The Land Of Laughs

by Jonathan Carroll

  "Well, you know, the snow and everything."

  "He's got chains on it. That bus don't stop running for nothin', friend. Sometimes he's late, but he doesn't stop running."

  Saxony came out into the hall with half a grapefruit in one hand and a spoon in the other. I put my hand over the mouthpiece and told her that it was going. She walked to the front door and looked at the snow.

  I hung up and couldn't decide whether to go back into the kitchen or go to her and see what she would do. I chickened out and went back to the kitchen.

  My eggs were still warm, so I scooped some sour cream onto the side of my plate and ate quickly.

  "Sax, aren't you going to finish your breakfast? That's a long bus ride to St. Louis."

  When she didn't answer, I thought it best just to leave her alone. While I ate, I envisioned her eating her grapefruit at the front door, watching the snow end.

  I had finished my second cup of coffee when I started to get a little nervous about her. Her plate was filled with food and her teacup was up to the top.

  "Sax?"

  I threw my napkin on the table and got up. She wasn't in the hall, and neither was her coat or her suitcase. She had left the hollowed-out grapefruit rind and spoon on the radiator near the door. I unhooked my coat from the rack and moved toward the door. The phone rang. I cursed and snatched it up.

  "Yeah? What?"

  "Thomas?" It was Anna.

  "Look, Anna, I can't talk to you now, okay? Saxony just left, and I've got to catch her before she's gone."

  "What? Don't be ridiculous, Thomas. Obviously if she left without telling you, she doesn't want you with her. Leave her alone. She doesn't want to say good-bye to you. You can understand that."

  That made me mad. I had had enough of Anna's gems of wisdom, and there were things that I wanted to say to Saxony before she took off. I told Anna that I would call her later and hung up.

  The cold sucked away all the heat from my body before I had left the porch, and my teeth were chattering as I went through the front gate. A car went slowly by, its chains ka-chunking and throwing snow out from beneath the wheel wells. I knew that the bus didn't leave for another hour, but I started running anyway. I had on heavy insulated work boots that the man in the shoe store had guaranteed against frostbite down to thirty degrees below zero. But running in them was a slow-motion jog. I didn't have my gloves, either, so I ran with my hands stuffed into my pockets; I didn't have my wool hat, so my ears and even my cheeks began to ache.

  When I finally saw her, I stopped running. I didnt know what I wanted to say, but I had to say something to her before she left.

  She must have heard me coming, because she turned and faced me just as I was about to catch up with her. "I wish you hadn't, Thomas."

  I was out of breath, and my eyes were watering from the cold. "But why did you just go off like that, Sax? Why didn't you wait for me?"

  "Am I allowed to do something my own way for a change? Is it okay if I leave this place the way I want to?"

  "Come on, Sax…"

  The anger fell away from her eyes and she closed them for several seconds. She began speaking while they were still closed. "This is all hard enough for me, Thomas. Please don't make it any harder. Go back to the house and go to work. I'll be all right. I've got my book with me and I can sit in the station and read until the bus comes. Okay? I'll call you at the end of the week. Okay?"

  She gave me a quick smile and reached down for her bag. I didn't even try to take my hands out of my pockets. She took a couple of crunching steps and then hefted the suitcase for a better grip.

  But she didn't call at the end of the week. I made a point of staying home from Wednesday night on, but she didn't call. I didn't know if that was good or bad, nasty or forgetful or what. Since she wasn't the kind of person who normally forgets to do things like that, I was nervous. In my fantasies I saw her tiredly trudging up the stairs of a dingy building that had a curling brown sign in a downstairs window advertising rooms for rent. She knocked on the door and the mad rapist or butcher-knife murderer welcomed her and invited her in for a cup of tea.

  Or else, what was worse was a shiny new building where the landlord was six foot two, ash blond, and sexy as hell. I was hopeless. If I spent the night in our apartment, the bed felt as big and as cold as the ocean. If I spent the night at Anna's, then I thought about Saxony all the time. Naturally I knew that if Sax was there, my desire for her would have been less and we'd be fighting again, but she wasn't there and I missed her. I missed her very much.

  She called on Tuesday night. She sounded ebullient and excited and was full of news. She knew an old friend from college who used to live in St. Louis. It turned out that he still lived there. She had even found a job working part-time at a children's day-care center. She had gone to the movies twice and seen the new Robert Altman. Her friend's name was Geoff Wiggins.

  I tried not to swallow my tongue too fast. I smiled sickly at the receiver, half-thinking that it was Saxony. I asked her who this Geoff was. A professor of architecture at Washington University. Was she living… uh… staying with him until she found a place? No, no, that was what was so great – – she didn't have to look now because Geoff had invited her to stay there with himmmm..

  I got the address and telephone number of old Geoff from her and then tried to finish our conversation with as much cool as possible, but I know that I came across sounding like a cross between Hal the Computer and Woody Woodpecker. When I hung up I felt totally miserable.

  I got a letter from one of my students. Seeing the kid's name on the return address was a shock in itself, but the contents of the damned thing knocked me for a loop.

