Twenty
He prays the neighbors can’t see Hanna squatting in the high grass playing out the cables a foot or so through the four holes clipped out at the base of the hurricane fence. In the wind the grass billows over her. Gigantic filthy mermaid.
If interested, the neighbors can see him an hour later in the twilight sauntering toward the neat Beth side of that fence, bending down as for sea-shells on a green-sanded beach, gathering the four balls of stout twine attached to the ends of the cables. Then (but this they can’t possibly see) letting the twine out as he saunters past the open window and casually tossing the four balls inside.
Elaborate precautions. He wants no witnesses.
Now inside, nearly invisible, crouched beneath the sill, her exotic plants out of harm’s way, he pulls the cables in hand over hand. Suppressing concern about auricular flutter, he can imagine he’s hauling in early morning nightlines heavy with eels. They slither across the lawn in convergence toward the living room window. Inevitably they run through the strip of tulips and do a certain amount of collateral damage. But most of the flowers are shattered by now anyhow.
Soon the cables are lying lifeless beneath the window.
The tricky part now. The green paint-job on the cables is fine camouflage for the lawn but not for the white wall. Takes another drink for encouragement. Then picks up the four strands of twine and puts back and heels into it, tottering back with gasps toward the opposite wall. Not good for his heart. All four of the cables pour into the house.
He goes on retreating, trips over the Christmas-wrapped monitor and gets a vicious jab in the small of the spine from one of the Christmas-wrapped sensors. (Christmas is way in the past or way in the future depending which way you look but they had to be disguised and it was the only wrapping-paper he found, in one of Harvey’s closets, decades old. Yellowed Santas waved over and over from their sleighs. What did the neighbors think of Christmas in late May if they witnessed those four heart-straining trips from one house to the other?)
With that blow to his spinal column the palpitations start up again. He has to return to the sofa. He should never have agreed to help Hanna with those big first-generation sensors three hours ago. A heart attack on the threshold of entry into real life would be too cruel.
Four times he’d transported them, knee-flexed, tottering behind Hanna like a winded sweat-blinded pallbearer. With the fourth sensor set up in its corner, completing the now operational quartet, his heart had started acting up in irregular bursts. He’d had to lie down on the sofa for a half-hour. He’d been deeply alarmed even after it subsided.
At the second alert following the blow in the spine three hours later, he longs to stay on the sofa indefinitely. But there are those four cables green against the white wall. He forces himself to get up. He goes over to the window. He flings the blanket over the cables. A blanket hanging out of a living room window is a little strange but less strange than what it’s hiding. As he slowly pulls the cables further into Beth’s living room he wipes each one perfectly clean and dry even though her carpet is protected by thicknesses of newspaper. “Wipe your feet,” he says to them comically, trying to forget his heart. Soon each one lies coiled at the foot of its sensor. He returns to the sofa.
The phone starts ringing again for the fifth time that evening. With such persistence it can only be Beth. He’d let it ring on and on the first four times. Just wasn’t up to standing there in the middle of her radically altered interior decoration scheme and talking about other things.
But now with the heart alert he badly wants to hear her concerned loving voice, wants her assurance that it’s probably nothing at all serious. Maybe it’s also a strategy to alarm her into early return. So he gets up like fine glassware and answers the phone in the prudent way she insisted on.
There’s no immediate reply, just hard breathing. Finally Ricky’s spaced-out voice:
“I want Beth. Who are you? I want my mother.” JW gives him the plant-watering routine. He takes a long time digesting the news that his mother is away for a week. He asks JW what he’s doing in their house. JW repeats the reason and throws in the goldfish stint for good measure. Ricky hangs up on him.
He goes outside and inspects the window job. The blanket does look odd. And you can make out the shape of the cables underneath. Finally the neighbors don’t matter all that much, but what about the police? Sometimes you saw them cruising around at night, their patrol cars hurling glaring full moons on the houses. That worries JW. But it will be only one night, that night. He made it clear to Harvey.
