Dreamcatcher Read online

  And then, oh God, this is new--the message does go through! As he reaches the corner, as he stands there on the curb, just about to step down into the crosswalk, it does go through!

  "What?" he says, and the man who has stopped beside him, the first one to bend over him in a past which now may be blessedly cancelled, looks at him suspiciously and says "I didn't say anything," as though there might be a third with them. Jonesy barely hears him because there is a third, there is a voice inside him, one which sounds suspiciously like his own, and it's screaming at him to stay on the curb, to stay out of the street--

  Then he hears someone crying. He looks across to the far side of Prospect and oh God, Duddits is there, Duddits Cavell naked except for his Underoos, and there is brown stuff smeared all around his mouth. It looks like chocolate, but Jonesy knows better. It's dogshit, that bastard Richie made him eat it after all, and people over there are walking back and forth regardless, ignoring him, as if Duddits wasn't there.

  "Duddits!" Jonesy calls. "Duddits, hang on, man, I'm coming!"

  And he plunges into the street without looking, the passenger inside helpless to do anything but ride along, understanding at last that this was exactly how and why the accident happened--the old man, yes, the old man with early-stage Alzheimer's who had no business behind the wheel of a car in the first place, but that had only been part of it. The other part, concealed in the blackness surrounding the crash until now, was this: he had seen Duddits and had simply bolted, forgetting to look.

  He glimpses something more, as well: some huge pattern, something like a dreamcatcher that binds all the years since they first met Duddits Cavell in 1978, something that binds the future as well.

  Sunlight twinkles on a windshield; he sees this in the corner of his left eye. A car coming, and too fast. The man who was beside him on the curb, old Mr. I-Didn't-Say-Anything, cries out: "Watch it, guy, watch it!" but Jonesy barely hears him. Because there is a deer on the sidewalk behind Duddits, a fine big buck, almost as big as a man. Then, just before the Town Car strikes him, Jonesy sees the deer is a man, a man in an orange cap and an orange flagman's vest. On his shoulder, like a hideous mascot, is a legless weasel-thing with enormous black eyes. Its tail--or maybe it's a tentacle--is curled around the man's neck. How in God's name could I have thought he was a deer? Jonesy thinks, and then the Lincoln strikes him and he is knocked into the street. He hears a bitter, muffled snap as his hip breaks.

  2

  There is no darkness, not this time; for better or worse, arc-sodiums have been installed on Memory Lane. Yet the film is confused, as if the editor took a few too many drinks at lunch and forgot just how the story was supposed to go. Part of this has to do with the strange way time has been twisted out of shape: he seems to be living in the past, present, and future all at the same time.

  This is how we travel, a voice says, and Jonesy realizes it is the voice he heard weeping for Marcy, for a shot. Once acceleration passes a certain point, all travel becomes time travel. Memory is the basis of every journey.

  The man on the corner, old Mr. I-Didn't-Say-Anything, bends over him, asks if he's all right, sees that he isn't, then looks up and says, "Who's got a cell phone? This guy needs an ambulance." When he raises his head, Jonesy sees there's a little cut under the guy's chin, old Mr. I-Didn't-Say-Anything probably did it that morning without even realizing it. That's sweet, Jonesy thinks, then the film jumps and here's an old dude in a rusty black topcoat and a fedora hat--call this elderly dickweed old Mr. What'd-I-Do. He's wandering around asking people that. He says he looked away for a moment and felt a thump--what'd I do? He says he has never liked a big car--what'd I do? He says he can't remember the name of the insurance company, but they call themselves the Good Hands People--what'd I do? There is a stain on the crotch of his trousers, and as Jonesy lies there in the street he can't help feeling a kind of exasperated pity for the old geezer--wishes he could tell him You want to know what you did, take a look at your pants. You did Number One, Q-E-fuckin-D.

  The film jumps again. Now there are even more people gathered around him. They look very tall and Jonesy thinks it's like having a coffin's-eye view of a funeral. That makes him remember a Ray Bradbury story, he thinks it's called "The Crowd," where the people who gather at accident sites--always the same ones--determine your fate by what they say. If they stand around you murmuring that it isn't so bad, he's lucky the car swerved at the last second, you'll be okay. If, on the other hand, the people who make up the crowd start saying things like He looks bad or I don't think he's going to make it, you'll die. Always the same people. Always the same empty, avid faces. The lookie-loos who just have to see the blood and hear the groans of the injured.

