The Death of Wendell Mackey Read Online Free Page A

all unknown and disturbing, his health in the hands of people who treated him for some unseen malady and pulled a veil over his eyes at the same time.
    “What’s it all like…” Wendell mused.
    They kept staring at him. He drained his beer.
    “It’s not like I feel weak or anything. Just different. Unsettled. Like all that vomiting and, well, you know—” and Wendell put his hands to his stomach “—were just emptying me out so that I’d get filled up with something new.” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
    “You look different,” said Connor.
    “Different how?”
    Connor dropped his eyes to his mug.
    “So when do you move in?” asked Laughlin.
    Move in. It usually implied moving out of somewhere else, but his studio apartment had nothing to do with his job at the institution. It would still be there, above the Thai restaurant, with its peeling linoleum, its refrigerator with its jackhammer motor, and the television on the tray table with its postage stamp screen that displayed as much snow as it did actual images. A humble cave for an unknown anchorite. The problem was that Wendell was no longer unknown. And like it or not, with attention drawn to him, moving into the institution—however temporary they insisted it would be—necessarily meant moving out of his cave. His refrigerator, his television, his privacy, all would stay tucked away above the restaurant. But something told him that he would never see them again.
    Something in Wendell trembled.
    He remembered saying “I don’t know” to Laughlin and Connor, but couldn’t remember hearing his own voice. Both men looked at him, and nodded, with the solemnity of churchmen.
    That evening, after returning to the NAG from the bar, Dr. Scotia had asked Wendell to go home, pack a suitcase, and return. Succinct, and said with a smile.
    After so much time as a patient —weeks, if not months, as time had a tendency to tumble into miscalculation in the institution—that last conversation in the bar, rational and lucid, engaged under his own power and with the only friends he could remember, kept crystal clarity in his mind, marking a dividing line between death and advent, man and monster. He would cling to that memory, replaying it in his mind as he lay in his bed in the institution, staring at the tiles in the ceiling. But replaying it brought up a question: had his friends known? He scrutinized every phrase, every dropped glance, the tone of their voices and the furrows in their brows. All of it could have signaled concern, or curiosity. And had they known what was to happen to their friend—laughable as that word friend was if they truly had known—then they were complicit. Conspirators, abettors, as much bloodstained as the men who wielded the needles and scalpels.
    “Thought we’d stick together. Thought we’d watch each other’s backs,” Wendell said to himself. “But if they turned on me, if they were working with them , then I…then I’ll…” His hands dropped to the wooden table, and his anger sank into his conjecture.
    Were they capable of conspiring with the doctors to bring him in? Connor perhaps. He was quick, educated, a grad student desirous for a future in a lab coat at the institution. But Laughlin was a dull cog on a slow wheel, a mediocre foreman too lazy even for the GED, his libidinous eye for barmaids more his personal driver than his own brain. But betrayal required little intellectual capacity, and it would have only taken a case of beer and new mud flaps to buy Laughlin’s loyalty, if there had been any to buy at all. In the end, it mattered little. He didn’t know where they lived, and if they really had worked to get Wendell imprisoned, the institution’s leadership was smart enough to make them disappear as easily as they had done to Wendell.
    The night after seeing Connor and Laughlin, the night he was to move into the institution, Wendell found that his employee locker had been cleaned out. His work boots, extra