Six hours earlier he’d found Harvey on the cot curled up on Hanna’s lap, clutching his stomach and staring at the wall. Hanna was rocking him. You seldom saw her down in the cellar except for emergencies.
She glares at JW and whispers: “Look what you did to him, you bastard.” JW has the means of relieving his pain if it’s just that. Solemnly he announces that he’s willing. Deep in his pain, Harvey doesn’t react. JW touches his arm and bends over and repeats in his ear, louder, that he’s willing to let the sensors be installed in the living room of the other house. For a strictly limited time, on the terms already agreed upon.
Still no reaction. After half a year of harassment this indifference alarms JW. Hanna comes to his rescue. She strokes Harvey’s caved-in cheek.
“Harv honey, didn’t you hear? You can have it. He says it’s okay, we can stick the things in the bitch’s house.” He goes on staring at his pain. She bends down closer to his face.
“Honey, you can have it. You can have it, he says. You talked all the time about it and now you got it you don’t care. Don’t do this to me, Harv. Does it hurt real bad, sweetie? Lemme get the pills.”
She removes her bulk from under his head, gentles it on the pillow. She comes back with a glass of water, eases him slowly up to a sitting position. The curly golden wig is shoved forward over his eyes. All you can see of his face is the gigantic beak and the embittered mouth.
She puts the glass down on the floor, carefully rearranges the wig, fluffs it. Then says, “Say ahh,” places the pill on his tongue and lifts the glass to his lips and swallows herself so he’ll do it in imitation.
He slowly comes back. Stares at JW.
“When?”
“Tonight.”
“How long?”
“Just tonight.”
“A week.”
“No.”
“Five days.”
“Just tonight.”
JW says it in a tone that should tell Harvey he’s wasting time and breath. He doesn’t have much left. It’s something deeper than his impaired vocal cords now. He has difficulty summoning up breath to make them vibrate into half-intelligible sound. His face is loose and waxen over the skull.
He tries to plead for time without breath. Holds up four bony fingers.
JW shakes his head.
“Whole house, then,” Harvey brings out.
“Just the living room.”
“Four days. Everywhere.”
“What I said.”
“Give you more money. For two days. And everywhere.”
JW feels stirrings of anger at the way Harvey’s maneuvering him into the role of a sadistic time-monopolist, as though by a single word (“four” then “three” and now even “two”) JW could prolong his life indefinitely. JW doesn’t let pity get the upper hand. He shakes his head. He isn’t indefinitely purchasable.
“Eighty-four thousand dollars was what you offered last night. That’s enough for me.”
“Eighty-four thousand dollars?” Hanna echoes the sum in the same incredulous shocked way she did over the phone long ago when JW told her the amount of the check Harvey had enclosed in the letter. After all, that money would have been hers soon. Most of it anyhow.
Harvey stares down at the floor. “Get. The checkbook,” he commands Hanna.
Negotiations nearly break down then and there. JW insists on cash. It’s Friday evening, Harvey reminds him in writing. He
wouldn’t be able to transfer that much cash from the money market account till Tuesday at the earliest. He wants to start in that very evening, he doesn’t have time to wait around. He offers JW an IOU as well, witnessed by Hanna. JW is suspicious.
Harvey orders Hanna to help him up the stairs to the salary-room. She bears him in her arms there. He has her open the wall-safe. All they have in cash is $5000. He offers JW $3000 as a bonus for accepting a check and an IOU. That’s JW’s one compromise. Reluctantly he accepts the check and the IOU along with the $3000 in cash.
He doesn’t have much time to wait around either.
At 9:00 pm Hanna stomps into Beth Anderson’s living room practically bearing Harvey who is disguised and reeking of mothballs and clutching the folded blueprint, the navigational compass and the yellow yardstick. She’s also bearing the tinkered permanent-wave helmet and a supermarket plastic bag with five bottles of that terrible California white wine that jimmied doors of faulty perception. Does he intend drinking five bottles for super amplification? Is it going to be a party? A wake?
