And when I came to it was with an audible pop in the ears, and a rich consciousness of solitude, and a feeling of love and admiration for this big stolid body I was in, which even now was preoccupied and unconcerned, straining out over the rose bed to adjust a loose swathe of clematis on the wooden wall. The big body pottered on, with slow competence: yes, it really knows its stuff. I kept wanting to relax and take a good look at the garden—but something isn’t quite working. Something isn’t quite working: this body I’m in won’t take orders from this will of mine. Look around, I say. But his neck ignores me. His eyes have their own agenda. Is it serious? Are we okay? I didn’t panic. I made do with peripheral vision, which, after all, is the next best thing. I saw curled flora swooping and trembling, like pulses or soft explosions in the side of the head. And a circumambient pale green, barred and embossed with pale light, like . . . like American money. I pottered on out there until it began to get dark. I dumped the tools in the hut. Wait a minute. Why am I walking backward into the house? Wait. Is it dusk coming, or is it dawn? What is the—what is the sequence of the journey I’m on? What are its rules? Why are the birds singing so strangely? Where am I heading?
A routine, in any event, has certainly established itself. It seems I’m getting the hang of things.
I live, out here, in washing-line and mailbox America, innocuous America, in affable, melting-pot, primary-color, You’re-okay-I’m-okay America. My name, of course, is Tod Friendly. Tod T. Friendly. Oh, I’m there, I’m there in Salad Days, or outside Hank’s Hardware World or on the patch of grass by the white town hall, with my chest thrust out and hands on hips and a kind of silent ho-ho-ho. Because that’s the kind of guy I am. I’m there—I’m there at the produce store, at the post office, with my “Hi” and my “Bye now” and my “Good. Good.” But it doesn’t quite go like that. It goes like this:
“Dug. Dug,” says the lady in the pharmacy.
“Dug,” I join in. “Oo y’rrah?”
“Aid ut oo y’rrah?”
“Mh-mm,” she’ll say, as she unwraps my hair lotion. I walk away, backward, with a touch of the hat. I speak without volition, in the same way that I do everything else. To tell the truth, it took me quite a while to realize that the pitiable chirruping I heard all about me was, in fact, human speech. Christ, even the larks and the sparrows sound more dignified. I translate this human warble, out of interest. I soon picked it up. I know I’m fluent, now, because I can dream in it. There’s another language, a second language, here in Tod’s head. We sometimes dream in that language too.
But, yes, here we go, trimly hatted, finely shod, with the Gazette tucked under the arm, past the little driveways (THICKLY SETTLED), the lettered mailboxes (Wells, Cohen, Rezika, Meleagrou, Klodzinski, Schering-Kahlbaum, and I don’t know what-all), the quiet ambition of every homestead (Please Respect Owner’s Rights), the kid-filled buses and the yellow sign saying SLOW—CHILDREN and the black shape of that precipitate youngster with his clutched school bag (of course he’s not looking. He’s busy running. The face, the eyes, are downward slanted. He has no mind for cars: only for the rightful exercise of his earthly powers). When the little ones squeeze past me in the Superette, I give their mops the chaste old tousle. Tod Friendly. I have no access to his thoughts—but I am awash with his emotions. I am like a crocodile in the thick river of his feeling tone. And you know what? Each glance, each pair of eyes, even as they narrow in ingenuous appraisal, draws a bead on something inside him, and I sense the heat of fear and shame. Is that what I’m heading toward? And Tod’s fear, when I stop and analyze it, really is frightening. And inexplicable. It has to do with his own mutilation. Who might commit it? How can he avert it?