Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

His eyes, behind the glasses, flashed blue fire. “It’s what they’re getting paid—a bundle—for. Lucrative way to make a living. Christ, no wonder they don’t want to boogie in here and say, ‘This is a total fucking failure—go home, folks, we screwed up this time.’ ”

“Horrible, isn’t it? What do people with no money do?”

Bill began to pace up and down past the row of jars hanging upside down by Father’s bed. “Well, these cats honestly don’t think they’re lying. They have different priorities from us, that’s all.”

There was a long silence. Father was snoring. His chest rose and fell with an irregular rhythm.

Bill moved back to his window, one boot in front of the other: heel, toe, heel, toe. “It’s really quite simple,” he said at last, turning to look at me. “A young hot-shot surgeon did this relatively experimental operation. The dude wants very badly not to go wrong—in the sense that if he does, Father could die. And Father’s not exactly a nobody, either. Bad publicity.”

He rubbed his back vigorously along the sharp juncture where the window and wall met.

“Do you want me to scratch your back?”

He smiled. “Doesn’t sound all bad.”

“Well, come over here. I’m too lazy to get up.”

Bill came over and presented his back to me, blocking my view of Father. My chair was at the foot of the bed. Bill grasped the iron footboard and leaned back into my fingernails.

“Ah. God, that feels good,” he groaned. “Over to the left and up. Feels like I’ve been bitten by a bedbug. Guess that’s not too likely at the River Club, though, huh?” Bill didn’t care for the Beekman and had moved over to the River Club because of the dining room there. He liked the view, at breakfast, of the boats on the East River.

“Just nerves,” I said, trying to scratch through his jacket.

His back twitched disjointedly like a cat’s.

“I really hate his stomach scene,” he murmured, looking down at Father. “This could turn out to be the doc’s first failure. That’s the thing, you see. His whole objective is to keep Father alive. Ours …” He lapsed into silence again.

“To let him die?”

“Um. There’s clearly so much brain damage.” He straightened up and walked around to the side of the bed.

“Pop,” he whispered, gently taking Father’s hand. Father’s hands were rather small-boned and slender. Mother had told us we were lucky to have inherited them from him, an opinion that had always pleased him enough to quote. Now his hand seemed like a child’s in Bill’s. He slept on.

I was reminded of the worst dream I could remember ever having had. I was six years old, and in the twenty-seven years since then nothing had equaled it in terms of sheer terror. Every night for weeks afterward, Emily had had to sit by my bed until I dropped off to sleep; it was in the days when my dreams were apt to recur.

I dreamed that one day an indescribably horrible monster rampaged through Brentwood, killing everyone in sight. Bridget, Bill, and I, forewarned by its dreadful roar, were able to save ourselves by hiding behind the blue sofas in The Barn. However, when we crept out in the silent aftermath, we found Emily, Elsa and Otto, and George Stearns gathered on the gravel driveway, weeping. The monster had killed Mother and Father. Then, abruptly, I was with my friends in the school cafeteria. With destruction all around us, the Red Cross had arrived and were passing out supplies and hot lunches. The food was extraordinarily delicious. It was a sort of fried chicken, succulent and delicate, quite unlike anything I had ever seen or tasted. While I was chewing on the bones, my teacher stopped by the table where we were all eating.

“Brooke,” she said. “We’ve given you the wrong lunch. Let me take it back and get you another.”

“Oh,” I answered, “I’m so hungry and it tastes so good.”

“But Brooke, dear, what you are eating,” she pointed out, “are your father’s hands.”

I had awakened screaming and screaming. Emily said she’d never heard such a sound. It was strange, too, because I’d never heard of cannibalism. It wasn’t until I’d grown up that the dream was interpreted as being a result of the spanking that Father, against his will and at Mother’s insistence, had given me that summer in St. Malo.

Father’s hand was so emaciated that when Bill held it up, light from the bed-table lamp passed through it, giving it the unearthly glow of a Georges de La Tour painting.

“Look,” he said. “You can see the silhouette of the bones. Look how transparent his flesh is. Amazing.”

He laid Father’s hand back on the sheet and bent over to kiss his forehead.

Bill is wonderful, I mused. My kid brother. Who would have thought? Miraculous. Thank God he’s here or I couldn’t possibly get through another day of this torture. Crazy Bill. He really is still crazy but nobody knows that any more except me—and maybe a few other well-chosen people—because most of the time he acts saner than anyone else for miles around. Just sometimes … Of course, it had occurred to me that the reason I knew that Bill was crazy was because I was secretly crazy myself.

“Sometimes,” I said out loud, “I don’t know, I don’t know. Do we want him to die? What we don’t want is for him to go on living like this, but—”

“It’s a bummer, no doubt about it.” As Bill moved down the line-up of suspended glass jars, he tapped each one experimentally with his fingernails. The room tinkled with varying tones. “But, Brooke, he is dying. Face it. He can’t possibly go on like this. When you come in here every morning and rap with him and there’s no change, or he’s worse—yes, worse. I remember when I first got here. At least he was coherent for a while, and then he kind of slipped into the—weirdness. Did I tell you what he said when he first saw me?”