“That's kind of you."
“No problem.” Dressed up in shrinkwrapped jeans, suede jacket and bolo tie, Wick looked older and more assured than in his supermarket apron. His cowboy boots bonged as he paced here and there, swinging his long legs from the hip. He parted the drapes to gaze lovingly at his own truck before saying, “Nice place you got."
“You want a beer?"
“I don't use alcohol."
“There's soda, too."
“That's okay.” He made it sound as if he were forgiving Tom. “You coming with us?"
Tom tried to let his unkempt look speak for itself, but Wick's stare demanded an answer. “I have work to do."
“Wouldn't hurt to try it."
Not long after Tom's accident, Jean had joined a sect that claimed miraculous cures, and she would urge him to let Rev. Fairbrother lay his hands on him. “It wouldn't hurt,” she would say. He hoped Wick didn't plan to take up where she'd left off.
But Wick had switched his attention to a book on the desk by Tom's computer, a popularized account of modern physics.
“Why don't you have a seat?” Tom disliked people poking among his things, although it was inevitable in these cramped quarters. “Jean will be out in a minute."
“Been sitting all day,” he said, as if unaware that Tom had been doing nothing else for five years. He riffled the pages like an adult patronizing a children's book. “Nothing but questions in here, Tom. If you want answers—” he must have spotted it earlier and planned this bit of theater, because he reached inerrantly for Jean's Bible and held it up—"they're all in this one."
“I've read the Bible. You didn't discover it, you know, you and your—"
“Now, now, boys!” Jean entered as if cued by his raised voice. “Don't get him started, Wick, he's hopeless."
“That's not very charitable,” Wick said.
It galled Tom that this twerp should come into his home and rebuke his wife. It galled him even more that she accepted the rebuke with downcast eyes. He reminded himself that the twerp was her boss, and they needed her paycheck.
“Well, you just get on with your work, Tom, and I'll say a few prayers for you.” Wick winked. “Hope you don't mind that."
Jean bent to give him a cool kiss, recoiling from his stubble. She was dolled up like Tackie Dynette, as Tom called all the country singers she admired, in curly blond wig and vivid eye makeup. Her perfume threatened to evoke a memory that he deftly blocked.
“Have fun,” he said.
He heard the pickup howling through its gears into the night as he dialed the phone and said, “Congratulations, Mr. Fisher! It's my pleasure to inform you that you've won a free weekend in Florida, courtesy of...."
Tom's employer had culled his current list of prospects from the upscale zipcodes of New York City, where any gift horse is routinely given a dental X-ray, and it pained him to be called a crook by almost everyone he spoke to. He heard himself beginning to sound like a doctor calling to break the worst possible news.
He was no crook. They would get their free weekend, be fed, housed, shown the sights. They would also get a hardball pitch for condos. It was no more dishonest than showing commercials with TV programs. It was more of a miracle than any of Rev. Fairbrother's cures, that a man stuck in a trailer in Maine could whisk people from New York to Florida for a corporation headquartered in Indiana. In the back of Tom's mind the Beach Boys tried to start singing “I Get Around,” as they often did, but he squelched them.
The familiar pep-talk failed to inspire him, and he decided to call it a night before he got disgusted enough to quit his job.
Honest or not, the job was nothing like going down to the dock before dawn and cranking up an engine that he knew would start because he had held every piece of it in his hands and coaxed them into harmony. ( “Told Jean I'd look at your car,” said Wick.)
Herding prospects to the condo-sharks, he told himself, was no different from shipping lobsters to Boston. But he knew there was a world of difference, a world peopled by gaunt wraiths of seasmoke that he broke with his bow, a world of water heaving and rolling beneath strong legs that could adjust to its whims without thought. It became real again for a moment, so real that he felt the dew of Jean's loins cooling on his as he stood at the wheel, a sensation he would never feel again. He destroyed that world with an angry cry.
