For a moment I actually saw a spreading octopus-pattern of blood soaking into the sheet, that’s how real and focused my terror was. Then I closed my eyes tight, opened them, and looked again.
The sheets were rumpled, the bottom one mostly pulled free. I could see the quilted satin hide of the mattress. One pillow lay on the far edge of the bed. The other was scrunched down at the foot.
The throw rug — a piece of Jo’s work — was askew, and my water-glass lay overturned on the nighttable. The bedroom looked as if it might have been the site of a brawl or an orgy, but not a murder. There was no blood and no little stuffed animal with black fur.
I dropped to my knees and looked under the bed. Nothing there — not even dust-kitties, thanks to Brenda Meserve. I looked at the ground-sheet again, first passing a hand over its rumpled topography, then pulling it back down and resecuring the elasticized corners. Great invention, those sheets; if women gave out the Medal of Freedom instead of a bunch of white politicians who never made a bed or washed a load of clothes in their lives, the guy who thought up fitted sheets would undoubtedly have gotten a piece of that tin by now. In a Rose Garden ceremony.
With the sheet pulled taut, I looked again. No blood, not a single drop. There was no stiffening patch of semen, either. The former I hadn’t really expected (or so I was already telling myself), but what about the latter? At the very least, I’d had the world’s most creative wet-dream — a triptych in which I had screwed two women and gotten a handjob from a third, all at the same time. I thought I had that morning-after feeling, too, the one you get when the previous night’s sex has been of the headbusting variety. But if there had been fireworks, where was the burnt gunpowder?
‘In Jo’s studio, most likely,’ I told the empty, sunny room. ‘Or on the path between here and there.
Just be glad you didn’t leave it in Mattie Devore, bucko. An affair with a post-adolescent widow you don’t need.’
A part of me disagreed; a part of me thought Mattie Devore was exactly what I did need. But I hadn’t had sex with her last night, any more than I had had sex with my dead wife out on the swimming float or gotten a handjob from Sara Tidwell. Now that I saw I hadn’t killed a nice little kid either, my thoughts turned back to the typewriter. Why had I gotten it? Why bother?
Oh man. What a silly question. My wife might have been keeping secrets from me, maybe even having an affair; there might be ghosts in the house; there might be a rich old man half a mile south who wanted to put a sharp stick into me and then break it off; there might be a few toys in my own humble attic, for that matter. But as I stood there in a bright shaft of sunlight, looking at my shadow on the far wall, only one thought seemed to matter: I had gone out to my wife’s studio and gotten my old typewriter, and there was only one reason to do something like that.
I went into the bathroom, wanting to get rid of the sweat on my body and the dirt on my feet before doing anything else. I reached for the shower-handle, then stopped. The tub was full of water. Either I had for some reason filled it during my sleepwalk . . . or something else had. I reached for the drain-lever, then stopped again, remembering that moment on the shoulder of Route 68 when my mouth had filled up with the taste of cold water. I realized I was waiting for it to happen again. When it didn’t, I opened the bathtub drain to let out the standing water and started the shower.
I could have brought the Selectric downstairs, perhaps even lugged it out onto the deck where there was a little breeze coming over the surface of the lake, but I didn’t. I had brought it all the way to the door of my office, and my office was where I’d work . . . if I could work. I’d work in there even if the temperature beneath the roofpeak built to a hundred and twenty degrees . . . which, by three in the afternoon, it just might.
The paper rolled into the machine was an old pink-carbon receipt from Click!, the photo shop in Castle Rock where Jo had bought her supplies when we were down here. I’d put it in so that the
blank side faced the Courier type-ball. On it I had typed the names of my little harem, as if I had tried in some struggling way to report on my three-faceted dream even while it was going on: Jo Sara Mattie Jo Sara Mattie Mattie Mattie Sara Sara Jo Johanna Sara Jo MattieSaraJo.
Below this, in lower case:
normal sperm count sperm norm all’s rosy
I opened the office door, carried the typewriter in, and put it in its old place beneath the poster of Richard Nixon. I pulled the pink slip out of the roller, balled it up, and tossed it into the wastebasket. Then I picked up the Selectric’s plug and stuck it in the baseboard socket. My heart was beating hard and fast, the way it had when I was thirteen and climbing the ladder to the high board at the Y-pool. I had climbed that ladder three times when I was twelve and then slunk back down it again; once I turned thirteen, there could be no chickening out — I really had to do it.
I thought I’d seen a fan hiding in the far corner of the closet, behind the box marked GADGETS. I started in that direction, then turned around again with a ragged little laugh. I’d had moments of confidence before, hadn’t I? Yes. And then the iron bands had clamped around my chest. It would be stupid to get out the fan and then discover I had no business in this room after all.
‘Take it easy,’ I said, ‘take it easy.’ But I couldn’t, no more than that narrow-chested boy in the ridiculous purple bathing suit had been able to take it easy when he walked to the end of the diving board, the pool so green below him, the upraised faces of the boys and girls in it so small, so small.
I bent to one of the drawers on the right side of the desk and pulled so hard it came all the way out. I got my bare foot out of its landing zone just in time and barked a gust of loud, humorless laughter. There was half a ream of paper in the drawer. The edges had that faintly crispy look paper gets when it’s been sitting for a long time. I no more than saw it before remembering I had brought my own supply — stuff a good deal fresher than this. I left it where it was and put the drawer back in its hole. It took several tries to get it on its tracks; my hands were shaking.
At last I sat down in my desk chair, hearing the same old creaks as it took my weight and the same old rumble of the casters as I rolled it forward, snugging my legs into the kneehole. Then I sat facing the keyboard, sweating hard, still remembering the high board at the Y, how springy it had been under my bare feet as I walked its length, remembering the echoing quality of the voices below me, remembering the smell of chlorine and the steady low throb of the air-exchangers: fwung-fwung-fwung-fwung, as if the water had its own secret heartbeat. I had stood at the end of the board wondering (and not for the first time!) if you could be paralyzed if you hit the water wrong.
Probably not, but you could die of fear. There were documented cases of that in Ripley’s Believe It or Not, which served me as science between the ages of eight and fourteen.
Go on! Jo’s voice cried. My version of her voice was usually calm and collected; this time it was shrill. Stop dithering and go on!
I reached for the IBM’s rocker-switch, now remembering the day I had dropped my Word Six program into the Powerbook’s trash. Goodbye, old pal, I had thought.
‘Please let this work,’ I said. ‘Please.’
I lowered my hand and flicked the switch. The machine came on. The Courier ball did a preliminary twirl, like a ballet dancer standing in the wings, waiting to go on. I picked up a piece of paper, saw my sweaty fingers were leaving marks, and didn’t care. I rolled it into the machine, centered it, then wrote