Breathless (17 page)

Unless, even now, dead Jim was out there in the generator shed, sabotaging the machinery.

“What the hell is the matter with me?” Henry asked the darkness, and at once wished that he hadn’t spoken, for fear he would receive a response in a familiar if slurred voice.

No dead man replied, of course, and Henry had no answer to the question he asked. His regressive superstition was as inexplicable as it was dismaying.

No dead man had ever come back to life, neither Count Dracula nor Jesus Christ, neither Lazarus nor the insatiable cannibalistic legions in George Romero’s movies. The dead stayed dead and the living were only the dead of the future, and the future would have its end, too, in the heat death of the universe and the collapse of time into nothing. Men were meat and nothing more, no soul survived the body, nothing came back from the dead because there was no spirit to return and nowhere to return
from
, and that was the sum of it, men were nothing from nothing on a journey to nothing, nada, zip, zero, nil, naught, cipher.

To avoid thinking about Jim, Henry decided, as an intellectual, to busy his mind with the lessons of the intellectual giants whose work had shaped him. He brooded on James Joyce and
Finnegans Wake
, in which there was such brilliant mockery of Jews and of the Jewish faith, a parody of Psalms in which God was reduced to Lord and Lord was jokingly renamed Loud. “ ‘Loud, hear us!’ ” Henry quoted from the Joyce novel, “ ‘Loud, graciously hear us!’ ” and he laughed. He focused on the most poignant remembered wisdom of,
one by one, James Joyce, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Marcel Duchamp, Ralph Waldo Emerson, that Madonna who is Ciccone, Bertolt Brecht, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Peter Singer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and so many others, all so wise, so brilliant, so courageous that his memory of their works easily distracted him from thinking about Jim, not merely distracted him but by virtue of their magnificent one note, their truth drone, their heroic reductionism of all of creation to a single machine hum, they also put him to sleep.

He dreamed of Jim.

Thirty-two

T
he excitement of the evening, culminating in the chase upstairs and down, inspired in Merlin a need to pee. He informed them of his condition by the intense and insistent look that Grady called his “flood warning.”

No doubt Puzzle and Riddle also needed to toilet, but in the kitchen, as Grady was about to open the door for the trio, Cammy said, “Wait, we need to take pictures of them, in case they don’t come back.”

“I thought you said they were moving in.”

“They are. I’m pretty sure of it. But just in case.”

Pointing to a digital camera on the kitchen table, Grady said, “I took a slew of pictures before you got here.”

“You’re sure they’re clear?”

“Yeah. I’ve reviewed them. They’re great. But you haven’t seen their eyes in the dark. I want you to slip through the door first, go out on the lawn, watch them come toward you.”

When told to sit and stay, the wolfhound obeyed, although he grumbled.

As if they understood what was wanted, but more likely following the dog’s example, Puzzle and Riddle sat flanking their new playmate.

Grady let Cammy out and closed the French door, watching as she descended the porch steps. She went into the yard, turned toward the house, and knelt on the grass.

“All right, gang. Last chance till morning.”

When Grady opened the door and released Merlin from the sit-stay, the wolfhound and his posse raced out of the house.

Grady stepped onto the porch in time to see the dog bound past Cammy as she let out a wordless cry of astonishment at the spectacle of the other animals’ color-changing, lantern eyes.

Puzzle and Riddle gamboled around her for a moment, giving her an opportunity to admire them, and then they sprinted after Merlin, toward the place where yard met meadow.

Remaining on her knees, Cammy said, “Oh, my God. Grady. Oh, my God.
Their eyes!”

She laughed so merrily, she sounded like a young girl. Grady sat on the porch steps, grinning at her.

When the animals returned from their toilet, Merlin sat beside his master. But in a playful mood, Puzzle and Riddle rejoined Cammy, swarming around her and over each other. They appeared to understand that they enchanted her, and they were in turn pleased by her admiration.

Their eyes lustered, as though reflecting the memory of the most spectacular aurora borealis ever to grace the northern sky.

Grady had never before seen Cammy laugh with such joy. She
had always seemed too cautious to delight unreservedly in anything.

Each man or woman was a mansion in a condition between grandness and disrepair, and even in a grand palace, sometimes a room existed in which no one but the resident would ever be welcome. Cammy’s heart contained more than one forbidden room, contained an entire wing of doors locked with bolts of guilt or grief, or both. Grady sensed that she denied even herself the power to open them, to let in the light.

Nevertheless, she was his best friend. He had never known her to lie or to deceive by omission, or even to finesse a matter to her advantage. Parts of her life were off limits not because she wished to deceive but because, right or wrong, she judged the architecture of those rooms to be so inconsistent with the design of the rest of the structure that they added nothing to an understanding of it.

