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Blood Makes Noise

DEPTH DRUNKENNESS BRINGS strange thoughts—stranger than usual, at least. Right at the moment, it’s like I’m seeing my deaf paternal grandmother’s hands hover in this darkening air, signing the scenes of my life away syllable by syllable: Old, new, in and out of order.

These slippery reminiscences, repetitive and elusive—squid-ink images written on oil, squirming from close examination. A memory flip-book, curling at the corners: Nanny Book’s crepe-paper skin, laced with pale blue veins; the vestigial webs between her arthritic fingers, spread to catch the light.

My unit bracing to take their turn—pulses shallow, impatient with dismay, most of them more terrified to gauge the true limits of their shameful, mounting fear than consider the circumstances prompting it—as Captain Kiley lies propped up against his bunk, making rabbit-shadows on the holding cell wall.

The sky over Pittsburgh when I was five years old, dirty as a bed of nails.

A map I saw once of the twin moons of Mars.

Hit, flash: Popped bulb, clicked lens—image, then absence. Whispers in my skull, like the roar inside an empty shell: Blood echoes. Music to—in—my ears.

And just what the hell is that word for the fear of fear, anyway?

Fear: Phobos. Fear of: Phobia.

Phobophobia?

. . . must be it.

I press my eyes closed, momentarily forgetting to remember just how deep we must already be. HPNS regulations at least breached, for certain—sure, if not exceeded—more than deep enough to check my hands for tremors, and count off the rest of those prospective High Pressure Nervous Syndrome symptoms our mission literature listed:

Increased excitability, motor reflex decay; aphasia. Mental glitches.

. . . under the deep black sea, who loves to die with me . . .

—glitches. Psychosis. Cyanosis.

And eventually . . .

I slam my head back, skull on wall, hard enough to ring myself true—short, sharp shock, broken left incisor into lip, tweak of clarifying pain. Instant coherence. Kiley’s rules, channeling themselves: Keep alert. Tell it through. No opinion without research. No solution without . . .

. . . with—out . . .

“Book,” the Doctor whispers, beside me. I shift a bit towards him, deliberately trying to find the floor’s sharpest angle, to bend my hip in such a way as to make the pain flare just so, girdling my pelvis. Making myself uncomfortable.

“Doctor,” I answer.

“Book, Regis. American. No . . . registered rank.”

“Specialist.”

He coughs. “I . . . didn’t know that.”

“No reason you would.”

The Doctor gives a snuffling gasp, a liquid retch. Something catches in his throat, rattles there briefly—then flicks out again, splattering the floor between us with wet, red bile. I glance back at the wall I just used for a memory aid, which could frankly use a few shadow animals right about now. And as though he’s read my mind—

—which may, I suspect, no longer be quite as hard to do as it once was—

“Black . . . Ops . . . operative. ‘Wet . . . boy.’ Yes? C . . . I . . . A—puppet.”

I smile, thinly. “Whatever.”

But at least you know my first name.

“You . . . are a—coward, Book,” the Doctor tells me. Then lets all his breath out in one big rush, ragged with the effort, like he expects me to pause, to take note—to congratulate him on his sudden insight, his startling perspicacity.