Fear Me

So he brought Palmquist his supper-greasy green bean casserole and a few wedges of rye bread that were more rye than bread-and the hack let him in, let him sit in there with the kid for a few moments, even shut the door behind him.

Palmquist didn’t look so good, what with the contusions and the stitches and the cast on his arm. But it was more than just the beating he took. His face was moon-white and his eyes were ponds of black, simmering liquid sunken into red-rimmed sockets. To Romero he looked like a guy coming off heroin, like his soul had been milked dry.

He didn’t say anything at first, so Romero said, “Tell me about it, Cherry. Tell me all about it.”

But the kid did not lift his head. “I…can you get me some speed, Romero? Some Dexedrine or uppers? Caffeine pills even? Anything like that? Something that’ll keep me awake, I don’t care what it is.”

“Probably,” Romero told him. “If I can get it past the hog out there.”

“If you can’t do that, get me a fucking razor.”

Romero just watched him. Suicidal now. He had sunken that low. Romero knew, of course, what had happened to Heslip and Burgon. He’d heard all about it that morning. But unlike the affair with Weems, Romero had slept through it…with a little help from some sedatives. “You think that’s the answer, Cherry? Pills and razors?”

“I can’t go to sleep,” Palmquist said in a cool, lifeless voice. “Maybe not ever again, but sure as hell not tonight.”

“Why is that?”

“You know why.”

Romero figured he did. “I heard it,” he said, sighing. “I heard it the night it got Weems. I heard something up there with you and you know what, Cherry? It scared the piss right out of me. I heard that business up in your bunk, but I didn’t have the balls to go and look.”

“I’m glad you didn’t, he…”

“Yes?”

Palmquist just shook his head. “I hated Weems and Gordo, those other two…”

“Nothing but trash, Cherry. Human trash.”

“…yeah, sure, but ah,-us" heigyou gotta believe me, Romero, I never meant for them to…oh Jesus, this has gone way too far and I’m to blame. All those cons, they fucking hate me and they want me dead. I wish they’d killed me this morning.” He said it and he meant it, too, you could hear the pain in his voice. “Funny, ain’t it? All day long I been wishing they’d killed me. It’s the only thing that sounds good to me right now.”

Romero thought about it long and hard. He lit a cigarette, blew the smoke out through his nostrils. “Tell me something, Cherry. Whatever’s going on with you, it’s happened before, hasn’t it? I mean, c’mon, this…whatever in the fuck it is…it can’t be a new thing.”

“It’s not.”

“It targets your enemies, doesn’t it?”

“Anything it thinks is a threat to me.”

Romero put a hand on his arm, said, “C’mon, kid, what the hell is this about?”

Palmquist chuckled low in his throat, dropped his face into his hands. “You wouldn’t believe me. Nobody would. I’ve told other people…they thought I was nuts.”

Romero pulled off his cigarette. “Shit, I’d believe anything by this point, kid. Really, I would.” He paused. “Okay. Let me tell you then. It’s this brother of yours, dammit. You called him Damon that first day. I remember. You said he wasn’t like other people, he was different. That if somebody fucked with you…he’d straighten them out. Except, well, I thought he was on the outside, but he’s on the inside, isn’t he? He’s inside you.”

“Yes, he is.” Palmquist clenched his teeth, scratched fingers over his scalp. “He’s always been in me. See, Romero, I was one of a set of twins. My brother, he died at birth. Well, he was already dead. Sometimes, when you have twins in the womb, one of them will assert its dominance and absorb the other one. I was the dominant one, though sometimes I don’t think that’s true at all…”

Palmquist said sometime in the first trimester of his mother’s pregnancy she had an ultrasound, and they discovered twin boys in her womb. She named the boys Danny and Damon. Whichever came out first was to be Danny, the other Damon.

Only Damon never came out at all.

By the second trimester, there was only Danny and some rudimentary tissue that had never taken. It was absorbed by the other fetus. Rare at that date, the doctor told her, but it did happen.

“She told me about it when I was like five or six. My old man died in a car accident and I guessnt " a it was time for confessions,” Palmquist said. “Part of me already knew, because somehow, someway, I always knew I was never alone. I just sensed it, I guess, and as the years passed, that sense of another in me grew stronger and stronger. No, Damon never came out, never really formed, but what he was, it hid inside me.”