I looked up and she was staring at me. Her eyes were full. A tear spilled up over the edge and moved down her pink cheek. She held her napkin to her face and looked at me again. I couldn't meet her eyes.
"I have no right to hold you to anything, Thomas." She was breathing deeply, irregularly. She began a sentence, stopped, and didn't try again. She looked at her lap and shook her head. She brought the napkin to her eyes and said, "Oh, shit!"
I unballed my napkin and tried to fold it very carefully along its original crease mark.
6
A woman met me at the door. She was smiling, and grabbing my hand, squeezed it tightly.
"Uh, hi, uh, how are you?"
"You don't know who I am, do you?" Her smile was a little crazy. I wondered where Anna was.
"No, I'm sorry, but I don't." I tried a winning smile and lost.
"Arf-arf. Bowwow." She grabbed my shoulders and hugged me.
"Petals?"
"Yes indeed, Petals! But a little different now, wouldn't you say?"
"My God! You mean you really…"
"Yes, Thomas, I told you that it was over. I'm back from that life and I'm me again. Me. Me. Me." She patted herself on her full chest. She couldn't stop beaming.
"I don't know… Jesus. I don't know what to say. I mean, uh, congratulations, I'm really happy for you. I just, uh…"
"I know, I know. Come on in. Anna is in the living room. She wanted me to meet you as a surprise."
I swallowed and tried to clear my throat. My voice sounded like chalk squeaking on a blackboard. "It's… it's, uh, some surprise."
Anna was sitting on the couch drinking coffee from a thick porcelain mug. She asked me if I wanted some, and when I said yes, she looked at Petals, or rather at Wilma, who danced out of the room to get another cup.
"Are you still upset about what I told you?"
"Saxony knows about us, Anna." I sat dawn in a chair facing her.
She picked up the cup again, and holding it in two hands, brought it to her mouth. She peeked at me over the rim. "How did she react?"
"I don't know. As you'd expect. Half-good, half-lousy. She started crying after a while, but it wasnt anything big and weepy. She's pretty tough, I guess."
"And how do you feel?" She sipped her coffee but kept her eyes on me. Thin smoke from the cup moved quickly out from beneath her breath.
"How do I feel? Shitty. How do you think I feel?"
"You're not married to her."
I grimaced and drummed my fingers on the arm of the chair. "Yes, I know – I'm not married to her, I've got no obligation to her, everybody around here is a free agent… I've gone through that whole spiel in my head a thousand times, but I still feel shitty."
She shrugged and licked the rim of her cup. "All right. I just wanted –"
"Look, Anna, don't worry about it, okay? It's my thing, and I've got to work it out."
"It is partly mine, Thomas."
"Yes, okay, fine, it's all of ours. But let's just sit on it and see what happens, okay? I just spent the whole night fighting, and I don't feel like talking any more about it this morning. Okay?"
"Okay."
Neither of us said anything until my coffee came. Then I remembered that the woman serving it to me had supposedly been a dog the night before. As she passed it to me, I secretly sniffed to see if she smelled like a dog.
Anna said something that I didn't catch. I stopped sniffing and looked at her. "Excuse me?"
She looked at the other woman. "Let us talk alone for a while, all right, Wilma?"
"Of course, Anna. I've got to get that casserole ready for dinner. I can't tell you how much fun it is to cook again. I never thought that I'd say that!" She left, but the click of her high heels going away made me think of dog's toenails skittering across wooden floors.
"Is it really true, Anna? About Wilma?"
"Yes. Father got mad at the Inklers years ago for mistreating their children. He couldn't stand any kind of child abuse. When he found out that they were beating their son, he changed them into dogs. Don't look so skeptical, Thomas. He created them – he could do whatever he wanted with them."
"So he turned them into bull terriers?"
"Yes, and they would stay that way until Gert Inkler died. Then Wilma would be changed back into a woman. Father didn't want them around together again as a human couple. If they stayed together as dogs, that didn't bother him. He hated dogs." She snickered and stretched her arms out luxuriantly to the sides.
"Then are all of the animals in Galen people?"
"Many of them. But Nails and Petals were the only ones who could speak. Father made them that way on purpose. Remember, dogs can go places and do things that people can't. That's one of the reasons why Nails was living at Goosey Fletcher's house when you came. Normally the two of them stayed here with me. You didn't know it, but Nails spent a lot of time spying on you two."
I remembered all of the times he had come in in the morning, or slept on the bed with us at night, been in the room when we had made love….
"All of the bull terriers in town are people. Father thought that they were the least offensive because they are so comical-looking. He said that they might as well be interesting to look at if we had to have them around."
I put my hand on my forehead. I was surprised to find it so cool. There were things that I wanted to say, but I had no way to say them then. I drank some coffee and it gave me back some voice.
"All right, if he didn't like them, then how come he didn't just erase them? Get out the old ink eradicator and finish them off? Christ, I don't know what the hell I'm saying here anymore. Why the fuck did you have a dog spying on me?" I wrenched up out of my chair and without looking at her walked over to the wmdow.