No longer surrounded by a wooden shell in a wrackful sea, but by an aluminum box in its slot with all the other boxes, he stared at the pinwheel of stars on the cover of his library book. All worlds are unreal, the book said. The hardness of the desk and the softness of his hand upon it were illusions, patterns of electrical impulses that were basically nothing, nothing at all. He lived in a universe he couldn't even visualize, much less see.
He had read of the paradoxes before, but he kept going back to them in a vain attempt to grasp them as firmly as he could grasp the book in his hand: that each decision, for instance, generates a whole new universe for each alternative.
(In some other universe, on a winter's day five years ago, Tom Ganley decided to pull his car into the lot of the Cumberland Farms store instead of parking across the highway. He never stood in the road beside his car door for the instant it took to switch the bag containing bread, milk and a TV Guide from his right arm to his left. A reckless driver had never murdered him from the waist down and sped on. In that alternative universe, Alternative Tom was now playing with his kids or making love to his wife.)
He strangled the fantasy. No matter what the book said, no matter what scientists theorized, the world was nothing more than it seemed. The flesh of his hand was solid, separate from the solid plastic of the desk, and no amount of trying to visualize the dead meat of his lower half as a dancing cloud of electrons would ever reweave the severed nerves.
It was past eleven when he wheeled himself into the kitchen for an apple. The prayer meeting would have ended long ago. Jean had gotten to chatting with friends, had been invited somewhere for coffee and cake.
Probably.
Wick had never before arrived alone to pick her up.
He was almost glad to find a nuisance to distract him. Jean had left the bowl of fruit on top of the icebox, out of his reach. Bread was on the counter, there was ham and cheese in the fridge, but he wanted an apple.
She set a new frustration in his path every day. She would block the bathroom with an ironing board, she would hide his pills behind a bottle of mouthwash, she would drive his specially equipped car to work on the day she knew he had an appointment at the clinic. Yesterday she'd unplugged his telephone while cleaning and omitted to plug it in again. He had wasted an hour dragging himself under furniture, tracing wires, hoisting himself painfully back in his chair before he could do any work.
She had always been absent-minded. He later amended that to thoughtless. Maybe he should amend it further: sadistic.
She had her own frustrations, of course. She'd signed on as wife, not nurse. Maybe she had imagined coping with the problems of a baby's bowels and bladder, but never a husband's. He could still make love to her in a way, but she no longer cared much for that way.
She never complained. Since finding Jesus, she was cheerful to a fault. Her new friends must have thought she was a saint for sticking with a bitter cripple who snapped at her honest mistakes and scoffed at her faith. Only a cynic like himself, wallowing in error and self-pity, would suspect that she bore her cross so gladly because of the status it gave her. Only one harkening to the whispers of Satan would imagine that she revelled in her role as the heroine of a typical hillbilly ballad. Only a poor sinner who had failed to develop a personal relationship with Jesus would think that she had turned their trailer into an obstacle-course on purpose.
He could knock down the bowl with a broom, but that would break the bowl, bruise the apples and scatter them around the floor. Jean would see the mess and know she'd scored.
Staring up like a cat at a birdcage did no good. He closed his eyes in an eff
ort to control his anger and discovered the sea surging and foaming inside his eyelids.
Sometimes, for a minute or so before he slept, his mind would treat him to a movie like this. Though brief and disconnected, it would be vivid as any film. The sea, in all its times and weathers, had been a frequent subject.
Lately he had more often suffered an annoying scroll of cryptic characters and meaningless equations in the black-on-white imagery of his computer-screen. He was pleased to see the ocean again. But he wasn't sleepy now, and such an image had never presented itself when he was wide awake. He scanned the picture for details. There was no sky. Either he was looking down into a collision of waves or, like a corpse, he floated beneath it. Chilled, he snapped his eyes open. He was prepared to believe that he had dozed off for a moment, but he could detect no break in his consciousness. He was still fully alert. The minute-hand of the clock had not advanced. The kitchen was unchanged—though how and why it should have changed, he couldn't say. Feeling foolish, he closed his eyes again.
