No Sleep till Wonderland

by Paul Tremblay

  I say, “They could be anywhere.”

  “I know, I know, but his house is the only other place that makes sense. It’s the only other place we can check.” He runs the short distance to his car. “You coming or staying?”

  Gus is smooth. Even when he appears to be flustered, he does it with style, panache with a soft, drawn-out -che. He’s a walking and talking wink, a come-hither look, and I can’t help but follow even when every ounce of my being knows to stay away from him and his Dart, to go home and call Detective Owolewa, and drop this hot and messy fondue in his lap.

  I limp to his car, dragging my lazier-by-the-minute left leg behind me. Looks like he and I get to take a joyride after all. I’ll try not to let it go to my head.

  Gus starts the car and says, “Carter lives in Milton. We’ll jump on the highway real quick. Fifteen-minute ride, tops.” He pulls out of the parking spot, shaking his head. He says, “This isn’t good.”

  “I know.”

  Thirty

  The Dart’s front end is an elongated snout, rooting through the dips and potholes of the southeast expressway. There aren’t any truffles. We don’t feel the bumps as much as we glide over them, cresting the waves, a boat on water. It’s a sea-sickening feeling. With every swell the tires strain to keep contact with the road, and we could go careening into the median at the slightest breeze or driver misstep.

  Gus talks because he has to. He doesn’t know what else to do with his mouth. I can’t hear him over the engine. My window is open, filling the old car with new air. But the air isn’t new. It’s unaccountably ancient and used.

  I turn my head, and Gus isn’t driving anymore. It’s my old roommate Juan-Miguel. He looks small with the Dart’s Conestoga-wagon-sized steering wheel in his hands. He wears a black T-shirt over a white T-shirt, like he always did. I send him a smile, and I’m as nervous as a middle schooler at his first dance. Juan-Miguel yells at me about what I did to the couch, and he yells at me about what I did, about the lies I told him, but he won’t look at me, can’t look at me, and I can’t remember when he could.

  I turn my head, and Gus isn’t driving anymore. It’s my mother, Ellen. She calmly explains why she’s relocating me back to the Cape and our old family bungalow. She tells me that I’m not doing well on my own and that I need help. She can look at me, but she won’t.

  I turn my head, and Gus isn’t driving anymore. It’s Dr. Who. He has a stack of notebooks on his lap, and Jesus is still on the dashboard. I reach across the canyon of the bench seat to grab the notebooks. I need to leaf through them and find pictures of me, find one that I like, or at least one that I can live with.

  I turn my head, and Gus isn’t driving anymore. It’s my old friend George. I’d like to say that he never left, that he’s always with me—it’s the sugar-sweet culturally approved sentiment—but it’d be a lie. He’s been gone for ten years. He’s a fading memory, a shrinking part of the story-of-me that I tell occasionally. George is here now, though, and he’s finishing a laugh about something. He always finished after me. I loved that about him.

  I turn my head, and now I’m driving the van. This isn’t right. The van is too big for me to control. Too big for me to handle. George is in the passenger seat. He finishes the laugh that wouldn’t end, shaking it out like he’s emptying his shoe of sand. He slumps against the passenger door and rests his head on the glass. I shouldn’t be watching him instead of the road, but I am. This isn’t how it happened.

  I blink, wiggle my nose, try to Bewitch him back into the driver’s seat. It doesn’t work. I’m driving. My hands are too sweaty and treacherous. I can’t trust them, the saboteurs, and I can’t stop them from pulling right.

  Our seats in the van are too high up. Our falling down is an inevitability.

  I turn my head, and Gus isn’t driving. Neither is George. I’m driving. George is asleep. This isn’t how it was supposed to happen. George promised to help keep me awake. George is asleep. And I am too.

  Thirty-One

  The Dart rolls onto the grass shoulder of a narrow, wooded street. Just outside my door is a stone fence with gaps, missing pieces, and it’s not tall enough to stop anybody. Behind the crumbling fence is a thicket of trees, putting a mighty lean on the remaining stones.

  Gus shuts off the car, taps my arm, and says, “We’re here. You awake?”

  “Always.” I have a crick in my neck and in the rest of my body.

  “I drove up and down the road a couple of times but couldn’t really see anything, couldn’t tell if they’re here. The house is set too far back and up that big hill,” Gus whispers.

