“Can you make me forget?” Gentle heard himself saying. “Do you have the trick of that?”
“Of course,” came the soft reply. “But you don’t want it.”
“No, what I want’s death, but I’m too afraid of that tonight. That’s the real sickness: fear of death. But I can live with forgetfulness, give me that.”
“For how long?”
“Until the end of the world.”
Another lightning flash burned out the figure in front of him, and then the whole scene. Gone; forgotten. Gentle blinked the afterimage of window and silhouette out of his eyes and, in doing so, passed between sleep and waking.
The room was cold, but not as icy as his deathbed. He sat upright, staring first at his unclean hands, then at the window. It was still night, but he could hear the sound of vehicles on the Edgware Road, their murmur reassuring. Already—distracted by sound and sight—the nightmare was fading. He was happy to lose it.
He shrugged off the bedclothes and went to the kitchen to find himself something to drink. There was a carton of milk in the refrigerator. He downed its contents—though the milk was ready to turn—aware that his churned system would probably reject it in short order. Quenched, he wiped his mouth and chin and went through to look at the painting again, but the intensity of the dream from which he’d just woken made a mockery of his efforts. He would not conjure the assassin by this crude magic. He could paint a dozen canvases, a hundred, and still not capture the ambiguities of Pie ‘oh’ pah. He belched, bringing the taste of bad milk back up into his mouth. What was he to do? Lock himself away and let this sickness in him—put there by the sight of the assassin—consume him? Or bathe, sweeten himself, and go out to find some faces to put between him and the memory? Both vain endeavors. Which left a third, distressing route. To find Pie ‘oh’ pah in the flesh: to face him, question him, have his fill of him, until every ambiguity was scoured away.
He went on staring at the painting while he turned this option over. What would it take to find the assassin? An interrogation of Estabrook, for one. That wouldn’t be too onerous a duty. Then a search of the city, to find the place Estabrook bad claimed he couldn’t recall. Again, no great hardship. Better than sour milk and sourer dreams.
Knowing that in the light of morning he might lose his present clarity of mind, and he was best to close off at least one route of retreat, he went to the paints, squeezed onto his palm a fat worm of cadmium yellow, and worked it into the still-wet canvas. It obliterated the lovers immediately, but he wasn’t satisfied until he’d covered the canvas from edge to edge. The color fought for its brilliance, but it soon deteriorated, tainted by the darkness it was trying to obscure. By the time he’d finished, it was as if his attempt to capture Pie ‘oh’ pah had never been made.
Satisfied, he stood back and belched again. The nausea had gone from him. He felt strangely buoyant. Maybe sour milk suited him.
Pie ‘oh’ pah sat on the step of his trailer and stared up at the night sky. In their beds behind him, his adopted wife and children slept. In the heavens above him, the stars were burning behind a blanket of sodium-tinted cloud. He had seldom felt more alone in his long life than now. Since returning from New York he had been in a state of constant anticipation. Something was going to happen to him and his world, but he didn’t know what. His ignorance pained him, not simply because he was helpless in the face of this imminent event, but because his inability to grasp its nature was testament to how his skills had deteriorated. The days when he could read futurities off the air had gone. He was more and more a prisoner of the here and now. That here, the body he occupied, was also less than its former glory. It was so long since he’d corresponded the way he had with Gentle, taking the will of another as the gospel of his flesh, that he’d almost lost the trick of it. But Gentle’s desire had been potent enough to remind him, and his body still reverberated with echoes of their time together. Though it had ended badly he didn’t regret snatching those minutes. Another such encounter might never come.