Michael opened his left eye-the good eye, free of the hydraulic pressure that swelled his right eyeball during a migraine. His eyelashes were crusted with mucus; he teased it away with his finger. The room was dark. He could make out the sloping surface of his pillow, the outline of the bedroom window. His head remained still. Behind him, his mother whispered rosaries. Her beads ticked softly as she worried them in her hand. Even then-with his brain pressing open the fissures of his skull, trying to blossom out of its thick bone case-he saw that it was funny. Margaret would treat his migraine with ancient cultic hocus-pocus. A half dozen norepinephrine tablets had not worked; maybe a dose of Jesus would do the trick. He had seen a cartoon in a magazine once: a witch doctor in a grass skirt dancing around a car with its hood raised. That was Margaret. The sound of her whispering infuriated him. Sibilant hisses, like mouse scratches. Why wouldn’t she be quiet?
Michael thought he might vomit. He risked jostling his head to feel for the stainless-steel mixing bowl on the floor by his bed. His fingers found the bowl and he pulled it up onto the bed.
His mother whispered, “Michael?”
He let his eye close, let himself drift.
The attacks usually began on the right side, a ghost behind the right eyeball, and as the pressure intensified and expanded, the pain became increasingly physical, sensual. It invaded the bony and spongy and meaty parts all packed tight in his head, and the loose weave of capillaries that netted the whole thing and kept it drenched. At times it seemed that the interior of his skull was illuminated. He could visualize the smooth bowl of his eye socket, and the mounting pressure in his arteries, and the poisonous fluid accumulating between his skull and scalp. At its worst-when he wondered if someone observing his scalp might actually see it stretch-at these moments he was conscious of the weight of his brain lolling on its stem, this pulpy wet mass that contained his consciousness. His mind beheld his brain. It was an electrochemical engine, impossibly complex, and when it broke the doctors were at a loss to fix it. They understood the mechanisms of migrainous pain well enough. Michael understood them, too; he had studied the literature and even with his layman’s knowledge he could follow the cascading failures-minute dilation of the arterioles feeding the brain, increased intracranial hydrostatic pressure, which in turn triggered the excruciating buildup of fluid in the subcutaneous tissue under the scalp, a drop in circulating serotonin, erratic electrical activity. The neurologists could explain how it all happened; what they could not explain was why. What triggered it? What was the First Cause? Somewhere in his brainstem was a flaw. The same sustained electrochemical reaction that produced Michael’s mind was flawed.
In her shushy whisper, Margaret continued to page Dr. Jesus, who seemed not to hear the message, or was not inclined to answer it. But then, He had not interceded on Amy’s behalf or on Joe Senior’s either. How, after all that, could Margaret maintain her childish faith in the old Catholic fairy tales and trinkets? What made the Jesus myth any more credible than a thousand others that people had been chanting around campfires all over the world in Jesus’s day? What distinguished Jesus from, say, the army of abandoned jesuses on Easter Island-except that Jesus had had the good fortune to be taken up by Europeans? Ah, it did no good to cross-examine her. Margaret’s faith was its own answer. He took her religiousness as a sign-yet another sign-of her simplicity. A lifetime in the hermetic world of a housewife had left her dull.
He pushed his head down into the pillow. Sometimes he could mash the heel of his hand into his right eyeball and feel relief, or press on his neck at the carotid artery, or squeeze his entire head with two hands. But the relief came at a price: When the compression was released, the gush of pent-up fluid was excruciating. So, by experimentation, he had found a compromise in which he lay on his right side and pressed his head down into the pillow with light, steady pressure that could be maintained for long periods. This was the position he returned to now, out of habit. He thought the attack was beginning to crumble. The peak had been reached and passed, almost undetectably. The sensation of pain took on a slightly different tone-stale, stanched, like turbid standing water. The current was reversing. He could begin to imagine himself in control of his body again. The very profusion of all these thoughts was itself a sign of recovery; pain annihilated thought, but Michael was thinking now. He was coming back to himself. The rebound stage would progress relatively quickly. Still, still. Another hour or two.
