The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams (25 page)

We could hear paper
rustling on the tape. Alex taking notes, despite the
camera.

Alex:
How was he yesterday?

Georgiana:
I couldn’t talk to him. I couldn’t say a thing to
him. Every time I tried, all he’d say was thank you—thank you for
telling me. His voice all squeezed and raspy. Then, obviously, he
went out last night. I asked where he was going. He said he wanted
to find Mr. McShane and thank him for bringing everything into the
light.

She cleared her throat,
reached for a paper cup with a dangling tea bag and took a
sip.

Georgiana:
I didn’t think he was capable of… I didn’t think
he’d do anything like that. I thought I knew him better. I thought
he was stronger than that. He never gave me trouble. None at
all.

Alex:
You had no idea what was going to happen?

Georgiana:
I never saw it coming.

“Now
there’s
a fucking piece of irony for
you,” said Wooly.

Nobody paid attention to
him. We kept looking at the screen, Georgiana quietly sipping her
tea, nothing left to say, still staring at the camera like she was
counting the ions in the air between her eyes and the
lens.

>>>>>>

We walked out of village
hall under a cloudless blue p.m. sky. Genevieve called it a
gorgeous day. Wooly disagreed. Big fucking deal, he said. The sun
is out, no clouds—it’s all a fucking cliché. Genevieve invited me
back for dinner. I politely passed. I had to start putting my notes
together for the story, I said, start catching up with work again.
Besides, I’d spent enough time in that house.

She and Wooly walked
ahead, arguing with each other. I stayed with the hobbling Nickie.
How’s the leg? How’s the shoulder? Both doing okay.

“How long you staying on
for?” I said.

“They want me to stick
around a few more days. Until he recovers from all the
shock.”

“Few days? Pretty
optimistic.”

“You’re holding up? You’re
okay at the hotel?”

“It’ll do.”

“You need
anything?”

“I’m okay for
now.”

“Look, I wanted to say
something. I just wanted to say—“

At which point Wooly, with
his exquisite sense of timing, turned around to shout at us. “You
know what this is? You know what this is? This is the worst fucking
year of my whole fucking
life!”

>>>>>>

GOD’S BALLS

A simple dawn—a single
band of white light across the horizon. I’d slept almost the whole
night. I’d slept well. My shoulder hurt, but my bones felt like
they’d reached a release point, a signal that it was all over. I
went back to sleep, got up a couple hours later. I wasn’t
necessarily feeling good, but I could remember what feeling good
was. I’ll take it.

The phone.
Genevieve.
I’m worried. I’ve got concerns.
There’s something wrong with him. There’s something DIFFERENT about
him.

Crime tape was still
strung across the front of the house and in the area of the living
room where the shooting had gone down.

“Look at this shit,” said
Genevieve, meaning the yellow ribbon festooned around the
furniture. “How’s a person supposed to live like this? Why did that
Marco have to pick this place to die?”

No answer for that one.
“What’s going on?”

“What’s going on? You
notice how quiet it is in here?”

Not until she stopped
talking, no. But once she did, the silence was hard to miss. The
tension of the last few days was gone, replaced by a strange, heavy
limbo silence.

“It’s him,” she said.
“He’s not talking. Ever since he got up, I can’t get him to say a
damn thing. You say something to him—nothing. Like he’s deaf. He’s
like, I don’t know,
past
speaking.”

“Where is he?”

“Out back.” She started
walking me to the kitchen. “He won’t go to the rock. He won’t do
anything. He won’t even cut himself. I tell him, you want to slice
yourself up? Will it make you feel better? Go right ahead, be my
guest. But what do I get out of him? Not one damn
response.”

The big furball was laying
flat on his back in the middle of the yard. He’d covered himself
head to toe with a blanket, completely bundled away from the world.
He looked like a corpse on a battlefield.

Nickie was crouched next
to him. I looked at her. She shook her head. Hopeless
case.

I pulled the blanket down,
uncovered his face. His coloring made lead look alive. “What’re you
doing?”

His eyes were open but he
wasn’t acknowledging my presence. I wasn’t sure if he was seeing
anything.

“I’m putting the
twerkulator on the percolator,” he said mournfully. “Getting my
plate before it’s too late. The fish is all rough and scaly. The
Yellow River, by I.P. Daily.”

He was lost in his head,
singing some crazy sorrow song.

I shook his shoulder, got
his attention. “You’re looking good.”

He thought. “I don’t want
to talk about it.”

“About what?”

“I don’t want to say
anything.”

“Too late, you just
did.”

He kicked the blanket off.
“I got no sleep. All night. Didn’t sleep. Didn’t
want
too.”

“Sleep is not your
enemy.”

“Mine is. I go to bed last
night, I had a dream. I’m walking down Seventh Avenue, where I used
to work? Everything’s the same, the buildings’re all the same. But
all the street names are different. Seventh Avenue, now it’s Burnt
Black Boulevard. The cross streets—stead of
37
^th
,
38
^th
,
you got Lost Liver Lane, Dental Decay Drive. What kinda names’re
these?”

“It was
disturbing.”

“Never went back to sleep.
Pulled an all-nighter.”

My turn to think. I looked
at Nickie, back to him. “This is about the other day, right? The
solstice?”

He shook his head. “I
can’t talk about it. I can’t talk about that cause there’s
no
words
to it.
Nobody would understand.”

“Give it a
shot.”

“It’s
complicated.”

“It’s
always
complicated.”

