The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams (21 page)

>>>>>>

Solstice Day 10:00
a.m.

YOU’LL KNOW BY THE
EYES

Even a sense of impending
danger can get heavy and dull after a while. We all felt it
settling over us, like mud slowly sliding down a mountain.
Genevieve tried to fight it back with endless talk. Nickie
helped—they’d chatter away about stuff from the news, the turn in
the weather, favorite movies, rhubarb pie, anything.

Despite their best
efforts, though, they’d run out of breath every once in a while.
That’s what happened while Genevieve was giving Wooly a massage,
standing behind him and kneading his trapezius muscles. A sudden
uneasy silence seeped into the room.

Wooly decided to take up
the slack.

He looked at Nickie. “You
remember it, right?”

“Remember
what?”

“You know. You remember.
Word for word you remember.”

“You mean
that
?”

“That.”

“You’re sure? It’s really
necessary?”

“I want to hear it,” he
said, calm, insistent. “I want to hear it again.”

Nickie focused her eyes on
the floor, never moved them. “First she said
death will visit your house. Someone will die in your
house.
”

Genevieve took her hands
off Wooly’s back. “
This
is what we have to hear? Right
now
we have to hear
this?”

He ignored her. “Right,
the house. That’s what she said. Go on.”

“Someone will be killed…by
someone who’s killed before.
Then she
stopped, and she looked right at you. She looked at you and
said
It’s you. You’re the one. Death is
coming to you. You’ll know by the eyes…by the eyes of one who looks
down.
”

“Right, right.”

“By the sphinx, by the
lion…by the eagle. When the eyes’ two rays are at their most
powerful, when they’re…at their strongest, when the two rays are at
their strongest, that’s when you’ll die.
”

More of that silence
again. It was a real killer.

Wooly sat nodding. “That’s
it. That’s exactly what she said.”

Genevieve left the back of
the chair and started circulating through the living room. Did
anybody want something to eat? She could make corn cakes, crab
hash, bread pudding. She kept it up at a delirium pace, like every
quiet moment was a threat, every silent second was a
betrayal.

>>>>>>

Solstice Day 11:30
a.m.

THE FOG

Wooly had enough. Couldn’t
put up with this anymore, just sitting around here talking shit. He
hoisted himself out of his chair and made for the front double
doors.

“Where do you think you’re
going?” Genevieve wanted to know.

“Outside.”

“Where
outside?”

“Sit outside.”

“On that crappy
outdoor/indoor/whatever stuff you bought?”

As soon as she said
crappy
she’d started
crying.

The dense humidity
cement-fell on you as soon as you walked out. Wooly hunched himself
on one of the cast aluminum chairs, staring at the trees across the
road. Nickie stood guard by the doors, hand on the grip of her
Smith & Wesson, looking for any furtive movement, any rustling
in the bushes.

“What’re you doing?” I
said.

“Just waiting,” he
mumbled. “Just waiting for something to happen.” His voice was thin
and distant, like he was whispering to me from 25 feet away. “I
keep trying to hold onto this acceptance thing.”

I told him it was a good
idea, told him to take slow deep breaths and keep the thought
steady in his mind. Meditation is good, I said, meditation is the
GPS of the soul.

Next couple minutes I
talked to him about faith, letting go, not clinging to the ego. God
can’t visit you unless you’re not here.

Nickie gestured at me with
her head.
Inside
.

“You shouldn’t be sitting
out here,” I told him. “The drive-by was only a few days ago.
You’re too open to the street.”

“I don’t want to go like
that. Hail of bullets, no. If I have to, if that’s what’s meant to
be, okay, but it’s not my top choice.”

“Well, that’s good to
hear.”

“Know how I want to go?
Like the fog. The way the fog disappears. It just lightly fades, it
just lightly lifts away. It’s here and then it’s gone.”

Yes, I knew what he meant.
“Let’s go inside.”

>>>>>>

Solstice Day 1:00
p.m.

ABOUT TIME

Wooly was managing to keep
his zen cool, but the strain was starting to show through.
Genevieve was talking about sitting in her kitchen when she was a
little girl, eating apple slices dipped in a plate of sugar and
cinnamon, and by the way wasn’t it cold in here, was anyone else
cold, when Wooly started taking peeks at his watch. He’d drop his
eyes for a second, flick his gauzy wrist up to see the time and
twist it down again. It was nothing obvious. But 10 minutes later
he did it again. Then five minutes later. By the time a half hour
had gone by he was fixated on the watch, just staring at it and
never coming up for air until—

“Will you
stop
that!” Genevieve
reaming him out with a full-throat yell. “You’re getting to me.
You’re really
getting
to me with this shit. Just stop looking at it.”

But Wooly didn’t. “When
did time get so fast?” he said slowly, never lifting his eyes. “I’m
looking at it, I can see it move. That’s all it does. It just keeps
moving.” There was almost a sob in his voice and I thought it would
go to tears until he finally glanced up and saw us all looking at
him. “What’re you
doing
? What’re you people
doing
? Don’t keep staring at me,
goddamit!”

>>>>>>

Solstice Day 2:00
p.m.

MOVEMENT

We gradually switched
positions. Wooly sat on one of the sofas. Nickie took his chair by
the window. Genevieve and I moved to other chairs. Nothing changed.
Wooly said he was thirsty. Genevieve brought him a bottle of water.
Wooly opened it and drank some. Completely unremarkable, but not in
this house and not on this day.