  Dear Mr. Abbey,

  How are you? I guess you're pretty glad to be away from here this year. I don't know what that feeling is like yet, but I will in June, when, believe it or not, I'll be graduating. I got into Hobart early decision, so I'm pretty much taking it easy these days. I go over to the Senior House a lot to watch television, and I've even been reading some of the books on that list that you gave us last year that you said we'd like.

  My favorite so far has been The Young Lions (by Irwin Shaw), but I really also liked The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka) and Look Homeward, Angel (Thomas Wolfe). I guess talking about books is the best way to tell you why I'm writing this letter. I've been here for almost six years now (and you can believe me when I say that they've been six long ones!) and I've had every teacher in the school at one time or another (or just about). Anyway, I was thinking about it the other day, and I realized that you were the best one. I wasn't any big "A" student in your class and I know that I fooled around a lot in your class with Romero, but believe it or not, I got more out of that English class last year than any other course I took. Whenever we had a discussion they were always interesting, and I know that more than once I'd read something you had assigned and not really liked it, but after you had finished talking about it in class, I either did like it or at least I understood what the writer was trying to say. You always asked us for examples on our essays to support what we said, so the one I'm thinking about here is when we read Walden and most of us thought it was bad, no offense. After you had gone through it, though, I could see what Thoreau was trying to say even though I never did end up liking the whole book.

  I have Stevenson this year for Senior English (we're right in the middle of King Lear), and since you're not here, I guess I'm allowed to say that compared to you, he's bad news. Half of the time we fall asleep in his class and the other half I spend doodling in my notebook. I know that I doodled in your class too, but I want you to know that I was always listening and that even though I only got C's from you, it was the best class that I've had here, bar none.

  I hope that everything is going well for you out there. Maybe you'll be back in time for graduation and you can laugh when I go up to get my diploma. Ha Ha!

  Tom

  Rankin

  Tom Rankin was one of those boys who look li
ke something out of a jar of eels. Thin and hunched, greasy long hair, rumpled clothes, big thick smudged glasses. I had always known that he wasn't any dummy, just totally unmotivated. One of those students who are able to skim a book the night before a test and still squeeze out some kind of C or C –.

  Another dream-vision of "Abbey's Future" floated up through my mind: finish the biography and then go back East with Saxony. Teach part-time at some school (maybe even at the old one, after Rankin's letter!) and write the rest of the time. Buy an old house with bay windows and brass door plates, with room enough for each of us to have separate studies. I don't know if it was Geoff Wiggins' doing, but after that phone call, I thought about Saxony a hell of a lot.

  8

  "Mrs. Fletcher, has anyone ever left Galen? Any of Marshall's people?"

  She had asked me up to her apartment one night for a cup of organic cocoa, whatever that was. It tasted all right.

  "Left? How far have you read in the journals?"

  "I'm up to January of nineteen sixty-four."

  "Nineteen sixty-four? Well, there was one girl, Susy Dagenais, but you'll be reading about her in the nineteen sixty-five book. I can tell you about her anyway if you'd like."

  "Please."

  "Susy Dagenais was a real pistol. She was one of those people that you were asking about before – one of the ones who didn't want to know her fate? The whole time she lived here she hated being one of us. She said it made her feel like a freak in the circus and that one day she would leave because she didn't believe where she'd come from. You know all about that, don't you, Tom? As soon as a child can understand things, their parents tell them who they are and why they're so special. They don't tell them anything else until the kid's eighteen, but some things got to be explained early so that they don't go do something foolish like run away from home."

  "Yes, I know about that, but what was Susy like?"

  "Oh, she was a great gal – pretty, real smart. We all loved her around here, but there wasn't anything we could do to stop her. She packed a bag, got on the bus to New York, and was gone. Poor thing – she'd just been in New York a couple of days when she died."

  "But Marshall was alive then. Why didn't he stop her? He could have done it if he wanted to."

  "Tom, Tom, you're not thinkin'. Yes, Marshall was alive, and sure he could have stopped her."

  "But he didn't!"

  "No, he didn't. Think, Tom. Why do you think he didn't?"

  "The only thing I can imagine was to show people that he meant what he said. He used her as a kind of hideous example."

  "Right. You hit it on the head. But I wouldn't use the word 'hideous.'"

  "Of course it's hideous! He wrote this poor character so that from the beginning she didn't want to know, then he wrote that she would leave Galen and die in a week? That's not hideous?"

  "Nobody else has ever tried to leave since then, Tom. And she was happy – she thought she was getting away. She did get away."

  "But he wrote it that way! She had no choice!"

  "She died doing what she wanted, Tom."

  Phil Moon and Larry Stone worked together in the Galen post office. They were friends long before they married the Chandler sisters, but the marriages brought them closer.

  Their passion was bowling. Both of them owned expensive custom Brunswick balls and matching bags, and if they had been a little better, they might have been pro material. As it was, they bowled every Wednesday and Friday night at Scappy's Harmony Lanes in Frederick, the next town over. They alternated cars and split the cost of gasoline. Once in a while their wives went with them, but the girls knew how much their husbands appreciated their Boys' Night Out, so they often splurged on their own Wednesdays and Fridays and went to the movies or dinner and shopping afterward at the Frederick Town Mall.

