The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams

THE DEAD HAVE A THOUSAND
DREAMS

Richard Sanders

Copyright 2012 Richard
Sanders

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>>>>>>

To Laurie with love. I’d be
dead without you.

>>>>>>

and as you read

the sea is turning its dark
pages,

turning

its dark pages

—Denise Levertov,

“
To The Reader”

>>>>>>

CHAPTER 1

THIS IS A SENTENCE I DON’T
WANT TO FINISH

>>WEDNESDAY JUNE 13
(8 days to go)

>>THURSDAY JUNE 14 (7
days to go)

WEDNESDAY JUNE 13, 2:15
p.m.

I’M GOING TO DIE 8 DAYS
FROM NOW

“
The
glass is half
full
, motherfucker!” Those were the first words I ever heard out
of Wooly Cornell’s mouth. This was a couple years ago, in a meeting
room in the village hall of Hidden Lake, a town on the eastern end
of Long Island. Wooly was the owner of Material Witness, a company
that tested textiles and fabrics to prevent fading and decaying. He
was being sued at the time by a group known as F.L.A.C., the Fatal
Light Awareness Committee. Their suit, the subject of the night’s
public hearing, claimed that the 6,500-watt xenon arc lamps Wooly
used 24 hours a day were causing deadly hormonal changes, including
cancer. According to studies cited by F.L.A.C., women who were
exposed to artificial light during night shifts—and Wooly’s workers
were getting hit with 156 times the normal amount of
sunlight—suffered a 60% rise in the incidence of breast
cancer.

Wooly, a pretty litigious
guy himself, was really getting burned by the charges.

“These people can bring up
all the goody goody gumdrop statistics they want,” he said, “but
all they’re doing is trying to jerk me around. They’re just trying
to jerk me off, and jerking off’s just for jerk offs. I been using
those lights for years, and I’ve never died
once
.”

He was drawing looks of
blinking disbelief from everyone there, the F.L.A.C. members, the
village board, the mayor, the two Hidden Lake cops leaning on the
back wall in a casual effort to keep the peace. It wasn’t just his
words. His
body
was also a fearful factor. Wooly had a Caesar haircut, about
twice as much jaw as anyone could possibly use and a torso roughly
the size and shape of Texas. You didn’t want to mess with this
guy.

Unless you were the
founder of F.L.A.C., Roy Freeny, a man with a tattoo of the blue
Earth inked into the side of his shaved head. Freeny stood up and
began to say that we’re altering biological rhythms by flooding the
night with artificial light, and that 100 million songbirds die
every year in North America alone because they can no longer
navigate by the glow of the stars.

Wooly called him a
fucktocious dick face who couldn’t remember what planet he was on
without looking in the mirror, and when Freeny asked if someone
could shut this shrieking idiot up, Wooly threw a chair at him,
missing his head but smashing into a water pitcher and two glasses,
which prompted the cops to peel themselves off the wall and pin
Wooly to the floor while the mayor declared the hearing
adjourned.

When Shakespeare wrote
about
this thing of darkness…thou
poisonous slave, got by the devil himself
,
I’m pretty sure he had Wooly Cornell in mind.

>>>>>>

Against my squirming
resistance and better judgment, my boss had sent me out to Hidden
Lake to do a story on Wooly and the F.L.A.C. lawsuit. I didn’t talk
to Wooly that night—he seemed to be in a less than introspective
mood—but I went to his house the next day. He lived on the edge of
the Paumanok woods, in a single-level glass and cedar home with a
set of double doors big enough for the Mormon Tabernacle
Choir.

I rang the bell, waited.
No answer. Rang two more times and was seven seconds into the next
waiting period when I heard the scream. A woman’s voice. I was
trying to look inside the house when I heard the scream again. It
was coming from around the back.

I was running for the
corner when I picked up a man’s voice—pitched somewhere between a
yell and a moan—mixing with the woman’s shrieks.

I stopped moving the
moment I got to the backyard. The first thing I saw was Wooly
fetal-rolling in the wild grass that led to the woods. A black
woman was standing over him but all I could look at was the big
boy. Yes, his six-three size and Orson Welles fat certainly
commanded attention. More than that, though, his hands and arms
were dripping with blood and he was stark raving naked.

“I want it to
stop!
” he shouted,
staring at the woman with a mad-panic look that was pure electrical
voltage. “Make it
stop!
”

“You stupid son of a
bitch!” she screeched. “What’re you
bleeding
for?”

“I can’t get out! I can’t
get out of this!”

“Put it down! Put it
down
now!
”

I saw what
it
was. He had a razor
blade in his hand. I understood—he was a cutter. He’d been slicing
up his own arms. Fortunately, he had plenty of blubber to work
with—those cuts were only surface deep.

As for the rest of him,
Wooly’s real name was William Cornell and he had one of the
hairiest bodies I’d ever seen. Arms, chest, legs—a lot of the
growth was gorilla-thick. There was no doubt about how he got his
nickname.