  Orderly lines of trees act as the honor guards on both sides of the road. There is a gated driveway entrance across the street, but no homes are visible through the surrounding woods. We’re neck-deep in quaint New England charm and misanthropic privacy. Although I haven’t seen Carter’s bachelor pad, it’s a safe bet that it must’ve cost him a medium-sized fortune, one that was credit card aided.

  I say, “Any reason as to why you’re whispering? I won’t tell anyone.”

  Gus opens his door, and the interior dome light flashes on, blinding the blind. He says, “Come on. We hoof it on the driveway. Try and be quiet.”

  “I’ll be a delicate ballerina. What are we going to do when we get there?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  We’re both on the same page. And we both climb out of the car.

  The starry-starry-night sky is cloudless and filled with pinprick holes of light, light that took too long to get here, just like us. A soundtrack of crickets featuring the Into the Woods orchestra is undercut with the familiar Sturm und Drang of not-so-distant interstate highway traffic.

  On our right, the weathered and rolling stone fence parts for Carter’s driveway. We follow the one-lane private road, which is canopied by more trees that crowd and elbow each other, fighting for the right to blot out the night sky. Gus has his hands in his pockets. We don’t talk. There isn’t anything left to say.

  We climb and come around a bend, and then a few more bends, until finally we spill out of the copse of trees, to the top of the hill and onto a gravel path that splits an open field of tall grass. Twenty yards ahead is Oz, a large, white, well-kept colonial farm house with a wraparound porch, two-story barn attached, and maybe a man behind a curtain inside. A lone lamp hanging off the barn spotlights the parked Lexus. They’re here.

  Gus crouches and jogs ahead of me. I can’t keep up, never could. He waves his hand. I’m supposed to follow him. Luckily, I walk in a permanent crouch. Not so luckily, it’s almost impossible for me to traverse this last bit of the driveway quietly. While I’m doing my baby elephant walk on the gravel, Gus glides like the hot coals under his feet don’t bother him.

  There’s a light on in only one room of the house, first floor, its window adjacent to a side door near the barn and Lexus. The blue curtains are drawn.

  We stalk to the car and hide behind its back end. My heart is in my collar, and my head fills with fuzz, like I’ve been holding my breath too long. I breathe, and too loudly for Gus’s taste, apparently, as he shushes me.

  We watch for a shadow to appear in the window or for the side door to open. Neither happens. Gus tilts his head toward the other end of the house. We duckwalk off the gravel, onto the grass, and to the front yard, which slopes away from us steeply. Nice view of west Milton and the highway. Below us, a stream of headlights moves slowly but inexorably, fish in a thickening river.

  Gus pulls me onto the porch, but it’s a mistake. We should’ve avoided the porch, no matter how nice the swing seat and matching rocking chairs looked. The boards creak, an alarm of dead wood under my feet. I try to walk lighter, but I can only do so much. Goosed by my bull-on-a-porch routine, Gus skips ahead and peeks into the lit window. I lean on the porch railing, which groans under my weight. I can’t catch a break.

  Gus bolts upright, firing like an engine piston. He spies in the window again but not for as long or as de
eply. Then he looks at me. I can’t tell if he’s hesitant or determined. He says, “Come on. Quick.”

  I follow him to the door, and inside, past a mudroom that’s too clean—maybe I’m supposed to take my shoes off—and then a doorway to a bright country kitchen with its one-thousand-watt bulbs and Day-Glo colors, including red on the white ceramic tile. A step ahead of me, Gus swears and dry-heaves, blocking his mouth with his hand, then skitters off to the left like a house spider.

  From somewhere out there, Ekat says, “What took you so long?” She sounds like a child whose parents forgot to pick her up at soccer practice.

  Timothy Carter lies on the floor, facedown and sprawled, arms and legs pointing in directions that aren’t on a compass. What’s left of his Humpty Dumpty head is aimed at me and the doorway. The back of his skull is deflated, and his scalp doesn’t fit right anymore. A pool of red and other dark matter slowly expands in a timely fashion, sands leaking through a horrific hourglass. There’s more blood misted on the tile beneath my feet and on the blue wallpaper next to me and on the door frame.