The vision persisted. It held shapes that didn't belong to the sea. These were so distorted that it took him a while to understand he was seeing the objects in his kitchen: icebox, apples, clock and—viewed from an angle he could ascribe to no specific point—his own figure in the wheelchair.
Nothing had color or texture. Everything was made of the same gray fluid whose confusing eddies had suggested the sea. The substance of the seated figure flowed into the refrigerator and was in turn replaced by the substance of the sink, just as the ceiling became the wall and the floor.
Although his body was part of the picture, his mind's eye was free to leave it and view things from a different angle. It was so drastically different, so unrelated to any normal change in perspective, that he froze, afraid that he might not find his way back. He made an effort to breathe evenly as he took a systematic inventory of the vision.
The clock, formerly facing him, now floated behind his head. The forthright rectangle of the icebox had transformed itself into a figure unknown to geometry. The man in the wheelchair now seemed to be above the bowl of fruit. It struck him that he—or the figure in his vision—could reach the apples easily.
He forgot to be afraid. This was fun. The new pills that Doc Wilson had prescribed for his pain had obviously brought an unexpected fringe benefit. He reached playfully for one of the apples.
He felt his real hand move, but the hand in his vision moved the wrong way, in three wrong ways at once. He laughed aloud. It unsettled him when an irregular hole opened in the smooth, colorless oval of the seated figure's face.
He refused to open his eyes and reassure himself that the real world still existed. He was afraid of losing the diverting vision forever. It had already run on far longer than those tame hallucinations that came between waking and sleep. The clock—the clock in his vision—said eleven forty-five, and he was disposed to believe it.
He concentrated on his hand. Advancing it in a straight line was useless: it veered, doubled back, ended farther than ever from the apples. He tried to adapt his movements to the crazy geometry. It felt as if his hand were traveling an impossible distance, as if his arm had no end to it; he concluded that all his senses must now be involved in the hallucination.
He wondered what Jean would think if she came home to find him sitting in the kitchen with his eyes closed, corkscrewing his hand through a bizarre sequence of gestures. If she did, he wouldn't stop. He was too close to success. It would be like giving up on one of his computer puzzles.
He felt his hand close on an apple.
He jerked back instinctively and cried out. Something sharp was biting his hand. It was trapped. If he opened his eyes, he told himself, he would discover that his contortions had only trapped his hand in the spokes of his wheelchair. But he didn't want to open his eyes. He was afraid that he would see his arm cut off at the shoulder, where it had entered the fourth dimension, and his hand on top of the icebox, where it had emerged. He knew the notion was ludicrous, but the fact remained that he felt the cool, firm apple in his grasp.
Sweating now, his arm aching and quivering as if he had worked out too long with his weights, he extricated his hand by the route it had taken. The liquid substance of his vision swirled and collided more vigorously, as if resenting his violation of its unknowable laws.
At last he opened his eyes and was nearly stunned by the blaze of light on chrome and plastic. The daisy magnets on the icebox door shouted their colors like fireworks. The shock of seeing everything so suddenly in its proper place and perspective made him dizzy. He lowered his head, afraid that he might faint, and found himself staring at a shiny red apple in his lap.
It was solid, it was glossy ... but real? He bit into its resistant flesh, tasted it, felt juice trickle down his chin. It was a real apple, an ordinary apple, but one that had been hopelessly beyond his reach twenty minutes ago.
He wheeled hastily back to the phone, and his hand was on it before he considered whom to call, what to say. “I just pulled an apple through a space-warp!” he heard himself telling one of his old buddies.
He took his hand off the phone.
He wished Jean were here to witness his wild talent. But could he give a demonstration? He cast about for a more difficult test, while dreams of unlimited possibilities exploded in his mind. He saw his disembodied hand roving through the world to defuse nuclear weapons, foil villains, free victims of injustice. Why stop at the world? With his hand suitably protected, he might grope for souvenirs from the moons of Saturn, from the unknown planets of Arcturus.
If he learned something about anatomy, could he bridge the gap in his severed nerves? Could he heal others?
