perilously close to the door into the furnace-room. Sifkitz, however, still saw the
picture perfectly. It was fixed firmly in his mind now and never changed. Unless he
was riding, of course, but even then he was aware of an underlying sameness. Which
was good. That essential sameness was a kind of touchstone, a way of assuring
himself this was still no more than an elaborate mind-game, something plugged into
his subconscious that he could unplug whenever he wanted.
He had brought down a box of colors for the occasional touch-up, and now, without
thinking too much about it, he added several blobs of brown to the road, mixing them
with black to make them darker than the drifted leaves. He stepped back, looked at the
new addition, and nodded. It was a small change but in its way, perfect.
The following day, as he rode his three-speed Raleigh through the woods (he was less
than sixty miles from Herkimer now and only eighty from the Canadian border), he
came around a bend and there was a good-sized buck deer standing in the middle of
the road, looking at him with startled dark velvet eyes. It flipped up the white flag of
its tail, dropped a pile of scat, and was then off into the woods again. Sifkitz saw another flip of its tail and then the deer was gone. He rode on, giving the deer-shit a
miss, not wanting it in the treads of his tires.
That night he silenced the alarm and approached the painting on the wall, wiping
sweat from his forehead with a bandanna he took from the back pocket of his jeans.
He looked at the projection critically, hands on hips. Then, moving with his usual
confident speed—he’d been doing this sort of work for almost twenty years, after
all—he painted the scat out of the picture, replacing it with a clutch of rusty beer cans
undoubtedly left by some upstate hunter in search of pheasant or turkey.
“You missed those, Berkowitz,” he said that night as he sat drinking a beer instead of
a V-8 juice. “I’ll pick ’em up myself tomorrow, but don’t let it happen again.”
Except when he went down the next day, there was no need to paint the beer cans out
of the picture; they were already gone. For a moment he felt real fright prod his belly
like a blunt stick—what had he done, sleepwalked down here in the middle of the
night, picked up his trusty can of turp and a brush?—and then put it out of his mind.
He mounted the stationary bike and was soon riding his old Raleigh, smelling the
clean smells of the forest, relishing the way the wind blew his hair back from his
forehead. And yet wasn’t that the day things began to change? The day he sensed he
might not be alone on the road to Herkimer? One thing was beyond doubt: it was the
day after the disappearing beer cans that he had the really terrible dream and then
drew the picture of Carlos’s garage.
IV. Man with Shotgun
It was the most vivid dream he’d had since the age of fourteen, when three or four
brilliant wet-dreams had ushered him into physical manhood. It was the most horrible
dream ever, hands down, nothing else even close. What made it horrible was the sense
of impending doom that ran through it like a red thread. This was true even though the
dream had a weird thinness: he knew he was dreaming but could not quite escape it.
He felt as if he’d been wrapped in some terrible gauze. He knew his bed was near and
he was in it—struggling—but he couldn’t quite break through to the Richard Sifkitz
who lay there, trembling and sweaty in his Big Dog sleep-shorts.
He saw a pillow and a beige telephone with a crack in the case. Then a hallway filled
with pictures that he knew were of his wife and three daughters. Then a kitchen, the
microwave oven flashing 4:16. A bowl of bananas (they filled him with grief and
horror) on the Formica counter. A breezeway. And here lay Pepe the dog with his