In Michael’s head was a film: His father, Joe Senior, not idealized but as he’d been in life, fifty-eight years old, thin and sinewy like Ricky, with a pair of reading glasses in his shirt pocket, in the same black windbreaker he always wore on the job. He was running. Fast. He could surprise you with his athleticism, even at fifty-eight. It was easy to forget Joe Senior had not always been old. The brothers always thought of their dad as an old man, decrepit from the booze and the long hours. When he ran, it was like a revelation-this, this, was the real Joe Senior, the young man inside the old one. The scene was a road, not a proper road but an access road along the water, bounded by redbrick buildings on the left and a molded-concrete seawall on the right. Ahead of Joe Senior a kid was scampering away. Probably just a reflex. See a cop-run. There were swarms of tough kids like this one scurrying around the East Boston wharfs. Wharf rats.
(In his confession at Bridgewater, as Michael listened, Albert DeSalvo had claimed he’d hung around the East Boston waterfront for a while as a kid. The waterfront had been his only escape from an abusive father, he had said. The wharfs had toughened him up. This was where DeSalvo learned he could take care of himself, that he had good fists. He did not hate cops-DeSalvo had hastened to point this out, always ingratiating-but the other wharf rats did. One of the beat cops here liked to blow the homeless boys who lived at the wharfs. He liked it when the boys ejaculated on his blue brass-buttoned tunic. The rats all hated that cop, but DeSalvo did not hate him, or any other cop. It was just a story, DeSalvo had said, a memory.
But Michael was conflating memories. When Joe Senior sprinted down that alley in 1962, no one had heard of Albert DeSalvo, or the Strangler, or Lee Harvey Oswald or any of the rest of it. This was Before. Michael depressed his head into the pillow again, tried to refocus. He had to slow his brain down to keep the movie running, to let the reel play out.)
The kid skittered around a corner with a neat pivot. He disappeared. He was there and then he was not. Black sneakers, blue jeans, white T-shirt, blue jacket-Joe Senior made his mental notes as he ran, he started writing his report. His feet tick-tick-ticked light on the gritty ground. Behind him were the heavier chunking footfalls of Brendan Conroy, his partner. Conroy chuffed loudly, struggled to keep up. “That’s the kid!” Conroy shouted. “That’s the kid!” Conroy and Daley had a tip on a homicide. They wanted to talk to this kid. When the kid vanished around that corner, Joe Senior seemed to accelerate. Something in him opened up and he found himself rushing ahead faster than he’d thought possible, lifted, flying. (Michael saw from his dad’s point of view now, through the old man’s eyes, heard the old man’s breath in his own ears. He heard his dad say through Michael’s own mouth, “Hold it! Police!”) Joe Senior fixed on that corner, an alley between two buildings. He had to slow down to come around the corner. A good cop does not rush around a corner. But it was a kid. He was thirteen or fourteen years old, he was not a suspect, just a witness, a “person of interest.” Joe Senior came around the corner a little off balance, turning left as his upper body pulled him right, momentum like an invisible string tugging his torso; he leaned right, put out his left hand to steady himself on the brick wall of the building. And here was the kid a moment’s confusion no here was the kid with a snub-nose four-shot derringer, a punky toy thing wavering in the kid’s hand and in the last moment the temptation was to stare at the gun but Dad looked up at the kid, caught his eye Joe Senior was going to say No! – the tip of his tongue flattened against the roof of his mouth to sound the N.
And now beside Michael’s bed, his mother was repeating and repeating those whispery rosaries imploring Jesus Christ and Saint fucking Anthony and God Himself to come down and heal the mis-calibration in Michael’s central nervous system, “grant him rest and relief”-this from the same Jesus who had not bestirred Himself to intervene on Amy Ryan’s behalf as her blood soaked the bedsheets, nor to stop the bullet from a child’s gun that drilled Joe Senior’s chest-for that matter the same Jesus who coded the flaw into Michael’s brainstem in the first place. Stupid woman. Stupid fucking woman.
“Get out!”
He spoke the words into his pillow and felt the muffled humidity of his own breath.
Margaret was silent.
He snapped his head around recklessly and the fluid swirled in his skull and phosphenes floated across his vision and he was dizzy and furious. He saw her face, wide-eyed, shocked, and knew how he must have looked to her. He did not care. His voice was low and raw. “Get! Out!”