Shift: Infected, #5, page 4
“Pays me to tie him up and humiliate him? Yes. He remains a curious client, but a loyal one. And I can’t say he didn’t show me a decent time, as he gave me free run of his minibar and room service.”
“You have a strange life.”
He said it so deadpan and mild Holden almost laughed. “Tell me about it. I did check my messages, and I discovered Fiona had called me and left me a message about Roan’s latest case. I’ve got people out looking for more info, but I had some for him anyways. I also had a gift.”
“Oh boy, did you get him a tacky souvenir?”
“More like a tacky trinket I picked up in a Las Vegas pawn shop. And no, I didn’t pawn anything. I don’t gamble. If I wanted to waste my money, I’d buy lottery tickets like everyone else. I was just doing a bit of window-shopping with everyone else’s misery.” He pulled the gift out of the pocket of his jeans and put it on the coffee table.
Dylan sat forward and examined it curiously. “Oh, how ’bout that. It is very tacky.”
“And one hundred percent pewter. If that’s worth anything, and I don’t think it is.” It was a ring shaped like a lion’s head, with a mane large enough to cover the lower half of the finger.
“I’m sure he’ll love it. Which bothers me.”
“You’re not alone.”
“So what information did you have for him?”
“Hawley was no walker. Might have been trans, but not a hooker, not to anyone’s knowledge, and we would know.”
“Would you? I mean, you’re not unionized.”
“No, but there’s always a way to find out who’s working what corner. No hooker is ever alone on a street, and we use a lot of the same motels. It’s a smaller world than you’d think.”
“I’m sure. If the johns knew, they might be a little scared by it.”
“A little? A lot. For good reason.”
Dylan nodded, looking down at his mug, his attention wandering elsewhere. They were silent for a moment, and Holden felt that something was going desperately wrong here. Dylan was depressed and probably sleep deprived, but he wasn’t the type to open up to him. He knew that Dylan really didn’t like him that much, and yet he seemed to be confiding in him. Was he that lonely? Was he feeling that lost?
Dylan sagged back on the sofa and stared at him almost boldly, his dark brown eyes set like stone. “You love him too. What would you do if you were me?”
Holden stared back at him, but he was so flabbergasted by what Dylan had said it took him a moment to speak. “Uh, what? I don’t love Roan. I like the guy, but—”
“Oh please, I’ve had enough self-deception from Ro. Please don’t you do it too.”
“Dylan, I don’t. I don’t want him and he doesn’t want me. He’s all yours.”
He scoffed faintly. “You’re a gay man. I don’t have to explain the difference between love and desire to you. You can want a person without loving them, but the opposite also holds true. Look, I know you’re not a threat to our relationship, so I’m not gonna go crazy-ass jealous on you. I just want to know why you haven’t given up on him yet.”
Holden wasn’t sure if he should be angry, offended, or amused. All three? (And actually, he wouldn’t mind doing Roan. Yeah, it’d be pretty weird considering their relationship now, but he’d always left the invitation of doing him for free open. Well, he was a good-looking guy, there was no getting around that, and Holden was always impressed by his humor, which could be incredibly sexy on a guy. And it was probably the lion pheromones or something, but he did have a mysterious kind of magnetism. You kind of wanted to follow him, let him take the lead.) “Why not get crazy-ass jealous? I mean, that’s the least a guy could want.”
“Because Roan isn’t like that. He’s a nester. He grew up without a home, and now all he wants is a nice, stable home.”
“Let me guess—you minored in psychology.”
“I was trying to understand my dad,” he replied, a roundabout way of saying yes. “It didn’t work. And I’m not trying to offend you, although why you’d be offended by me saying you loved someone is a bit puzzling.”
“I’m offended because you couldn’t be more wrong. He’s a friend, that’s all. I’m not capable of much more.”
“Bullshit,” Dylan said without rancor. His voice was as weary as his posture, as the expression on his face. “You’d kill for him. I saw that when we were trying to solve the Newberry case without him. Even Dee saw it, and he gave me the oddest look. He asked me later if I was worried about that, and I said no, because I’m not. In a strange way, I wish I was.”
