11. The Dreamers

I don’t know what the universe means. I might have an idea. You might, too. Or not. All I can say to you is beware of dreams. They’re dangerous. I found out.

I did two tours in Vietnam. Got out in June of ’71. Nobody spit on me when I got off the plane in New York, and no one called me a baby killer. Of course no one thanked me for my service, either, so I guess that’s a wash. This story—memoir? confession?—has nothing to do with Nam, except it does. It does. If I hadn’t spent twenty-six months humping the boonies, I might have tried to stop Elgin when we saw the teeth. Not that I would have had much luck with that. The Gentleman Scientist meant to see it through, and in a way he did. But I could have walked away at least. I didn’t because the young man who went to Vietnam wasn’t the same young man who came back. That young man was empty. Emotions scrubbed. So what happened, happened. I don’t hold myself responsible. He would have gone on regardless. I just know I stayed even when I knew we were edging past sanity. I suppose I wanted to wake myself up again. I suppose I did.

I went back to Maine and stayed with my mother for awhile in Skowhegan. She was doing all right. Assistant manager at George’s Banana Stand, sounds like a roadside stall but it’s a grocery store. She told me I’d changed and I said I know. She asked me what I was going to do for work and I said I’d find something in Portland. I said I’d do what I learned from Sissy and she said that sounded good. I think she was glad to see the back of me. I think I made her nervous. I asked her once if she missed my father or my stepfather. She said my father. Of Lester she said good riddance to bad rubbish.

I bought a used car and drove to Portland and applied for work at a place called Temp-O. The woman who took my application said, “I don’t see where you went to school.” She was Mrs. Frobisher.

“I didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

“Go to school.”

“You don’t understand, young man. We hire stenographers here to fill in when someone is sick or quits. Some of our temps work in district court.”

“Try me,” I said.

“Do you know Gregg?”

“Yes. I learned from my sister. I was helping her with her homework, but I turned out to be better.”

“Where is your sister working?”

“She died.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” Mrs. Frobisher didn’t sound sorry and I didn’t blame her. People have problems enough coping with their own tragedies without taking on the tragedies of others. “How many words a minute?”

“Hundred and eighty.”

She smiled. “Really.”

“Really.”

“I doubt it.”

I said nothing. She handed me a pad and a #2 Eberhard Faber. “I’d like to see a hundred and eighty in action. That would be a treat.”

I flipped open the pad. I thought of Sissy and me sitting in her room, she at her desk in a circle of lamplight, me on the bed. She said I was better than her. She said how I picked it up like a dream, which was true. It was like picking up Vietnamese, also the Tay and Muong dialects. It’s not a skill, just a knack. I could see words turning into pothooks and hangers. Thick strokes, thin strokes, curls. They marched across my mind in lockstep. You could ask me if I liked it and I’d say sometimes. The way a person likes breathing sometimes. Most of the time you just do it.

“Are you ready?”

“Born ready.”

“We’ll see about that.” Then, very fast, “The quality of mercy is not strained it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath you can’t just walk in off the street and say you can transcribe a hundred and eighty it is twice blessed both he who gives and he who takes. Now read that back to me.”

I read it back to her without telling her she got the last part of Portia’s speech a few words wrong. She just looked at me for a few seconds, then said, “I’ll be goddamned.”

I worked at Temp-O for the next ten months or so. We were losing in Vietnam. It didn’t take a genius to see it. Sometimes people don’t stop when they should. Saying that makes me think of Elgin. The Gentleman Scientist.

There were four of us when I started, then six, then down to three, then back up to six again. Temping was a high-turnover job. They were all women except for Pearson, a tall drink of water with a bald spot he tried to cover and eczema around his nose and the corners of his mouth. Around his mouth it looked like dried spit. Pearson was there when I came and there when I left. He could do maybe sixty words a minute. On a good day. If you went too fast he’d tell you to slow down, slow down. I know because sometimes when it was slow the bunch of us would race. Two minutes of TV ads. Dishwashing liquid. Toothpaste. Paper towels. Things women who watch daytime TV buy. I always won. After awhile Pearson wouldn’t even try. He called it a childish game. I don’t know why Mrs. Frobisher kept Pearson on. She wasn’t fucking him or anything. I think maybe he was like something you get used to overlooking, like a pile of Christmas cards on the hall table that are still there come Valentine’s Day. He didn’t like me. I didn’t feel one way or the other about him, because that was how I rolled in ’71 and ’72. But it was Pearson who introduced me to Elgin. Or so you could say. He didn’t mean to do it.

We’d come in around eight-thirty or nine and sit in the back room there on Exchange Street, drinking coffee and eating doughnuts and watching a little portable TV or reading. Sometimes having a race. There were usually two or three copies of the Press Herald and Pearson always had one of them, muttering away at the stories and rubbing at his eczema so it snowed down in flurries. Mrs. Frobisher would call for Anne or Diane or Stella if it was an ordinary job. I mostly got court if someone was out sick. I had to learn the stenograph and I had to wear a stenomask, but that was all right. I got sent to high-powered meetings sometimes where recording devices were verboten. Then it was just me and my pad. So far as I liked any job, I liked those. Sometimes I’d transcribe and then have to hand over my pad. That was all right. Sometimes I got tipped.

Pearson used to drop sections of the paper on the floor when he finished with them. Diane called that slutty behavior one day and Pearson told her that if she didn’t like it she could just roll it small and stick it up her ass and a week or two later Diane left. Some days I would pick up the sections Pearson dropped and glance through them. The back room, which we called the bullpen, got boring when there were no jobs. The game shows and talk shows were tiresome. I always carried a paperback but this one day, the day I found out about Elgin (although I didn’t know his name just then because it wasn’t in the ad), the book I was reading didn’t engage my attention. It was a warbook written by a man who didn’t know anything about war.

It was the ad section I got hold of. Cars for sale by owner on one page and help wanted on the other. I cast my eye down the help wanteds, not exactly looking for another job, I was okay with Temp-O, just passing the time. The words Gentleman Scientist in boldface caught my eye. And the word phlegmatic. Not a word often seen in classified ads.

GENTLEMAN SCIENTIST wants assistant to aid in series of experiments. Stenographic expertise a must (60-80 wpm or better). Excellent wages upon receipt of excellent references. Confidentiality and phlegmatic temperament also a must.