A little girl in a yellow rain slicker rode by on a wobbly and battered bicycle. I wondered what she had been – a canary? A carburetor? Or always just a kid?
"Thomas?"
The bicycle disappeared around a corner. I didn't feel like talking to her. I felt like taking a nap at the bottom of the ocean.
"Thomas, are you listening to me? Do you know why I'm letting you do this? Why I am letting you write this biography? Why I'm giving you all of this information on my father?"
I turned around and looked at her. The phone rang and brought its shrill curtain down between us. She didn't answer it. We waited five-six-seven rings for it to stop: it finally did. I wondered if it might have been Saxony.
"Over there on my desk is a black notebook. Pick it up and look at page 342."
The notebook was unlike the one I had seen the night before. It was gigantic. It must have been fourteen inches long and had five or six hundred pages in it. I leafed through from the very back, and all of the pages were filled with the France scribble. The pages under my left thumb leaped from page 363 to 302, so I had to stop and flip back.
The ink color changed throughout the book; 342 was written in a kind of violent green: "The great problem here is that whatever I have created in Galen may only be a figment of my imagination. If I die, is it then possible that they will die along with me because they have come from my imagination? An intriguing and horrible thought. I must look into this possibility and make provision for it. What an incredible waste that would be!"
I closed the book on my index finger and looked at Anna. "He was afraid that Galen would disappear after he died?"
"No, not the physical Galen – only the people and the animals that were his. He didn't create the town – only the people."
"I guess he was wrong then, huh? I mean, everybody is still here, aren't they?" Way off in the outside distance a train hooted.
"Yes, but not completely. Before Father died, he had written the history of the town up until the year three thousand –"
"Three thousand?"
"Yes, three thousand and fourteen. He was still working on it when he died. Absolutely unexpectedly. He lay down for a nap one afternoon and died. It was horrible. Everyone here was terrifie
d that they all would disappear the moment he passed away, so when it actually did happen and things remained the same, we were jubilant."
"Anna, do you know the story by Borges, 'The Circular Ruins'?"
"No."
"A guy wants to create a man in his dreams, but not just a little dream man – a real flesh-and-blood man. The real thing."
"Does he do it?" She smoothed her hand across the top of the couch.
"Yes."
There's a point where even a sponge can't absorb any more water but reaches a saturation point. Too much stimulus, too many things happening all at once, all of them incredible, but taken together, they made my brain play five-dimensional chess.
She patted the cushion beside her. "Come on, Thomas, come here and sit down next to me."
"I don't think I want to right now."
"Thomas, I want you to know everything. I want to try to be totally honest with you. I want you to know about me, Galen, Father, everything.
"Do you know why?" She shifted completely around so that she faced me over the back of the sofa. Her damned breasts rested on that soft shelf. "A couple of years ago everything that Father had written was still happening. If someone was supposed to give birth to a boy on Friday, the ninth of January, it happened. Everything went as he had written it down in his Galen Journals. It was Utopian –"
"Utopian? Really? Well, then, what about dying? Aren't people here a little afraid of dying?"
She closed her eyes and shook her head. The dumb student was asking a dumb question again. "Not at all, because death is nothingness."
"Oh, come on, Anna. Don't get heavy and religious with me now, all right? Just answer the question."
"No, Thomas, you misunderstand me. Remember that when one of them dies, it isn't the same thing as when a normal person dies. When we go, there is a chance that there's a heaven or a hell. For the people in Galen, Father didn't create an afterlife for them, so there is no question in their minds. They just disappear. Poof!" She flung her unclenched hands up as if releasing fireflies.
"An existentialist's delight, eh?"
"Yes, and since they know that nothing comes afterward for them, they don't worry about it. Nobody is going to judge them or throw them into a fiery pit. They live and they die. As a result, most of them spend their lives trying to be as happy as possible."
"But doesn't anyone rebel? Don't at least some of them want to live longer?"
"Of course, but that isn't possible. They have to get used to it."
"And nobody complains? Nobody runs away?"
"Any Galener who tries to leave, dies."
"Uh-oh, now, look –"
She laughed and fluttered a hand at me. "No, no, I don't mean it that way. This was part of Father's security system. As long as the people live here, everything will be fine for them. But if they try to leave and they're gone for more than one week, then they die of heart attacks or cerebral hemorrhages, fulminating hepatitis…." The hand fluttered again and floated, weightless, back down to the couch. "It's silly to talk about, because no one ever tries to leave, because it hasn't been written –"
"Written! Written! So all right, so where is this great almightly oracle of his?"
"You will see it in a little while, but I want you to know the story of it first, so that when you do see it, you will understand everything better."
"Ha! Fat chance of that. I'm not understanding things now!"
Anna's story was fantastic and involved, and she made a hundred detours along the way. I ended up sitting next to her on the couch, but only after I'd spent an hour perched uncomfortably on the hot radiator beneath the windowsill.