Holden felt something cold settle in his gut, a twinge and a twist. This had all suddenly gone somewhere he didn’t want it to go, and he wasn’t a hundred percent sure why. It almost felt like the walls were starting to close in. “I’m not explaining myself to you. I like the guy a lot, but that’s the end of it. Full stop. And if you want my opinion, you either get used to him or pack your bags now. Is he a moody son of a bitch? Hell yeah. Either he’ll snap out of this on his own or he’ll need a shock to snap him out of it, but he’s been a morose-leaning bastard since I’ve known him.” Holden stood up, feeling angry now. Maybe because he always hated being told how he felt about something. It seemed presumptuous, insulting, and arrogant to tell him how he felt. He’d hated it when his parents did it, and he had grown no fonder of it as an adult.
Dylan looked up at him with something like surprise, eyebrows rising slightly. “Holden, I didn’t—”
“Save it. I’m not the person you should be talking to anyways. You want Roan to get over himself? Tell him. He won’t be happy, but he’s not an idiot. Spell out your terms, and if he can’t live with them, leave.”
Dylan made a noise of disbelief and put his mug down heavily on the coffee table. “Oh yeah, he could only be dead in a month. I should walk out on him.”
“Oh please. He’s been dying since you met him. If you stay with him out of pity, he will resent the shit out of you. If you don’t like things, do something about it, or just sit down, shut up, and live with it.” He headed for the door, hoping he wasn’t storming out like a big drama queen, but... yeah, there was probably no avoiding that. Still, he had to leave because he was so angry he was sure he’d say something they’d both regret.
Dylan said something, but Holden just ignored him. He hadn’t even told Dylan he knew the name Carey Switzer. In fact, he knew Switzer very well.
And he could easily imagine him being a killer.
5
Psychosomatic
IT WAS day three when Dylan decided the Way of Water was just not going to work for him this week.
It was something to strive for. It was the essence of Taoism basically: to be fluid, essential, give without taking, to be strong without being violent, to be calm and placid.
Yeah. Not this month.
Not that he didn’t want to be. Without Roan here, and with Doctor Rosenberg only letting him stay long enough to see Roan was fine before shooing him out of the hospital, he’d spent a lot of time at the Buddhist temple, working on his meditation techniques. But then he’d get frustrated, his mind wandering all over the place, so he’d come home and paint; but he found himself not wanting to paint, so he’d fill in for someone at work and find himself too exhausted and distracted to deal with customers. It was a vicious cycle that continued without ceasing. He even slept badly, so he was always tired.
He’d come to the conclusion that living in Roan’s house without Roan here made him feel like a trespasser, or worse, a living ghost, haunting someone else’s house. What would he do without Roan exactly? What if he never came back?
His mind just shied away from it. He couldn’t think it. It seemed impossible that Roan, probably the largest of the larger-than-life figures he’d ever met, could simply die, disappear, go away. He seemed almost mythical now. Or if he did die, it would be doing something big and splashy, something heroic and needlessly violent. He wasn’t the type to die in his sleep.
So when Doctor Rosenberg called him on day three, his heart lurched, but she said quickly, in her smoke-husky voice, that nothing was wrong with Roan; she just needed Dylan to come down to her office as soon as he could. That happened to be the moment he’d given up on the Way of Water (fuck his laundry; he could do that any time), and he raced there in the rain, finding all the traffic lights working against him as he tried to figure out why she’d want to see him. Was she lying about nothing being wrong? She must have been. She just didn’t want him to freak out. So he tried very hard not to freak out in traffic, and when he parked his car, he made sure no one was around before screaming at the top of his lungs. Sometimes it was cleansing to let out the pain and fear, but today all it did was make his throat hurt.