Grady valued her judgment, admired her commitment to animals, respected her standards as a veterinarian, cherished her kindness, which he sensed came from an experience of cruelty, and loved her because in this world of whiners and self-declared martyrs, Cammy Rivers never complained and never portrayed herself as a victim, though Grady suspected that she had more reason than most to claim that status.

Cammy in the night, on the lawn, playing with Puzzle and Riddle, astonished by their eyes, enraptured by the mystery of them, laughing with delight: Grady had never known a finer moment in his life.

Thirty-three

I
n his hotel room in Las Vegas, Lamar Woolsey dreamed, but not of his lost wife, Estelle.

He dreamed of a casino so vast that he could not see as far as any wall. From the gold-leafed ceiling depended an infinite number of perfectly aligned chandeliers swagged with symmetrical ropes of crystal beads, each great lamp icicled with exactly the same number of crystal pendants in precisely the same arrangement.

Under this exquisitely ordered ceiling, he sat at a blackjack table with three other players: a one-eyed woman, a one-armed man, and a nine-year-old boy with one missing front tooth.

The woman wore a low-cut dress and repeatedly withdrew black hundred-dollar chips from between her ample breasts. Each time that she put them on the table, they transformed into black beetles and scurried across the green felt, much to the dealer’s annoyance.

Every time the one-armed man received a card, he looked at it and in disgust threw it angrily at the dealer, who then dealt it to the boy. The boy didn’t know the rules of the game and kept asking,
“Has anyone seen my sister? Does anyone know where she’s gone?”

The six-deck shoe contained ordinary playing cards but also tarot cards and picture cards from a children’s game. Regardless of what Lamar drew, he won. A six of diamonds and a rabbit holding an umbrella: winner. The tarot hangman and an eight of hearts: winner.

When Lamar’s winnings had grown sizeable, the one-eyed woman said, “There’s the Pipp boy.”

Glancing at the gap-toothed child who sat farther around the elliptical table, Lamar said, “That’s not Marcus. Not him at all.”

“Over there,” she said, “at the roulette wheel.”

The roulette game lay behind them, not in their line of sight. Turning on his stool, Lamar saw Marcus Pipp where she said he was.

Lamar left the table with his winnings in a chip rack, intending to give everything to Marcus. By the time he got to the roulette game, Marcus had gone.

The roulette table was one in an infinite row of them. Surveying the casino, Lamar saw Marcus four tables away and hurried toward him.

Rotors spun, balls danced and clattered, and croupiers called the results, which suddenly were the same: “Double zero … double zero … double zero … double zero.…”

The dream didn’t descend into a full-blown nightmare, but it became a drama of fleeting promise and enduring frustration. Table after table, Lamar pursued Marcus but couldn’t reach him or catch his attention. Later, glimpsing him in the slot-machine maze, Lamar sought to intercept him without success. Later still, he spotted Marcus at a craps table, then at others, but Marcus drifted away.

Dead in reality, alive in the dream, Marcus Pipp was in both cases outward bound and beyond contact.

Thirty-four

D
uring the walk into town, Tom Bigger worked up an appetite.

At a convenience store that offered prepackaged deli creations, he bought a submarine sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a sixteen-ounce bottle of Coke.

A couple of customers shied away from him. The clerk had served him before, however; she took some of his panhandled money and gave him change without saying a word to him, without glancing at his face.

In a nearby park, under an old iron lamppost that provided more atmosphere than light, Tom sat on a bench that looked out onto the street. He watched the passing traffic as he ate.

Behind the bench rose an enormous phoenix palm. During the lulls in traffic, he could hear rats agitating one another in their nest high in the crown of the tree.

Tom didn’t have much overhead, but panhandling alone couldn’t
pay for his needs. Every other month, he took a bus to the nearest city and, working at night, stole enough to cover his expenses.

Primarily, he burglarized suburban homes where a lack of lights and a few days’ of newspapers scattered on the driveway suggested he would not risk coming face-to-face with a homeowner.

If he found a likely target walking alone on a lonely street, he robbed him at gunpoint. Tom’s face and the pistol turned even strapping young men into situational pacifists.

The gun wasn’t loaded. He didn’t trust himself with cartridges.

He never worried that in a frenzy of self-hatred he might kill himself. Suicide required either more courage than he possessed or more despair than afflicted him.

His hatred was directed inward, his rage outward. With bullets in the weapon, he would sooner or later kill somebody.

From experience, he knew that once he indulged in a vice, that indulgence became a habit, then an obsession. Murder would be no less addictive than tequila or weed, or the other drugs that he consumed so recklessly when he could get them.

He was a lot of things, none of them good. He dreaded adding
murderer
to the list of words that described him.

As he ate the sandwich, his mind reeled back more than once to the incident in the bluff-top rest area.

Initially, he had been astonished. Astonishment turned to shock that rendered him bewildered and emotionally numb. On the walk from his cave to the town, numbness relented to a creeping disquiet.