Zod Wallop (10 page)

“Call me Harry,” he repeated.

“My station will not allow it,” Raymond said.

“I demand that you call me Harry!” Harry clutched Raymond’s coat, which was not a coat at all but a brown terry cloth bathrobe of ancient appearance, bald in spots. Harry looked past Raymond and saw the dark, muffled form of Emily. Her head was nodding slightly, perhaps to the sprung rhythm of the big car’s motion, perhaps in time to some internal music. She was not, in any event, chatting up a blue streak. Had she spoken at all? The monkey lay sprawled in her lap, probably sleeping, although it had the aspect of something dead for several days. Is this the way most monkeys slept, arms akimbo, mouths wide open? This monkey seemed more dissolute, more unsavory, then did the monkeys of Harry’s zoo-going days. Granted Harry hadn’t been to a zoo in a long time, not in fact, since he took Amy which had to have been…a long time ago, in another life.

“True hearts,” Raymond said. “Evil always underestimates the strength of a true heart.”

Raymond seemed to be offering some sort of consolation here, but Harry had missed its context.

“Stop the car,” Harry said.

“I’m sorry. Every second is essential. We must move southward without impediment.”

“I order you to stop the car.”

Raymond sighed, leaned forward, and tapped the giant on the shoulder. “Pull over, Lord Allan.”

When the car came to a full stop, Harry climbed out. His legs were untrustworthy, not shaky exactly but possessing more elasticity than was warranted. The sound of gravel crunching under his shoes was consoling, however, a stolid, physical voice. They were on a stretch of two-lane blacktop, telephone poles marching into the distance, the lights of a Texaco station illuminating the horizon’s last hill. A field of pale, tall grass rolled out into darkness. Harry took a few deep breaths—the air had a damp, doughy consistency that was not at all bracing—and got back in the car.

“Raymond,” he said, “what you do with your life is your affair. We met briefly under unpleasant circumstances, but there is no fate that binds us together, no special karmic bond or whatever. I’m sure all this will be clear to you as soon as you are properly medicated again. In the meantime, I am not available for pursuing the fancies of your fertile imagination. Let’s go back to the cabin now. Your parents will be arriving in the morning, and we can sort everything out then. I am sure they are worried sick. And they aren’t the only ones. Allan’s mother is already at the cabin.”

A door slammed open, and Raymond leaned forward. “Allan. Allan, wait!”

That young man was already charging across the field, a diminishing white shape sinking into the darkness. The pretty girl named Rene turned around and glared at Harry, her eyes lighted with passionate disgust.

“That was smart,” she said. “Everyone knows the bitch scares him shitless.”

Harry sat in the backseat with Emily while Raymond and Rene hunted for Allan. Harry could hear their shouts through the car’s open window. He had watched them run across the field until the darkness had settled like ink in their clothing, blotting them out, and now he had only their voices to tell him they were out there. He could distinguish the girl’s high, irritated holler from Raymond’s robust boom, but both voices were growing fainter.

Harry was aware that there were things he was not thinking about, that he was keeping a kind of mental stillness, as though any sudden, psychic motion might cause him to fall. And if he fell, he would fall back into what he thought of as the time of the Great Tiredness. The Great Tiredness had come on him after Amy’s death, it had settled like thick tar on a dinosaur’s bones, and it had wrapped the outrage and the pain and the craziness in a blanket of fatigue. It was in the time of the Great Tiredness, when he was at Harwood Psychiatric, that he had written
Zod Wallop
.

A hand clutched Harry’s wrist, and Harry jumped. “Ah!” Harry said.

He looked down at the grinning monkey. It looked like an evil mendicant in a bad dream. “Jesus,” Harry said, feeling his heart jump like a willful child.

The monkey released Harry’s wrist, leapt to Harry’s shoulder, and darted out the window.

“Hey,” Harry said, but the monkey was gone, scampering through the tall grass in pursuit of his master.

An hour passed and Raymond and his companions did not return. The night breeze carried the sound of crickets and a single, insistent frog. Harry closed his eyes and slept.

He woke abruptly to stillness. His heart was beating rapidly, and he felt the dank reek of the pond constricting his throat.

He shook himself upright. He glanced to his left, and froze.

Emily was staring at him. There was just enough light for her face to coalesce in a grainy, black-and-white image, a blurred, guesswork vision, but the look of supplication was so intense that she might as well have shouted.

“Emily,” Harry said. “What is it?”

He moved forward and touched her hand, which lay like white, broken crockery in her lap. Her hand was surprisingly warm.

She was trying to speak, the words a buzz in her mouth, and Harry leaned forward. Lowering his ear to her mouth, Harry smelled the forgotten sweet, acrid smell of childhood fevers and unarticulated fears.

“Close,” Emily said, the word coming out amid Ss, wrapped in sibilance and urgency. “Close…”

Harry felt her fear, and his own fear translated the single word. She wanted him to close the windows, to lock the car doors. Her instructions were entire in the single word, and it was only later, in the desperate business of rationalization, that Harry claimed the thought for his own.

He did as she asked, in a flurry of clumsy motion, banging a knee on a door handle, bumping his head on the map light.

“There,” he said, settling back next to her and patting her shoulder, “it’s done.”

They sat then, close to each other, shoulders touching, the both of them waiting. Harry could not say what he waited for, but he could almost chart its approach, and so when something slammed into the car’s roof, Harry did not cry out. He hugged Emily and held his breath.

It made a noise as it crawled over the roof. Two noises actually. The one noise was like sandpaper on slate, a noise made by the thousands of small, hooked claws on the underside of its wings. The other sound, more unsettling if you knew its nature, was a series of short screams, like sonar—if sonar were designed to bounce off fear. It was fear the creature sought.

