“How about before a mirror?” Jim said. “Is the image another person?”
“From Sarcasmville,” Wunier growled. “Just obey the rules, and you’ll get along fine.”
Wunier dragged his foot across to the wall and tore off a taped-up paper. Jim read the words on it before it went into the wastebasket.
DON’T BE AFREUD OF YOUR SHRINK.
Beneath the phrase was a Kilroy-was-here drawing.
“There’s some wise guy puts this stuff up in all the rooms,” Wunier said. “We call him the Scarlet Letterer. His ass’ll be scarlet if we catch him.”
Besides some framed prints that looked as if they came out of the Saturday Evening Post, the only thing hanging on the wall was a calendar.
Jim said, “How about the mantras? A lot of the rooms have them up on the walls.”
“That’s OK, part of the therapy. Some people need them to get into the World of Tiers.” Wunier paused, then said, “You decided yet what character you’ll choose?”
He obviously wanted to stay and talk. Poor guy must be lonely. But Jim didn’t feel like sacrificing himself for someone who was the last person he wanted to talk with.
“No,” Jim said. He was about to get up but then drew back into the chair. He pointed at the space below his bed.
“What’s that?”
Wunier’s eyes widened. He started to bend over to look under the bed, then changed his mind.
“What do you mean, ‘What’s that?’”
“It just moved. I thought it was just the shadows. But it’s very dark, blacker than outer space. It looks like if you put your hand in it, the hand’d freeze off and float into the fourth dimension. Sort of spindle-shaped. About a foot long. Hey, it moved again!”
Wunier stared briefly at the bed and a longer time at Jim.
“I have to get going,” he said. Attempting nonchalance, he added, “I leave you to entertain your guest.” But he got out of the room as swiftly as he could.
Jim laughed loudly when he thought that Wunier would not hear him. The thing he had claimed to see was out of a novel by Philip Wylie—he didn’t remember the title—but he didn’t know if Wunier had really thought there was one under the bed or if he was scared that Jim was about to freak out.
However, he was, a minute later, in a mixed black and red mood. A sort of AC phase. Depression alternating with anger. The psychologists said that depression was anger turned against yourself. So, how could he, like a light flashing off and on, suffer from both states within a minute’s time? Maybe he really was about to freak out.
IT’S DEPRESSING TO BE A MANIC.
He’d tape that to the rest-room wall. He’d show them that the damned elusive Scarlet Letterer wasn’t the only one who could strike from the shadows.
He didn’t even have clothes of his own. And he had no money. Strip a man or woman of his possessions and money, and you see a person who’s lost his manhood or her womanhood. That person was no longer a person. Not unless he or she were a Hindu fakir or yogi, part of a culture that considered such people to be holy. Not in this world where clothes and money made the man, where the emperor was the only one who could go naked and still be a person.
He had nothing.
While sitting in the chair, staring at nothing, a nothing looking into a mirror, he felt the blackness recede. It was followed by red, red that surged into every cell of his body and mind.
But a man who was angry was a man who had something. Rage was a positive force even if it led to negative action. A poem he’d read a long time ago said—how’d it go? couldn’t remember it verbatim—rage would work if reason wouldn’t.
Gillman Sherwood, a fellow patient, stuck his head in the doorway. “Hey, Grimson! Group therapy in ten minutes!”
Jim nodded and got up from the chair.
He knew then what character he was going to choose. To be.
Red Orc. A villainous Lord in the series, Kickaha’s most dangerous enemy. One mean and angry Ess Oh Bee. He kicked ass because his own was red.
CHAPTER 4
October 31, 1979, Halloween
Something had awakened Jim just before the alarm clock had gone off. His eyes still sleep-blurred, he had stared upwards. The cracks in the ceiling were slowly forming a map of chaos. Or were they preliminary strokes of a drawing of the image of a beast or some cryptic symbol? Several new cracks had shot out from the old ones since he had gone to bed last night.
The alarm clock startled him. Twirrruuup! Up and Adam! Rise from bed, sluggard! Roll ’em! Roll ’em! Once more to the breach!