He took one of the deepest
breaths in the whole history of breathing. Then he raised his head
and stared at Nickie. Really
stared
at her.

She got the message. “I’ll
leave you two alone."

Even when she was back in
the house, it took Wooly a while to get his mouth open.

“I had peace that day,” he
said. “It was peaceful. Talking to you, all that, I finally found
acceptance. Took a long time, you know? I’ve looked for that
feeling a long time before that.”

“I know it.”

“I was ready to go. I
accepted that. It felt, I don’t know if it felt good, but it
felt
right
, you
know? It felt like this was the thing to do. And then it didn’t
happen, you understand? It
didn’t
happen. I’m sitting there, I’m ready for it,
it
didn’t
happen.”

“So, basically, you’re
depressed because you didn’t die.”

“I can’t explain it. I
told you I can’t explain it. It’s like I’ve been waiting all my
life for this to happen—that’s what it felt like. I’ve been waiting
all my life to die, and now—and now what? That’s the thing. What do
I do
now
?”

“I understand. I know what
you’re going through. It’s not all that uncommon, what you’re
feeling.”

“The fuck you talking
about it’s not uncommon?”

“It can happen. Like with
terminally ill patients? You know, they’re told they’re going to
die, they prepare themselves for it? Then something happens, they
go into remission, or something that didn’t work before works now.
When they don’t die, a lot of them go into depression. It’s all in
the expectation.”

Wooly took a reflective
glance around the yard. “Funny you should say that. Terminally ill
people. That’s almost what it feels like. Like there’s this big
thing, this big tumor growing inside me.”

“I know. I know what it’s
like. It’s like the world gets smaller. It’s like the boundaries of
the world keep shrinking until they match the skin around your
head.”

“Yeah, you know. I knew
you’d know. I always knew that. Right from the beginning, when I
asked you to come out here, I knew you’d know.”

I leaned closer into him.
“Okay, so listen to me. What you felt the other day. The peace? The
acceptance? You can get that without actually dying. You can
actually do that.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you.
Anybody.”

“I’m not so sure about
that. Not about me. You come down to it, honestly speaking, I’m
pretty fucking useless. I don’t know what it is, beat blood or
whatever, but I’m a pretty fucking useless piece of
shit.”

“Beg to differ. You saved
my life. You get points for that.”

Wooly shook his head like
he was trying to fling it off his neck. “I shot him cause I was
pissed. I shot him cause he was after you and not me. That’s all it
amounted to. Shit, if you hadn’t jumped all over him, it never
would’ve happened.”

“Yeah, but
still—“

“No, it’s on you. You’re
the one who stepped it up. It was your balls, not mine.”

Now it was my turn to
shake my head. “Actually, it was God’s balls, not mine. I had to
pray for that. I had to pray to get there. I had to ask God for
help—I couldn’t do it on my own. Which is the point I’m trying to
make to you.”

He stared at the blanket
lying next to him. “That’s you, not me. Me, maybe I’m just not, I
don’t know, what’s the word,
incented
to God.”

“You think?”

“I don’t know. I think
those lines might be kinda burnt out for me.”

“They never are. Might
feel like it, but they never are. I mean I told you my story.
Facing manslaughter, cranked out of my mind? What happened was
simple. I said I want to live and I prayed for help. And I just
kept doing it.”

“Yeah, I don’t know. I
just don’t know.”

I told him that was okay.
It was okay not to know. Good starting point. Because who we are,
who we really are, can’t be known. The identity you can know is
just a thought, just a name, and the whole of what we are is more
than just a thought, just a name.

When I was up in Red
Mountain, I said, I realized I needed to get my mind back. I needed
all mind. And to do that, I needed to ask some basic questions.
Like, where does your mind come from? When did you decide to create
it? The thing, of course, is that I didn’t. It didn’t come from me.
It’s bigger than that. It comes from life, from the world, from the
universe, from God. And that’s where I needed to go for an answer.
Go to God. Go to the source.

He was sitting up now, his
face as twisted as a hangover. “I’m still stuck on what I felt.
Still stuck on that feeling of peace. I really thought I’d been
chosen for it.”

“It’s not like the fucking
priesthood. You gotta work at it. Takes discipline,
patience.”

“Patience.” Like he was
spitting the word out.

“What? Little patience
wouldn’t kill you.”

His head trembled a bit as
he looked up at me. He opened his mouth, opened it wide enough to
show his teeth and gums. I thought he was going to go into an angry
wailing scream. But he didn’t. What came out instead was a laugh.
Not loud, not demented. Just an empty, toneless, hysterical laugh.
He wasn’t trying to stop it but I don’t think he could if he wanted
to. He just sat there with that sound coming out of his mouth—a
laugh with no relief in it, no remorse, no resignation, no
hope.

It was one of the scariest
things I’ve ever heard.

>>>>>>

I shuffled him into the
house, the kitchen, moving at a Percoset pace. Genevieve and Nickie
were waiting there, low hum of tension all around them. Nickie
looked like she wanted to say something to me. I knew I wanted to
say something to her. Wrong place, wrong time.

“So what’s his problem?”
Genevieve said. “Did you figure it out?”

Since Wooly seemed
reluctant to speak, I gave her an answer. “It’s because of that
night. It’s because he didn’t die.”

“Are you’re kidding me?
He’s down about
that
?”

“It was supposed to be my
fate,” Wooly protested.

“Maybe it’s me, but most
people I’d think would be
happy
about something like that.”