Baal

IN THE PREDAWN HOURS the heat wafted high above the city and then, dropping down, wrapped itself like ropes around blocks of granite slugs. It waited for sunrise, to burn the city dry.

He had not slept. Bloated with beer, he sat in a cracked vinyl chair before the open window and watched the lights that never dimmed, very far away, toward the city's heart.

My God, he said to himself over and over until he thought there was someone else standing behind him and speaking. My God. How can a man be allowed to do something like this? He saw the scene in the reddened eye of his mind: the drunken gutter bum waiting in the shadows as Mary Kate approached. Then leaping from his hiding place to bear down on her like a heavy sack of filth. And pounding pounding pounding until he couldn't bear to think about it anymore.

Things hadn't been the greatest in the world for a while; he knew that too well. And now this moved inside him like something trying to escape through the bears of his teeth, something to make him pick up a gun and roam the streets like a mad spittle-mouthed dog.

He had telephoned her parents earlier. Her mother choked back a cry. "And where were you? You weren't where you were supposed to be! No, you were sitting on your ass at home! She could have been murdered!"

"I'm holding you responsible for this, Joe," said her father, taking the phone away from the woman and bellowing into it. "Now act like a man! What hospital did they take her to?"

"They're not going to let you see her," he said quietly. "They wouldn't even let me see her."

"I don't give a damn about that! What hospital?"

He deliberately put the receiver on its cradle, cutting off the man's voice. He had expected there would soon be an angry knocking on the door but they didn't come. Maybe they'd checked the hospitals and found her, or maybe they meant to find him later on in the morning. He didn't care; for the moment he was glad he didn't have to face them.

He had come from the Midwest two years ago, hunting an education and a "meaningful experience." His family were people "tied to the land," as his father put it. They had wanted him to root himself into the earth and grow like an ear of corn, rich with the good ways of the dirt. But that was not for him; he had known it for a long long time. He wanted to become a teacher, perhaps of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature, but first he wanted to live, to break away from the flat land of his birth and perhaps in the city find himself born again. That was when he was so much younger and idealistic.

He'd found a part-time job driving a cab, enough to get by on with monthly allowances from his family, as he attended classes at night. And for a while he enjoyed Othello and Central Park concerts and the sweet strength of pot.

Then he met Mary Kate. He walked into a diner and there found himself attracted to a thin doe-eyed young girl who slapped plates down and feverishly wrote his check in a stilted, unschooled hand. They had nothing in common except an immature sexual yearning; she liked to read love novels in the afterglow. His parents had protested violently at the news of their impending marriage. Son, they'd written, if you do this thing you can't count on us sending you money anymore. Remember your education. He'd written back: Go to hell.

But then the plans had turned to smoke. Money was needed badly; driving the cab became a full-time occupation and the English courses went down the drain. Their dissimilarities became painfully obvious; her illiteracy made him wince. And here they were, like two roommates who suddenly discovered they got in each other's way. They barely made enough money to live on; a divorce was beyond their means.

Yet there had been good, close times. On their "honeymoon," a trip to the movies to see a horror double bill, they sat together in the balcony and threw popcorn at the leering bloody faces, then slipped down under the seats and necked, smacking loudly like highschoolers. They did have their friends in common; scatterbrained longhairs who supplied them with some good highs at low costs; a few married couples he had met in his classes. And sometimes a few buddies from the company would pop over for beer and poker and she would serve them sandwiches, writing them checks on paper napkins. That was always good for a laugh.

Sitting in the chair amid drained cans of beer, he realized how different the apartment was without her. At this time of the morning, usually, he would be awakened by her restless thrashings as she fought hashhouse phantoms in her dreams. He sometimes sat up on their sofa-sleeper and watched her eyes dart beneath closed lids. Dreaming of what? Rush hour? The dinner trade? A hamburger fifty feet across?

He was responsible for her, for better or worse, as the vows had said. It was only right that he take care of her through this thing. He gathered up the cans and threw them into the trash. Outside, dawn was breaking behind a gray veil. It was odd, he thought, how at this time of morning the sky was so washed and featureless, neither holding the promise of sun nor rain. Blank like a staring impassive face.

He waited until visiting hours and then took a cross-town bus back to Bellevue.

On the seventh floor he stopped a nurse and inquired about his wife.

"I'm sorry, sir," she told him. "I can't let you see Mrs. Raines without an official okay from either Dr. Wynter or Dr. Bertram."

"What? Listen, I'm her husband. I've got a right to see her. What room's she in?"

"I'm sorry, sir," she repeated, and started to move away toward the nurses' station down the corridor.

Something was wrong. He had sensed it earlier and now he knew. He grasped her wrist. "I am going to see my wife now," he said, leveling his gaze at her. "I am going to see her and you're going to take me to her."

"Do you want me to call a security officer? I will."

"All right then, goddamn it, you go ahead and call a damn security officer. But you're taking me to her room." His voice had become unintentionally harsh. From the corner of his eye he saw the nurses at the station gawking. One of them reached for a telephone and pressed a button.

