“Okay, I get it,” Kerri whispered. “There’s something out there. I can’t ignore it. But why do we have to take care of it? Why us?”
Andy sat back down, a rogue hand holding one of Kerri’s. Softness took over again: “Because we’re the Blyton Summer Detective Club. BSDC forever, right? It’s what we do. We help people, catch the bad guys, fix problems. It’s the last thing I remember being good at. You want to know what I’ve been up to the last five years? I’ve been a cook, a cabbie, a welder, a train operator, an air force cadet, and I sucked phenomenally at every single one of those things. So I’m going back to what I was good at, and you and Tim are coming with me.”
Tim stood on all fours again, panting at the prospect of action.
Kerri murmured, “Can I sleep some more before we go?”
“Okay,” Andy said, lying down again and pulling the sheets back up. “But not too long. We gotta fetch your cousin Nate in Arkham.”
“They were onto us,” said Xira, swiping the wharg blood from her ax blade. “We must get to Actheon’s citadel before them.”
“We’ll cut through the woods,” Adam suggested.
“We’ll cut through the woods,” said Princess Irya, Xira’s faithful companion.
“You know they make wharg blood with maple syrup and purple dye?” Ethan triviaed, but no one listened. “It’s actually delicious.”
“Go! The sun is setting,” Xira bid, hopping over the gurgling carcasses toward the Bierstadt sunset that shone red upon Adam’s acned face, inches away from the screen.
“This show is stupid,” Craig grumbled from his armchair.
All seats in the living room had been tacitly assigned among the inmates long ago, mostly through ancient pacts among the elders, with the occasional revision of terms by means of an amicable skirmish. The twin armchairs with autumn motifs were for people no one really liked; Craig was one of them. Old Acker was granted the rocking chair. The corner chaise longue was for catatonics. The sofa was a sort of UN demilitarized zone, an upholstered Jerusalem that members of different creeds reluctantly shared during interbellum periods. Anyone actually caring for the TV broadcast had to relinquish his seat and take the first row on the linoleum floor.
“Adam,” said Nurse Angela, beginning the four o’clock roll call for medicines. She approached the unresponsive fat kid in front of the TV, put a red-and-white pill in his open mouth, prodded his chin shut, and moved on. Adam knew every word of dialogue of Xira the Princess Warrior by heart. He liked to read Irya’s lines.
“Kimrean.”
“Meeeee!” cheered the schizophrenic hermaphrodite lying on the sofa.
“You know, this was one of Linda Hamilton’s ten least favorite episodes,” said Ethan, bearing Kimrean’s mantis legs on his lap. “The filming was so taxing.”
“How do you know?” Kimrean asked, childishly interested.
“She told me.”
“Oh, come on!” went Craig, snapping off his chair and getting an automatic first warning from the head nurse—barely a nasal caveat in a sitcom housewife tone. “I’m so sick of this! So Linda Hamilton told you. Was that when you chaperoned her to the Golden Globes?”
“Before that,” Ethan replied matter-of-factly. “We weren’t officially dating yet.”
“You dated her?” wowed the hermaphrodite, staring with mismatched eyes, brown and green.
“Bullshit!” cried Craig, just short of loud enough to merit the second warning. “Christ, it’s infuriating! They don’t want us to make any progress—they’re just locking us away! How do you expect patients to recover when you put the pathological liars next to the only guys dumb enough to believe their shit? (Aside, to the nurse offering him a cup.) No, Dr. Willett put me off that yesterday; Belle knows—tell her, Belle. (He goes on, undisturbed.) All day I have to listen to your collective fantasies! This asshole dated Linda Hamilton, that one met Peter Manner, you screwed Patty Hearst—everyone in this place is so well-connected and full of shit!”
ADAM: A storm is brewing, Xira.
CRAIG: Shut up!
“I screwed Hearst?” Kimrean wondered, and then recalled, “Oh, yeah, I did.”
“Rogers.”
The nurse neared the second armchair, where Nate sat, or lay, a cigarette between two Band-Aided bony fingers. He took the Dixie cup, swallowed his pills, opened his mouth in a hippo display for the nurse to see, and continued smoking, all this using a record low number of muscles.
The nurse, a young woman right out of school, leaned closer to him. “Did you really meet Peter Manner?”
“Yeah, I did,” Nate groaned. “He was my best friend.”
“Really?” she whispered excitedly. “I loved him in that movie with Shannen Doherty—I used to have such a crush on him! You went to school with him?”
“No, he was from California; I grew up in Oregon,” he retold, tired of his own story, words dropping off his dry, flaky lips. “We met in summer camp and afterward spent all holidays together at my aunt Margo’s house in Blyton Hills: my cousin Kerri and her friend Andy and Peter and me. And we went camping, and climbing, and fishing, and we got into trouble every school break.”
He was speaking in a low voice to spare those who’d heard the story already, but for some reason everyone was listening. Craig stood in tension, a skeptical eyebrow arched up.
“He was so talented,” the nurse said. “So did you continue to see him after that?”
Nate locked eyes with her.
“I still do.”
The room dismissed him with a scoff as Xira went to commercials.
—
Tim had been gnawing the armrest into submission for the last ten miles. In the front seat, Kerri sat with her head against her window like a broken robot, hazy eyes surfing the flowing tarmac.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” she beeped.
“Now?” Andy checked her for a split second. “You went only an hour ago.”
“I need to go again.”
“Can you go there in the woods?”
“No. It’s number two.”
“But it was number two last time.”
“Yes! Well spotted, Inspector Craphound from the Rectal Police, you caught me!”
“Okay, okay. Jesus.”
Andy was uneasy too. Not so much about the destination as the journey itself, to put it in Confucian terms. Bad becomes unbearable only when contrasted to expectation; Andy had learned through her life on the road to bear little or no expectations, which enabled her to weather most scenarios without visible wearing. But a car trip with Kerri was one of the few premises she had often allowed herself to fantasize about. Of course, in her daydreams the radio worked, the car was certainly something better than a 1978 Chevrolet Vega Kammback wagon, and the destination, albeit undefined, was definitely not a psychiatric asylum in Arkham, Massachusetts. Nor Massachusetts, period.