  In the cluster surrounding him, just behind old Mr. I-Didn't-Say-Anything, Jonesy sees Duddits Cavell, now fully dressed and looking okay--no dogshit mustache, in other words. McCarthy is there, too. Call him old Mr. I-Stand-at-the-Door-and-Knock, Jonesy thinks. And someone else, as well. A gray man. Only he's not a man at all, not really; he's the alien that was standing behind him while Jonesy was at the bathroom door. Huge black eyes dominate a face which is otherwise almost featureless. The saggy dewlapping elephant's skin is tighter here; old Mr. ET-Phone-Home hasn't started to succumb to the environment yet. But he will. In the end, this world will dissolve him like acid.

  Your head exploded, Jonesy tries to tell the gray man, but no words come out; his mouth won't even open. And yet old Mr. ET-Phone-Home seems to hear him, because that gray head inclines slightly.

  He's passing out, someone says, and before the film jumps again he hears old Mr. What'd-I-Do, the guy who hit him and smashed his hip like a china plate in a shooting gallery, telling someone People used to say I look like Lawrence Welk.

  3

  He's unconscious in the back of an ambulance but watching himself, having an actual out-of-body experience, and here is something else new, something no one bothers to tell him about later: he goes into V-tach while they are cutting his pants off, exposing a hip that looks as if someone had sewn two large and badly made doorknobs under it. V-tach, he knows exactly what that is because he and Carla never miss an episode of ER, they even watch the reruns on TNT, and here come the paddles, here comes the goo, and one of the EMTs is wearing a gold crucifix around his neck, it brushes Jonesy's nose as old Mr. EMT bends over what is essentially a dead body, and holy fuck he died in the ambulance! Why did no one ever tell him that he died in the fucking ambulance? Did they think that maybe he wouldn't be interested, that maybe he'd just go Ho-hum, been there, done that, got the tee-shirt?

  "Clear!" shouts the other EMT, and just before they hit him the driver looks back and he sees it's Duddits's Mom. Then they whack him with the juice and his body jumps, all that white meat shakin on the bone, as Pete would say, and although the Jonesy watching has no body, he feels the electricity just the same, a great big pow that lights up the tree of his nerves like a skyrocket. Praise Jesus and get-down hallelujah.

  The part of him on the stretcher jumps like a fish pulled from the water, then lies still. The EMT crouched behind Roberta Cavell looks down at his console and says, "Ah, man, no, flatline, hit him again." And when the other guy does, the film jumps and Jonesy's in an operating room.

  No, wait, that's not quite right. Part of him's in the OR, but the rest of him is behind a piece of glass and looking in. Two other doctors are here, but they show no interest in the surgical team's efforts to put Jonesy-Dumpty back together again. They are playing cards. Above their heads, wavering in the airflow from a heating-vent, is the dreamcatcher from Hole in the Wall.

  Jonesy has no urge to watch what's going on behind the glass--he doesn't like the bloody crater where his hip was, or the bleary gleam of shattered bone nosing out of it. Although he has no stomach to be sick to in his disembodied state, he feels sick to it just the same.

  Behind him, one of the card-playing docs says, Duddits was how we defined ourselves. Duddits was our finest hour. To which the other
replies, You think so? And Jonesy realizes the docs are Henry and Pete.

  He turns toward them, and it seems he's not disembodied after all, because he catches a ghost of his reflection in the window looking into the operating room. He is not Jonesy anymore. Not human anymore. His skin is gray and his eyes are black bulbs staring out of his noseless face. He has become one of them, one of the--

  One of the grayboys, he thinks. That's what they call us, the grayboys. Some of them call us the space-niggers.

  He opens his mouth to say some of this, or perhaps to ask his old friends to help him--they have always helped each other, if they could--but then the film jumps again (goddam that editor, drinking on the job) and he's in bed, a hospital bed in a hospital room, and someone is calling Where's Jonesy, I want Jonesy.