His threat had done its work. "Room 712," she said, and shook away from him.

He walked on down the corridor to room 712 and entered without hesitation.

Mary Kate was asleep. She had been placed in a private room with off-white walls and white half-closed window curtains. Through the blinds the sun cast three stripes across her bed.

He closed the door behind him and approached her. The sheets were pulled up around her neck. She looked pale and wasted, frail and lost. Her eyelids were oddly red and swollen, probably, he thought, from crying. Here, surrounded by cloud-like walls, she seemed very far removed from both the harsh neon-painted grill and their forlorn apartment.

He lifted the sheets to take her hand.

And when he did he staggered back.

Splotched along her arm were the reddened marks of hands. Grasping and clawing, they crawled five-fingered along her flesh, disappearing beneath her hospital gown. The red hands tore open her thighs; a handprint clutched at her throat. Fingers, like some strange faddish makeup, painted her cheek. He let the sheets fall, knowing that beneath her gown more hands moved, clutched, clawed in an obscene bit of choreography. Branded, he said. Like a piece of beef. Someone's tied her and branded her.

Someone touched him. Someone behind him. He caught his breath and whirled around. The touch had seared him.

It was Dr. Wynter, with dark circles beneath his eyes that clearly indicated he, too, had gone without sleep. A severe-looking nurse stood behind him in the doorway.

"This is the man who caused the disturbance, Doctor," the nurse was saying. "We told him he couldn't just..."

"It's all right," Dr. Wynter said softly, searching the other man's eyes. "Go back to your station and tell the security officer everything is under control. Go on, now."

She looked from Dr. Wynter to the ashen-faced man who stood limply over the bed and silently closed the door.

"I didn't want you to see her," the doctor said. "Not yet."

"Not yet? Not yet?" He looked up, his lips spraying spittle, his confused eyes demanding a fierce vengeance. "When? Jesus Christ! What's happened to my wife? You told me she'd been attacked... you didn't say a damned thing about this!"

Dr. Wynter reached over and arranged the sheets neatly around the sleeping girl's throat. "She's in no pain," he said. "The sedative is still in effect." He turned to face the younger man. "Mr. Raines, I want to be candid with you. Lt. Hepelmann asked me to withhold some things from you so as not to... overly excite you."

"Jesus Christ!"

Dr. Wynter held up a hand. "Which I agreed with. I felt... telling you certain things would not be in order. These marks are first-degree burns. I've had two skin specialists examine her during the night. I called them out of bed. They both came to the same conclusion. Burns. Like a moderate sunburn. Mr. Raines, I've been in medicine a very long time. Even probably before you were born. But never, never have I seen anything like this. These are the handprints of the man who attacked your wife."

Dazed and suddenly very tired, he shook his head. "Is that supposed to explain anything?"

"I'm sorry," Dr. Wynter said.

Joe had moved to the edge of the bed. He put his hand out and gingerly touched the print on his wife's cheek. It was still hot. When he pressed the flesh the print whitened away, but when the blood flowed back it re-emerged in a sear of red.

"What could have caused this... ? My God, the way these marks... ?"

"I've never seen anything like it. Neither have the police. There should be no lasting tissue damage. It should peel within a few days, exactly as a sunburn would. But the heat from the man who attacked her left its mark, amazingly, on her flesh. And there is no way I can stand here and say that I understand it."

"And you didn't want me to see until you could explain."

"Or at the very least give an excuse why we couldn't. One theory has been offered by a psychologist friend of mine, though I tend to discount it because he said I woke him in the middle of a nightmare. He proposes that it's a psychological reaction to the attack, a mind-over-body sort of thing. But I am convinced that those are burns from some sort of... unnatural source of heat."

"So you can see for yourself," Dr. Wynter continued, "why we must keep this as quiet as possible. Our observation will continue for another week or so at the very least. We wouldn't want any of those National Enquirer journalists nosing around, would we? All right?"

"Yes," he said. "All right. You say she's in no pain?"

"No pain."

"Jesus," he breathed, stunned by the patchwork of hands that violated her body, though their owner was now God knows where. "The man," he said after a moment. "The man who attacked her. Did he... you know... did he... ?"

"In emergency our usual procedure was followed. She was cleaned and probed. The nurses administered diethylstilbestrol. We'll conduct a thorough pelvic-vaginal exam. But from all indications there was no spermatozoal contact. Evidently the man was interrupted just prior to climax."

"Oh man," said Joe. "Another week? I've got some insurance, but I don't know... I'm not a rich man."

On the bed Mary Kate stirred. She whimpered and her arms weakly flailed the air above her.

He sat beside her and took both her hands. They were cold. "Don't worry. I'm here," he said. "I'm here."

She stirred again and finally looked up at him. Her face was swollen and her hair was disheveled and dirty. She said, "Joe? Joe?" and, reaching out, she clung to him and cried bitterly until the tears had wet the front of his shirt.