Harvey has come dressed as for a fancy-dress party or a wake, as though you could really wake them. All JW had insisted on was clean-soled shoes and clean pants and shirt as protection for Beth’s living room. He comes disguised as a caricature of his earlier self in the 1940’s, shrunken away from those obsolete padded shoulders and flopping elephant cuffs that had lain embalmed forty years in an obscure closet. He even has a tie, broad and short like a gaudy Roman sword. Crowning anachronism: he’s abandoned the wig for a fedora. Who wears fedoras in this age?
JW can’t help saying: “Dressed to kill.” It almost comes out: “Dressed to resurrect.” Transitive or intransitive use? For a second JW sees him tiny and shrunken in those expendable clothes, laid out in a first-generation time-sensor coffin. He’d told him to come over reasonably clean, not tricked out for a corny posthumous social visit. All that’s lacking is a bouquet. Lilies, necessarily. Flowers make JW think of Beth.
Harvey insists on undoing the Santa Claus wrappings of the machines himself. Starting in, he looks like a wizened child on Christmas day. Only the tinsel garlanded tree is missing. He manages to disengage one sensor. The Scotch tape on the second proves too much for him. Hanna and JW finish the job.
He looks on, stretched out on the sofa now. JW has protected it with more newspapers. He makes him remove those corny two-toned shoes as well. Harvey gives them faint orders. Hanna does the final shifting. The correct positioning of the sensors isn’t where they’d placed them, one in each corner as in the dead room. Here the real and the virtual living rooms don’t coincide.
Harvey directs Hanna to place two of the sensors in the middle of the room. The third winds up in the closet where Beth keeps her photo-albums. The fourth goes in the kitchen, in the place of the refrigerator which JW lets Hanna push out of the way unaided. He’s strained his heart enough for one day. He just slips more newspapers under the sensors.
After she lugs the Formica breakfast table into the living room JW orders her back to her stool. When her muscles aren’t needed JW makes her sit out of harm’s way on a kitchen stool in a corner of the living room far from delicate things. He’s put additional sheets of newspapers under the stool too because of her feet. She wanted to sit like a queen in Beth’s prized rococo armchair. JW vetoed that idea instantly. The worm-riddled gilt-and-velvet heirloom wouldn’t have borne up a second under her two hundred odd pounds.
JW makes a rustle of dead leaves on the yellowing newspapers underfoot as he moves about assembling the equipment. He places the monitor on the Formica table, also the control panel, the video and the time storage units, the cassettes. Then cables all the components into an operating whole. Harvey makes him change the lighting. Sullen red bulbs replace source after source of gentle sane light. Finally the living room is filled with red gloom, like what Beth’s electric fireplace manufactured, except static.
As soon as he smells the acrid illegal reek JW runs rustling into the kitchen for a saucer, places it on the floor alongside the sofa and warns Harvey against ashes and embers. He’ll air out the living room after it’s all over and they’re gone. Harvey wants wine. JW gives him a glass and warns him against spilling it.
Now Harvey asks for another pill. Hanna refuses. He’s already exceeded the prescribed dosage. JW learns it’s morphine. He didn’t know you could administer morphine orally. Hanna has to give it to him, the vial as well. He whispers something in her ear. She nods.
They help Harvey to the table. JW holds the glass of wine for him and watches the joint trembling between his fingers. Harvey sits down and stares dissatisfied at the control panel. Something’s wrong or missing. He tells them to get the relay. It weighs a ton.
JW thinks of his heart and tries to put up an argument. What does he need the relay for when the sensors are cabled to the machine in his cellar? Harvey repeats his order.