  My olfactory imagination might be running away with me. I smell blood, piss, and burned meat. My gorge rises along with my stress level, which is about to go Vesuvius. Puking wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, but going out now would. My patchwork neurons sputter and fail. Limbs get shaking in rhythm to a song I can’t hear, and I lose feeling in my extremities. My fingers and toes are made out of light.

  If I don’t keep moving, keep a focus, I’m going to suffer a cataplexy attack. A big one. All systems point to go-out, but I pretend that I can hold it off.

  Ekat is on the other side of the kitchen. She’s gone all fetus, huddled in a corner, propped against mahogany pantry cabinets. She still wears the wig and yellow dress. There are fine red dots that once intimately belonged to Carter coloring the dress and the wig’s blond hairs. The dots form a pattern I’m unable to read. Her arms are wrapped tightly around her knees, which might run away without her.

  A handgun sits at her feet, its proud black eye pointed this way, like I won spin the bottle. I don’t know what kind of gun it is, but it’s big and nasty and I get woozy just looking at it.

  Ekat lifts her head and sees me. Her eyes are stained-glass windows, and recognition is a process that might take a week or two. She blinks a few times until it’s clear that I’m in her scene.

  She says, “What is he doing here, Gus?” Her voice cracks and eyes well up. Her face momentarily landslides into a look of utter sorrow, but she recovers. She stands up and wipes her cheeks on the short sleeves of her dress. The gun stays and heels at her feet, a well-trained dog with bite worse than its bark.

  Gus is on my left, hand over his mouth, speaking no evil, until he says, “Shh. It’s okay. Are you all right?” He tiptoes around Carter and his broken levee, avoiding the mess like it’s a freshly seeded flower bed.

  “No. I’m not all right. Why is Mark here?” Ekat shivers but not because it’s cold in here.

  Gus isn’t listening to her or watching her. He only has eyes for the gun at her feet. He bends, hand outstretched, fingers twitching.

  I’m not all right either. All this is happening too fast. I pull out my cigarette-lighter gun and point it at them although nobody wants to smoke. I call my own bluff.

  “Stop! You touch that gun and—” I cut the line’s cord, not sure if I need to finish the sentiment. My new headache doesn’t agree with the yelling. The unfinished sentence vandalizes my head.

  No one says anything. It’s too quiet here. It’s too everything here. I finish the old thought anyway; never too late to play it safe. “You touch that gun and I’ll shoot. You. I’ll shoot you, Gus. Stand up. Now.”

  I hope they don’t see my hand and arm shaking. They’re so excited and they just can’t hide it. The gun lighter rattles in my hand. The sound could be authentic. I have no idea. I look at Ekat, waiting for her to share the old punch line of my fake-gun joke. She doesn’t say anything yet. She looks back at me, maybe waiting to see if there’s a new punch line.

  Gus does stand, slowly. I’m sure he’s always played well with others. He says, “Mark. Take it easy. What are you doing?” His voice drips soothing and calm and relaxed. He’s a snake charmer and a barroom hypnotist, and it still kills me to know the truth about him.

  I say, “Christ. I almost deserve it. I stepped on every one of the banana peels you assholes left out for me.”

  Gus starts in again with, “Mark, wait, you don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “Shut up. You two were lying about Carter the whole time. You both knew about the fire. You’re both trying to set me up, pin the Carter-tail on the donkey me.”

  Gus says, “Whoa, Mark. No, no way, you’re wrong, listen to me for second.”

  Ekat joins in: “Everything I told you tonight was true, Mark.”

  I yell again. “Shut up! Fucking listen to me!” This time I get as loud as I’m physically capable. I usually don’t have the energy to get this angry, and it almost ruins me. I keep my feet, though, even if I don’t feel them under me.

  The exploding Mark yields two results. Gus and Ekat both stop talking, which is good. Not so good, I’m running out of me-being-upright time. I say, “You both lied about Carter not knowing your bagmen. Carter had been stopping by Aleksandar’s apartment throughout the summer, exchanging money and credit cards, and maybe Christmas cards too.”

  Ekat looks at me and Gus. The real gun is between Gus’s feet. Ekat stares hard at my cigarette lighter, and we both know she could take me out with one phrase, but she doesn’t. She says, “That’s not true, Mark.”