  There, he thinks with wretched satisfaction, I always knew it was Jonesy, not Marcy. That's death calling, or maybe Death, and I must be very quiet if I'm to avoid him, he missed me in the crowd, made a grab for me in the ambulance and missed again, and now here he is in the hospital, masquerading as a patient.

  Please stop, crafty old Mr. Death groans in that hideous coaxing monotone, I can't stand it, give me a shot, where's Jonesy, I want Jonesy.

  I'll just lie here until he stops, Jonesy thinks, I can't get up anyway, I just had two pounds of metal put in my hip and it'll be days until I'm able to get up, maybe a week.

  But to his horror he realizes he is getting up, throwing the covers aside and getting out of bed, and although he can feel the sutures in his hip and across his belly straining and breaking open, spilling what is undoubtedly donated blood down his leg and into his pubic hair, soaking it, he walks across the room without a limp, through a patch of sunlight that casts a brief but very human shadow on the floor (not a grayboy now, there is that to be grateful for, at least, because the grayboys are toast), and to the door. He strolls unseen down a corridor, past a parked gurney with a bedpan on it, past a pair of laughing, talking nurses who are looking at photographs, passing them from hand to hand, and toward that droning voice. He is helpless to stop and understands that he is in the cloud. Not a redblack cloud, as both Pete and Henry sensed it, however; the cloud is gray and he floats within it, a unique particle that is not changed by the cloud, and Jonesy thinks: I'm what they were looking for. I don't know how it can be, but I am just what they were looking for. Because . . . the cloud doesn't change me?

  Yes, sort of.

  He passes three open doors. The fourth is closed. On it is a sign which reads COME IN, THERE IS NO INFECTION HERE, IL N'Y A PAS D'INFECTION ICI.

  You lie, Jonesy thinks. Cruise or Curtis or whatever his name is may be a madman, but he's right about one thing: there is infection.

  Blood is pouring down his legs, the bottom half of his johnny is now a bright scarlet (the claret has really begun to flow, the old boxing announcers used to say), but he feels no pain. Nor does he fear infection. He is unique and the cloud can only carry him, not change him. He opens the door and goes inside.

  4

  Is he surprised to see the gray man with the big black eyes lying in the hospital bed? Not even a little bit. When Jonesy turned and discovered this guy standing behind him back at Hole in the Wall, the sucker's head exploded. That was, all things considered, one hell of an Excedrin headache. It would put anyone in the hospital. The guy's head looks okay now, though; modern medicine is wonderful.

  The room is crepitant with fungus, florid with redgold growth. It's growing on the floor, the windowsill, the slats of the venetian blinds; it has bleared its way across the surface of the overhead light fixture and the glucose bottle (Jonesy assumes it's glucose) on the stand by the bed; little reddish-gold beards dangle from the bathroom doorknob and the crank at the foot of the bed.

  As Jonesy approaches the gray thing with the sheet pulled up to its narrow hairless chest, he sees there is a single get-well card on the bedtable. FEEL BETTER SOON! is printed above a cartoon picture of a sad-looking turtle with a Band-Aid on its shell. And below the picture: FROM STEVEN SPIELBERG AND ALL YOUR PALS IN HOLLYWOOD.

  This is a dream, full of a dream's tropes and in-jokes, Jonesy thinks, but he knows better. His mind is mixing things, pureeing them, making them easier to swallow, and that is the way of dreams; past, present, and future have all been stirred together, which is also like dreams, but he knows that he'd be wrong to dismiss this as nothing but a fractured fairy-tale from his subconscious. At least some of it is happening.

  The bulbous black eyes are watching him. And now the sheet stirs and humps up beside the thing in the bed. What emerges from beneath it is the reddish weasel-thing that got the Beav. It is staring at him with those same glassy black eyes as it propels itself with its tail up the pillow, where it curls itself next to that narrow gray head. It was no wonder McCarthy felt a little indisposed, Jonesy thinks.

  Blood continues to pour down Jonesy's legs, sticky as honey and hot as fever. It patters onto the floor and you'd think it would soon be sprouting its own colony of that reddish mold or fungus or whatever it is, a regular jungle of it, but Jonesy knows better. He is unique. The cloud can carry him, but it cannot change him.

  No bounce, no play, he thinks, and then, immediately: Shhh, shhh, keep that to yourself.