“Your hand is shaking,”
said Genevieve.

“What?” said
Wooly.

“Your hand. When you bring
the bottle up, it’s shaking.”

“No it isn’t.”

“It is. You shouldn’t let
it shake like that.”

“It isn’t shaking. And
even if it was, you think I could help it? You think it’s the kind
of thing you can decide to—Jesus
Christ
!”

He jumped off the sofa
like a prisoner some guard had forgotten to strap to the electric
chair. “It
moved
!”

He was pointing to a wall
on the other side of the living room. He seemed to be pointing to
the powder room.

We all jumped with him,
jolted.

“What
moved?” said Nickie.

“The
door
.”

“What
door?”

“The door to the
powder
room. I saw it
move. I saw it open a little, then I saw it close.”

I approached the door with
my hand on the Glock. Didn’t hear anything, didn’t see anything
moving. The door opened to nothing but an empty bathroom, spotless
since Genevieve had cleaned up Wooly’s blood a little over 24 hours
before.

“I saw it
move
!” Wooly maintained.
“I’m sitting here I saw it
move
.”

Everybody else exchanged
looks.

“Maybe it was a draft,”
Genevieve suggested. “Maybe the a.c. There’s a lot of
a.c.”

“Yeah?” said Wooly. “If it
was the a.c., how come I never saw it move before?”

“Well, there’s nothing in
there,” said Genevieve.

“But I saw it
move
.”

Genevieve grabbed a small
armless chair, dragged it over to the powder room, closed the door
and propped the chair under the knob. “There. You satisfied? It’s
not gonna move now.”

Wooly grabbed an arm of
the sofa and let himself down slowly. He wasn’t really convinced.
“I swear I saw it.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said
Genevieve. “A storm could blow through the house, that door is not
gonna move.”

He nodded, but he was
still expecting some bout of phantom hinge action. He kept staring
at the door with a blank, shock-shredded expression.

We closed ranks around
him, trying to reassure him everything was okay, trying to talk him
down, three planets orbiting a doomed sun.

>>>>>>

Solstice Day 3:15
p.m.

THE SUN’S STRAIGHT
SHADOW

Maybe the silver streak
was an omen, I don’t know. Wooly and I were a half-mile into the
woods, everything as soft and silent as heroin, when I saw it—a
ripple of silver gliding over our heads, floating across the sky
like some hallucinated Airbus before disappearing into the trees.
Wooly was too busy talking to notice, but it scared me, even though
I had no idea what it was. Some UFO attack device? The sky falling
a piece at a time? Then I saw it again—a long metallic streak
shimmering in the air, setting out from the tree. It was a bird for
shit’s sake, a bird with maybe five feet of silver gift-wrap ribbon
in its beak. It landed in another tree, then took off and flew
further into the woods, marking its path with a silver contrail.
I’d never seen anything like that. It was a beautiful thing to
watch, but it made me wonder, was it a sign?

“People always want to be
lifted,” Wooly was saying. “They always want to be transported out
of themselves. That’s why sex remains so popular.”

The walk seemed to restore
him. The air was clearer and cooler out here, much less
humid.

“And the solstice, you
know, solstice-worship’s another way of getting that done. Like,
what’s it called? Bighorn Medicine Wheel. You ever hear of it? Out
West?”

I nodded. “I believe
Wyoming.”

“All right, so you got
this big wheel sitting out there, the medicine wheel. You go a
little off from there, there’s a small pile of stones a little
outside the wheel. At the exact time of the solstice, the exact
time, the sun forms a straight shadow from the pile to the center
of the medicine wheel. Pure straight line. That’s no
accident.”

We came in sight of the
famous oak, the tree that served as host one night to thousands of
fireflies.

We kept walking as he told
me about the ruins at Qumran, the Essene settlement where the Dead
Sea Scrolls were found. When archeologists started digging, they
found this one large room that first they thought must’ve been the
dining area, that’s how big it was.

“The only thing they
couldn’t explain was this little hole in one of the walls. What the
hell was that for? Then they realized, hey, this room wasn’t for
eating. This wasn’t some cafeteria. It’s a sun temple. Cause that
hole? It’s built so that on the solstice it lets in the full light
of the sun. On the solstice, it suddenly lights up the whole
eastern wall. It’s like magic.”

And here we were. Right
away, I could sense that the mind-pull of the big rock was
exceptionally strong today. It felt like a tugboat had latched onto
my brain and was carrying it out to the ocean. Wooly, silent now,
stood at the western face of the stone. The electromagnetic high
was really kicking in. The same hypnotic nerve flutter I was
feeling was visible in his face. Something was about to
happen.

Time check: 3:36. I looked
at the trees surrounding the rock, the leaves seeming to tremble in
the diamond air, and I was hit with a rush of sacramental beauty.
It was like being a child again. I felt like my body was filled
with light. I felt like my body was burning with light. I felt like
one of the Apostles that morning in Jerusalem, burning with the
Pentacostal flame.

It happened: The sun moved
between two small base stones and suddenly lit up the shadowed
space underneath the rock, the crawlspace where the dead once were
kept. It as like watching water break out of a dam. The whole
ground beneath the rock was suddenly flooded with light. I looked
at my watch: 3:37. Of course. Of course it was 3:37, and the sun
was falling exactly between a pair of stones that supported a
massive boulder and that somehow had been set in precise position
hundreds or maybe even thousands of years ago.

It was mesmerizing. It was
mind-spinning. It was just as predicted.