As they lug the relay unit up the cellar stairs the machine behind the lead-plated wall starts up. The bone-trembling bass rises to a shriek. At the sudden noise (or at the thought that the sensors are now at work in the other house) JW’s heart acts up. The relay nearly slips out of his sweating grasp. It’s too great a strain on his heart. He insists on halts every five yards. They’ve reached Beth’s neat white gate when Hanna lets her end down on the sidewalk without warning.
“Forgot something,” she says and disappears.
He squats alongside the relay, puffing badly. That close to the street lamp, isn’t he visible from the neighboring houses? But most of the houses are dark except for here and there a square of bluish shifting light from late TV.
When Hanna comes back they lug the relay into Beth’s living room. The two visible sensors are tracking and zooming invisible presences.
JW stretches out on the sofa. A checkup tomorrow. Monitoring his heart, he stares dully at Harvey at the table. He’s kept his fedora on. He looks like the mummy of an old Jew about to perpetrate electronic abomination. Golem. Ignoring the two of them and the relay, he manipulates the switches and buttons of the control panel. Hanna announces a bursting bladder and goes to the bathroom.
Harvey’s finger is on the red button now. He turns his head toward JW and explains in whispered fragments that navigation for the replay of tonight’s tapes will be automatic, like the earlier experimental ones with that teacher and the dogs. JW will have no trouble launching the voyage if he, Harvey, decides to let him voyage to what he’s going to bring back this night from the old house (the third, virtual, house).
JW whispers back that he has no intention of ever voyaging again. Not his way. He’d be gone in a few days anyhow.
Harvey presses the button with effort and leans forward toward the screen. His back monopolizes it. Time goes by. JW looks at his watch. Ten to midnight. More time goes by. Then Harvey says:
“Me. June 1940. Bad focus though.”
A while later he says:
“You. April 1942. Dressed to kill. But fuzzy too. What’s the matter?”
A while later:
“Hello, Momma. December 1944. Same thing. Fuzzy. Why?”
A long while later he whispers:
“Have her. Almost sure. May 1943. Still not clear. Sure now. She’s wearing. That. Blue blouse. Remember?”
At that detail JW tells himself it’s invention. Even for Harvey the unvisited images on the screen have always been monochromatic. Unless his memory, suddenly jogged by her image, is supplying the blue.
JW gets up and approaches the monitor. Harvey switches it off.
“Not clear enough. Can’t voyage. In that. The red. Notebook. I know. What’s wrong. But can’t remember. The sequencing.”
The red notebook, he repeats. The correct sequencing is in the red notebook. But where is the red notebook? Can’t remember. Not in the cellar. In the living room? In one of the closets? Maybe in the attic? JW should go over and look in those places. Even if it takes an hour or two. It’s vital.
&nb
sp; JW pours himself a drink and goes back to the other house. He takes the bottle with him.
He tries the living room first. It looks strangely empty now without the sensors. Even gone, though, they reveal things beneath surface. They’ve left four squares of flooring in the dust. The four heaps of desiccated roaches are visible too.
He stands there and can’t get beneath that dusty surface, can’t even imagine the flowered and striped armchairs and their occupants. JW thoroughly explores what’s available for exploration in the room but doesn’t come up with the red notebook that supposedly will materialize her out of haze.
He doesn’t find it in any of the closets either. Spends a foolish sweating hour pulling and poking, coughing from the dust he raises in those confined spaces.
Is it then that he takes off his blue denim jacket?
Finally he goes up to the attic. He’s never been there before. Has Harvey? Under the naked bulb dangling from a rough-hewn beam and cauled with spider webs, the floor is thick with dust. The dust is undisturbed by footprints or has slowly gotten the best of old ones. He steps inside anyhow. There’s movement ahead.
In a big oval mirror framed by gilt wooden rosebuds he sees himself advancing tarnished and gravely distorted toward himself. Next to the mirror are two ripped armchairs, one faintly striped, the other faintly flowered.
He goes down to the cellar even though Harvey said the red notebook wasn’t there. His memory’s bad.