Dylan was shaking a little when he finally got up to Doctor Rosenberg’s office at the university hospital, but she thought he was just soaked from the rain and chided him in a motherly fashion for not wearing a warmer coat. Her office smelled faintly of cigarettes, although there were no ashtrays in evidence. There was a small explosion of paper covering her desk, little drifts of mail, a flat-screen computer, and a complicated-looking phone. Her carpet was dark green, her walls an off gold like old ivory, and along with framed degrees was what looked like a picture of a fractal in a metal frame but was apparently a microscopic photo of a virus. She had a half-dead ficus tucked away near the window, which had a fantastic view of the back quad parking lot.
No family photos? No personal photos of any kind. Did she even have a family? There was something about her intensity that screamed “meddling grandma” to Dylan, but on the other hand, that single-minded focus and dedication to her work could have left her alone. Considering the sheer number of degrees and awards on her wall, he had no idea when she would have had time to get married or start a family. That just ate up too much time.
As soon as Dylan sat in the worn, padded chair she had in front of her chipped wooden desk, she started typing, her fingers flying over the keyboard, chewing on a pencil like she wanted a cigarette. Just as Dylan was about to break the silence, she took the pencil out and said, “I’m just gonna give it to you in layman’s terms, okay? Roan doesn’t need to be here. He never needs to be here again.”
Maybe it was sleep deprivation, but that made no sense to him. “Huh?”
“He’s out of viral sequence. Permanently, as far as I can tell.”
She was speaking neither English nor Spanish; she wasn’t speaking a language he could understand. “What? Are you saying he’s cured?”
“Oh God no! How would that happen? I’m just saying he isn’t a slave to his viral cycle anymore. I think it’s a slave to him.”
“Again—huh? What are you saying?”
“I’m saying he’s not changing this month, not without conscious thought. There are certain hormones, viral proteins, and neurotransmitters that increase when a change is imminent. Did Roan ever tell you he almost agreed to a clinical trial a few years ago? It was during Paris’s last days. He only came in to test for it ’cause he wanted to see if it would save Paris, but he was too sick to participate, and Roan wasn’t gonna do the trial without him. I took blood samples then, and I compared them with blood samples I took from Roan just an hour ago. And his virus has changed shape. In the last couple of years, it’s... mutated. Or been forced to mutate, perhaps by the increase of CD8+ T cells in his system. He can change basically at will. We all know that, right? By doing this, he’s disrupted the natural rhythm. There isn’t one anymore, not for him. His viral protein levels, hormones, and neurotransmitter levels are now naturally higher than normal because he needs to be ready to go at any point. His body and the virus have both adapted to this new reality.”
Dylan decided he was going to be like stone, and the information, like water, would flow over him, and he would make sense of it as it went by. He tried very hard. But the conclusions he reached didn’t make much sense. “You’re saying he doesn’t need to change a few days a month anymore? He doesn’t need the cage?”
“Exactly. No point.”
“But he just changed last month. For four days!”
She nodded, like she expected to hear this. “Yes, because he thought he was going to.”
Being stone was just as hard as being water. There was surely a lesson in that. “What? Are you saying he... he did it to himself?”
“In a sense. Not deliberately. He expected it to happen, and it did, because he was expecting it to. Call it a self-fulfilling prophecy, if you will. He’s probably been psychosomatically changing for... well, fuck if I know. But for a bit, certainly.”
“This is insane,” he blurted, too confused to worry about offending her.
But she just nodded. “Isn’t it? I don’t get it at all. Medically, this is a first. But then again, Roan has been a medical oddity since I first started seeing him. He’s fairly atypical, unique. If I actually introduced these findings to the world at large, he’d be an instant celebrity in medical circles overnight. But I don’t want to see him as an animal in a freak show any more than he wants to see that happen.”
He was sure there was something strange about that statement, but he couldn’t quite decide what. “You’ve never told anyone about him?”
“Oh, I have. I’ve written papers about Patient X—as I call him—and shared it with a few colleagues, but most think it’s my attempt at fiction. They don’t believe he could exist, that a medical oddity this extreme is even possible. But that’s what they said about the virus when it first appeared, so what the hell?”
