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  Whether or not he was meant to be sharing a mental ward with a loose society of adult early learners Ray determined that he wasn’t going to. He was going to find Nurse Nancy or whoever the key nurse was or a fire escape or jump out of a window if necessary, but he wasn’t staying. Ray armed himself with a banana and headed back toward the ill-green corridor.

  And so Ray was eating a banana when he passed the observation room full of starving junkies, who had all turned a jolly blue under the emergency lighting. They had entirely abandoned their artificial fruit harvest and were concentrating their efforts on the magic invisible wall, unaware that the door on the other side of the room probably wasn’t locked and in any case would be easier to penetrate. When they saw Ray or, more specifically, when they saw Ray successfully consuming fruit, they froze for a moment, mesmerized and hungry, before redoubling their assault on the glass with cushions and a broken lamp.

  “You know,” Ray said to the captive audience, “I’m normally a hard fruit man. Apples and pears and the like. But this banana, I tell you. This has got to be the finest banana I have ever tasted in my life.” He enjoyed a bite of the banana and made an elaborate show of savoring it before walking on down the hall.

  The radiologist had lost interest in the X-ray machine which had ceased to buzz in its efforts to blind the old man in the lead apron. He seemed very vaguely interested in Ray or at least in the notion that there was another place in the world and he began to approach the door. The emergency response officers were similarly inspired and Ray dropped the banana skin to allow them to make of it what they would.

  The Dodgers fans, deprived of TV, had reorganized themselves in concentric circles on the floor around the snacks with the three largest men, probably orderlies and nearly as big as Leonard, monopolizing them in the center. They looked worryingly like a primitive society already ordered by dominance and access to food. But they were calm and quiet and preoccupied with their snacks and Ray was hunting nurses.

  The gentle wilderness scene was interrupted by a brisk crack, high-pitched and urgent, like a shotgun trying to sing soprano. Ray didn’t initially know which way to look when an awful instinct drew his attention in the direction of the observation room in time to see an ugly orange lounge chair settling in a shower of tiny glass cubes. It was immediately and inevitably followed by a scrambling stream of skinny, bleeding, greasy-haired escapologists who lost no time in organizing themselves into Ray’s worst enemy.

  Whatever humanity the haggard mob may have been developing was certainly lost by the time they poured like a wave over the first of the emergency responders who had picked up the banana peel and was calmly considering its potential applications. He probably would have surrendered the peel willingly but the junkies were in a rage. They tore the peel to all but unserviceable shreds fighting over it before swarming the emergency responders and the radiologist like piranha, tearing at their throats and eyes with rotted teeth and broken fingers.

  Ray ran the other way.

  The junkies were hampered somewhat by broken glass and broken limbs and Ray had a good lead by the time he made it back to the ill-green corridor. Nancy and the other nurses and visitors were still there but they’d formed their own little society now, far more benign than the Dodgers fans or junkies. Sitting on the floor beneath an emergency light sharing pills from Nancy’s little cups, they seemed quite content and docile and certainly unsuitable allies in a battle against starving addicts who can break bullet-proof glass.

  At the end of the hall was another hall, doubtless leading back to reception and Ray considered very briefly the strategy of running the junkies around in circles until they got tired or starved to death. But in the corner where the halls joined a different and far more appealing option presented itself in the form of a small red light above a door: “FIRE EXIT”. The door not just to safety but liberty. Ray sprinted toward it with a few of the fitter junkies only steps behind him.

  Had the fire exit been locked Ray would have been disappointed but unsurprised. But it wasn’t locked and Ray pushed through and ran directly into a wire gate. The gate blocked the stairs leading down and it, of course, was locked. A strange and probably illegal measure which Ray would have appreciated enormously had he been on the other side. As it was the only options were to bar the door and live out his life in a stairwell or go up.

  Ray looked for something to block the door. There was nothing on the landing but the gate, a big red “4” on the wall, and a fire extinguisher. While it wouldn’t serve to block much of anything for very long the fire extinguisher was of the heavy industrial sort and it might make a passable bludgeon. Ray hoisted the extinguisher to his shoulder just as the first blank-faced target presented itself.

  The first swing exceeded all expectations and the decisive crack told Ray that he’d just killed a man. The junky’s head pursued a perfectly horizontal path into the wall and his body followed it like a plume of listless smoke behind a cannonball.

  Unfortunately the first swing was also the last and Ray was unable to reposition the fire extinguisher before the landing was overwhelmed. The stairs leading upward were unlit by emergency lighting but there was sufficient natural light coming from an ominous source at the top for Ray to not miss a crucial step while the junkies found stairs a new and intimidating experience.

  And then he was on the roof. Even before he was through the door Ray was conscious of intense heat beyond it and he wondered if the roof was on fire. The roof was not, technically, on fire but the atmosphere was hazy and hot and the sun had apparently come in for a closer view of the action. The top of the building was perhaps the size of the parking lot of the only bowling alley in a small midwestern town and like a parking lot it was covered in tar. Thick, oily tar that had turned into a determined glue in the sun. Ray couldn’t run, even if there had been anywhere to go.