There was a number. Curious to know who wanted a phlegmatic assistant, I called it. Passing the time. That was Thursday noon. On Saturday I drove seventy or so miles to Castle Rock in my used Ford and out Lake Road, which ended at Dark Score Lake. On the beach was a large stone house with a gated drive and a small stone house behind it where I came to live while in the employ of Elgin, the Gentleman Scientist. The house wasn’t a mansion, but it was close. There was a Volkswagen Bug and a Mercedes in the driveway. The Bug had a Maine plate and a flower decal on the gas hatch and a bumper sticker saying STOP THE WAR. I recognized it. The Mercedes had a Massachusetts plate. I thought it must belong to the Gentleman Scientist, which turned out right. I never knew where Elgin’s money came from. Maybe gentlemen don’t tell. What I thought was that he inherited it because he had no job so far as I could tell except for gentleman science and called the not-quite-a-mansion his summer place. I don’t know where the winter place was. Probably Boston or one of those outlying suburbs where the only Black or Asian faces you ever saw were pushing lawnmowers or serving lunch. I could have investigated these things, asked around town because town people have a way of knowing things and if you ask the right way they will always tell you, they want to tell you, nothing passes the time like gossip, and I did know the right way having grown up in a small town myself and elided my r’s as good Yankees do, but that wasn’t “where I was at,” as we used to say back then. I didn’t care if it was Weston or Brookline or the Back Bay. I didn’t even want the job or not want it. I wasn’t sick or anything, but I wasn’t a well man. You might understand that or you might not. Most nights I didn’t get much sleep and darkness is full of long hours. Most nights I fought the war and the war won. It’s an old story, I know. You can see it on television once a week.

I parked beside the Bug. A young woman came out carrying a briefcase in one hand and the steno pad in the other. She was dressed in a skirt suit. It was Diane, lately of Temp-O.

“Hello stranger,” I said.

“Hello yourself. You must be the next one. I hope you have better luck.”

“Didn’t get it?”

“He said he’d call me. I know what that means. Is Pearson still there?”

“Yes.”

“That fuck.”

She got in the Bug and puttered away. I rang the bell. Elgin answered it. He was tall and thin with a lot of sweptback white hair like a concert pianist. He wore a white shirt and khaki pants with the crotch hanging down like he’d lost weight. He looked about forty-five. He asked me if I was William Davis. I said I was. He asked me if I had a steno pad. I said I had half a dozen in the backseat of my car.

“You better get one.”

I got one, thinking it would be Mrs. Frobisher all over again. He took me inside to the living room, which felt like it still held the ghost of winter when the house was empty and the lake turned to ice. He asked me if I had brought my resume. I took out my wallet and showed him my honorable discharge and told him that was my resume. I didn’t think he’d care about me pumping gas or working as a busboy in the Headless Woman after I graduated high school.

“Since I got out of the Army I’ve been working at an agency in Portland called Temp-O. Your last one worked there, too. You can call if you want. Ask for Mrs. Frobisher. She might even let me keep my job if she finds out I’m looking for another one.”

“Why is that?”

“Because I’m the best she has.”

“Do you really want this job? Because you seem, what’s the word, lackadaisical.”

“I wouldn’t mind a change.” That was true.

“What about the wages? Want to know about them? Or how long the job lasts?”

I shrugged.

“Rolling stone are you?”

“I don’t know.” That was also true.

“Tell me, Mr. Davis, can you spell phlegmatic?”

I spelled it.

He nodded. “Because the last one couldn’t, even though she must have read it in my advertisement. I doubt if she even knew what it meant. She looked flighty to me. Was she, when you worked together?”

“I wouldn’t want to say.”

He smiled. Thin lips. Lines going down the sides of his mouth like you’d see on a ventriloquist’s dummy. Hornrim specs. He didn’t look like a scientist to me. He looked like he was trying to look like a scientist.

“Where did you serve? Vietnam?”

“Mostly.”

“Did you kill anyone?”

“I don’t talk about that.”

“Get any medals?”

“I don’t talk about that, either.”

“Fair enough. When you say you’re the best at Temp-O—I’ve seen a couple of others from there, not just Diane Bissonette—how many words a minute are we talking about?”

I told him.

“I’m going to test you on that. I have to. If you’re the best, that’s what I need. Stenography will be the only record. Almost the only record. There will be no audio recordings of my experiments. No motion picture film. There will be Polaroid photographs, which I will keep if I publish and destroy if I don’t.”

He waited for me to be curious, and I was, but not enough to ask. He would either tell me or he wouldn’t. There was a stack of books on the coffee table. He picked up the top one and tested me from it. The book was Man and His Symbols. He spoke at a good pace, but not speeding along the way Mrs. Frobisher had. There was some technical jargon, like activation-synthesis, and some difficult names, like Aniela Jaffé and Brescia University, but I saw them correctly. That’s what it is, a kind of seeing. I put them down, even though he stumbled over the name of Jaffé, pronouncing it Jaff. I read everything back to him.

“You are wasted at Temp-O,” he said.

I had nothing to say to that.

“You would live here during the course of my experiments. In the guest house out back. Days off. Plenty of free time. Do you have any medical skills as a result of your service?”

“Some. I could set a bone and I could resuscitate someone. If they were fished out of the lake in time, that is. I don’t suppose you’d have any need for sulfa packs here.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

“You look older.”

“Sure.”

“Were you by any chance at My Lai?”

“Before my time.”

He picked up one of the books in the stack: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. He picked up another called Memories, Dreams, Reflections. He hefted them. Seemed to weigh them in each hand, as if on a balance scale. “Do you know what these books have in common?”

“They’re both by Carl Jung.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You say his name correctly.”

Better than you say Aniela Jaffé, I thought but didn’t say.

“Don’t suppose you speak German?”

“Ein wenig,” I said, and held my thumb and forefinger apart.

He took up another volume from the stack. It was called Gegenwart und Zukunft. “This is my treasure. Rare, a first edition. Present and Future. I can’t read it, but I can look at the pictures, and I’ve studied the graphs. Mathematics is a universal language, as I’m sure you’re aware.”