Dylan just sat there in the chair, wondering if he was going to wake up at home on the sofa, where he must have fallen asleep trying to decide if he should cut his latest canvas in half or set it on fire. This couldn’t actually be happening, could it? “Is, um, there any chance the virus will mutate further?”
She did something you never wanted to see a doctor do: she shrugged. “I wouldn’t think so, but I didn’t think it could mutate further to begin with, so who knows?”
He scratched his head, wondering what the appropriate response was here. Surely throwing a chair through the window was out of bounds, but the fact that he felt like crying made about as much sense. “Why, um, why did you ask me here?”
“Because I’m gonna get him out of his coma tonight, and I want you to lie with me that his cycle came to a sudden end. Then, once he’s had a day to prove that he won’t change, I’m gonna call him back in here and tell him the truth. You don’t have to participate in that. I’m sure it won’t be pretty, but I’ll tell him I set you up for it so he won’t be mad at you.”
He nodded and found himself blinking tears away from his eyes. “Okay, sure.”
“You’re upset.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know why I would be upset.” He rubbed his eyes and took a deep breath through his nose. Calmness; he had to think calm thoughts. He was water, he was stone.
“’Cause it’s hard to be the loved one of an infected, especially when you’re normal.”
“I’m normal?” he replied, almost laughing.
“You’re not infected. And the fact that he’s been living under a death sentence must have added nothing but stress.”
“He’s not going to die,” he said, and his voice cracked. He was water, and now it was coming out of his eyes.
“Well, the possibility is still there. Aneurysms will always be a threat, and I’m sure he’ll die just like we all die. But we don’t have to worry about it on a month-by-month basis anymore. Here, have a tissue.”
“I’m okay,” he lied, not sure why he felt like curling up in the corner and bawling like a little kid.
Maybe because this should have been good news, extraordinary news, but he was afraid that Roan wouldn’t take it that way.
If he really wanted to die, this actually made it easier to accomplish. He would have to decide between the living and the dead.
And Dylan was pretty certain that was an argument lost before it was even made.
HOLDEN wondered if fighting was the only thing that kept people from realizing hockey was kind of gay.
All the skating, all the body contact, guys hugging after a winning goal... kinda gay. But maybe that was his own prejudice talking. Maybe he was seeing everything through a gay glass. But no one could deny there were obvious homoerotic overtones, although not as much as in mixed martial arts fighting—now that was totally, completely fag-tastic. Guys in shorts, sweaty and grappling with each other in a cage as other men cheered them on... it was like soft-core porn at times. You could jerk off to it.
Holden caught the end of a home game between the Falcons and the curiously named Wheat Kings (“All bow before the mighty Wheat King, or I will blight your crops with fungus!”), which the Falcons lost in overtime. Holden didn’t care, as he was just trying to spot the client, which he did when he came off the bench. It helped that he was very nearly the tallest dude on the ice and that he drew attention to himself by pasting a guy so hard to the boards that he thought the glass—Plexiglas, plastic, whatever it was that surrounded the rink—was going to shatter. Grey’s number was twenty-two, but Holden thought 666 might be more appropriate, since he tried to make that guy a pancake. Did they teach you that in hockey school? Not plastering someone, but continuing to skate and play even though the right side of your rib cage has just collapsed and your lung is deflating? That Wheat Kings guy was amazing for not passing out, although he did go to the bench and seemed to sit there for a bit before he got out on the ice again. Holden noticed the client mostly seemed to be on the ice when that guy was, and when the Falcons were on a penalty kill, or the Wheat Kings (“Bring me your rice! Hear the lamentations of your oats!”) were really trying hard to score.
He ended up loitering for almost two hours behind the arena before the Falcons started to emerge. The weird thing about hockey players was they looked so big and thick in their padded uniforms, their body armor protective gear, that out of it they seemed almost ludicrously skinny. Generally fit as hell and as hard as brick walls, but wispy all the same. You wouldn’t know there was a good chance they could break your jaw with one punch until they actually did it.