  The roof was barren but for some pulleys and cables on tracks within thin aluminum housings and a low-profile HVAC unit the approximate size and shape and defensive properties of an elevated dance floor. Only five or six junkies had made it this far but it was enough. Ray couldn’t run and he couldn’t breathe in the heat and he knew that he was in no position to fight. So he struggled across the flypaper surface and the junkies struggled after him in an absurd slow-motion chase, pulling a foot free and clomping it down again with each step, like a toddler in his first deep snowfall.

  Ray’s experience advantage was fading as the junkies organized themselves to surround him against the edge of the roof. Any hope he had of an end run back to the stairs was gone as Ray was herded between the aluminum pulley casings which the junkies mounted, freeing themselves from the ooze and affording a decided speed advantage. They were preparing to charge and now they could.

  Ray stepped up onto the metal flashing bordering certain death and certain death. “Go fuck yourselves” he said and as the junkies rushed Ray stepped off the roof.

  Ray chapter 3

  From the safety of the window washer’s platform Ray counted the junkies as they passed rapidly and soundlessly until making a narrow variety of short and diabolical snaps as they hit the cars and concrete of the parking lot four stories below.

  The window washer was still dutifully in position but he had passed out from the heat. Ray knew that he was in grave danger of doing the same if he didn’t climb back out of the fire and into the relative comfort of the frying pan. As a point of order he tried the platform controls but of course without power they didn’t work and he prepared to climb the cables when he realized that he was uniquely positioned to do a short reconnoiter of the mental ward.

  Pressing his face against the glass and blocking the reflection of the ball of death in the sky, he could see most of the common area. The Dodgers fans hadn’t changed position appreciably but they’d evolved considerably. The three massive orderlies still held sway in the middle but now the lesser members of the tribe were moving about them, some doing guard duty and others making sneaky, obsequious l
ittle grabs for food only to be rebuffed with a swat from an open hand the size of a catcher’s mitt.

  A wiry kid with a number 22 jersey loped warily into the circle and proffered his Dodgers pennant. One of the giants appraised it skeptically before taking and holding it without waving or looking at it or doing anything at all, which number 22 took as tacit permission. He reached a modest fistful of peanuts and scampered away to a tight cove between a couch and the wall, pursued by enthusiastic new friends. Ray was watching primitive society remake itself on a tiny scale on a worn carpet in the common area of a mental ward. It looked peaceful and doubtless would remain so as long as there were peanuts and popcorn and potato chips.

  Or until the junkies got involved. Those that remained, about ten of them, were returning from their failed murder attempt, possibly feeling it was a raging success upon which they were anxious to build. They spotted the snacks and it must have blinded them to the impossible odds because they began positioning themselves around the Dodgers fans like jackals who’ve found themselves quite unexpectedly in a meadow full of bunny rabbits. The Dodgers fans ignored them entirely.

  The boldest of the scrawny jackals crept toward the center of the circle looking exactly as if he thought he was invisible. There was no reaction from the inner circle but a few members of the civilian class were clearly getting skittish. The invisible man reached for the peanuts and remained invisible until a moment before his goal when the giant with the pennant leapt to his full height. His ascent was slowed in no way by the acquisition of the junky’s neck which he shook, Ray thought, not unlike a pennant. The giant rattled his prize for the moment that it took to snap the life out of it and then he rattled it some more before throwing it to the floor with an effect similar to that of falling four floors to a concrete parking lot.

  This should have been a sign for the junkies to scatter and hide and rethink their loyalties so naturally they attacked in a disorganized and hopelessly under-manned frenzy. The one-sided battle was short and bloody and for the most part indiscriminate but the Dodgers fans were merely brutal with the women while the men were killed with a terrifying ferocity. The lesser classes ganged up on the men and gouged at their eyes and tore at their throats while the orderlies observed no such battlefield niceties, preferring to address the enemy as just a head that needed to be smashed against the floor or wall or cement column.

  And then it was over and as soon as it was life returned to normal in the tribe. Parliament resumed in the center of the floor and remaining society cowered around them, but now there were women among them and they instinctively took positions of privilege behind the leaders. All was peaceful again, but the snacks had been scattered and trampled and now there were more mouths to feed.

  Overall, Ray thought, a satisfactory result. The immediate threat had been dispatched and he knew exactly what part of the ward to avoid in his search for the keys. He only needed to get back inside before bursting into flame.

  The roof was only three feet out of reach but it might as well have been three hundred for all the strength Ray had remaining. He placed a foot on the guardrail next to the window washer who had by then, it seemed, stopped breathing. The effect was to put the platform into a gentle swing that felt to Ray like the dangerous part of the sort of carnival ride that’s forbidden to children or pregnant women or people with sense. He moved to the other side of the platform and tried again. There was less motion and he was able to grasp a cable which turned out to be a sort of chain with a rubber jacket. Ideal for climbing under normal circumstances but in the clammy heat it felt like trying to shimmy up a raw bacon rind.

