Why, for God’s sake? Something nagged at him; that was all he knew. Something told him: wait, just a little longer.
“It’s not over,” the opera-queens of his acquaintance used to say, “’til the fat lady sings.”
Well, somewhere deep in his soul, he knew that the fat woman still had an aria up her sleeve.
So he kept on living, which was often a wearisome business, all the while waiting for whatever it was that was nagging at him to make itself apparent.
Finally, on the night of March 31st, it did.
The circumstances were peculiar: he had a dream so powerful that it woke him. This in itself was odd, because he usually went to bed with a couple of scotches to wash down his sleeping pills, and as a consequence seldom woke.
But he woke tonight, and the dream he’d dreamed was crystal clear.
He had dreamed that he was sitting on the toilet, of all places, in a state of agonizing constipation (which was in his waking life a consequence of the pain-killers his doctor prescribed). As he sat there he realized that there were wooden boards on the floor of his toilet, not tiles as there were in life, and the cracks between the boards were so wide that he could see right down into the apartment below. Except that it wasn’t another apartment, it was — in the strange logic of this dream — another house. Nor was it just any house. It was Katya’s dream palace that was spread below him. And as he realized this, the gaps between the boards grew wider, so that he dropped down between them, slowly, as though he were feather-light.
And there he was, in Katya’s house, in Coldheart Canyon. He pulled up his pants and looked around.
The dream palace was in a state of considerable disrepair. The windows were broken, and birds flew in and out, shitting on the fancy furniture. A coyote skulked around in the kitchen, looking for scraps. And outside in the tree there were dozens of little red-and-black-striped monkeys, chattering and screeching. This was not so fanciful a detail as it might have seemed to someone who’d not known the house, as he had, in its heyday. There had been monkeys there — escapees from Katya’s private menagerie; and for a while it seemed the climate suited them and they would proliferate, but after a year or two some virus had decimated them.
Something about the place in its present condition made him want to leave. He knew, however, that he couldn’t. Not without paying his respects to the lady of the house. So rather than wait for her to show herself, he went to look for her, figuring that the sooner he found her the sooner he’d be released from this dream. He started up the stairs. There were flies crawling on the ground beneath his feet, so densely assembled and so sluggish that they refused to move as he ascended, obliging him to crush them under his bare feet as he climbed.
The door to the master bedroom was open. He stepped inside, somewhat tentatively. He had only been into the room once before. He remembered it as being large; but here in his dream it was immense. The drapes were partially drawn, and the sunlight that streamed between them was a curious color, almost lilac.
There was an enormous, but extremely plain, bed in the room. And sitting on the bed was the only woman, besides his mother, whom Jerry had loved: Katya. She was naked; or — more correctly stated — unclothed. Ninety percent of her body’s surface was covered with large snails, the common tortoiseshell variety that every gardener curses. They were moving all over her skin. They were on her face, on her breasts and belly, on her thighs and shins. Her hair was matted with their silvery trails, and thirty or forty of them were arranged on her head like a grotesque crown. Her legs were open, and they were also investigating the crevice between her thighs. As is so often the case in dreams he saw all this with horrid particularity. Saw the way their boneless grey-green bodies extended from their shells as they moved over Katya’s skin; their horns extending tentatively as they advanced, then retracting as they encountered an obstacle — a nipple, an ear, the knuckle of her thumb — only to stretch out again when they were certain there was no danger in the encounter.