I wasn’t because no language is universal. Numbers, like dogs, can be taught to do tricks. And the title of his first edition was actually Presence and Future. There is a world of difference between present and presence. A gulf. I didn’t care about that, but the book under Gegenwart und Zukunft interested me. It was the only one not by Jung. It was Beyond the Wall of Sleep, by H.P. Lovecraft. A man I knew in the ’docks, a doorgunner, had a paperback copy. It burned up and so did he.

There was more talk. The wages he proposed were high enough for me to wonder if his experiments were strictly legal. He left me several opportunities to ask about them but I didn’t. Finally he gave up teasing and asked me if I would like to hazard a guess about what his experiments would concern. I said dreams seemed likely.

“Yes, but I think I will keep the exact nature of my interest, the thrust, shall we say, to myself for the time being.”

I hadn’t asked about the thrust, another thing I didn’t bother to point out. He took a photo of my discharge papers with his Polaroid camera, then offered me the job. “Of course you could keep working at Temp-O, but here you would be aiding me as I explore realms no psychologist, not even Jung, has visited. Virgin territory.”

I said all right. He told me we would start in the middle of July and I said all right. He asked for my phone number and I gave it to him. I told him it was a roominghouse phone and down the hall. He asked if I had a girlfriend. I said no. He wore no wedding ring. I never saw any help. I cooked my own meals once I moved into the little guest house, or ate at one of the cafés in town. I don’t know who cooked his grub. There was something timeless about Elgin, as if he had no past and no future. He had a present but no particular presence. He smoked but I never saw him take a drink. All he had was his obsession about dreams.

On the way out I said, “You want to go over the wall of sleep, don’t you?”

He laughed at that. “No. I want to go under it.”

He called me on July 1st and told me to give my two weeks’ notice. I did. I didn’t think Mrs. Frobisher would tell me to never mind two weeks, just take a walk (or roll it small), and she didn’t. I was her best, and she wanted as much of me as she could get. He called me on July 8th and told me to move in when I finished work on the 14th. He said if I was living in a roominghouse I probably didn’t have much. He was right about that. He said he had a task for me right away, a small one.

My last interaction at Temp-O was with Pearson. I told him he was an asshole. He had no reply. Possibly he agreed with the assessment. Possibly he thought I might strike him. I don’t know. I drove around to the guest house and saw a keyring with two keys hanging down and a third stuck in the lock. Four rooms. Tidy. Warmer than the big house, probably because it was added later, after in-wall insulation became a thing. There was a fireplace in the living room and plenty of seasoned wood out back in a pile covered with a canvas tarp. I like a fireplace fire, always have. I didn’t go around to the big house. I figured Elgin would see my car and know I was in. There was an intercom in the little galley kitchen and a fax machine beside it. I had never seen a home fax machine before, but I knew what it was, having seen a few in Vietnam HQs. On the kitchen table was what looked like a scrapbook. A note taped to it said Familiarize yourself with these. You may want to take notes.

I leafed through the book. I didn’t take notes. My memory is good. There were twelve pages and twelve photographs under cellophane or maybe it was isinglass. Two were driver’s license photos. Two were headshots. Six women and six men. They were all different ages. The youngest looked like a high schooler. Below the photographs were their names and occupations. Two were college students. Two were teachers probably on their summer break. One was retired. The rest were what are known as bluecollar workers by people who don’t do bluecollar work, waitresses and store clerks, a carpenter and a long-haul truck driver.

There were eggs and bacon in the Frigidaire. I fried four eggs in bacon fat. There was a little deck on the side with a view of the lake. I ate there and looked at the water. When the sun was in the wedge between Mount Washington and Mount Jefferson and gold across the lake, I went in and went to bed. I slept better that night than I had in four years. Ten hours of thoughtless imageless darkness. It’s what being dead must be like.

On Saturday morning I walked down to the lakeshore. There was a bench. Elgin was sitting on it and smoking. Same white shirt and same long-crotch khaki pants. Or maybe different ones. I never saw him wear anything else, as if they were a kind of uniform. He asked me to sit down with him. I did.

“Get settled in all right?”

“Yes.”

He took out his wallet from his hip pocket and handed me a check. It was from The Dream Corporation LLC and made out to me. The sum was a thousand dollars.

“You can take it to the KeyBank in Castle Rock. That’s where I have my accounts, both personal and corporate. You can open your own account, if you like.”

“Can I just cash it?”

“Of course. Do you remember the first test subject in the book I left you?”

“Yes. Althea Gibson. A hairdresser. Looks to be about thirty.”

“Good memory. Is it eidetic? Given your stenographic speed and your knowledge of Vietnamese, I think it might be.”

So he had done some digging. Made some calls, as they say. “I suppose so. I picked up steno from my sister. Helping her study.”

“And you were better at it.”

“I guess I was but she landed rightside up. Got a job in Human Resources at Eastern Maine Medical. Better pay.” He didn’t need to know she died and I didn’t want to tell him.

“You were a translator in Vietnam.”

“Some of the time.”

“Don’t want to talk about it? That’s fine. It’s nice here, isn’t it? Peaceful. Later in the day there will be picnickers. The whine of the boats is annoying, it goes on from Memorial Day to Labor Day, but the picnickers stay further down the beach.”

“Your part is private.”

“Yes. I like my privacy. Mr. Davis, I believe I am going to change the world.”

“You mean the world’s understanding of dreams.”

“No. The world. If I am successful.” He got up. “I’m going to send you a fax. Look it over. Mrs. Gibson will be here at two o’clock on Tuesday afternoon. I’m paying her to close her hairdressing shop. You will greet her and show her in. I will want to show you the set-up before. Say noon. In case she comes early.”

“All right.”

“Read the fax. If you have comments, use the intercom. Otherwise, you are off until Tuesday.” He offered his hand. I stood up to shake with him. I was struck again by his timeless look. A kind of serenity. He believed he was going to change the world. He really believed it.

The fax shrieked in while I was making coffee. It was a release for his test subjects. I wondered again about the legality of this particular op. There were spaces for the test subject to print her or his name, address, and phone number. Below that it said that the undersigned had been informed and agreed to a light hypnotic drug being administered before the test run. It said the drug would wear off in six hours or less and that the test subject would feel fine. Since Elgin would be the one administering the drug and I wouldn’t be on the hook if something went wrong, I had no comments. I will admit I was becoming a little more interested. I thought it was possible that Elgin was crazy. After Vietnam I had a nose for it. I went downtown and bought groceries. The bank was open until noon. I started an account and deposited the check, taking a hundred dollars in cash. There was nothing about waiting for the check to clear. So they knew he was good for it. I had lunch at the Castle Rock Diner, then went back to the guest house and took a nap. There were no dreams.

