Going After Cacciato Read Online Free PDF Page B

beneath the tower. “We’ve all got these biles—Stink, Oscar, every body—but you’ve got yourself a whole bellyful of the stuff. You’re oversaturated. And my theory is this: Somehow these biles are warping your sense of reality. Follow me? Somehow they’re screwing up your basic perspective, and the upshot is you sometimes get a little mixed up. That’s all.”
    Doc had gone on to explain that the biles are a kind of glandular substance released during emotional stress. A perfectly normal thing. Like adrenaline, Doc had said. Only instead of producing quick energy, the biles act as a soothing influence, quieting the brain, numbing, counteracting the fear. Doc had listed the physical symptoms: numbness of the extremities in times of extremity; a cloudiness of vision; paralysis of the mental processes that separate what is truly happening from what only might have happened; floatingness; removal; a releasing sensation in the belly; a sense of drifting; a lightness of head.
    “Normally,” Doc had said, “those are healthy things. But in your case, these biles are … well, they’re overabundant. They’re leaking out, infecting the brain. This Cacciato business—it’s the work of the biles. They’re flooding your whole system, going to the head and fucking up reality, frying in all the goofy, weird stuff.”
    So Doc’s advice had been to concentrate. When he felt the symptoms, the solution was to concentrate. Concentrate, Doc had said, until you see it’s just the biles fogging things over, just a trick of the glands.
    Now, facing the night from high in his tower by the sea, Paul Berlin concentrated.
    The night did not move. On the beach below, the barbed wire sparkled in moonlight, and the sea made its gentle sounds behind him. The men slept their hard, dense sleeps. Now and then one ofthem would stir, turning in the dark, but they slept without stop. Oscar slept in his mesh hammock. Eddie and Doc and Harold Murphy slept on the tower floor. Stink Harris and the lieutenant slept side by side, their backs touching. They could sleep and sleep.
    Paul Berlin kept the guard. For a long time he looked blankly into the night, inland, concentrating hard on the physical things.
    True, he was afraid. Doc was right about that. Even now, with the night calm and unmoving, the fear was there like a kind of background sound that was heard only if listened for. True. But even so, Doc was wrong when he called it dreaming. Biles or no biles, it wasn’t dreaming—it wasn’t even pretending, not in the strict sense. It was an idea. It was a working out of the possibilities. It wasn’t dreaming and it wasn’t pretending. It wasn’t crazy. Blisters on their feet, streams to be forded and swamps to be circled, dead ends to be opened into passages west. No, it wasn’t dreaming. It was a way of asking questions. What became of Cacciato? Where did he go, and why? What were his motives, or did he have motives, and did motives matter? What tricks had he used to keep going? How had he eluded them? How did he slip away into deep jungle, and how, through jungle, had they continued the chase? What happened, and what might have happened?

Three
The Road to Paris
    Y es, they were in jungle now. Thick dripping jungle. Club moss fuzzing on bent branches, hard green bananas dangling from trees that canopied in lush sweeps of green, vaulted forest light in yellow-green and blue-green and olive-green and silver-green. It was jungle. Growth and decay and the smell of chlorophyll and jungle sounds and jungle depth. Soft, humming jungle. Everywhere, greenery deep in greenery. Itching jungle, lost jungle. A botanist’s madhouse, Doc said.
    Single file, they followed the narrow trail through banks of fern and brush and vine. There was weight in the air. Smells came together, and the final smell was of rot. They moved slowly. The heavy grind of the march: Stink still at point, then Eddie, then Oscar and the lieutenant, then Harold Murphy toting