The early-morning sun shone through the thin yellow curtains on white dust motes falling from the cracks.
The earth had moved below the house and shaken his bed. Somewhere directly below him, one of the many long-ago abandoned mine tunnels or shafts under Belmont City had shifted or crumbled, and the Grimson house had sunk or tilted a little more.
Three months ago, four blocks from Jim’s house, two houses, side by side, had fallen into a suddenly born gap two feet deep. They now leaned toward each other, their front and back porches torn off. Once six feet apart, they were jammed together, stuck in the hole like a couple of too-large and too-hard suppositories in the Jolly Green Giant.
A tremor a minute-ago had yanked him upward, like a trout on a hook, from a nightmare. But it was no dream of a monster that had made him moan and whimper. It had been a black-on-black dream in which nothing, nothing at all, had happened.
He told himself to haul his weary ass out of bed and get it in gear. “With a song in his heart.” Yeah. A song like “Gloomy Sunday.” Only this was Wednesday, All Souls’ Day.
The room was very small. Seven big posters were taped to the faded red-roses-and-light-green wallpaper and the back of the door. The largest was that of Keith Moon, Moon the Loon, great and late mad drummer for The Who. The most colorful displayed the five members of the Hot Water Eskimos, a local rock group. There was “Gizzy” Dillard vomiting into his saxophone; Veronica “Singing Snatch” Pappas shoving the microphone up under her leather miniskirt; Bob “Birdshot” Pellegrino jacking off one of his drumsticks; Steve “Goathead” Larsen looking as if he were humping his guitar; Sam “Windmill” Wyzak tickling the ivories. Above the unsavory crew hovered a dozen cowbells resembling UFOs in flight. Up close and in bright light, you could see very thin wires connecting them to the ceiling.
Clad in torn green pajama tops, red pajama bottoms, and black socks, he got out of bed and opened the door. Yes, it did stick more than it had yesterday. Turning to the left, he went down the unlit hall. Its carpet was thready and a dull green. Inside the narrow bathroom, he turned on the light. When he looked in the mirror, he winced. A third pimple was bulging redly under the skin. His reddish whiskers were sticking out a little more than they had yesterday. By weekend, he would have to shave. The dull razors his father insisted on keeping because new ones cost too much would scrape his skin raw, cut off the scabs over the recently squeezed pimples, and make them bleed.
He urinated into the washbowl. By doing this, Jim was helping his father, Eric Grimson. Eric was always hollering about too many flushes running up the utility bill. Jim was also getting a small, if secret, revenge on that domestic tyrant and all-around prick, his father.
While standing there, he studied his face. Those large deep-blue eyes were inherited from both his Norwegian father and his Hungarian mother. The reddish hair, long jaw, and prominent chin were handed down from Eric Grimson. The small ears, long straight nose, high cheekbones, and slightly Oriental cast of the eyes were the gifts of his mother, Eva Nagy Grimson. His six feet and one and a half inches of height came from his father. Jim would grow three more inches if he became as tall as his begetter. His old man was wiry and narrow-shouldered, but Jim had gotten his broad shoulders from his mother’s side of the family. Her brothers were short but very wide and muscular.
God Almighty and then some! If he could get rid of the damn pimples, he might be good-looking. He mig
ht even get some place with Sheila Helsgets, the best-looking girl in Belmont Central High, his unrequited love. Jim meant to look up “unrequited” in the dictionary someday and find out what it meant exactly. To Jim, it meant that his love was one-sided, that she felt no more for him than an orbital satellite did for the radar beam bouncing off it.
The only remark she had ever directed his way had been to ask him to stand downwind of her. That had hurt him but not enough to make him quit loving her. He had started bathing twice a week, a big sacrifice of time on his part, considering how little he had to spare for trivial matters.
Those pimples! Why did God, if He existed, curse teenagers with them?