  There were two ways to get over there. You could hop onto the Interstate and then get off at the next exit, or you could take Garah's Mill Road that more or less paralleled the Interstate until it came to the Frederick traffic circle that spun you off in any direction you wanted. Most of the time they took the Mill Road because they timed it once and it was four minutes faster from door to door, although you could really blow your car out for a mile or two on the Interstate.

  I knew all of this because I had gone bowling with them once, and on the way over, the four of them discussed the ins and outs of Wednesday and Friday nights.

  On the night of their accident, they took the Interstate. Larry came down the exit ramp too fast in his lavender 442. He hit a long patch of ice, and fishtailing from side to side, took out the stop sign at the bottom of the hill. A Stix, Baer and Fuller trailer truck broadsided them and pushed the car almost two hundred feet up the road.

  Larry's whole side was crushed, and it was a wonder that he wasn't killed. His wife, sitting directly behind him, broke both legs and her right hand. Phil got a severe concussion, and his wife broke her collarbone.

  None of it was supposed to happen, according to the journals.

  I heard about it from Anna, who called me from the county hospital. She told me straightaway what had happened. Her voice was thin and frightening. I totally misunderstood why until she reminded me.

  "I don't know what any of this means now, Thomas." I could hear things bustling, people talking, someone being paged over the loudspeaker in the background.

  "What what means?"

  "This is the first thing that has gone wrong again since you started writing the biography. I don't understand what's going on."

  "Look, Anna, it doesn't mean anything. You just got your hopes up too high before. How can things start to go right until the book is written?" As I spoke, I realized how convinced and confident I sounded. Like it was all a snap now: I would just finish writing this book, and bango, there would be Marshall France, back from the dead.

  A Dr. Bradshaw was paged while I waited for her to speak.

  "Anna? Is there anyone there with you?"

  "Richard." She hung up.

  I started working like a man possessed. Two, three, four pages a morning, research in the afternoons, three or four more pages at night.

  I had never gotten over the initial shock of "discovering" Galen, but being there every minute of the day forced me to accept it. I was the moth and the town was the flame, and the damned place had me going in such circles that I didn't know what to do much of the time except to keep writing.

  I was living in the middle of the greatest artistic creation in the history of the world. In my own tiny way, I was chronicling the life of the man who had done it. Whether that chronicle would bring him back to life… No, no, that's not true. I was going to say that it made no difference to me whether that chronicle brought him back to life, but that's a bunch of bullshit. He had said that it was possible, and then his daughter had chosen me to do it. That's partly why I sent Saxony away. The other "part" was of course Anna, but after the car accident we didn't make love much. I assumed that old Richard was still socking it to her, but even that didn't really bother me that much, because all of my energy – all of it – was going into the work. I would like to have known, though, why she slept with him, but I had a sneaking suspicion now. Suppose Richard had gotten bored with living in Galen. Since Anna and he were the only two "normals" in the town, how could she keep him there? Simple: go to bed with him. Never in his wildest imaginings would a guy like him have thought (or hoped!) of having someone like Anna France. So, so long as she kept him hot and bothered and interested, he was hers. And Galen's. I wondered if his wife knew what was going on between them.

  I went out very rarely. Mrs. Fletcher started cooking for me, and Anna came over once in a while to see how things were progressing. Saxony called a couple of times, but our conversations were short, dry, and stale. I didn't ask about Geoff Wiggins and she didn't ask about Anna. I was too tired by then to want to play games, but I did realize that it would be better not to tell her how celibate I had become. Nevertheless, she got so fed up with ou
r conversation one time that she called me a sourpuss and hung up.

  Joanne Collins gave birth to a bouncing baby boy who was supposed to be a bouncing baby girl according to the journals.

  Anna came over and demanded to see my manuscript. I astonished myself by holding fast and not letting her. She went away but was not at all happy.

  Saxony called and asked if I was aware of the fact that she had already been gone a month.

  I wrote Tom Rankin back and told him that I would try very hard to get back for his graduation in June.

  My mother wrote, and feeling guilty for having been out of touch since September, I called her and chatted on about how wonderful things were for me these clays.

  Joanne Collins went in to take care of her new baby one morning and found a three-week-old bull terrier fast asleep in the crib.

  I had had enough work for one day and decided to go over to the Green Tavern for a drink. It was nine at night and the town was dead quiet. The snow was slushy in the streets, but up on the sidewalk it was still white and crunchy under your feet. A silent, nasty wind drilled through the dark. Once in a while it stopped, waited for you to come up out of your shell, and then shot back, sniggering. The telephone wires were glazed over, but when the wind gusted it shook them and the ice fell into the street in short straight pieces. By the time I got to the bar I knew I either should have stayed at home or else taken the damned car. It was that cold.

  The place had a thick oak front door that you really had to get your shoulder behind to open. A warm blast of stale heat, cigarette smoke, and George Jones's voice from the jukebox. The bar dog – really a dog, as far as I knew – whose name was Fanny, came over wagging her tail. The official greeter. I took off a glove and patted her head. It was warm and wet.

  Because of the dark outside it didn't take long to get accustomed to the dark fog light in the bar.