  I say, “I have a witness who places Carter at his apartment. Multiple times.”

  The three of us get lockjaw and share an eternal instant. We’ll never forget it because, crazy as it sounds, there’s a weird vibe in the farm house air. It’s almost as if one of us buddies could break the tension by giggling and we’d all crack up into tear-pulling, gut-busting laughs; then someone would suggest we go to the nearest bar for some shots, and we’d cheer and leave the house and body behind, and we’d be all smiles, slapping each other on the back, secret handshakes, fist pounds, and at the bar clinking glasses and obnoxious platitudes in honor of each other’s names.

  All right, so no one laughs. I’ll always miss my would-be life with my youthful imaginary friends. My hand sweats on the butt on my lighter, which is gaining mass despite not moving anywhere near the speed of light.

  Gus opens his hands, presenting some sort of offering, but they’re empty. He finally says, “Okay, Mark. You’re right. You’re right.”

  “What?” Ekat turns to look at him. Part of her wig falls in front of her eyes.

  “Mark, listen, that is the only lie I told you tonight. I swear.”

  Ekat says, “What do you mean?”

  Gus’s hands move fast when he talks, and now he’s talking even faster, in a hurry to get somewhere. “Look, Ekat, we wanted to expand a little and knew you wouldn’t go for it. So Jody and Aleksandar were our experiment, and we were going to tell you about it after it had gone well, but you found that ID in my trash, which you didn’t take so well, and Carter and I—and remember, this was all before he went off the deep end, all right?—we decided we couldn’t tell you, not then anyway, and shit, then everything blew up and…I’m sorry. I should’ve told you earlier, and…I’m sorry. That’s all I can say. I’m sorry, Ekat, I’m sorry.”

  Ekat shakes her head, and the wig doesn’t look real anymore. It’s hard to believe that anyone ever thought it was real. She gives me a look, but when I accept it she hides her eyes under the wig. This isn’t an act, can’t be an act. She didn’t know that Carter knew about Jody and Aleksandar.

  I say, “Everything blew up because Jody got caught at the Hub with one of your stolen cards and you found out about it. You and Carter weren’t too happy about that, were you, Gus?”

  Gus says, “Yes,” pauses, then adds, “I mean, yeah, after Jody g
ot caught, that’s when Timothy started panicking, getting so goddamn paranoid and unreasonable about everything. That’s when he started talking about killing those guys.”

  “Unreasonable is an interesting way to put it.”

  Gus says, “But Jesus, Mark. The rest of it is true. It was all his idea, and we tried to stop Carter. We—”

  I interrupt. “Where’d you get the gun, Ekat?”

  “It’s Timothy’s. I got it out of his game room while he was getting us drinks.”

  And that’s it. I wait for more: explanation, recrimination. But I get nothing. She’s as matter-of-fact as the two untouched glasses of wine on the marble countertop behind Gus. The wine is a dark red. I don’t and won’t know if the stuff is any good.

  Gus sighs deep as a canyon, and he sways on his feet, left to right, midtempo. He doesn’t like her answer. He says, “Mark just put down the gun, all right? We’re talking. We’re good, okay? We’re all going to get out of here. I’ll make it better.”

  I say, “I think you should answer one of Ekat’s questions.”

  “What questions?”

  “Short-term memory issues, good buddy? I sympathize, I really do. So let me help you out a little. Way back when we first crashed the little kitchen party, Ekat wanted to know what took you so long to get here. It sounds to me like you were expected, like Ekat being here instead of her place wasn’t a surprise to you. I could be wrong. It’s happened before.

  “Then there’s the follow-up: she asked what I was doing here. I’m guessing both questions are related to each other, part B to a part A, so feel free to address either. No partial credit awarded.”

  I already know the answers. They had already planned Carter’s murder, but when I showed up at Wonderland tonight, Gus decided to bring me along to be the suicide half of that act. Cops find me and Carter dead tomorrow, or—if Gus is lucky—a few days later. Carter and I share a brief, convenient, and what-I-hate-about-you recent history, with me screwing up his surveillance case as a matter of phone records and office visits, so the cops might buy that I was Carter’s killer for a day, maybe two. It wouldn’t stick but would give Gus and Ekat more than enough time to disappear, to find their own rabbit hole.