After splashing water on his face and penis and drying them off with the towel only his father was supposed to use, he headed for the kitchen. Despite the darkness of the hallway, he could see white plaster dust on the carpet. When he got to the kitchen, he noticed that new cracks were in the greenish ceiling. There was white dust on the gas stove and the oilcloth cover on the table.
“We’re all going to fall into a hole,” he muttered. “All the way to China. Or Hell.”
Hurriedly, he made his own breakfast. He swung open the door of the forty-year-old refrigerator, the cooling coils atop it looking like an ancient Martian watchtower. From it he took a jar of mayonnaise, a Polish sausage, a Polish pepper hot enough to burn the anus when it came out the next day, half a browned banana, wilted lettuce, and cold bread. He forgot to close the refrigerator door. While water boiled for the cup of instant coffee he would make, he sliced the sausage and banana and slapped together a sandwich.
He turned on the radio, purchased by his father’s father the day after the first transistor radios came on the market. The vacuum-tube GE was gathering dust up in the overburdened attic along with piles and piles of old newspapers and magazines, broken toys, old clothes, cracked china, rusty silverware, broomless brooms, and a burned-out 1942 Hoover vacuum cleaner.
Eric and Eva Grimson found it painful to throw anything away except garbage, and sometimes not even that. It was as if, Jim thought, they were cutting off pieces of their own bodies when they parted with a possession. Most people put their past behind them. His parents put it above them.
He bit deeply into the sandwich and followed it with a piece of Polish pepper. While his mouth burned and his eyes watered, he turned the gas off and poured the boiling water into a cup. As he stirred the instant coffee, WYEK, Belmont’s only rock station, blasted into the kitchen with the tail end of the weather report. After that, it began to blare out number sixteen of this week’s local hit list. “Your Hand’s Not What I Want!” was the first song by the Hot Water Eskimos that Jim had ever heard on the radio. It would also be the last.
While he was bent over the sink and filling a glass with cold water, he heard a growling which did not come from the radio. Then the set went off. For two seconds, there was no sound except that of running water. The growl behind him came again.
“Goddamn! I told you and I told you! Keep that fucking noise down! Or, by God, I’ll throw the goddamn radio through the window! And close the fucking refrigerator door!”
The voice was low in volume but deep in tone. It was his father’s, his legal master’s. The voice that had filled Jim with dread and wonder when he was a child. It had not seemed to be human. Jim still found it hard to believe that it was.
Yet, he could remember moments when he had loved it, when it had made him laugh. That was what confused his attitude toward his father. But he was not mixed up now.
He straightened up, turned the faucet off, and drank from the glass as he wheeled slowly around. Eric Grimson was tall, red-faced, red-eyed, puffy-lidded, fat-jowled, and big-paunched. The broken veins in his nose and cheeks reminded Jim of the cracks in the ceilings.
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!
Another parent-child confrontation, as the school psychologist called it. One more time locking horns with a shithead, as Jim thought of it.
His old man sat down. He put his elbows on the table and then his face between his hands. For a moment, he looked as if he were going to cry. Then he straightened, his open palms striking the tabletop loudly and making the sugar bowl dance around. He glared. But his hands, when he lit a match to a cigarette, were shaking.
“You turned it on loud on purpose, didn’t you? You won’t let me sleep. God knows, you know, too, your mother knows, I need it. But no, will you let me sleep? Why? Goddamn nastiness, pure orneriness, the mean streak you got from your mother, that’s why! And I told you to close the refrigerator door! You … you … snake! That’s what you are! A goddamn snake!”
He slammed his right hand against the table. The cloud of stale beer issuing from his mouth made Jim wrinkle his face.
“I won’t put up with that crap from you anymore! By God, I’m going to throw that goddamn radio through the window! And you after that!”
“Go ahead!” Jim said. “See if I care!”
His father would not take him up on that dare. No matter how furious Eric Grimson got, he would not destroy anything that might cost him money to replace.
Eric rose from the chair. “Get out!” he yelled. “Out, out, out! I don’t want to see your fartface around here, you long-haired freak-weirdo! Get out right now or I’ll kick your ass all the way to school! Now! Now! Now!”