Laughing at his wild schemes, he forced his immediate ambitions back to size. He had only reached the top of his own icebox. It remained to be seen if he could even reach outside his trailer.
He must have looked a sight when they came in: grinning wildly, bathed in sweat, his hand cut and blistered by the rigors of an unknown world. They didn't notice. Nor did they notice the apple core on his desk or the Louisville Slugger leaning against the wall behind him. That bat had recently lain beneath the bunk of a sleeping boy in a trailer across the way.
It was two in the morning, Tom saw now. Jean looked rumpled, her wig, skirt and lipstick askew. Wick prowled restlessly, snapping his gum, and went to study his truck through the drapes. Tom said, “How was the prayer meeting?"
Jean cried out as if he'd slapped her.
“She got something to say to you, Tom, something important."
“No! I don't!” she wailed, running for the kitchen.
“Wait! It doesn't matter,” Tom called, and he was telling the truth. He could guess what had happened between them. He could guess that Jean was resisting Wick's demand that she leave with him. Hell, she could leave! He had things to do, a world of things.
“Really, I—"
“I told you what I'd do!” Wick shouted after her. “God damn, woman, I told you!"
“No!” Jean screamed.
Tom felt like an actor in the wrong play. No matter what he said, they would ignore him and speak their appointed lines to each other. He swiveled angrily to confront Wick. He had only half turned when he saw the baseball bat coming, the bat that his wild talent had procured.
Wick was swinging for the fences.
Tom woke with the worst headache of his life. A roaring noise that nearly muffled Jean's damned hillbilly music didn't help. He tried to yell, but only a ragged sigh passed his lips. One eye seemed to be glued shut, but he could open the other. Intermittent lights flashed in a green murk, nothing more.
Damn that radio! He couldn't understand what he was doing here, wherever here was, bouncing painfully on a cold, hard surface, unable to move. The last thing he remembered was crawling under the desk to hook up the phone that Jean had unplugged. Perhaps something had fallen on him.
Why wasn't she helping him? She must be home if that music was playing.
&nb
sp; The nature of the green darkness puzzled him. His cheek lay on something smooth and soapy. It was as if he had been stuffed inside a green plastic garbage bag, then dumped on a metal surface that bounced erratically. That was an absurd idea, of course, but it was impossible to think straight with all that racket. He could do nothing about the roaring noise, which sounded like an engine and may have been merely a symptom of his unknown injury, but at least he could try to deal with the radio. He reached out for it.
He couldn't be inside a plastic bag, because his hand was free. It found a hold on something solid. He tried to haul himself toward it. It moved. Then it jerked back violently, as if someone were pulling it the other way.
“That hand on the wheel!” Jean shrieked. “It's not your hand!"
“Of course it's my hand,” Tom tried to say, but the plastic stuck to his lips when he drew breath. What wheel?
Someone grabbed his hand, someone with a stronger grip than Jean's, but not nearly so strong as Tom's. He pulled the thing, the wheel, whatever it was, with all his strength.
Two people began screaming even louder than the music. That didn't last long, fortunately. Their screams and the radio and the mechanical roar were all cut off in a confused instant of pain and noise and blinding light.
Now that it was dark and quiet he would be able to think, but it was easier to stop thinking and slip deeper into a vision of colliding waters.
* * *
Marticora
The instant the driver disappeared into the rest room, Phil Howard made a dash for the garishly repainted schoolbus.
“Hey!” He ignored that cry from the kid pumping gas. “Hey, you from the bus! Some guy's messing in it."
Frozen child-faces locked startled eyes on Phil as he plunged down the aisle. Could he still recognize her? They all wore the same red and gold gowns.
“Daddy!"
If she had kept quiet, he might have missed her. He had been concentrating on those who looked eight, and she was very big for her age. Maybe she had a thyroid problem; her eyes bulged more than he remembered. Doctors were part of the real world rejected by the Waywarders. He angrily dismissed the thought of abnormality. He was a big man, and she was his daughter.
Even More Nasty Stories Page 5