So perhaps escape is possible. Escape from the—from the indecipherable monad. As for her journey into him, well, that’s tougher. She tells us things about ourself. But how much does she really know? Tod’s playing it cool, of course, as always. I still don’t know if he’ll ever come across.
It’s quite exciting, I suppose—the news about my wife and child. The wife and child that Tod and I will one day have. But babies worry me. We do know, naturally, that babies are always causing worry and concern. They are very worrying little creatures.
Where do they go, the little creatures who disappear: the vanished? I have an intractable presentiment that I will soon start seeing them in Tod’s dream.
Every sixth or seventh day or so, in the morning, as we prepare to sack out, and go through the stunned routines of miring, of mussing (we derange each eyebrow with a fingerstroke against the grain), Tod and I can feel the dream just waiting to happen, gathering its energies from somewhere on the other side. We’re fatalistic. We lie there, with the lamp burning, while dawn fades. Tepid sweats form, and shine, and instantly evaporate. Then our heart rate climbs, steadily, until our ears are gulping on the new blood. Now we don’t know who we are. I have to be ready for when Tod makes his lunge for the light switch. And then in darkness with a shout that gives a fierce twist to his jaw—we’re in it. The enormous figure in the white coat, his black boots straddling many acres. Somewhere down there, between his legs, the line of souls. I wish I had power, just power enough to avert my eyes. Please, don’t show me the babies. . . . Where does the dream come from? He hasn’t done it yet. So the dream must be about what Tod will eventually do.
There is a thing out there called fashion. Fashion is for youth and all its volatility, but Tod and I occasionally dabble. For example, we went to the thrift store not so long ago and picked up two pairs of flared pants. I wanted to try them on right there but for months he let them dangle in the closet upstairs, growing the wrinkles and air pockets that would finally fit his shape, the peculiar wishbone of his shanks. Then, one night, he unceremoniously slipped into them. Later, after work, I got a pretty good look at these new pants of ours, as Tod stood before the full-length mirror unknotting the plump Windsor of his tie. Well, they weren’t actually outrageous, Tod’s flares, nothing like the twin-ballgown effect we would soon start seeing on the street. But I found them thoroughly disgraceful, all the same: aesthetically, they worked on me like violence. This substantial citizen, this old doctor—and his slobbering calves. Where have his feet gone, for Christ’s sake? I knew then, I think, that Tod’s cruelty, his secret, had to do with a central mistake about human bodies. Or maybe I just discovered something to do with the style or the line of his cruelty. Tod’s cruelty would be trashy, shitty, errant, bassackward: flared. . . . Still, the pants caught on and now everyone is into them. They move down the street like yachts: the landlocked sailors of the city. Next thing you know, women’s hemlines go up by about three feet. The sudden candor and power of female haunch. They’re already coming down again, slowly, but Jesus.
Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change. A few years ago, the pedophile, strolling through the shopping mall, or sitting at a quiet table in Salad Binge or Just Desserts, might have coordinated his assignations— his intergenerational trysts—by mobile telephone. Now you never see mobile telephones, and malls and restaurants are different, so the pedophile must manage things in some other way, in some other style.
A war is coming. Just a little one, for now. Several times, in bars, glancing up from our Bud or our Molson or our Miller, we have seen that same shot on the mounted TV: like a eugenic cross between swordfish and stingray, the helicopter twirls upward from the ocean and crouches grimly on the deck of the aircraft carrier, ready to fight.