Chapter 3

Slowly, slowly, a voice came to him out of the darkness. It was quiet and without inflection, a little bit prim, like a good schoolboy reciting his lessons.

"…thirteen-thousand-seven-hundred-fifty-one, thirteen-thousand-seven-hundred-fifty-seven, thirteen-thousand-seven-hundred-fifty-nine, thirteen-thousand-seven-hundred-sixty…"

The voice broke off abruptly, and it seemed that Frank could hear the click of saliva working its way up into a dry throat. "You're finally awake."

Frank opened his eyes, and was seized with a disorienting sense of unreality, as if he had slipped back into a dream.

The room was bare, with cinderblock walls and a concrete floor. Dust motes drifted in the wedges of light that slanted through the cracks in the boarded up windows.

A cell, Frank thought, and the surge of panic that followed was enough to make him raise himself on his elbows. Indigo lights exploded behind his eyes, and pain boiled to the surface as if through a crack in his skull. And somehow, in spite of that, he felt himself aware, uncannily aware, of the soft tread of Gerard's boots as he came around the side of his bed. His freshly-dyed hair was the color of rust, until he passed through one of the beams of light and it burst, like an alarm, into bright lacquered red.

Gerard sat down, and the canvass cot on which Frank lay creaked beneath his weight. His new leather jacket creaked too, when he reached to touch the spot on the side of Frank's head, the source of all his agony.

"Take it easy," he said quietly. "You've been asleep for a while."

Frank did not ask how long, but he was gripped by a sudden terror, as if "a while" did not mean hours, or days, but rather years. Decades. As if this man with him now were not Gerard at all, but his descendant, a son or grandson with an achingly familiar face but all else fundamentally changed.

Then, with careful deliberation, Gerard removed his gloves, setting them aside with a practiced smoothing of his hand, and in that moment Frank recognized him. Beneath the new hair, and the new clothes, was the same refinement and breeding, the polish and poise that Frank had found both repulsive and compelling.

With careful fingers, Gerard began to unwind the bandage around Frank's head. A little blood had soaked through the gauze underneath, and Frank felt the edges catching as Gerard worked them free. The side of his head felt swollen and unsupportable, as if a piece of his skull had been removed, leaving only a delicate membrane of skin stretched over the darkness beneath.

"Am I… all right?" he asked quietly, carefully. His fear must have shown plainly on his face, though, because Gerard smiled.

"Three stitches."

"Oh…" Frank watched him drop the stained gauze into a pile beside the bed, and he felt his stomach turn over weightlessly. He had never been afraid of the sight of blood before.

Gerard's head was bent, and his red hair hung over his face, stiff with sweat. He'd cut it too, Frank thought; hacked off three inches with unimpassioned efficiency. He did not miss it at all – no, not Gerard – but Frank could not help but feel a pang of loss for the way the half-curls had once boiled around his collar.

He reached out impulsively and touched Gerard's hair. The dye was still so fresh it left a kiss of red on his fingertips. "You look…"

"Different?" Gerard said.

"Yeah. Different."

"It was time for a change." Gerard folded a clean piece of gauze over in his hands, spit on it, and began to clean the blood from Frank's temple. "I never wanted a change until now."

"Gerard—" Frank began, but Gerard moved fast at the sound of that name, clamping a hand over his mouth.

"No, don't call me that. A new face deserves a new name. That's what he told me. He said, it's just a name. Going by your real one will only weigh you down. Practically no one does that anymore, he said."

His hand had slipped a little, enough that Frank could brush it away from his mouth. "Who do you mean? Gerard…"

"Poison," Gerard said sharply.

"What?"

"That's my name now. Party Poison. I won't answer to the old one, never again."

Frank was quiet for a long moment. Then he started to laugh. The sound pinballed off his bruised ribs and made his head throb. His parched throat grated and burned. All at once, he stopped.

"Stupid name," he said, his voice a bruised whisper.

Behind the curtain of his hair, Gerard – Poison – was smiling. "I know."

"Fuck it, do I get a stupid name too?"

"You'll have to come up with it on your own," Poison said. He ran his thumb along the stitches in Frank's temple to make sure they were holding, then he stood up. He retrieved his gloves, and pulled them back on. "I've done all I can for you."

Frank looked up at him boldly. "And whatever I pick, you're going to call me that, right? And I'll never answer to the old name again?"

"That's right," Poison said.

"What else is going to change?" Frank said.

Poison pursed his lips. "Nothing."

"Nothing at all?"

