The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams (26 page)

“Well some aren’t. It’s a
fact. And I’m one of them.”

“Of course you are. Why
not? It’s always about you, isn’t it?”

Wooly shrugged. “I don’t
know why, but it always seems to work out that way.”

He went to sit at the
table but he jerked to a stop before he got down.

“I smell eggs,” he said.
“I smell eggs in this house.”

“No you don’t,” said
Genevieve.

“Where are they? I told
you, no fucking eggs in this house.”

“Aren’t any. You said no
eggs, I threw ‘em all out.”

“Well there’s something
eggy around here.”

“There are
no
eggs
here!”

“I
smell
‘em! They’re here
somewhere!”

“Look in the refrigerator
you want. Look anywhere.
No
eggs!”

He sat himself at the
table, completely unsatisfied, looking like he wanted to break
something.

“Ever think you need
help?” said Genevieve. “
Professional
help?”

“I can give you names,
numbers,” said Nickie.

“Bring it on,” said
Genevieve. “You won’t hear me object.”

“He gets help,” I said,
“this could all change. It could all grow away.”

“Fuck all of ya!” said
Wooly.

Genevieve turned away.
Enough. She took salt and a box of grits from a cabinet, butter and
cheddar cheese from the fridge.

“Least he’s saying
something
,” she said.
“Can’t believe this is coming out of my mouth, but it’s almost good
to hear him talking again. The silence around here is
murder.”

“You notice the silence,
do you?” said Wooly.

“Of course I do. It’s like
walking into a wall.”

He looked out the windows,
gave a good stare into the woods. “Sometimes I think it’s waiting
for me, you know? Feels like the silence is just waiting for
me.”

“Well you’ll have some
food waiting on you in a minute. You just sit there and
eat.”

Wooly paused a moment and
then went to say something, but he stopped. He just stopped. There
was some slight movement to his mouth, like words were on their
way, but they never came. He just sat there. He looked like he was
trying to remember something, but he couldn’t quite get it
back.

>>>>>>

MEXICO CITY AT 3
P.M.

The weather reports the
next morning were calling for a mother of a hot day. Eastern Long
Island was getting hit with a burn-the-earth high pressure front.
The temperature at 10 a.m. was already 88 and it could go to 103.
This was going to be the hottest day of the year, no contest, and
it would probably set a record for all the June 24ths in recorded
weather history.

Not that I much cared. I
was getting ready to leave here, leave this loco town. I’d been
answering messages most of yesterday and this morning, scrolling my
way into other stories that were waiting to be worked.

Only a few things left to
do here. Stop and see if Wooly was doing any better. Try to find
Jen, who wasn’t answering my texts and voicemails, and pay her the
$20 for that last night. Say goodbye to Genevieve. Try to clear
things up with Nickie, if I could.

The day was so hot and the
hotel a.c. units so ancient that the windows kept steaming up with
condensation. I was wiping one clean, getting ready to call Jen
again, when the cell buzzed in my hand. It was 10:22. I remember.
Exactly 10:22.

It was Genevieve, but this
wasn’t like her other calls. She wasn’t panicked. She wasn’t
pissed. She was in pure quiet shock.

He did it. He did it. The
son of a bitch, the bastard. He finally did it.

“Did what?”

Did IT.

“Meaning what?”

You KNOW what I
mean.

“Jesus.”

Wooly had killed himself.
He’d gotten up early, telling her he
had
to—if he slept too much, he
said, he’d remember his dreams. He told her he was going to the
lab, check in on things. She didn’t know it at the time, but he
left the house with a bottle of champagne, a Krug Clos d’Ambonnay.
They’d been saving it for a special occasion.

The Sunday crew found him
when they got in. He’d locked himself in the test room he’d
called
Mexico City at 3
p.m.
, the one where textiles were exposed
to hazmat doses of carbon monoxide and other pollutants. He’d
turned the pumps up high and then gotten himself numb and delirious
on the champagne while the fumes slowly poisoned him. They found
him on the floor of the room, curled up in a fetal position with
the bottle still in his hand.

If you’d lifted the Hidden
Lake Hotel and laid it on my chest, let the entire weight of the
building crush my chest, it would feel like this.

I kept talking to
Genevieve, trying to comfort her. I wiped the steam off the window
as the feeling of 10:22 settled over me. Tourists in the streets,
weekend traffic. Three teen girls were walking by the hotel,
laughing, chattering with each other. How could they do that? How
could anybody do that at a time like this?

Who were we before we were
born? Who will we be after we die?

>>>>>>

Walking into the house was
like walking into a land without shadows. Nickie was talking to
Genevieve, speaking solace-words very slowly, very clearly, as if
Genevieve barely understood English. Genevieve couldn’t answer with
anything more than one- or two-word phrases. Her words sounded like
individual stones tossed down a canyon, each one echoing as they
fall.

He’d left a note for her
on the kitchen table.

I am so sorry about this.
But what else is there to do? It is very hard for me to write
anything down. I love you. I will always love you. I do not know
what else there is to say. My brain is too fucked to think. I feel
like I have been waiting all my life to die. Please bury me under
the rock. I guess that is all I have to say.

Genevieve said she didn’t
know what to do. She had to make arrangements, she didn’t know who
to call. They’d never made arrangements about
arrangements.

Nickie and I said we’d
help, we’d make calls. You won’t be alone.