The woman noticed me. She
was a haggard, harried, sad-eyed person with Christmas red
sweatpants and a face gone dark purple from screaming.

“Can I help
you?”

“Quinn McShane.
Real Story
. Louisa
Collins sent me here to talk to him.”

“Genevieve
Cornell.”

She didn’t have to tell me
she was his wife. I could hear years of grievance in her
voice.

“Tell Louisa not today,”
she said. “He’s upset over last night.”

Wooly wasn’t paying
attention to our talk. He was caught in some primal nightmare, and
all he could hear were the batwings beating in his head.

“I don’t know what day it
is,” he cried, frantic. “What day is it? What fucking day is
it?”

“Get inside,” said
Genevieve. “I’ve had enough of this. I want you in the house right
now.”

“You need some
help?”

“Once I get him inside,
he’ll be better. He says the pain actually calms him down. He says
it’s a kind of cleansing this, a kind of letting go. Trust me, this
isn’t his debut performance.”

At this point Wooly became
aware of a stranger in the midst. “Who’s that?” he yelled,
gesturing wildly at me. “I don’t
know
him. He’s completely new to
me.”

“He’s here to see
you.”

“Get rid of him. Tell him
I’m whacked out.”

“I think he can see
that.”

“Make him go
away!”

“You’ll have to come back
some other time. Please tell Louisa we’re sorry.”

“Least let me help,” I
said, looking at Wooly naked on the ground, pummeling his head and
chest with his other hand, smearing blood wherever his fist landed.
It was like he was trying to find the button to turn himself
off.

Genevieve and I yanked him
inside, and while he eventually calmed down to a degree and we
talked a bit, he was still in no shape for an interview. I want
back to the city. I hadn’t learned much about Wooly, though I was
convinced that Mars was getting ready to revoke his
citizenship.

>>>>>>

The story never ran. A few
days later part of the lawsuit was settled and the rest of it was
dropped and life in Hidden Lake and the rest of the world went on
much as before. Hard to forget Wooly, of course. The man loomed on
your mental map like an eighth continent. But I thought—in fact, I
hoped—I’d never see him again.

Not a chance.

>>>>>>

Cause here he was again,
two years later, sitting in Louisa Collins’ office, not looking
particularly good. He was still full-flesh heavy, but his face was
a drained and saggy white. He looked a lot older than two years
would warrant. So what brought him back? Whatever Wooly’s
faults—and let’s not get into them now—he was a big donator to
charities, and my boss sat on the boards of two of them. If he
thought he needed media exposure, like he did with the F.L.A.C.
lawsuit, Louisa was prone to give him what he wanted.

“There’s a lot of shit
going on,” he was telling us. “A lot of jig-jag that’s really
bothering me. I’m telling you, people in the
bible
never suffered like
this.”

“What’s happening?” said
Louisa.

“Somebody, some poo head
out there, is trying to kill me.”

“Are you
serious?”

“Somebody took a shot at
me the other day. I'm pulling into work, getting outta my car, bam
fucking boom all over the place.
Plus
I got a death threat delivered
to my own fucking door.”

“Who’s doing
this?”

“I don’t know. I
do not
know. Thing is,
whoever it is, I think they’re going to succeed.”

“Why?”

He took a long breath,
lotta lung to fill.

“I’m going to die eight
days from now.”

Just like that he said it.
Like he was saying the sun is out today.

“I’m going to die on June
21. I’m going to die on the day of the summer solstice.”

Louisa shot me a quick
the-fuck? look, then went back to Wooly. “What are you
talking
about?”

He took another
four-second breath. “I know this is gonna sound crazy,” he said,
and when somebody like Wooly Cornell says something sounds crazy,
you know you’re in for a ride.

>>>>>>

It all started with a
hole, an empty space on his living room wall. For years he’d been
vaguely thinking of filling it with something, and then one day one
of his friends tells him about a local photographer, Georgiana
Copely, she’s really good, she’s really different, you should buy
one of her pictures. One thing, though, says the friend, she’s a
little strange, she thinks she can see things about the future, but
don’t pay any attention to it, don’t let her weird you out. She’s
worth it.

So Wooly pays a visit to
Georgiana Copely. Yes, she’s one odd bird, but he’s totally amazed
by her work. Never seen anything like it. He makes an offer for one
of the photos. And once they’re done with the negotiations, he asks
for some investment advice. He’s goofing with her, just funning
around. But she says something like
a bird
from the sea will be found in the north.

What’s it mean? Fuck does
he know. Next day, though, he sees that Albatross Industries, a
company in Canada, has just come on the market with some new
smartphone technology. A bird from the sea = Albatross. From the
north = Canada. He buys some Albatross stock. In three days he’s
made a 38% profit on his investment.

He calls her up. Hey, how
about another tip? She’s reluctant. She says I was doing you a
favor—I don’t want to make a habit out of this. He begs. He gets on
his knees—even though he’s on the phone—and he begs. She mentions
something about
the warm pines are filled
with liquid
.