On Tuesday I went to the big house at noon. Elgin was waiting on the stoop. Inside on the left was the living room where he had looked at my discharge papers and showed me his books by Jung. On the right were double doors. He opened them. It used to be a dining room but was now where he meant to conduct his experiments. It had been partitioned in two by a wall that looked made of plywood. One half of the room was for his test subjects. There was a couch with the head lifted and the feet lowered, like a psychiatrist’s couch. On one side of the couch was a Polaroid camera mounted on the tripod and pointed down. On the other side was a small table with a Blue Horse tablet open to the first blank page and a pen. So he expected his subjects to write notes, or thought they might, probably what they dreamed while the dreams were fresh. There were Bose speakers mounted on the walls. In the middle of the plywood wall facing the raised portion of the couch was a mirror and you’d have to be someone who never watched a cop show on TV not to know it was oneway glass. On Elgin’s side of the wall was a desk and another Polaroid on a tripod, looking through the oneway glass and pointed at the couch. There was a microphone on the desk. There was a row of buttons. There were more speakers on the walls. There was a Philips stereo system with a record on the turntable. There was a chair by the oneway glass.

“That’s for you,” he said, pointing at the chair. “Your post, where you will sit and watch. Do you have a fresh pad?”

“Yes.”

“You will take down everything I say. If Mrs. Gibson says anything, you’ll hear it from the speakers on this side and take that down. If you don’t understand what she says, often what a person says while asleep is unintelligible, draw a double line.”

“If you had a tape recorder,” I began, but he waved that off.

“I told you there will be no audio, no film. Only Polaroids. I control the sound system and both cameras from the desk.”

“No audio, no film, roger that.” There was also no medical equipment of any kind, no way to record the brainwaves of his subjects or REM sleep. It was crazy but the check hadn’t bounced so I was okay with it. I saw no excitement on his face, could detect no nervousness. Just that serenity. He was going to change the world. He was five-by-five on that.

Althea Gibson showed up fifteen minutes early. She was one of the two who had sent Elgin a headshot, probably taken by a professional photographer who had used a ringlight to make her look a bit younger. She was about forty and on the portly side. I met her at her car and introduced myself as Mr. Elgin’s assistant.

“I’m a little scared,” she said while we walked to the house. “I hope I’ll be all right. Will I be all right, Mr. Davis?”

“Sure,” I said. “Easy as falling off a log.”

They say truth is stranger than fiction, don’t they. Here was a woman at the end of a country road that dead-ended at a private beach, talking to a man she had never met before, and had she met Elgin or only talked to him on the phone? She didn’t think anything bad would happen to her even though she had been told she would be taking a drug described as a “light hypnotic.” She didn’t think that because bad things happened to other people, on the TV news. Was it lack of imagination that she had never thought about rape or a shallow grave or only the close horizon of her perception? That raises questions about what imagination and perception even are. Maybe I was thinking a certain way because I had seen certain things on the other side of the world, where bad things happened to people all the time, sometimes even to hairdressers.

“For eight hundred dollars, how could I refuse?” She lowered her voice and said, “Am I going to get high?”

“I really don’t know. You’re our first…” What? “Our first customer.”

“You’re not going to take advantage of me, are you?” Said in a joking way that meant she hoped she really was joking. “Or him?”

“Nothing of the sort,” Elgin said, coming down the hall to greet her on the stoop. He had a little flat case like a recon officer’s mapcase on a strap over one shoulder. “I’m safe as can be and so is Bill.” He held out both of his hands and took both of hers and gave them a brief squeeze. “You are going to enjoy this. It’s a promise.”

I gave her the release form, which was probably about as legal as a three-dollar bill. She gave it a cursory skim, filled in the blanks at the top, signed at the bottom. She was living her life and did not believe it would end or even change. Blindness to possibility is either a blessing or a curse. You choose. He led her to the couch in the former dining room and took a beaker of clear liquid from his case. He pulled the rubber stopper and gave it to her. She took it gingerly, as if it might be hot.

“What is it?”

“A light hypnotic, as I told you. It will put you in a serene state, and from there it may lull you to sleep. There will be no side effects and no hangover. It’s quite harmless.”

She looked at the beaker, then made a toasting gesture at me and said “Over the teeth, over the gums, look out tummy, here it comes.” She tossed it off easy as that, truth being stranger than fiction, then looked to Elgin. “I expected a kick but there wasn’t one. Are you sure it wasn’t just water?”

“Mostly water,” he said with a smile. “You’ll be back in your car and headed home to… where is it you live? Refresh me.”

“North Windham.”

“Back in your car and headed back to North Windham by four o’clock with a check for eight hundred dollars in your purse. In the meantime, relax and I’ll tell you what I want you to do. It’s quite simple.” He took the beaker and returned the stopper and put it back in his little case where there was a loop to hold it. He took out the only other thing in the case. It was a picture of a small house in the woods. The house was painted red. It had a green door atop two stone steps and a brick chimney. He handed it to her.

“I’m going to play some music. Very soft and very calm. I want you to listen to it and look at this picture.”

“Ooo, I’m feeling it now.” She smiled. “It’s like from smoking a doob. Mellow!”

“Look at the picture, Mrs. Gibson, and tell yourself you want to see what’s inside that house.”

I was writing all this down, G for Gibson and E for Elgin. Pothooks racing across the page of a virgin steno book. Doing what I was being paid to do.

“What is inside it?”

“That’s up to you. Perhaps you will dream of going inside, then you can see for yourself. Will you try to do that?”

“If I don’t dream of the inside of the house, do I still get to keep the eight hundred dollars?”

“Absolutely. Even if you just have a pleasant little nap.”

“If I do go to sleep, will you wake me up by four?” She was starting to drift. “My neighbor is picking up my daughter at school, but I have to be back by six to make her… make her…”

“Make her supper?”

“Yes, her supper. Look at that green door! I would never paint a green door for a red house. Too Christmassy.”

“Look at the picture.”

“I am.”

“Dream of the house. Try to go inside.” A hypnotist’s chant.

“All right.”

I thought she was already under. I thought if Elgin asked her to bark like a dog she’d give it a try.

