Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(96)
He reads it twice. Then begins to peck out a message about how he remembers when he told her he was leaving. They were on the porch of the cabin and he wishes very badly he could go back to that moment. He hasn’t lived long enough to know for sure, but he guesses in the end life adds up to one long string of regrets like this. Memories of should-haves and might-have-beens that will sneak up on him when he least expects it, when he’s soaping his armpits or driving a nighttime highway. There is no going back. The trick is looking ahead, anticipating and remedying the mistake before it occurs.
He writes that this is what he would do if he could go back. When she stood from the bench and stomped across the porch and slammed the door on him, he wishes very much that he had told her to stop. And when she turned, he would have taken her face in both hands. To kiss her, yes, but first to memorize her. He has thought about it many times. Then there would have been a physical marker to tether them all this time.
He sees it now. Sees the mistake he made. Letting her walk away. “If you offered me a million dollars right now or a kiss,” he writes, “I’d take the kiss.” He isn’t sure whether this qualifies as a good line or a bad one, but he means it. He really does.
He hits send and heaves a sigh, then takes the piece of notebook paper from his pocket and unfolds it and flattens it on the desk beside him. He calls up Google and plugs in the word his father kept using: metallothioneins.
Every webpage takes a maddening length of time to load, the images staggering downward like a stiff set of blinds. Eventually he finds what he is looking for on bestenbalt.com, an entry that tells him metallothioneins are presently in virtually all forms of life. Their function is not entirely understood, “but experimental data support participation of metallothioneins in regulation of Zn and Cu, detoxification of toxic metals like cadmium, silver, copper, and mercury, and in protection of cells against reactive oxygen species and alkylating agents.”
He reads this three times and slumps back in his chair. He doesn’t know what this means, but it means something. He hits print and folds the paper into his pocket.
*
The Tall Man visits regularly. Sometimes he asks Jeremy questions—about the Resistance, about addresses, about email and phone communication, about money and management and infrastructure, about Puck, Miriam, Claire, and a hundred other names—and sometimes he removes a small black notebook from within his suit coat and jots a few notes down in it.
But mostly he hurts Jeremy. That is their primary mode of communication: suffering. The Tall Man electrocutes him with live sparking wires. He pulls out clumps of his beard, and then his armpit and pubic hair, with a pair of pliers. He makes him eat a live scorpion. He burns him with cigarettes. He rubs salt into his eyes and open wounds. He drowns him in cold water and scalds him in hot.
At first Jeremy coped. He left behind his body and escaped into his mind and found himself, day after day, walking down that same dirt path in the forest and approaching the gnarled pine tree and pulling down on its lever of a branch and stepping into the dark yawning entrance that led him belowground. That was his safe place.
Then it became too much—the vast, intricate networks of pain that seized every nerve so that his attention became singular with the injury coursing through him. It was not like something on a television program. The Tall Man would not ask a question and then prod Jeremy to receive an answer. Instead, in silence, he would torture Jeremy for hours—just watching, his eyelids never seeming to lower—pleasuring in the screams, the flash and curve of his many tools. Then he would slump back in his folding chair and unscrew a bottle of water and gurgle a swallow and smack his ruined mouth and say, “What do you think? Do you think you’re ready for a break?”
The break lasts only as long as he talks. These days, Jeremy is always ready to talk, always ready for a break. Though he once clung stubbornly to his silence, that time has passed. His old life and loyalties are so far removed from his current situation that they seem like a story he once read. When he talks to the Tall Man, he is simply recounting a plot, somebody else’s fancy, the information harmless, meaningless.
Sometimes he talks about his daughter and the way the bomb tore her into many meaty pieces that he collected in a black trash bag. Sometimes he talks about how, when he was a student at William Archer, he was called into the office of Alan Reprobus to discuss a paper he wrote about violence as protest, a paper the professor called brilliant and incendiary, a paper that would go on to become the first chapter of his book The Revolution. Sometimes he talks about how the professor would hold late-night meetings at his house during which they would discuss political issues and plan protests and design flyers—mostly harmless—but once in a while Reprobus would take a few of them aside—the trusted ones, he called them—to design an act of terror: mail a bomb, slash brake lines, trash a construction site. Sometimes he talks about the semester he spent abroad in the Lupine Republic—building houses and teaching English—and how the Master sought him out during this time. That is how he refers to Balor, as the Master, and the Tall Man is very interested in the Master, very interested indeed.
And sometimes, when Jeremy runs out of stories, he invents new ones, anything to keep the Tall Man from growing bored.
*
If his father was brewing, he had a workspace hidden somewhere on the base. Patrick feels stupid for not realizing this earlier. Months ago, when one of the lieutenants mentioned in passing that his father made a hell of a beer, Patrick figured he was a fan of Anchor Steam. He has a few off-duty hours to spare and spends them searching.