The door is locked. They left it open two hours before when they transported the relay up the stairs. He recalls now that Hanna went back to the house, probably for that. Maybe the red notebook is lying on the cot, despite what he said. His memory’s very bad. He can’t have remembered the color of a blouse forty years before.
JW goes to the back of the house, past the dark tree with the ladder and kneels before the rectangular opening where they removed the ventilation grill for the passage of the cables. They glint black in the moonlight. He’s kneeling as he did months before when he saw Harvey voyaging white-eyed. But now it’s pitch-dark inside. He’ll have to get the cellar key from her.
He starts for the other house when he hears a sound from the mutilated elm. The ladder’s trembling. It’s as if someone light and invisible were climbing up. A faint slither comes from the tall dead grass a few feet away. The grass is swaying in forward progress. A snake? In that miniature suburban jungle? The ladder goes on trembling.
When empty beer bottles start clinking he understands everything, sees Hanna at the top of the stairs in Beth’s house digging her heels in and powering the four cables up the staircase, soon into the room at the end of the corridor. He gets confirmation when he runs back to the cellar opening. All four cables are in movement, like snakes. They jostle the ladder in their progress toward the honored guestroom.
In fear and outrage, JW places his Glenfiddich on the ground. Maybe it’s then that he struggles out of his blue denim jacket. He pounces on the nearest slithering cable, digs his heels in and yanks with all his might. Murderously pictures Hanna yanked forward, toppling over, tumble and bang, bang, bang, step-edge after step-edge chastising her teeth and vertebras.
But now a terrible pain clamps his chest, my heart, O my heart, and at the same time the cable wound about his forearm yanks forward murderously, pitching him face forward into the grass and violent painless impact against empty beer bottles, painless because of the greater pain in his chest. He lies there motionless except for his heart. The cables, unimpeded, slither forward again.
JW lies there a long time.
He gets up slowly and mops the blood from the wound on his temple. He listens inwardly. The cables are lying still and silent in the grass now. They’ve reached destination. He picks up his Glenfiddich and drinks from the bottle deeply as he’s doing now from Lord’s Vineyards down in the cellar much later.
Of course Beth’s front door is locked. When he unlocks it and pushes, something resists. A chair jammed under the knob as he himself had done the night before, he guesses. (They’d both of them, Harvey and JW, forgotten Beth’s new bolt.)
He goes slowly to the back of the house and looks up at the open window of the honored guestroom. The room is lit dull red. The theatre of operations has shifted. He imagines Harvey at last seated there commanding the sensors, helmeted like a triumphant general.
Clobbered by fatigue, JW has to lean against the house he was supposed to keep. He has a sudden desire to escape, to get into his car and drive the rest of the night southward into dawn. After a while he returns to the front of the house. Why hadn’t he thought of the window immediately? Pathetic. They’d locked and barricaded the door but they couldn’t do that to the window, not with the passage of the four cables. He goes to it, reaches over the cables and pulls the drape aside.
Hanna bulks there with a poker. “You got the notebook? You can’t come in less you got the red notebook.” She grins malevolently.
Crazy and pathetic, thinks JW, stepping back from her. Poker and lock and chair or whatever, don’t they realize he can sabotage those cables at any point from one house to the other, knife, spade, saw? He goes back to the other house, not for any of those definitive instruments, but for the ladder leaning against the dark tree. Crazy and pathetic. He grapples with the ladder, tears it away from the embrace of dead bindweed. Bent double with it balanced on his backbone like a seesaw, he bears it away and sets it up beneath that open red window.
Is this the moment and place that he takes off the blue denim jacket?
He starts climbing up. His heart isn’t equal to the task, not with moldering rungs below that break under his weight, that slip out of his grasp above and the dangerous buckle as he rises through dead bindweed toward the open red window like a lover or a fireman, not a fireman though, forty years too late for that, and the one-way lover hadn’t needed a ladder, the key is under the mat as Mrs Morgenstern said it would be and he gets it and inserts it and lets himself in, steals across the living room to the stairs and up the stairs to that room at the end of the corridor and at that point, taking him out of it, cars brake violently in front of the house, voices, the slamming of the car doors.