  Ray pulled until he had both feet on the guardrail and his heart in his mouth. In this position he was mostly outside of the safety of the platform and hovering over the parking lot. He knew he shouldn’t look down so he did and saw the broken body and exposed bones of a junky draped over an ambulance about a thousand stories below. But he was within reach of the top now and he could put his hand on the searing branding iron that had become of the roof’s metal flashing. In a single movement he released the cable and put both hands on the flashing and held himself in that position long enough for his life until that moment to flash before his eyes, which wasn’t very long at all.

  His hands were burning and the flesh melting into the metal may have helped his grip enough that he was able to pull his center of gravity over the flashing and roll over into the stinking and sticky and entirely welcome pitch of the rooftop.

  Ray scrambled instinctively away from the edge and took a moment to appreciate solid ground and try to figure out where he was. Beyond what he took to be the back of the building was open water. That would be the Pacific Ocean, of course, because the rest of the landscape was recognizable as the sprawling, low-density urban blight that is Los Angeles. He could see the walled gardens and flat-topped mansionettes growing more successfully ugly as they climbed Beverly Hills almost directly to the East and the bobbing ambitions moored in Marina Del Rey to the south, placing the hospital and Ray somewhere in Santa Monica, although he still had no idea how he knew all that.

  Never-the-less Ray recognized the cookie-cutter subdivisions and ersatz downtown of Culver City with its half-realized office buildings determinedly reflecting the sun back on itself. Beyond that the elusive motif of downtown LA clustered together like buildings bullied and eventually kicked out of better skylines and still too shy to face each other. And then the hills and houses and apartment blocks and parks of the world’s largest failure to plan stretching to the horizon and beyond. And none of it was moving.

  There were cars everywhere as there always is in LA but none of them were going anywhere. Santa Monica Blvd and the freeway were crammed with vehicles but they’d all run into guardrails or buildings or each other or just stopped. Some people were milling about but most were still in their cars, unable to get out or unaware that they could. Fires were burning here and there, some of them quite large and all of them out of control but there were no sirens and no fire trucks and no one seemed to notice. The only sound was the ocean, gently delivering the bodies of a few scattered swimmers and surfers who’d of an instant forgotten how to do either.

  And then Ray heard a sound that he knew as hope before consciously recognizing it as an airplane. Then it came into view from the south in the unbroken blue of the otherwise blank, hazy sky — a passenger jet. At the very moment that Ray had become sure that he was entirely alone in a world he didn’t understand there was proof that somewhere, even if it was well beyond the city, there was still intelligent life. He needed to get to it. He still needed the key and then a car and a full tank of gas but he’d get out of Los Angeles and back to normalcy. The jet passed over him and in that instant the engines stopped and he watched the plane dive slowly and gracefully into the Pacific ocean.

  Ray watched the plane shatter like it was made of glass and the water of stone and he continued watching as the wreckage spread and sank and his long range plans were rendered obsolete. He looked back at Los Angeles and searched the streets and windows and hills for some reason to go back inside and find that key. Finding none, he did it anyway.

  Nancy was gone. In fact the entire ill-green hall was empty now. Ray checked the patient and examination rooms and they were all empty too. He peered around the corner and saw that the nurses and visitors had formed a third tier to the rudimentary society building in the common area. They sat or squatted in the periphery of the concentric circles, all but the nurses who had joined the privileged women taken in the Great Junky Conquest. Nancy sat next to the biggest leader. She no longer had her little cups but now Ray saw that hooked on her uniform at her waist was a bulky collection of keys.

  Remembering the fate of those who just try to take things from Dodgers fans Ray knew that he’d need to approach with a more deft strategy than a presumption of invisibility. He abandoned his position and headed toward the so far unexplored hall which would lead back to the reception area and then back to the cafete
ria. And there he would find bait.

  This last hall was unlike the others. Where the opposing hall had windows and a common area this one had the escape-proof fire escape and a dark room with purple curtains over the door and a modest sign which made the room a chapel. The rest of the hall was behind double swinging doors. Past the doors the hall may well have been ill-green like the others but it was closed at both ends by hospital doors and the only light was from the fading blue emergency units. Two doors on either wall were closed and the high portal window on each glowed more static blue. There were no people nor any sign that people had ever been there. Not on this side of the doors, at least, and Ray was in no mood for a surprise. He rushed along the hall as quickly as he safely could and found no difficulty in resisting the urge to look behind him.

  Ray was through the doors just slightly short of the end of the hall and the relative cheer of the reception area. He could see light from the windows around the corner and the forlorn goldfish waiting to be reminded what food looked like. On the right was the only door that looked anything like an office that Ray had so far seen. It was big and oak and had a smoked glass portal behind which natural light glowed from an external window. Beneath the portal was a small brass plaque with just a name: Dr. Thomas Spivic.