His problem could be best summed up with how he felt about Jonesy… and of course that he felt at all was bad enough. He could think Now Jonesy is cut off and I have solved my problem; I have quarantined him just as their military tried to quarantine us. I am being followed-chased, intact-but barring engine trouble or a flat tire, neither group of followers has much chance of catching me. I have too great a lead.
These things were facts-truth-but they had no savor. What had savor was the idea of going to the door behind which his reluctant host was imprisoned and yelling: “I fixed you, didn’t I? I fixed your little red wagon, didn’t I?” What a wagon, red or otherwise, had to do with any of this Mr Gray didn’t know, but it was an emotional bullet of fairly high caliber from Jonesy’s armory-it had a deep and satisfying childhood resonance. And then he would stick Jonesy’s tongue (my tongue now, Mr Gray thought with undeniable satisfaction) between Jonesy’s lips and “give him the old raspberry”.
As for the followers, he wanted to drop Jonesy’s pants and show them Jonesy’s buttocks. This was as senseless as What goes around comes around, as senseless as little red wagon, but he wanted to do it. It was called “mooning the assholes” and he wanted to do it.
He was, Mr Gray realized, infected with this world’s byrus. It began with emotion, progressed to sensory awareness (the taste of food, the undeniable savage pleasure of making the State Trooper beat his head in against the tiled bathroom wall-the hollow thud-thud of it), and then progressed to what Jonesy called higher thinking. This was a joke, in Mr Gray’s view, not much different from calling shit reprocessed food or genocide ethnic cleansing. And yet thinking had its attractions for a being which had always existed as part of a vegetative mind, a sort of highly intelligent not-consciousness.
Before Mr Gray had shut him up, Jonesy had suggested that he give over his mission and simply enjoy being human. Now he discovered that desire in himself as his previously harmonious mind, his not-conscious mind, began to fragment, to turn into a crowd of opposing voices, some wanting A, some wanting B, some wanting Q squared and divided by Z. He would have thought such babble would be horrible, the stuff of madness. Instead he found himself enjoying the wrangle.
There was bacon. There was “sex with Carla”, which Jonesy’s mind identified as a superlatively enjoyable act, involving both sensory and emotional input. There was fast driving and bumper pool in O’Leary’s Bar near Fenway Park and beer and live bands that played loud and Patty Loveless singing “Blame it on your lyin cheatin cold deadbeatin two-timin double-dealin mean mistreatin lovin heart” (whatever that meant). There was the look of the land rising from the fog on a summer morning. And murder, of course. There was that.
His problem was that if he didn’t finish this business quickly, he might never finish it at all. He was no longer byrum but Mr Gray. How long before he left Mr Gray behind and became Jonesy?
It’s not going to happen, he thought. He pressed the accelerator down, and although it didn’t have much, the Subaru gave him a little more. In the back seat the dog yipped… then howled in pain. Mr Gray sent out his mind and touched the byrum growing inside the dog. It was growing fast. Almost too fast. And here was something else-there was no pleasure in meeting its mind, none of the warmth that comes when like encounters like. The mind of the byrum felt cold… rancid…
“Alien,” he muttered.
Nevertheless, he quieted it. When the dog went into the water supply, the byrum should still be inside. It would need time to adapt. The dog would drown, but the byrum would live yet awhile, feeding on the dog’s dead body, until it was time. But first he had to get there.
It wouldn’t be long now.
As he drove west on I-90, past little towns (shitsplats, Jonesy thought them, but not without affection) like Westborough, Grafton, and Dorothy Pond (getting closer now, maybe forty miles to go), he looked for a place to put his new and uneasy consciousness where it wouldn’t get him in trouble. He tried Jonesy’s kids, then backed away-far too emotional. Tried Duddits again, but that was still a blank; Jonesy had stolen the memories. Finally he settled on Jonesy’s work, which was teaching history, and his specialty, which was gruesomely fascinating. Between 1860 and 1865, it seemed America had split in two, as byrus colonies did near the end of each growth cycle. There had been all sorts of causes, the chief of which had to do with “slavery”, but again, this was like calling shit or vomit reprocessed food. “Slavery” meant nothing. “Right of secession” meant nothing. “Preserving the Union” meant nothing. Basically, they had just done what these creatures did best: they “got mad,” which was really the same thing as “going mad” but more socially acceptable. Oh, but on such a scale!