Marshall France began The Night Races into Anna to make his daughter feel better. One of the main characters in the book was his good friend Dorothy Lee, only he changed her name to Dorothy Little. After he accidentally "killed" her and the cats came to tell him, he realized what he was capable of doing. He stopped writing The Night Races and began The Galen Journals. For months he researched, wrote, and rewrote. Since he was a perfectionist, he would sometimes do twenty drafts of a book before he felt that it was right, so it isn't hard to imagine how long he worked and "prepared" for Galen.
The first person he created after Dorothy Lee was a man named Karl Tremmel. An innocuous plumber from Pine Island, New York, who brought his wife and two little girls out to Galen in a silver Airstream trailer. There hadn't been a plumber in Galen in years.
Then came a barber named Sillman, a mortician named Lucente (I tried to smile at the in joke, but I didn't have it in me)… and the parade of Marshall France characters was on.
They lived quiet, uneventful lives except for a post-office clerk named Bernard Stackhouse, who got drunk one night and accidentally blew his head off with a shotgun.
Et cetera, et cetera. A small factory outside of town that employed five hundred people caught fire mysteriously in the middle of the night, and after the insurance claims were settled, the owners decided to relocate a hundred miles closer to St. Louis.
"In a few years the only ones left here were Father and I, Richard, and 'Father's people.'"
"Why did he let Richard stay?"
"Oh, because we needed to have at least a couple of normal people in case some kind of emergency ever came up and one of us would have to leave here for a while. Remember, the others will die if they leave for more than a week."
"How did he get the rest of the 'normal' people to go? The ones who didn't work at the factory?"
"Father wrote it so that some of them – some of the normal Galeners – wanted to move on. One person was convinced that his house was haunted, another man's natural-gas tank exploded when he was away on vacation and he decided to move to Illinois… Do you want me to go on?"
"And none of them suspected anything?"
"No, of course not. Father wrote it so that everything would look totally natural and acceptable. He didn't want anyone to come around asking questions."
"Did he ever… ?" One of my fear-yawns took over. "Did he ever use, uh, violence?"
"No. No one was hurt when the factory burned down. But it depends on what you would call violence. He did cause the fire and he did make that man's gas tank explode. But he never hurt anyone. He didn't need to, Thomas. He could write anything he wanted."
France went on creating, but he didn't know how long it would last. That's why Anna had had me read that one notebook entry. In the end, he decided that the only thing he could do was to get down as much about each character as he could and then take it as far into the future as he could go. Then hope for the best to happen after he died.
"It will probably be explained in the notebooks, Anna, but just how much of people's lives did he control? I mean, does it say things like, 'Eight-twelve Joe Smith woke up and yawned for three seconds. Then he – '"
She shook her head. "No, no. He found that he could leave most of their lives up to them. Later on, he decided only about the big things in their lives, the big events – who they were to marry, how many children each of them would have, when they died and how…. He wanted them to have –"
"Don't you dare say free will!"
"No, no, I won't. But in a way it was. Look at what happened to Gert and Wilma Inkler: he let them go and do what they wanted with their son. When it got to be too much, he changed them into dogs."
"Our God is a jealous God, eh?"
"Don't say that, Thomas." Two nasty matches lit up in her eyes.
"Don't say what, that he played with them? Look, I don't want to piss you off, Anna, but if all this is true, then your father was the most…" I tried to think of appropriate words that would encompass what he had done, but there weren't any. "I don't know – he was the most amazing human being that ever lived. I'm not even talking about him as an artist either. The man put a pen to paper and actually made people come alive?" I realized that I was talking more to myself than to Anna, but I didn't care. "No, it's impossible." All at once it flooded over me thick and heavy and
impossibly gluey. What the hell kind of idiot was I, believing this crap? But then again there was Nails, who had talked to me. And Petals, who had talked to me. And what little I'd read in the notebooks that coincided with what had happened. And Anna knowing that the little boy would die after he got hit by the truck..
"Why was it so important for people to know if the little Hayden boy was laughing, Anna? How does that all fit in?"
"Because he was supposed to be killed that day. He was supposed to be laughing and happy right up to the moment when he got hit by the truck. The problem was that the wrong person was driving the truck. That's what Joe Jordan and all of the others were so upset about. He wasn't laughing, and he was killed by the wrong man."
As long as things went according to France's plans, Anna and the Galeners had little contact with the outside world. Once in a while one of them went shopping or to a movie in a nearby town, and the Galen stores were constantly being replenished by trucks from St. Louis and Kansas City, but that was about all. For appearance's sake, there was a real-estate office in town, but the only things for sale there were in other towns. What wasn't privately owned belonged to the town of Galen, and nothing was ever for sale. Nothing for rent either.
"But what about Mrs. Fletcher's? What about – ?"
"You and Saxony are the first new people to live in Galen since my father died."
"So that's why she didn't mind our not being married that first day that we rented it! She must have told us ten times that she didn't care about that kind of thing. You set us up, didn't you, Anna? It was all a big plan!"
She nodded. "The moment I heard that you were coming out here from David Louis, I called Goosey Fletcher and told her to move upstairs in that big house. Then I sent Nails over to live with her."
"And I thought that she did it for the money."
"Goosey is a very good actress."
"Was she really in the insane asylum?"
The Land Of Laughs Page 19