The blue principle of reality to his rescue a second time. Any moment now the police will break inside. This time, however dumb, they’re sure to see the four cables immediately. They’ll follow the cables up the stairs, down the corridor, through the door and break into what’s going on inside the helmet.
JW’s foot gropes for missing rungs to descend from his compromising posture. With the shift of his weight the ladder at that acute angle buckles away from the house, teeters unsupported for a second and then clatters violently back against the wall, almost wrenching him loose.
The voices are close now, girls’ voices too. He opens his eyes and over his shoulder looks down at them in the moonlight looking up at him: Ricky, his chunky Hispano pal, two other rocker types, four busty girls with violet lips and nails, black in the moonlight.
The girls start making savage lynch-mob noises. Now they’re all milling at the foot of the ladder. They start shaking it violently. No question of making the universal gesture of surrender, hands in the air. His white-knuckled hands can only strangle the wood for survival.
He tries to explain that he’s Mrs Anderson’s neighbor, but can only cry it spasmodically to the wall because he’s hugging the bucking frame and anyhow they can’t hear him with the noise they’re making.
With the window open can’t Harvey hear the noise? Or is he encapsulated forty years back, already in the other room where there can be no noise, not even of weeping? That’s a fleeting thought, skimming over the slow sands, so no time-trap because JW is at grips with an intensely real present. He should be grateful for the imminence of cardiac arrest or a smashed spinal column.
“Come on down, you mother,” one of them yells.
Unable to turn around, JW cries to the wall, choppily: “Please stop. Shaking. The ladder. I have a. Bad heart. Conditi
on. Let me. Get down. And explain.”
A rocker starts up the ladder. JW tries to clamber up higher, away from that murderous face. The other lunges up, grabs at his foot. All he gets is JW’s empty shoe. Off balance, he topples off the ladder with the shoe in his hand down onto the others. Taking advantage of the confusion below and the end of the shaking, JW starts letting himself down, crying, “Neighbor! Neighbor!” Ricky pushes the others back. JW collapses on the grass, clutching his chest.
When he opens his eyes Ricky’s spaced-out white face, inches away, is staring down at him. At a higher level a circle of hostile spaced-out faces look down at him. A foot above his face a hand is holding his shoe.
JW gasps again, “Neighbor!” Gasps it over and over. After a while his heart allows him to elaborate the concept. Does it the wrong way. Doesn’t say plausibly: had heard noise from the house, seen suspicious red light, had climbed up the ladder to have a look. Conditioned reflex by now for him to state function after identity.
So he says: “I’m the neighbor. I water Mrs Anderson’s plants.”
The girls jeer. Before he can rectify their image of him climbing up a ladder at 2:00 am with a watering can, one of the rockers shouts, “Never mind the old bastard. The front door, for crissakes!”
They rush that way. The old bastard too, yanked to his feet by the chunky Hispano type who helped steal his precious audio system and who is now twisting his arm painfully behind his back. The gang fills the doorway and begins pushing with their shoulders. The door bursts open with a sound of irreparable breakage inside and they crowd into the red gloom of the living room crunching underfoot the debris of the gilt rococo chair. The second, illicit, passage of the cables has swept protecting newspapers away and the broad swathe of carpet is full of dirt. Also her cherry-wood side-table is overturned and her flowered vase smashed. The cables pour up the staircase and beyond.
The chunky Hispano releases his hold and JW collapses on the sofa. He sees them as from a great distance massed at the foot of the staircase, daunted by Hanna midway up the flight. Amazon defending a Thracian mountain pass. Her mean pig eyes glare through wilding hair. She viciously jabs Beth Anderson’s decorative poker down at them. Nobody dares take her on.