When Poison didn't answer, Frank sighed and dropped his eyes. "Shit, sorry. We don't even know each other, do we? I mean, sometimes I feel like I do, but most of the time I just think you're crazy and no one could ever really know you. Not if they hung around you for years and years."

"You think I'm crazy?" Poison said quietly.

"I don't know. What was that bullshit with the car earlier? You wouldn't listen to me. It didn't even seem like you heard."

"I'd never crashed before," Poison said. "When you were asleep, I came in here to tell you that. And to apologize. But once I started talking to you, I couldn't stop. I didn't have very much to say, but even when I ran out, I just kept talking. And I thought, how strange that I would want to talk to you when you were asleep. But I knew that was exactly why I could talk at all. I could say a great deal to you, as long as I knew you couldn't hear me."

His eyes slid out of focus momentarily, as if they looked now out over a great distance. Then, abruptly, the distance closed in and he was watching Frank's face once more.

"Then you woke up," he finished softly.

Frank said nothing. After a moment, Poison drew the heels of his motorcycle boots together in a kind of military salute, and turned to go.

"You've got a lot of secrets, you know," Frank said after him.

Poison paused in the doorway. He set a hand against the frame, as if to steady himself. "Don't you?"

"I don't know. Maybe. But I'm not like you."

After Poison had gone, Frank lay awake trying to get his head straight, but his thoughts were not like an orderly regiment of inquiries, marching forward in neat rows, ready for his inspection. Instead, they twisted and writhed in his mind, a black wind of questions that obliterated everything it touched. He was left feeling exhausted and empty and soberly hopeless.

All at once, he thought of the Manskinner who had once drawn him aside and said to him, You're not smart, Frank. You never will be. So don't waste your time trying to think things through. When you need to know something, you'll know it in your gut.

But the only thing his gut was telling him now was that he hated the goddamn Manskinner, who had always been at his most intolerable when he was giving advice, trying to be fucking helpful.

He had never really wanted to help anyone, and they had all known it, the Manskinner most of all. He had only wanted to interfere, to touch everything, influence it, draw it under his sway. None of them had meant anything to him, because the Manskinner hated all the imperfect individuals that made up humanity, loving and fighting only for Humanity as an untouchable ideal.

Kill all the Fascists. That had been the proposition and the promise, simple and pure, that the Manskinner had made them. But if he had the chance, he'd kill everything else, too. Burn it all, and then, without second thought or backwards glance, throw himself on the pyre. Give the world back to the sea turtles and cockroaches and sharks. That was The Manskinner's dream, and Frank no longer wanted any part of it.

He knew exactly what had changed; he just didn't want to admit it.

Frank jerked upright suddenly, as if he had been kicked. His head throbbed, but he barely felt it. He grabbed his shirt from where it sat, neatly folded, beside the bed. There was a little blood caked on the collar, and Frank scratched at it with his nail, did not succeed in loosening it, and at last pulled the shirt over his head.

He got up. He was stiff, but steady on his feet; he didn't feel any particular pain. For the first time, he looked around to get his bearings.

The room he had at first taken for a cell was in fact a disused storage room, old but swept and clean. Poison had not shut the door when he left, and when Frank went near it he could hear the low murmur of voices from without. He counted four: one that he recognized as Poison, and three others – two men and a woman – that he did not know.

He touched the butt of his pistol, reassuring himself that it was there, that it had not left him even in unconsciousness, and then he went out.

There were not four as he had first thought, but five, only one had kept silent the entire time. They had gathered in mismatched chairs by the dusty, ancient bar that ran the length of the room. Only Poison was standing, his hip cocked against the bar, arms folded over his chest. The beads of sweat that ran down his throat were tinged red from his hair dye. He looked like a prince presiding over his subjects.

One by one, they turned and noticed him there. Not one of them spoke, and when Frank tried to the words came out rough and broken.

"I was getting pretty thirsty," he rasped.

It was enough to spur them to movement. A slight man with silvery blond hair uncoiled from one of the battered backless chairs and got to his feet. He was dressed in a black suit – much faded by the sun but otherwise new-looking – and in his hands he held a round black hat. This he set decorously down on the seat of the chair before coming forward. Frank wasn't tall by any stretch, but he found he did not have to incline his head upward at all to meet the man's pale, colorless eyes.

He took Frank's chin in one hand and tilted his head so he could see the stitches. His fingers were surprisingly cold, unpleasantly so, and Frank had to steel himself so he didn't flinch away.

"It was a mercy that you were spared," the man said, running the fingertips of his free hand over the cut on Frank's temple. "By His grace…"

"Are you some kind of a doctor or something?" Frank muttered.