“Go inside and look around.”

“All right.”

“Go to the living room.”

“All right.”

“Not inside, just to the doorway.”

“Do you want me to tell you what it looks like in the living room? The furniture or what kind of wallpaper? Things like that?”

“No, I want you to kneel down and look for a crack in the floor. Right there in the living room doorway.”

“Will there be one?”

“I don’t know, Mrs. Gibson. Althea. It’s your dream. If there’s a crack, put your fingers in it and lift up the living room floor.”

She gave him a dreamy smile. “I can’t lift up a floor, silly.”

“Maybe you won’t be able to but maybe you will. Things are possible in dreams that would otherwise not be.”

“Like flying.” The dreamy smile got bigger.

“Yes, like flying.” He sounded a little impatient with that idea, although to me the idea of flying in dreams seemed as logical as anything else about them. According to Jung, dreams of flying indicated the core psyche’s desire to break free of the expectations of others, or even more difficult, usually impossible, the expectations of the self.

“Lift up the floor. See what is beneath. If you remember when you wake up, write it down on the pad I’ve provided for you. I’ll ask you a few questions. If you can’t remember, that’s all right. We’ll be back soon, won’t we, Bill?”

We left the patient half of the former dining room and went into the other half. I took my seat in front of the oneway glass with my pad on my knee. Elgin sat at the desk and pushed one of his buttons. The record turned, the tonearm went down, and the music started to play. It was Debussy. Elgin pushed another button and the music in our half of the experimental station stopped but I could still hear it in Mrs. Gibson’s half. She was looking at the picture. She giggled and I wrote, not in Gregg but in plain, G laughs at 2:14 PM.

Time passed. Ten minutes by my watch. She studied the picture of the house with the close attention only those who are quite seriously stoned can attain. Little by little it began to sag in her hand. With the head of the couch facing us I could see the way her eyes slipped closed and then opened. Her lips, dressed in bright red, softened. Elgin was now standing next to me, bent forward with his hands on his knees. He looked like a bird colonel I knew over there in that other world watching through his binoculars as the F-100Ds of the 352nd came in low over Bien Hoa, pregnant with the firejelly they would drop in an orange curtain, burning a miscarriage in the belly of the green, turning part of the overstory to ash and skeleton palms. The men and women, too, them calling nahn tu, nahn tu to no one who could hear or care if they did.

The picture of the house settled to her belly. She was asleep. Elgin went back to the desk and turned off the music. He must also have turned up the sound in our part because I could hear her snoring, very lightly. He came back and resumed his former position. The Polaroids on timers flashed every thirty seconds or so, the one on our side and the one on the Gibson side. Each time they flashed a picture extruded with that catlike whirring sound they make and fell on the floor. I saw something three or four minutes after she fell asleep and leaned forward. I didn’t believe it, the way you don’t believe anything that runs contrary to the way things are supposed to be. But it was there. I rubbed a palm across my eyes and it was still there.

“Elgin. Her mouth.”

“I see it.”

Her lips were slipping apart and her teeth were rising between them. It was like watching something volcanic rising from the ocean, only there were no sharp points except I guess for the canines. Not fangs or animal teeth, they were her teeth, just longer and bigger. Her lips folded back revealing their pink lining. Her hands were jerking, flipping back and forth, fingers wiggling. The Polaroids flashed and whined. Two more times in there, two more in with us. The photos fell to the floor. Then the cameras were out of film. Her teeth began to retract. Her hands gave one more jerk, the fingers seeming to play an invisible piano. Then that stopped, too. Her lips closed but there was a faint red ghost on her philtrum where the upper one had pressed a lipstick tattoo.

I looked at Elgin. He looked serene and didn’t. I got a brief glimpse of what was underneath his serenity, the way a bank of clouds at the end of day may rift apart just enough and just long enough to see the bloodred glare of the setting sun. If I ever doubted the Gentleman Scientist was the Gentleman Mad Scientist, that was the end of that.

“Did you know what was going to happen?” I asked.

“No.”

Twenty minutes later, at 2:58 PM, Mrs. Gibson began to stir. We went in and Elgin shook her all the way awake. She came from sleep with no inbetween muzziness, just stretched with her arms spread wide as if to embrace the whole world.

That evening I went down to the beach and Elgin was on the bench and I sat down beside him.

“Did you transcribe your notes, William?” Clicking his lighter open and closed.

“I will tonight. What was in that beaker?”

“Nothing remarkable. Flurazepam. Not even a clinical dose. Very diluted.”

“No drug would do what we saw.”

“No. But it rendered her suggestible. I told her what to do and she did it. Accessed the reality beneath the dream, if you will. Assuming there is such a thing, reality being what it is. Or isn’t.”

“What it did to her teeth…”

“Yes.” The serenity was back. “Remarkable, wouldn’t you say? Proof. The Polaroids show it, in case you think we were sharing a hallucination.”

“The idea never crossed my mind. What are you doing?”

“Now you ask.”

“Yes. Now I ask.”

“Have you considered existence, William? Really considered it? Because few people ever do.”

“Considered it and seen the end of it.”

“You mean in the war.”

“Yes.”

“But wars are human affairs. In relation to the universe, which encompasses all existence, including time both backward and forward, human wars mean no more than those you might see in an anthill with a magnifying glass. Earth is our anthill. The stars we see at night are just eternity’s first inch. Someday telescopes, perhaps hurled into space as far as the moon or Mars or beyond, will show us galaxies beyond galaxies, nebulae hidden behind other nebulae, wonders unthoughtof, on and on to the edge of the universe, beyond which another universe may await. And consider the other end of that spectrum.”

He laid his Zippo aside and bent over and picked up a fistful of beachsand and let it run through his fingers.

“Ten thousand tiny flecks of the earth in my fist, maybe twenty thousand or even fifty. Each one composed of a billion or trillion or a googleplex of atoms and protons, whirling their courses. What holds it all together? What is the binding force?”

“Do you have a theory?”

“No, but now I have a way to look. You saw it today. So did I. Suppose our dreams are a barrier between us and this neverending matrix of existence? That binding force? Suppose it’s conscious? Suppose we could defeat that barrier not by trying to go through it but by looking under it, like a kid peeking under a circus tent to see the show going on inside?”

“Barriers are usually there for a reason.”

