showed me what he’d drawn. It was a lightning bolt.”
Sure it was.
“Cut to the chase, Hugh.”
“Well . . .”
• • •
Hugh said he’d have to think it over. What he didn’t say (but was certainly thinking) was that he didn’t know Jacobs from Adam; the guy could be one of the crazybirds that flap around every big city.
Jacobs wrote that he understood Hugh’s hesitation, and felt plenty of his own. “I’m going out on a limb to even make the offer. After all, I don’t know you any more than you know me.”
“Is it dangerous?” Hugh asked in a voice that was already losing tone and inflection, becoming robotic.
The Rev shrugged and wrote.
Won’t kid you, there is some risk involved in applying electricity directly through the ears. But LOW VOLTAGE, OK? I’d guess the worst side effect you’d suffer might be peeing your pants.
“This is crazy,” Hugh said. “We’re insane just to be having this discussion.”
The Rev shrugged again, but this time didn’t write. Only looked.
Hugh sat in the office, the cloth (still damp but now warm) clutched in one hand, seriously considering Jacobs’s proposal, and a large part of his mind found serious consideration, even on such short acquaintance, perfectly normal. He was a musician who had gone deaf and been cast aside by a band he’d helped to found, one now on the verge of national success. Other players and at least one great composer—Beethoven—had lived with deafness, but hearing loss wasn’t where Hugh’s woes ended. There was the vertigo, the trembling, the periodic loss of vision. There was nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, galloping pulse. Worst of all was the almost constant tinnitus. He had always thought deafness meant silence. This was not true, at least not in his case. Hugh Yates had a constantly braying burglar alarm in the middle of his head.
There was another factor, too. A truth not acknowledged until then, but glimpsed from time to time, as if in the corner of the eye. He had remained in Detroit because he was working up his courage. There were many pawnshops on 8-Mile, and all of them sold barrel-iron. Was what this guy was offering any worse than the muzzle of a thirdhand .38 socked between his teeth and pointing at the roof of his mouth?
In his too-loud robot’s voice, he said, “What the fuck. Go ahead.”
• • •
Hugh gazed at the mountains while he told the rest, his right hand stroking his right ear as he spoke. I don’t think he knew he was doing it.
“He put a CLOSED sign in the window, locked the door, and dropped the blinds. Then he sat me down in a kitchen chair by the cash register and put a steel case the size of a footlocker on the counter. Inside it were two metal rings wrapped in what looked like gold mesh. They were about the size of those big dangly earrings Georgia wears when she’s stylin. You know the ones I mean?”
“Sure.”
“There was a rubber widget on the bottom of each, with a wire coming out of it. The wires ran into a control box no bigger than a doorbell. He opened the bottom of the box and showed me what looked like a single triple-A battery. I relaxed. That can’t do much damage, I thought, but I didn’t feel quite so comfortable when he put on rubber gloves—you know, like the kind women wear when they’re washing dishes—and picked up the rings with tongs.”
“I think Charlie’s triple-A batteries are different from the ones you buy in the store,” I said. “A lot more powerful. Didn’t he ever talk to you about the secret electricity?”
“Oh God, many times. It was his hobbyhorse. But that was later, and I never made head or tail of it. I’m not sure he did, either. He’d get a look in his eyes . . .”
“Puzzled,” I said. “Puzzled, worried, and excited, all at the same time.”
“Yeah, like that. He put the rings against my ears—using the tongs, you know—and then asked me to push the button on the control unit, since his own hands were full. I almost didn’t, but I flashed on the pistols in all those pawnshop windows, and I did it.”
“Then blacked out.” I didn’t ask it as a question, because I was sure of it. But he surprised me.
“There were blackouts, all right, and what I called prismatics, but they came later. Right then there was just an almighty snapping sound in the middle of my head.