His old man was trying to provoke him to hit him, Jim thought. Then he could break a few bones in his son, bloody his nose, slam him in the belly, kick him in the balls, kidney-punch him.
Which was exactly what his son wanted to do to his old man and was going to do some day.
“All right!” Jim screamed. “I’ll go, you drunken bum, hopeless welfare case, parasite, loafer, loser! And you can shut the door yourself.”
Eric’s cement-mixer voice got lower but louder. His face was red, and his mouth was wide open, showing crooked tobacco-yellowed teeth. His eyes looked like blood clots.
“You don’t talk to me like that, your father! You fucking hippie, stinking … stinking …”
“How about pink Commie bastard?” Jim said as he sidled by his father, facing him, ready to strike back but trembling violently.
“Yeah! That’ll do fine!” his father roared.
But Jim was running down the hall. Just before he entered his bedroom, he saw a door open at the far end of the corridor. From the narrow rectangle between door and wall came a flickering light and a strong odor of incense. His mother’s face appeared. As usual, she had been praying and fingering her beads while kneeling before the statues in the room. Then, hearing the uproar, instead of coming out to defend her son, she had hidden behind the door until peace and quiet came again or, at least, seemed about to break out.
“Tell God to shove it!” Jim shouted.
His mother gasped. Her head disappeared, and her door closed slowly and softly. That was his mother. Slow and soft, quiet and peaceful. And no more effectual than the shadow she resembled. She had lived so long among ghosts that she had become one.
CHAPTER 5
Jim, now dressed and holding his school book bag in one hand, leaped through the front doorway. Behind him, standing in the doorway, shouting insults and threats, was his father. He was not going to pursue his son outside his territory, on which he felt safe. He was the cock of the walk and the bull of the woods on his own land. Which, actually, was the bank’s, if you wanted to get technical about it. Which, if the tunnels and shafts under the house kept collapsing, might soon be Mother Earth’s.
The sky was clear, and the sun promised to warm the air up to around the low seventies. A great day for Halloween, though the radio weather report had said that clouds were supposed to appear later in the day.
That was the outside weather. Jim felt as if lightning was banging around in him like an angry ogre cook throwing pots and pans around. Black clouds were racing across his personal sky. They bore news of worse to come.
Eric Grimson kept on shouting though his son was now a block down t
he street. A couple of people were sticking their heads out their front doors to see what the commotion was. Jim plunged ahead, swinging his bag, which held five textbooks, none of which he had opened last night, pencils, a ballpoint pen, and two notebooks the pages of which mostly bore Jim’s attempts to write lyrics. It also contained three tattered and dirty paperbacks, Nova Express, Venus on the Half-Shell, and Ancient Egypt.
His mother had not had time to fix his lunch for him. Never mind. His stomach hurt like a fist gripping red-hot barbed wire.
Too much too long.
When was he going to blow up in his own Big Bang?
It was coming, it was coming.
In a notebook was his latest lyric, “Glaciers and Novas.”
Burn, burn, burn, burn!
Nothing tells how hot I am.
Words’re shadows; fury’s the substance.
Uncle Sam will blacken my fire.
Uncle Sam’s a grinding glacier,
Five miles high, a-grinding
Mountains down to flatness.
Glacier wants everything flat,
Glacier wants to quench all fire.
Pop and Mom are ice giants
Coming to get me, cool my fire.
White house frost giant,
FBI trolls,
CIA ogres,
Werewolf Fuzz are circling me.
Jailhouse fridge’ll freeze the fire.
Ahab chasing Moby Dick,
Chasing his own dick, it’s said,
Ahab tearing the mask from God,
Bombshell heart about to explode,
His anger’s a candle, mine’s a klieg.
Eons on, ages on, eons on, eras on,
Old switchman Time reroutes the tracks,
Express-train Sun rams head-on
In destined doom the Nova Special,
Blows, explodes, incinerates all,
Splattering Pluto with pieces of Mars.
Glacier gives up my frozen corpse,
Glacier gives itself to fire.
Frozen corpse will burn again.