He laughed as if I’d said something funny.

“Do you want to see God?”

“I want to see what’s there. I may fail, but what we saw today makes me believe that success is possible. The floor of her dream was too heavy for her. I have eleven more test subjects. One of them may be stronger.”

I should have left then.

We had two more subjects in July. One was a female carpenter named Melissa Grant. She dreamed of the house but couldn’t get inside. The door was locked against her, she said. One was the owner of a bookstore in New Gloucester. He said his shop was probably going to go under but he wasn’t ready to give up and eight hundred dollars would pay for another month’s rent and a shipment of books few people would buy. He slept for two hours while Debussy played and said he didn’t dream of the house at all but of his father, dead for twenty years. He said he dreamed they went fishing. Elgin gave him his check and sent him on his way. There was one more July appointment on our schedule, a man named Norman Bilson, but he never showed up.

On the 1st of August a man named Hiram Gaskill came to the house at the end of Lake Road. He was a construction worker who had been laid off. He kicked away his boots and took the couch. He said “Let’s get to it” and drank down the contents of the beaker with no questions. He looked at the picture and at first I didn’t think the drug was going to work on him, he was a big fellow, probably close on to two-seventy, but eventually he dropped off and began to snore. Elgin stood in his usual position beside me, bent forward vulturelike so his nose almost touched the glass and his breath fogged it. Nothing happened for almost an hour. Then the snoring stopped and still sleeping Gaskill groped for the pen resting on the open pad of Blue Horse paper. He wrote something on it without opening his eyes.

“Note that,” Elgin said, but I already had, not in Gregg but in plain: At 3:17 PM Gaskill writes for approx. 15 secs. Drops pen. Sleeping again now snoring again.

At 3:33 Gaskill awoke on his own and sat up and swung his legs off the couch. We went in and Elgin asked him what he had dreamed.

“Nothing. Sorry, Mr. Elgin. Do I still get the money?”

“Yes. That’s all right. Are you sure you remember nothing?”

“No, but it was a good nap.”

I was looking at the pad of paper and asked him if he’d served.

“No, sir, I did not. Went to the physical and they said I had high blood. Take pills for it now.”

Elgin looked at the pad and what was written there. When Gaskill was gone in his old pickup truck, leaving a blue cloud of exhaust for the wind to fritter away, Elgin tapped the single line which had been neatly printed even though the man running the pen had his eyes closed. That look of excitement, of triumph, was in his face.

“This isn’t his writing. Nothing like it.”

He laid down Gaskill’s release form beside the tablet. The name and address on the form were in the hand of someone who wrote seldom and found it laborious. Although we had background on Elgin’s subjects no more than Elgin had actual scientific equipment to test his subjects with, Gaskill’s laborious printing suggested to me a man who had only completed as much schooling as the state of Maine required, and that unwillingly except perhaps for the shop courses. The printing on the pad was neat and precise, although there were no diacritical marks over the words where they should have been and the spelling was not correct. It was as if Gaskill had been writing what he heard. Taking dictation like any steno would do. Which raised the question of who had been giving it.

“Vietnamese? It is, isn’t it. It’s why you asked if he served.”

“Yes.”

Of course it was. Mat trang da day cua ma guy.

“What does it say?”

“It says the moon is full of demons.”

That evening when I went down to the water, Elgin was on the bench, again smoking. The water was gray as slate. There were no boats on it. The sky was crowded with thunderheads coming in from the west. I sat down. Without looking at me, Elgin said, “That message was meant for you.”

Of course it was.

“He knew you were in Vietnam. More. He knew you knew the language.”

“Something knew.”

Lightning hit the water a mile out, electrocuting whatever fish happened to be near the surface. They would float in and feed the gulls. The rain would come soon. The hills on the far side of Dark Score had disappeared behind a gray membrane that would soon descend on our side.

“It could be time to stop. Something on the other side of your barrier is saying don’t fuck with me.”

He shook his head without looking away from the coming rain. “Not at all. We’re on the verge. I feel it. I know it.” Now he turned. “Please don’t leave me, William. I need your skills more than ever. If I publish, I will need your raw notes, not just the photos and the transcriptions. And you are a witness.”

Not just a witness. It had been me that Gaskill, or whatever came into Gaskill, had singled out. Not Elgin. The Gentleman Scientist was fooling with something dangerous and knew it but either wasn’t willing to stop or couldn’t and in the end those things come to the same. I could stop which made me a fool to go on, but there was another factor. Something had happened to me. I had grown curious. It was welcome and dreadful in equal measure. It was a feeling and in my world those had been in short supply. You see a man with his legs gone and his face sliding off even as he screams in agony, you see his teeth on his shirt like a barbaric necklace and know you were standing where he got it only seconds before and it stuns your feelings the way hitting a rabbit with a junk of firewood will stun it and lay it out flat on the ground, sides heaving but eyes far away, and when those feelings start to return you see the possibility that your humanity isn’t as gone as you thought it was.

“I’ll stay.”

“Thank you, William.” He reached out and squeezed my shoulder. “Thank you.”

The rain came, mixed with hailstones that stung like bees. He went back to the big house and I went back to the small one. Hail rattled on the windows. The wind. I dreamed that night of a hollow moon filled with demons eating each other alive. Eating themselves alive like the worm ouroboros. I could see the red house below the hollow moon. The green door.

We saw two more before the end came. The sixth, a woman named Annette Crosby, screamed herself awake. When she calmed down she said she dreamed of the red house and opening the green door and then remembered nothing except for darkness and wind and a foul odor and a bodiless voice that spoke a word that sounded like tantullah or tamtusha. It filled her with horror. She said she would not dream of that house again for another eight hundred dollars. Or eight thousand. But she took Elgin’s check. Why not? She earned it.

Then came Burt Devereaux, a teacher of mathematics at Saint Dominic Academy in Lewiston. He filled in the form and before signing asked Elgin several questions, more than the others had, about the “light hypnotic” he would have to take. Elgin answered these questions to Devereaux’s satisfaction. He signed the form, took his place on the couch, and quaffed the beaker of clear liquid. I took my seat before the oneway glass with my pad on my knee. Elgin sat behind the desk and started the music. In the testing room Mr. Devereaux was studying the picture of the red house with the green door. Eventually his eyes began to slip closed and the picture began to sag in his hand. It was like every one of our other test runs until it wasn’t.

