the humans in question were doing chores.
A midlife crisis, Sammy said (Sammy was his once-a-week masseur). You need to get
laid, Sammy said, but he didn’t offer his own services, Curtis noticed.
Still, the phrase rang true—as true as any twenty-first-century newspeak, he supposed.
Whether the Vinton Lot fuck-a-monkey show had provoked the crisis or the crisis had
provoked the Vinton mess, he didn’t know. What he did know was that he had come to think heart attack instead of indigestion each time he felt a transient, stabbing pain in his chest, that he had become obsessed with the notion that his teeth were going to fall out (even though they had never given him any particular trouble), and that when
he’d gotten a cold in April, he had diagnosed himself as being on the verge of a
complete immunological breakdown.
Plus this other little problem. This compulsion, which he hadn’t told his doctor about.
Or even Sammy, and he told Sammy everything.
It was on him now, fifteen miles inland on seldom-traveled Route 17, which had
never been particularly busy and had now been rendered all but obsolescent by the
375 Extension. Right here with the green scrub pressing in on both sides (the man had
been bonkers to build out here), with the bugs singing in high grass no cows had grazed for ten years or more and the power lines buzzing and the sun beating down
like a padded hammer on his helmetless head.
He knew just thinking of the compulsion summoned it, but that was of no particular
help. None at all, in fact.
He pulled over where a track marked DURKIN GROVE VILLAGE ROAD shot off
to the left (grass was now growing up the center hump, an arrow pointing the way to
failure) and put the Vespa in neutral. Then, while it purred contentedly between his
legs, he forked the first two fingers of his right hand into a V and stuck them down his throat. His gag reflex had grown numb over the last two or three months, and his hand
was in almost all the way to the bracelets of fortune on his wrist before it finally
happened.
Curtis leaned to one side and ejected his breakfast. It wasn’t getting rid of the food that interested him; he was many things, but bulimic wasn’t one of them. It wasn’t
even the vomiting part that he liked. What he liked was the gagging: that hard
rejecting clench of the midsection, plus the accompanying yaw of the mouth and throat. The body was totally in gear, determined to oust the intruder.
The smells—green bushes, wild honeysuckle—were suddenly stronger. The light was
brighter. The sun beat down more heavily than ever; the pad was off the hammer and
he could feel the skin on the nape of his neck sizzling, the cells there maybe at this very moment turning outlaw and heading for the chaotic land of melanoma.
He didn’t care. He was alive. He rammed his spread fingers down his throat again,
scraping the sides. The rest of breakfast yurped up. The third time he produced only
long strings of spittle, stained faintly pink with his throat’s blood. Then he felt
satisfied. Then he could go on toward Durkin Grove Village, The Motherfucker’s
half-built Xanadu out here in the silent bee-buzzing wilds of Charlotte County.
It occurred to him, as he putted modestly along the overgrown lane in the right-hand
wheelrut, that Grunwald might not be the only one who was in a tight place these days.
Durkin Grove Village was a mess.
There were puddles in the ruts of the not-yet-paved streets and in the cellar holes of unfinished (in some cases not yet even framed) buildings. What Curtis saw below—
half-built shops, a few pieces of shabby-looking construction equipment here and
there, sagging yellow caution tape—was surely a blueprint for deep financial trouble,
perhaps even ruin. Curtis didn’t know if The Motherfucker’s preoccupation with the
Vinton Lot—not to mention the decampment of his wife, his illness, and his legal
problems concerning Curtis’s dog—had been the cause of the man’s current
overextension or not, but he knew overextension was what it was. Even before