O brave hophead hoplites, lynching a drunk heart-sick old man with his back turned and his defenseless hands clutching unsteady wood for survival, no hesitation then: pitch him into myocardial infarction or quadriplegia. Do something now, for Christ’s sake. Baffle her back like a lion with the four legs of a chair, a kitchen chair, not one of these elegant ones here. Rush her, overpower her, follow the four black and now green guides down the corridor and into the room, rip wires, unplug him, evict the time-voyeurger.
Stalemate. The two sides don’t move, just eye each other. Then JW hears someone say, “The ladder.” Ricky disappears through the front door. Time goes by. Anxious for diversion, JW thinks: the side-table can be righted, the mass-produced vase replaced, the carpet vacuum-cleaned. But the heirloom?
Sudden dramatic turn of events. Stalemate broken. Harvey and Ricky appear at the head of the stairs. Isn’t that a wreath of dead bindweed in Ricky’s hair? Truce. Ricky is supporting Harvey, like a pal. Alliance now?
Ricky makes a sign to his friends not to move. Hanna backs up the stairs, still gripping the poker and keeping her eyes on the gang. She nearly trips over one of the cables. Harvey talks to her. She doesn’t look happy at what he says. She goes down the stairs to the door. Going out with the poker still in her hand her foot crunches a big fragment of the heirloom.
In a few minutes she’s back with an envelope. All three of them disappear down the corridor. The gang relaxes. They start smoking various things. JW hasn’t got the energy to get up and hand saucers around. Anyhow he senses that the fire-hazard worry is another diversion. From what? His heart? Or is that a diversion too?
Soon Ricky appears. Looks satisfied. Going down the stairs with the envelope in his hand he says, “Bingo!” Squeezes past Hanna. She still has the poker in her hand. Slam it bent double over his head, ram it up his venal rectum. She tosses the poker onto the carpet below.
Ricky directs his friends to drag the furniture into a barrier (be gentle with it, gentle, gentle, implores JW in thought) and now the living room is separated in two, on one side the gang, on the other side the cables and JW on his sofa. Peaceful partition of conquered territory.
JW retreats as far away from it all as possible. He and his bottle go into the Mexican nook with the big cactus and the terra-cotta sombreros. He takes a swig and lies down on the cactus-patterned sofa. He closes his eyes. He hears his heart, the persistent rustle of newspapers, the tinkle of glasses, raucous bursts of laughter, now loud rock music and above all that – how is it possible? – hears the buzzing and whirring of the four lenses upstairs. A party’s under way. He ought to get up and survey things. Tired. In a second he’ll do that, just a few seconds. So tired.
The ladder bucks wildly but he can’t hold on with the key in one hand the watering can in the other, can’t reach that inflamed open window with rungs breaking under him. He tries to tell the yelling lynch mob below that it’s not real fire but the electric fireplace, fictional fire that can’t burn, he’ll put it out anyhow. He tries to rise to the window. Ultimate rungs break. He pitches down into the lynch mob and their knives and spades and saws. They have familiar faces from way back but pitiless. Surviving them he’s on a beach looking for something precious lost in the sands. It must be found before night. It’s a deadline. The sky fills with darkness.
Maybe it’s another dream that he opens his eyes onto a face suspended white above him, staring down. What he should say to the bloodless face is: “Get out, all of you. Your mother left me with the key to the house. I’m responsible for what happens here. It’s delegated authority. So you and your gang get the hell out of here.” Or he should say: “Stop those machines up there. It’s not worth the money in that envelope, we’re all being radiated into incurable sickness. I delegate delegated authority for you to go back upstairs and shut the machines off and chase him out of this house or whatever house it is.”
Instead JW finds himself saying: “You stole my hi-fi. I want it back.” What he should urgently say now is: “Drive me to the hospital. I’m not well. I think I’m dying.” Instead, he says, “And the records too. All of them.”