  The gray creature raises its hand in a kind of weary greeting. On it are three long fingers ending in rosy-pink nails. Thick yellow pus is oozing from beneath them. More of this stuff gleams loosely in the folds of the guy's skin, and from the corners of his--its?--eyes.

  You're right, you do need a shot, Jonesy says. Maybe a little Drano or Lysol, something like that. Put you out of your mi--

  A terrible thought occurs to him then; for a moment it's so strong he is unable to resist the force moving him toward the bed. Then his feet begin to move again, leaving big red tracks behind him.

  You're not going to drink my blood, are you? Like a vampire?

  The thing in the bed smiles without smiling. We are, so far as I can express it in your terms, vegetarians.

  Yeah, but what about Bowser there? Jonesy points to the legless weasel, and it bares a mouthful of needle teeth in a grotesque grin. Is Bowser a vegetarian?

  You know he's not, the gray thing says, its slit of a mouth not moving--this guy is one hell of a ventriloquist, you had to give him that; they'd love him in the Catskills. But you know you have nothing to fear from him.

  Why? How am I different?

  The dying gray thing (of course it's dying, its body is breaking down, decaying from the inside out) doesn't reply, and Jonesy once again thinks No bounce, no play. He has an idea this is one thought the gray fellow would dearly love to read, but no chance of that; the ability to shield his thoughts is another part of what makes him different, unique, and vive la difference is all Jonesy can say (not that he does say it).

  How am I different?

  Who is Duddits? the gray thing asks, and when Jonesy doesn't answer, the thing once more smiles without moving its mouth. There, the gray thing says. We both have questions the other will not answer. Let's put them aside, shall we? Facedown. They are . . . what do you call it? What do you call it in the game?

  The crib, Jonesy says. Now he can smell the thing's decay. It's the smell McCarthy brought into camp with him, the smell of ether-spray. He thinks again that he should have shot the oh-gosh oh-dear son of a bitch, shot him before he could get in where it was warm. Left the colony inside him to die beneath the deer-stand in the old maple as the body grew cold.

  The crib, yes, the gray thing says. The dreamcatcher is now in here, suspended from the ceiling and spinning slowly above the gray thing's head. These things we each don't want the other to know, we'll set them aside to count later. We'll put them in the crib.

  What do you want from me?

  The gray creature gazes at Jonesy unblinkingly. So far as Jonesy can tell, it can't blink; it has neither lids nor lashes.

  Nyther lids nor lashes, it says, only it's Pete's voice Jonesy hears. Always nyther, n
ever neether. Who's Duddits?

  And Jonesy is so surprised to hear Pete's voice that he almost by-God tells him . . . which, of course, was the intention: to surprise it out of him. This thing is crafty, dying or not. He would do well to be on his guard. He sends the gray fellow a picture of a big brown cow with a sign around its neck. The sign reads DUDDITS THE COW.

  Again the gray fellow smiles without smiling, smiles inside Jonesy's head. Duddits the cow, it says. I think not.

  Where are you from? Jonesy asks.

  Planet X. We come from a dying planet to eat Domino's Pizza, buy on easy credit terms, and learn Italian the easy Berlitz way. Henry's voice this time. Then Mr. ET-Phone-Home reverts to its own voice . . . except, Jonesy realizes with a weary lack of surprise, its voice is his voice, Jonesy's voice. And he knows what Henry would say: that he's having one whopper of a hallucination in the wake of Beaver's death.

  Not anymore, he wouldn't, Jonesy thinks. Not anymore. Now he's the eggman, and the eggman knows better.

  Henry? He'll be dead soon, the gray fellow says indifferently. Its hand steals across the counterpane; the trio of long gray fingers enfolds Jonesy's hand. Its skin is warm and dry.

  What do you mean? Jonesy asks, afraid for Henry . . . but the dying thing in the bed doesn't answer. It's another card for the crib, so Jonesy plays another one from his hand: Why did you call me here?

  The gray creature expresses surprise, although its face still doesn't move. No one wants to die alone, it says. I just want someone to be with. I know, we'll watch television.

  I don't want--

  There's a movie I particularly want to see. You'll enjoy it, too. It's called Sympathy for the Grayboys. Bowser! The remote!