I made this thing up
, Harry thought.
There is no such thing
.

It was, of course, a Ralewing. Harry was surprised at how his reason sought no other explanation.

Now it would find him. It would find him and suck the flesh from his face.

It would dine on his eyes. A Ralewing could pluck an eye from its socket and swallow it as effortlessly as a rat snake scarfing a robin’s egg.
Except there is no such thing as a Ralewing
.

And it is going to get me
, he thought.
This no-thing
.

Unless, of course, he kept his fear at bay. It would be blind to him if he were fearless.

But there was no way not to fill with panic. Fear was the proper response to the terrible cry it uttered. Unless you went elsewhere. Unless you just stopped hanging on the edge, just sighed a long, low sigh of resignation and let those numbed psychic fingers go limp—and fell back. Fell back into the Great Tiredness.

They told him he had tried to kill himself, and they refused to believe that it was an accident, that the sleeping pills, the tranquilizers, the alcohol that almost shut his system down were merely the result of absentmindedness.

“Look,” Harry told Dr. Moore. “I’m not the suicidal type. That’s too melodramatic for me.” Besides, Harry thought, the Great Tiredness was every bit as good as death. There was no color here, no pain, no emotional weather at all, just an occasional oddness that was the outside world trying to puff itself up into significance when, of course, the secret of the Great Tiredness, the truth of this realm, was that everything was arbitrary and meaningless.

“I’ve read all your books,” the big, blue-eyed child-man said. “My name is Raymond Story, and I’ve read all your books. I have read every one of them hundreds of times.”

“Well,” Harry said. “Good for you.” The man held a yellow, grinning rubber toy animal under his arm. Harry recognized the toy instantly—he was, after all, to blame for its existence—but he ignored it, refusing to let it engage his eyes or conjure any memories of Amy.

“Are you writing another book?”

“No,” Harry said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Why don’t you want to?”

Harry sat up in bed. Had he been dozing when Raymond came into the room? Perhaps. In the Great Tiredness, the transition from sleep to wakefulness was often blurred.

“Go away.”

The big man leaned forward, his wide face filled with stupid concern, his unruly mustache animated by passionate conviction. Harry was afraid, for one moment, that the man might burst into tears.

“It’s because your daughter drowned, and you just don’t care. Isn’t that so?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I almost drowned when I was eleven,” Raymond said. “I jumped off the side of the pool and hit my head, and I was underwater a long time, and I died and went to a place of light and when I came back they had changed this world.”

“I’m very tired. Please go away.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m always being a nuisance. I know. I’m going. I’m out the door.” The fat man moved toward the door. Harry was struck by two things. The fat man was wearing a rumpled suit and his feet were bare. In the grayness of the Great Tiredness, these were small things, but they were noteworthy. At the door, Raymond paused. His wide face seemed to quiver slightly, shaken by some bulldog conviction. “You have to write another book. I bet…I bet…” He licked his lips, rocked back on his heels. “I bet if you wrote a book you could change it back. The world. You could change it back.”

Dr. Moore was delighted when, a week later, Harry requested the watercolors.

“It’s not going to be a pretty book,” Harry muttered, oddly diffident.

“No,” Dr. Moore said, his plain, kind face noncommittal, his hands in his lap. “I don’t suppose it will.”

Dr. Moore left and Harry stared at the blank white surface of the art board and felt an anger rise in him like steam.

You never change anything that matters
, he thought. And that was the book he wrote.
Zod Wallop
. About the end of things, the winding down, the world turning into stone. It was a rebuttal to a poor madman’s delusion.

The book began with a rock, a rock that wanted to live, to move, to participate in life. A fatal mistake. Everything awful followed from that desire, that romantic and doomed notion that awareness was a good thing.

The heroine of this book was a little girl named Lydia. Lydia, like Amy, was a worrier. She was right to be worried.

I don’t worry anymore
, Harry thought. He was above that. Or below it. The precise geography of his indifference was unimportant.

In the morning, the pharmacist would bring him a tiny little paper cup filled with pills. The pills were brightly colored, as though designed for children.

Raymond came in one morning, saw the little cup of pills and peered down at them. “He gives me those little red ones, too,” he said. “They are full of bad dreams. The man who brings them doesn’t work here. He lives in the place where they make the bad dreams. It is a big factory and they hurt animals there, in order to force the bad dreams out.”

It was true that the man who dispensed these morning medicines was seen at no other time, but then, he probably worked the night shift, his morning rounds being the last task of his day.

This man wore thick glasses and had a long, pale, unhappy face. He asked Harry questions, took blood. There were endless tests to take. There was a temptation to answer yes to all the delusional stuff. Craziness had a fine expansiveness to it. Yes, the President talks to me through the radio. Yes, aliens have the cure for cancer and are waiting until we say the magic word. Yes, I believe in God.

In group, Dr. Moore asked, “How is the book going?”

“Wow!” Raymond said. “I knew it.”

Harry shrugged. “It’s coming along,” he said. He didn’t look at Raymond.

The pharmacist asked if Harry experienced any bad dreams, and Harry said he didn’t. The pharmacist confided that he was having nightmares, and then he laughed nervously. “Just who is the patient here, anyway?” He grinned. He had taken to wearing tinted glasses that emphasized the darkness under his eyes. Sometimes he was unshaven, his hair uncombed.

“Call me Marlin,” he said. “We are all in this together, you know.”

No, Harry didn’t know that. He had no sense of being in anything with anyone, but he smiled nervously as the man paced around the room. This Marlin Tate had taken to uttering non sequiturs in the morning.