Weeping, Genevieve went
for another tissue, but first she asked Nickie if she was done with
her juice and she put the glass in the sink before reaching for the
Kleenex.

“When he got up,” I said,
“did he say anything else? Did he say anything that would make
you…”

Genevieve shook her head.
“He didn’t say anything. I said what are you doing? Why’re you
going to work at 6 fucking o’clock in the morning? He said, I don’t
know, I don’t know. He just kept saying that, I don’t know. I don’t
know what the hell is going on. And he didn’t say it like he was
confused or anything. It was more like a question, you know? It was
more like he was trying to figure something out.
I don’t know—I don’t know what the hell is going
on.
Those were his last words to
me.
I don’t know.

I thought about that room
at the lab, the brownish gas pouring out of the pumps, Wooly saying
it was 15 times as toxic as what the feds classified as bad
air.

The final
solution.

I remembered something
else he said at the lab, as we were leaving.
There’s just something fascinating about disintegration,
watching something fall apart with the passage of time. In a way,
it’s like looking into the future, predicting what’s going to
happen.

>>>>>>

BUT WHAT DID YOU
SEE?

At least her dark study
was cool. That was one good point you could make. Everything else
you could see was pretty grim. She’d changed in two days. There was
a grayness in her thin face now, the kind of gray you see in
coffins and that all the mortician’s makeup in the world can’t
hide. She was sitting at her desk as always, the tumor corroding
her brain, and even in the poor light of the room she was starting
to squint. She just wasn’t as
there
as much as she used to be, both in terms of
weight and spirit. She was almost a dream of herself.

I took a seat. Her puffy
new assistant had shown me in, looking at me through those goggle
glasses with complete incomprehension.

“How are you?” said
Georgiana.

“You heard?”

“Of course. Talk of the
town.”

“Hell of a way to
go.”

“If you’re here to ask if
I’m sorry, I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint you. I’m not. Excuse
the honesty of the dying, but I’m not sorry.”

Not really cold. More like
deep freeze. “And Marco? Just asking.”

“Different story. Utterly
different.”

“Either way, there’s a lot
of death going around.”

“Yes, the subject seems to
be in the air lately. But as I’ve told you, people have such
misconceptions about death.”

“Right, you’re not
afraid.”

“It’s not a matter of
life
or
death.
It’s a matter of life
and
death. They’re one and the same. The universe is
the universe. There’s nothing outside of it to fear.”

The sun was setting on the
other side of her closed blinds. A rose-colored shadow was
spreading through the slats like blood.

“What
do
you fear?”

“Wasted time. Mr. McShane,
as much as I enjoy your company, is there a reason you’re
here?”

“To be honest, I don’t
know. I guess it’s just to point out that you were
wrong.”

“Wrong?” The idea seemed
to startle her. “What do you mean, morally?”

“I mean
prophetically.”

“How?”

“You were a few days off
on his death.”

She was smiling.
Actually,
grinning
. A strange thing to see under that stringy white hair—a
dying woman’s sly grin.

“The other things I saw,
did they come to pass?”

“The dragon in the road,
time stopping—yeah, they all seemed to. But you blew his
death.”

“Really? What did I say?
Do you remember?”

Of course I remembered.
I’d heard it often enough. “You said
death
will visit your house. Someone will die in your house…someone will
be killed…by someone who’s killed before
.”

She nodded. “Yes, that’s
what I saw. I saw someone in his house, a man, a man with that halo
of smoke lingering behind him. I had no idea it would be
Marco.”

“And he was killed by
someone who killed before?”

“I understand your friend
Wooly once bullied a boy to death, when he was younger. So people
have told me.”

“Okay, but then you got
specific. You told Wooly
it’s you. You’re
the one. Death is coming to you.
You
mentioned eyes—a sphinx, a lion, an eagle and two eyes that look
down. You said when the eyes’ rays—exact words—
are at their most powerful, when they’re…at their strongest,
when the rays are at their strongest, that’s when you’ll
die.
”

A dreamy nod. Savoring the
memory. “Yes, I said that.”

“You said he’d die on the
solstice.”

“Well, there’s part of
your problem right there. Faulty interpretation. The other part of
it—and here I must admit to a bit of deception. The other part of
it is, I never
really
predicted his death. I never actually foresaw it.”

“What’re you talking
about? I was standing here. I
heard
you.”

“You heard me, but what
did you see? Think about it, Mr. McShane. What did you
actually
see
?”

Son of a bitch. I
remembered it now. I remembered her hands. She’d been sitting where
she was sitting now and her hands had been rubbing on the desk for
minutes straight. She’d had that hypnotized, gazing-at-Saturn look
that she’d get when she was in a trance and her hands had never
stopped working the wood of the desk. Then they went still—I
remembered that. Her hands weren’t moving any more and her far-gone
expression had dropped away and I’d thought, okay, it’s over. But
then she’d looked at Wooly. I remembered thinking for 1/16 of a
second that the look was strange—she never directly looked at
anybody when she was in a trance. But she’d looked right at Wooly,
and that’s when she said
It’s you. You’re
the one. Death is coming to you.

“You faked it? Is that
what you’re saying? You fucking faked it?”

“That’s right.”

“That was never part of
your vision?”

“The vision had ended a
moment before. But I saw an opportunity and I seized it. I saw a
chance to make him believe he really was going to die. An unstable
person like that, he’d either die of fright or take his own
life.”