Mr Gray was investigating boxes and boxes of fascinating weaponry-grapeshot, chainshot, minie balls, cannonballs, bayonets, landmines-when a voice intruded.
bacon
He pushed the thought aside, although Jonesy’s stomach gurgled. He’d like some bacon, yes, bacon was fleshy and greasy and slippery and satisfying in a primitive, physical way, but this was not the time. Perhaps after he’d gotten rid of the dog. Then, if he had time before the others caught up, he could eat himself to death if he so chose. But this was not the time. As he passed Exit 10-only two to go, now-he turned his mind back to the Civil War, to blue men and gray men running through the smoke, screaming and stabbing each other in the guts, fixing little red wagons without number, pounding the stocks of their rifles into the skulls of their enemies, producing those intoxicating thud-thud sounds, and-
bacon
His stomach gurgled again. Saliva squirted into Jonesy’s mouth and he remembered Dysart’s, the brown and crispy strips on the blue plate, you picked it up with your fingers, the texture was hard, the texture of dead and tasty flesh-
Can’t think of this.
A horn honked irritably, making Mr Gray jump, making Lad whine. He had wandered into the wrong lane, what Jonesy’s mind identified as “the passing lane”, and he pulled over to let one of the big trucks, going faster than the Subaru could go, sweep by. It splashed the small car’s windshield with muddy water, momentarily blinding him, and Mr Gray thought Catch you kill you beat the brains out of your head you unsafe johnny reb of a driver you, thud-thud, fix your wagon your little red
bacon sandwich
That one was like a gunshot in his head. He fought it but the strength of it was something entirely new. Could that be Jonesy? Surely not, Jonesy wasn’t that strong. But suddenly he seemed an stomach, and the stomach was hollow, hurting, craving. Surely he could stop long enough to assuage it. If he didn’t he was apt to drive right off the
Mr Gray let out an inarticulate cry, unaware that he’d begun to drool helplessly.
18
“I hear him,” Henry said suddenly. He put his fists to his temples, as if to contain a headache. “Christ, it hurts. He’s so hungry.” “Who?” Owen asked. They had just crossed the state line into Massachusetts. In front of the car, the rain fell in silver, wind-slanted lines. “The dog? Jonesy? Who?” “Him,” Henry said. “Mr Gray.” He looked at Owen, a sudden wild hope in his eye. “I think he’s pulling over. I think he’s stopping.”
19
“Boss.”
Kurtz was on the verge of dozing again when Perlmutter turned-not without effort-and spoke to him. They had just gone through the New Hampshire tolls, Freddy Johnson being careful to use the automated exact-change lane (he was afraid a human toll-taker might notice the stench in the Humvee’s cabin, the broken window in back, the weaponry… or all three).
Kurtz looked into Archie Perlmutter’s sweat-streaked, haggard face with interest. With fascination, even. The colorless bean-counting bureaucrat, he of the briefcase on station and clipboard in the field, hair always neatly combed and parted ruler-straight on the left? The man who could not for the life of him train himself out of using the word sir? That man was gone. Thin though it was, he thought Pearly’s countenance had somehow richened. He’s turning into Ma Joad, Kurtz thought, and almost giggled.
“Boss, I’m still thirsty.” Pearly cast longing eyes on Kurtz’s Pepsi, then blew out another hideous fart. Ma Joad on trumpet in hell Kurtz thought and this time he did giggle. Freddy cursed, but not with his former shocked disgust; now he sounded resigned, almost bored.
“I’m afraid this is mine, buck,” Kurtz. “And I’m a wee parched myself.”