I was in my chair. Elgin was in his place beside me. Ten minutes passed. Eyes closed, Devereaux reached for the pad and the pen resting on the upturned page, then dropped his hand. It began to clench and unclench. The other hand rose up, hesitated, then moved swiftly. I wrote in plain 3:29 PM, Dev raises right hand makes a fist hits self in cheek.

“He’s trying to wake himself up,” I said.

Devereaux began to shiver all over like a man suffering a fit of ague. His legs jittered and scissored. His back arched. His midsection rose from the couch and thumped down and rose again. His feet tapdanced and he began to make a sound, mump-mump-mump, as if his lips were spitstuck and he was trying to get them open to articulate.

“We need to wake him up.”

“Wait.”

“Jesus, Elgin.”

“Wait.”

The Polaroids flashed. Their cunning inbred motors whirred. Pictures fluttered to the floor in our part and his part, already starting to develop. His eyelids began to bulge until the eyes beneath must have swelled almost to the size of golfballs as if from an infusion of hydrostatic fluid. The lids didn’t open naturally but split apart. Devereaux’s eyes had been gray. The eyes which continued to protrude from their sockets were dead black. They grew like tumors out of his face. Elgin’s hand was clamped on my shoulder but I barely felt it. Neither of us asked what was happening, not because we couldn’t believe it but because we could. We might as well have been witnessing a locomotive emerging from a fireplace. Devereaux screamed and his eyeballs split and fine tendrils wavered up like dandelion filaments only black. There was no breeze to blow them, but they bent toward the oneway glass, as if sensing us.

“Oh my God.” Elgin.

The Polaroids flashed. The black tendrils separated from the black orbs that had given them birth and drifted toward us, at first in a small cloud but beginning to melt and disappear as they came.

“I need them!” Elgin shouted. “I need them! Proof! Proof!”

He started for the door. I grabbed him and held him back. He struggled but I was stronger. I wasn’t going to let him go in there, not because I cared for him enough to save him from himself but because I didn’t want him to open that door and let any of them out.

The split black eyeballs began to retract toward Devereaux’s face like a film run in reverse. He said mump-mump-mump. The crotch of his pants darkened as his bladder let go. The split black eyeballs healed themselves, first there was a seam and then that was gone and they were smooth again, only bulging from his face in small knobs like those you sometimes see on an old tree. Then they pulled back in and his eyes closed and Devereaux gave a galvanic twist at the waist and fell on the floor. Elgin’s white shirt ripped as he tore free of my grasp. He was out the door and around the partition and in the other half. He knelt and got his arms around Devereaux’s shoulders.

“Help me, William! Help me!”

If Devereaux was dead, this would be partly on me and even in my shock I knew it. Saying I was a witness rather than an accomplice wouldn’t fly. So I went around the partition and into the test room and asked Elgin if he was breathing.

He leaned forward, then winced back. “Yes, but his breath is foul.”

It wasn’t only his breath that was foul. His sphincter had let go. I looked around. Not all the black tendrils were gone. Some of whatever Devereaux had brought back from the red house when he picked up the living room floor, perhaps flying up at him from the darkness and infecting him with one indrawn breath, was still floating in the far corner of the room under one of the speakers. I watched them. If they moved toward us I intended to flee and let the Gentleman Scientist fend for himself. This was his experiment, after all. Yet even then in those endless moments I thought of far stars beyond the reach of any telescope and the fuming interiors of a hundred thousand grains of sand and knew it was also my experiment. I hadn’t left. I could have but I hadn’t. I had felt the returning tingle of something approximating a normal human being, whatever that is and assuming there is such a thing. Like a limb that has been slept on and fallen asleep and begins to awake. On the hook, we used to say in the boondocks. Or FIDO. Fuck it, drive on.

“We need to get him out of here.” I pointed to the black tendrils. They were stirring lightly, restlessly. I think they were watching us.

“I need a sample.”

“You need to think about how you would look in a jail suit. Help me.”

We lifted him, Elgin taking his ankles and me taking the rest of him. We got him out the door and across the hall and into the living room. We laid him on the floor with drool running from both sides of his mouth. I went back and shut the double doors to the former dining room, shutting in those black things from the other place, the place under the floor, unless they could waft under the doorjamb and in with us. I hoped the rest of them would just disappear. If Elgin wanted to fuck with them, that was on him. I was done.

But first there was the matter of Devereaux. I told Elgin to help me sit him up so what was left of him wouldn’t choke. We lifted his top half, Elgin on one side, me on the other, our hands meeting and clasping behind Devereaux’s back. Blackish-red tears ran from the corners of his eyes. Blood and something else. I didn’t want to know what the something else was. I slapped his cheek and bent to the ear on my side and told him to wake up, snap out of it, afraid of what his eyes would look like if he did.

His eyes opened. They were bloodshot and gray as they had been but empty of understanding. Elgin snapped his fingers in front of his face and nothing changed. I darted my fingers at his eyes and nothing changed. He was a breathing mansized doll.

“Oh my God, will he come back?”

“I don’t know. Will he? You’re the scientist.”

Elgin raised one of Devereaux’s hands. It only hung there until he put it down again.

“We’ll give it an hour,” he said.

We gave it two. Most of the black tendrils were gone by then but there were yet a few and Elgin donned nitrile gloves and a facemask from one of his desk drawers and collected them in a plastic bag. I tried to stop him but he wouldn’t listen. I thought they might melt away in his hand but they didn’t. One of them curled around his gloved forefinger and he had to detach it by scraping along the inside of the bag.

“You’re a fool to mess with those things,” I said, and he repeated “Proof.”

It wasn’t good to be chained to him as I now was. The teacher of mathematics had become a drooling mannequin who showed no signs of coming back and I had to deal with that, not for Elgin but for myself. At least the former teacher and present idiot wasn’t married with children.

I thought I am on the hook.

I thought Fuck it. Drive on.

“Did you give him the check?”

“What? No. I always keep the check until after the run is complete and they’re ready to go home. You know that.”

“Burn it. He never came. Like the other one. Bilson.”

What a way to wake up to the world.

