and hear this and know it all meant church to him; he was no fucking Mennonite.
He must’ve been talking to himself, because Mrs. Shepard gave him a look and Harlan Poole rapped him in the shin with a song book. Afterward, when the priest was leaving, Mears shouted at the priest until Poole slugged him in the gut.
The priest came over, scolding Poole. “How dare you strike him here?”
Mears was on the ground. “I need to see you,” he told the priest. Poole stepped on Mears’s fingers. The priest shrieked; Mears didn’t.
“He’s going back to lockup,” Poole told the priest, dragging Mears away.
Later that day, Mears was in the lounge. The priest came to him.
“I’m George Sedgewick,” he said. “Your name is Mears. I’ve spoken to Dr. Zimquist and Dr. Childs about you. They are hopeful.” Father Sedgewick wore a black raincoat and carried books under his arm. He was older than the doctors. His face was open and gentle. He sat down without taking off the raincoat, books on his lap.
“Help me,” Mears said.
Sedgewick folded his hands on top of the books. “The doctors are here to help you,” he said.
“The doctors?” Mears came forward to whisper, “They say I’m from Ohio, a farm with crows and somebody named Nimrod, but I never been there. They say I raped a girl in San Diego, but I never been there either. You saw me in church.”
Sedgewick shifted in his chair. “Yes.”
“I know the Latin.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Well, where do I know it from?” Mears told Father Sedgewick what he had seen when he heard the Latin: orphan boys and a nun marching up the hill to early mass.
Sedgewick said it was all very fascinating.
Mears touched the priest’s knee. “I’m not the guy they say I am.”
Sedgewick moved his knee and acted as if he’d heard all of this before. “Who are you then?”
There was the stumper. Thanks to a year of Zimquist and Childs, he knew who he wasn’t, nothing more.
“Were you here when I came in?” Mears asked Father Sedgewick.
“Yes.”
“The very first day I got here?”
“Night,” Sedgewick said. “It was late at night.”
“Did I do anything? Did I say anything?”
“You beat up half the shore patrol,” Sedgewick said. “They called you Mears, and you kept saying, ‘That’s not my name.’ We had quite a brawl that night.”
“They found me in Boston,” Mears whispered. “Childs said so.”
“You were a fugitive there.”
“Well,” Mears said, “what if the shore patrol got the wrong guy?”
Sedgewick stood up, swinging the books under his arm. “Listen to your doctors,” he said. “It’s for your own good.”
So he said whatever they said to say. Accept that you are Mears. Accept that you are violent. He did whatever it took to convince Zimquist and Childs that they were geniuses and that he was cured. After a few months, they gave him some money and a bus ticket to Cleveland and a paper saying Joe Mears was free to leave the base.
He shook everyone’s hand the day he left the ward, even Harlan Poole’s. He walked alone to the depot; he insisted on going alone. He cashed in his ticket, scaled the wall of the Navy base, and stole a car from the parking lot. He jumped Poole that night outside a trailer park, and began a new life as whatever he was.
Now he leaned on Dr. Childs’s buzzer and hugged the wall. Childs opened the door.
“Shotgun,” Mears said, indicating his side. “Clean me up.”
Childs helped him in, and Mears fell on the couch. Two logs were burning in the fireplace. A pot of tea sat under a cozy.
Mears refused anesthesia; he couldn’t let Childs put him under, not after Portsmouth. Instead, he bit a dishrag and watched Childs carve shot from his torso and clean his palm. He squirmed as Childs stitched the flaps of skin together, jerked his hand away, ripping the wound open again.
Childs reached into an old house-call bag and produced a syringe. “It’s ethyl chloride,” he promised. “Strictly local. You won’t go under. Can I?”
Mears nodded. “Hurry up.”
Childs daubed a vein with rubbing alcohol and shot him up. Mears knew that he’d been lied to as soon as the does hit. He thought that maybe Childs was the sort of guy who could only kill a sleeper, but he lost this thought, falling back into the couch and into something deeper than the couch. He was awake but he couldn’t move. He watched Childs sew his hand and pick Narco lead from under his skin. Childs dropped the pellets into a glass candy dish. The only thing Mears could move was his eyes.
WHEN he woke up, the fire was out and the couch was covered with splashy stains, dried blood. Childs was packing up his instruments. Mears sat up.
Childs said, “What happened today?”
“The cops raided my place,” Mears said, inspecting his stitched-up hand. “Boston’s too hot now. I’m getting out. That means a last score, a big one.”
“I’m working on it,” Childs said.
“One of the cops saw my face,” Mears said. “I don’t need to tell you what happens if I get collared. I’d have to tell them everything. We’d both go down in flames.”
“Yes,” Childs said.
“The cop who saw my face got messed up. They’ll have to stash him someplace. Probably in a nuthouse, maybe City & County. His name is Biff Dunn. You got that? If he’s at City & County, I want you to find him and fix him so he can’t testify against me.”
“Are you asking me to kill this Biff Dunn?”
Mears pulled on a clean shirt Childs had fetched him. “If you could kill somebody, you’d kill me. Just fix Biff Dunn so he can’t recognize me.”
“Fix him?”
“Fix his brain like you fixed mine,” Mears said, wobbling to his feet. “And don’t forget my package: five hundred grams of the wonder drug. One more deal, and then I’m gone forever.”
At the door, Mears paused. He said, “Accept that I am violent.”