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He smiles at me, and damned if his teeth aren’t the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen in a human head. We. We: it’s an offer, an invitation to believe in his nonsense. I watch Davis put his ear against his “radio” and nod with his eyes closed, and all of a sudden I think: How do I know it’s not real? Okay, it’s a shoebox full of dust with knobs pushed through the cardboard, but what if it works? What if it actually does what Davis says? And in that split second I go from pretending straight into believing—it’s like all the pretending made me believe, except that doesn’t make sense, because pretending and believing are opposites. I don’t know what happens. Maybe it’s this place. Maybe if old fruit can be next week’s wine and a toothbrush can slit a throat and holding a girl’s hand is the same as fucking her, maybe a box of hair is a radio. Maybe in here it’s true.
Now wait a minute, someone’s got to be saying. Three pages ago Danny had been awake almost ten minutes, and now you’re telling us it’s forty-five? Are you kidding me? I could repeat everything they said on those three pages in five minutes tops, which means Danny should be awake seventeen minutes maximum. But hold on, bud, you’re forgetting two things: (1) Everything anyone said had to travel down a long tube to Danny’s brain, and so did his answers before they got to his mouth and (2) there were other things going on in the room that I didn’t write down because I would’ve needed pages and pages, which I don’t have, not to mention it would be boring as hell. Such as: Howard got up and poked at the fire. Nora shut the window. Howard scratched his head and blew his nose in a white handkerchief. Nora went into the hall to talk to someone and then came back. Howard’s walkie-talkie made a staticky noise so he had to fiddle with it to shut it up. Every one of those things adds time, to the point where if I’d told you an hour instead of forty-five minutes, even that would be realistic.
Benjy leaned closer. In his face Danny saw sympathy mixed in with a kind of cold curiosity you never saw in adults. They’d learned how to hide it.
Benjy: Are you sad to have nothing?
No, I’m not sad.
But he was. The sadness came on Danny suddenly and buried him. He saw himself: flat on his back in the middle of nowhere, with a smashed-up head. A guy who had nothing.
Benjy: Are you crying?
Danny: You’ve got to be kidding.
I see tears.
That’s just from the…my head hurts. You’re making it hurt.
Grown-ups cry sometimes. I saw my mommy cry.
I need to sleep.
Benjy peered at him. Danny shut his eyes. He heard the kid breathing next to his ear.
Benjy: Are you a grown-up?
[...] Danny had a creepy feeling of watching himself: a gimping, head-injured guy with a right foot full of big white toes anyone could reach out and grab, stumbling through a rotten garden outside a castle full of strangers in a country he didn’t know the name of. A guy at the end of the line is what Danny saw, with no options left. A guy with nothing, or why would he be here?
Another squirt of cold. Danny talked to himself: Get it together. Get. It. Together.
This was how the worm got in. You opened yourself to that kind of thinking and the worm crawled inside you and started to eat and didn’t stop until nothing was left. You saw yourself as a weak powerless guy and it was only a matter of time before everyone agreed you were that guy. Danny had seen it happen. The worm ate people up the way years had eaten away this castle: caving in ceilings, chewing through walls, tunneling under floorboards until even a perfectly renovated hallway with varnished doors and fake candles on the walls had a thousand bugs crawling around a few floors underneath it.
The slowing of his blood made Danny dizzy, the relief of not being afraid and even more than that, knowing he’d been afraid of nothing. Not that Danny was safe—the worm was trying to get inside him, that was clear. He knew the signs. When you were vulnerable to the worm you had to take precautions, put a few key facts in a strong place where the worm couldn’t touch them if it somehow did get in. Danny used to think of his heart as that strong place, but now he had a better word: the keep. His own keep, inside him, where his treasures would be hidden in case the castle was invaded. What should go in Danny’s keep? A lot of stuff went through his head, a whole storm of stuff from eighteen years of friendships, girlfriends, triumphant moments, powerful people whose number two he’d been, but when it came down to what he couldn’t live without, there was only one thing: Martha Mueller. That she loved him. Danny pictured himself holding that fact in his hands like it was alive, putting it in a box inside his ribs and sealing up the box. And then the fear left him. He felt safe. Weak, wiped out, but safe. As long as Martha was in the keep, the worm couldn’t win.
cute but also sad cus you cant put someone else in your keep. that's elevating them too much
Eight or nine boys were kicking a ball through the square. They were excellent players, even the littlest ones. Danny didn’t think much about his own soccer days anymore, but once in a while he’d remember something from that time: the smell of crushed-up grass or how the sky looked when he would walk home after practice, a strip of rust above the houses, then neon blue edging into black. Coming home in the almost dark made him feel grown up—a taste of grown-up life. Looking back, that seemed like one of the best parts of being a kid.
i just like the use of 'edging'
She turns to me, and I swear to God her eyes are bugging half out of her head. Are you aware, she says, that every question you ask is costing the taxpayer money? Those two guards outside the door, how much you think they’re getting paid? We’re turning people away downstairs because they don’t have insurance, and you robbers and rapists and murderers are lying around here being treated like kings. I don’t get it.
I try again. But the operation—
They should have a meter running right next to your bed, she says. Just so you can see the burden you are. Then maybe you’d give me a peaceful minute to do my work.
Is it the same as the last oper—
That’s fifteen dollars.
Or is it something—
Another fifteen. You’re up to thirty.
I stare at her. My head is starting to fog up. I say, Are you seriously asking me for money?
Angela looks behind her, realizing all of a sudden that this doesn’t look too good. I don’t hear you, she says, and starts to hum. She hums and hums. I try to talk, but all she does is hum.
so sad
Hey, Hannah, I say. How come you’re so nice to criminals?
That’s got nothing to do with me, LB, she says. That’s between you and God.
I have dreams, oh shit. Drug dreams, those ones where the past slops all over the place like a backed-up line. Sometimes I’m at school. The other boys would steal your food if you didn’t steal theirs first. Howie couldn’t do it. When he first came in he says, I don’t want their food. I can’t eat that much. I just want my own food. And I tell him, Take it, man, or they’ll take yours and then you’ll starve. I’ve seen it happen. They bring in fat kids like you and the next thing you know they’re skeletons. They take ’em out in coffins and bury them in unmarked graves. And then I start to laugh. He’s so new, that sweet scared face. Everyone’s like that at first. But you stay in here long enough, you can laugh about anything.
this is where the reader becomes pretty certain that the narrator is Mick
She looks up. I’ve caught her by surprise. Her face opens up and all of a sudden it’s like that paper mask is transparent. I’m looking right through it, and I get a flash of some kind of life we could’ve had—barbecues, dogs, kids flopping over us in bed—it rolls through me fast but strong and clear, like one of those cooking smells that blows in the window so sharp you can pick out the ingredients. And then it’s gone. It’s gone, and Holly’s holding my hand. Finally, after that long long wait, her hand is back on mine. Dry cool fingers, slim. The rings loose. I close my eyes. My hand is so hot, I feel my pulse in every finger. I’m afraid she’ll let go but she doesn’t let go. She keeps her hand around mine and it’s like she’s holding all of me in her cool sweetness, calming my fever back down.