"A preacher," Poison said quickly, contemptuously, but Frank did not miss the way his eyes flashed, the way his lips twisted into an ironic smile. Out from under his rich daddy's thumb and finally free to say all the dirty words he wanted, Frank thought. But even Better Living had been right about some things: only crazy people believed in god anymore.

"Prophet," he stranger said mildly. He finished his inspection and stepped back, bowing his head.

"I don't really know the difference," Frank admitted.

"I make ready the Way for his Earthly Reign. I foretell of the Seven Seals broken and the Seven Trumpets sounded and the Seven Bowls poured."

"Oh," Frank said. "That sounds cool."

The self-proclaimed prophet was watching him closely now, as if he expected Frank to say more. Poison was watching him too, as if he thought the two of them might, at any moment, burst into song for his amusement.

"His name's Prester John," the woman said, mercifully breaking the silence. "He forgets sometimes that there are people out there who haven't heard his sales pitch a hundred times already."

The prophet dipped his head, not quickly enough to hide a smile. "Though the Word falls on deaf ears, Sister, it is spoken just the same." He turned sharply, and retrieved his black hat, pulling it down squarely on his head.

"You're going?" Poison said.

"My Call continues," Prester John replied, not looking at him. "You will see me again, when the Spirit thirsts."

He went out, though the rusty screen door that hard stood untold seasonless years. The hinges squeaked, and a coil of reddish dust snaked inside, adding to the drift that had collected by the door.

Poison laughed softly behind his hand, a society laugh.

"He's not really with us," the woman said. "He's more like a stray. Shows up once in a while because we feed him. It looks like he did a pretty good job sewing you up, though. I didn't know he knew field surgery, did you, babe?"

This she directed at the older man who sat with her. He shrugged heavily, ponderously. "I don't know what he doesn't tell me, and he doesn't tell me much. He's got a one-track mind and a mouth that's only got two settings: preaching up hellfire, and pestering you for donations."

All at once he turned, thrusting a hand out in Frank's direction. "You can call me Dr. D. Which is short for Dr. Death. Which is short for Dr. Death Defying."

"Hey," Frank said.

"This is Crow Jane," he said, indicating the woman, and then he motioned to the final, silent watcher. The one with the covered face. "And Show Pony."

Hands shook all around. Crow Jane smiled at him, a tense harried look, like the smile of someone long-accustomed to cleaning up after other people. Show Pony offered only the tips of his fingers, and still he did not speak, but Frank felt him watching very closely from behind the visor or his motorcycle helmet.

Dr. Death had risen from his chair and gone around the bar, talking the whole while, as if he had a great store of words to expend or else they would pile up in his throat and choke him. He was saying that the desert was a bad mother, but mother all the same, to all the crazy orphans and unfortunate sons who had the bad luck to be born out of her sandy cunt, to come out screaming and purple, with the vultures already circling, before they'd even coughed the dust out of their lungs and drawn their first burning breath…

"You're mixing your metaphors again, babe," Crow Jane said with a shake of her head. "You get like this every time…"

"She means every time I drink," Dr. Death said. "Which is not as often as you might think, unless you count that rotgut moonshine they brew down by the coast, which you shouldn't."

With a flourish, he brought up a bottle from behind the bar. It was a little less than half-full. The paper label had long since worn off, and Frank, whose only experience with alcohol – besides the moonshine from the coast – was the bitter watered-down beer from the Better Living brewery, the vinegary wine from the Better Living vineyards, and the artificially colored ethanols from the Better Living distilleries, could only guess at what it contained.

Dr. Death lined up a row of shot glasses and poured. He was not conservative about it. Then he handed them around and said, "Salut."

Frank gulped his down. He glanced at Show Pony, thinking he might catch a glimpse of his face, but Show Pony held the empty shot glass delicately between two fingers, turning it to catch the light, the visor of his motorcycle helmet was securely lowered. Frank had the impression that he caught him looking, and that he smiled in the secrecy of his private darkness.

"By the way," Dr. Death said. "Poison here won't tell us your name. What do you want to be called?"

"I'm—" Frank started to say, but then he caught Poison watching him curiously. Poison, who had been Gerard for less than twenty-four hours. Who had shed his old name easily, like a weakness. Who was probably already thinking of himself as Party Poison, as if he had never been anything else, not even in a dream.

"I don't know yet," Frank said, and he was relieved when he saw Crow Jane nod in sympathy. "I'm still working on it."