Could the other have said outside a dream what he says in his curious high-pitched fragile voice? “I know you. You’re the old bastard who screwed my mother before I made her kick you out of our house. Get out of here.”
Whichever world he’s in JW is deeply shocked at that and replies: “You don’t know me at all but I know you, everything, inside and out.”
And proves it with testifying forefinger pointed up at the white wincing face by reciting everything he knows about him, from earliest childhood, his favorite ice cream flavors, the names of his early friends, sledding in Forest Park with his mother, precocious masturbation, once ran a fever of 105 and his mother lit candles for him in the church, his favorite toys, comic-books, movies, how he nearly drowned in a river, and his mother nearly died at that, the length of his appendicitis scar, recites three of his worst poems, tells how his mother rolled on the floor when she saw the dead girl in the room, how he’d vampired her out of a decade in a year, how he smashed his mother’s car and kicked her, kicked his loving mother, exploited her, drained her of money and beauty.
Where else than in a dream could the other have protested in a high weepy voice: Get out of my head. I never kicked my mother. I love my mother. I love Beth. Get out of my head. You’re in the Golden Galaxy too. You’re a Supreme in the Golden Galaxy.
He wants to talk about the Golden Galaxy but JW is back on the deadlined beach searching hard in the growing darkness. You can dream in a dream. From the seaward side of a dune he hears a scream, ohhh! and his name.
JW opens his eyes on painful daylight. Doesn’t know where he is but when he hears the sc
ream again (not “ohhh!” but denial: “nohhh”) sits bolt upright, blinking. Silence now. He staggers out of the Mexican nook.
Beth Anderson is sitting among the fragments of the rococo armchair near the open living room door. Still gripping the straps of her flight bag, she’s swaying to and fro. Her deathly white face is ecstatic with The Golden Galaxy technique to deny the painful reality of unpotted (but faithfully watered) hydrangeas, the smashed goldfish bowl with Oscar stiff in the shards, the butts and burned spoons and shooters on the carpet, the slumped and curled up bodies of the kids out for the count, the overturned table, the furniture-barricade, the broken vase, the dirt, the cables, the four black cables pouring up the staircase.
Her lips move soundlessly. Is it a prayer for belief and maybe the lucky cosmic number, bingo, one billion and something and this veil of chaos will vanish? JW feels like joining her in prayer.
At this point a thud comes from upstairs and then a raw animal bellow. She tries to ignore it but when the inhuman bellow comes again her eyes open on JW where he stands with his missing shoe, gripping the empty bottle of Glenfiddich.
Her wet blue eyes widen and widen. Then she squeezes them shut again and tries to struggle back into denial.
But Hanna thumps down the stairs with an earthquaking face, bearing Harvey, and she has to open her eyes again as Hanna jolts past her toward the door with Harvey’s bald head lolling over the crook of her arm, his mouth open, eyes white, a great red welt on his forehead.
Beth starts screaming again. She screams: Police! Police!
The kids who slumbered like rocks through the first screams and the bellows resurrect at the word “police”, grab their clothes and stuff and vanish in super-accelerated fast motion.
Beth and JW are alone in the shambles. They’re both looking around. She’s looking around for something in the room. He’s looking around for something to say. He doesn’t know what to say. Anyhow words are no good at this moment. What is she looking around for?
JW thinks of something better than words. He gropes for his inside breast pocket theoretically located at heart level. That gesture, desperate now, must resemble his earlier heart-clutching gestures last night.
He discovers he’s not wearing the blue denim jacket. So there can’t be an inside breast pocket and so no wallet and so no $84,000.30 check that he wants to give her to remove that expression from her face.
If he doesn’t find what he’s looking for, she does. She bends down and picks up the decorative poker Hanna tossed away. Less in fear of the poker than of her eyes JW backs up through the door, turns, and, loping like Lenny, leaves that house forever.
***