I got his keys out of a pissdamp pocket. We got him out to his car carrying him like a sack of laundry that’s still wet and heavy and put him in the passenger seat. He leaned forward and put his forehead on the Chevy’s dashboard as if praying to Allah. I told Elgin to push him back and I fastened the seatbelt. Not all cars had them but this one did. It was a three-point harness, the kind with a chest strap, and that held him more or less upright, although his head was down with his chin on his chest. I thought that was all right, anybody who saw him might think he was asleep. One of those black filaments came out of his nose and floated toward me but Elgin was still wearing his nitrile gloves. He snatched it out of the air and blew it away. I wondered if there were more inside Devereaux.

“What are you going to do with him?”

“I don’t know.”

I got in the Chevy and drove away back down Lake Road. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw Elgin standing in his driveway and watching.

I drove with the windows open and the air conditioner on full. I was wearing a pair of Elgin’s nitrile gloves, had been since I got in the car. Twice more black things came out of his nose and once from his gaping mouth but the moving air took them out the passenger window. I drove in the direction of Lewiston-Auburn but had no intention of going that far. I knew where he lived, his Minot Avenue address had been on the release form, but there was no way I was going to drive him into the Twin Cities, not with still having to get him over into the driver’s seat. I needed a quiet place to do that.

I was on Route 119 in Waterford when I came to the Wolf Claw rest area. In the heat of the day no one was there. I parked under the trees and went around to the passenger side and opened the door and unclipped the seatbelt and Devereaux went leaning forward until his forehead was resting on the dashboard again. I wished I had asked the Gentleman Scientist for one of his masks, but what good would covering my mouth and nose do? The black filaments had come out of Devereaux’s eyes; they could just as easily go into mine. I would just have to hope they were all gone. I hadn’t seen any for the last ten miles or so but they might have come out and flown away through the open window while I was watching the road.

I tilted him toward me and caught him and pulled him out of the car and dragged him around the hood. He was wearing loafers and one of them came off. His blank eyes stared raptly into the sun. I got him behind the wheel but it took time and wasn’t easy. I hadn’t expected it to be. He was breathing but dead inside and I knew from Nam that dead people are heavier. They shouldn’t be but they are. Gravity is greedy for the dead and wants them in the ground. Just my opinion but others share it.

He tilted forward again and I grabbed him by the backhair and pulled him up before his forehead could hit the horn. I fastened his seatbelt and his head sank until his chin was on his chest. I thought that was all right. I hoped no one would come until I got the righteous fuck out of there. I put the keys in the ignition and closed the door and started down Route 119. I had walked about a quarter of a mile before I remembered the shoe and went back. Somebody will be there by now, I thought, someone who looked in the open window of the Chevy with the St. Dom’s sticker on the bumper and said hey mister wake up and hey mister are you all right and by the way mister what are those black things coming out of your nose?

But no one was there. I picked up the loafer and opened the driver’s door again and put it on his foot. Then I brushed out the tracks going around the front of the car, the ones his heels had made, and set off walking again. About five miles down the road, my shadow now starting to drag out long behind me, I came to a combination general store and gas station with a phonebooth on the side. I had enough change in my pocket so I didn’t have to go into the store where someone might see and remember me. That probably would have been all right but by then I was thinking like a thief or a murderer. I called Elgin, wanting a ride. Elgin didn’t answer and I had come alive enough to feel scared. I had a plan now, one that might get me and the Gentleman Scientist in the clear, but plans change. I kept thinking of him saying proof, proof. I kept thinking he was crazy and then I thought of how I knew that. I knew it all along but said fuck it and drove on.

I turned back the other way, my shadow now drawing out longer and longer before me rather than behind. A car came and I stuck out my thumb. It passed me by. So did the next one but then came a pickup that slowed and stopped. The man driving had a weathered red face under a gray brushcut.

“How far you going?”

“Castle Rock. It’s where my father lives.”

“Well hop in. Did you serve? You got that look about you and you’re the right age for the current fuckadiddle.”

“Yes, sir, I did.”

“So did I. About ten thousand years ago. Semper fi if you like it and semper fi if you don’t.”

He let out the clutch with a jerk and talked about Korea and asked me what about those peaceniks. I said that’s right. He said ship them all out there to Haight-Fucksberry and I said that’s right. He offered me a beer from behind the seat. I took it and when he said “Take another, sojer” I did. Half an hour later he pulled over to the curb of Main Street in the Rock.

“We’re going to beat those gook sonsofbitches.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Take care of yourself, son.”

“That’s the plan.”

Off he went. By then it was evening and more thunderheads building up in the west. I walked the six miles out to Lake Road. By the time I got there the rain was beating its way across the lake again. Lightning flashed. Thunder rolled. The smell of ozone in the air like an unburned burning. My car was still parked next to Elgin’s Mercedes. I went inside. He hadn’t turned on the lights and the hall was a bowl of shadows.

“Elgin?”

I got no answer. The living room was empty, the books knocked over. Beyond the Wall of Sleep was faceup. On the coffee table was a glass ashtray, a pack of Winstons, and his Zippo. I took the Zippo and put it in my pocket. I went to the former dining room, thought about going into the room with the couch, fortunately thought better of it. I went into the room with the desk instead and sat in my chair and looked through the oneway glass. What was left of Elgin the Gentleman Scientist was on the couch. Polaroids scattered all around. The beaker shattered among the photographs. His head was in what looked like a black sack. Some of the photographs, those that were faceup, showed it forming over his sleeping face. The picture of the red house with the green door was also on the floor and so was the plastic bag into which he had put his samples. Now the bag was empty. The black sack on his head was made of those filaments. It sucked in and out from what was left of his mouth as he breathed. I thought about him telling me of endless universes both out there and below our very feet. I thought of a face sliding down a man’s skull. I thought of a helicopter on fire sinking into the very sea of napalm it had created. I thought of putting Devereaux’s shoe back on his foot. I thought of all the unknown and unknowable nether creations that might exist beneath a barrier of dreams. I thought that yes, plans change. Elgin could no longer get out of this but maybe I still could.

Some of the black filaments saw me and rose from the black bag and crossed the room and plastered themselves on the glass. More came. And more. I watched as they squirmed around until they made my name: WILLIAM DAVIS.

There was a gas stove in the kitchen. I turned on all the burners and blew out the blue gas flowers one by one. I turned on the oven and opened the oven door. A pilot light came on in there and I blew that out, too. As I created this nascent gasbomb I looked constantly over my shoulder for the black filaments. I was in s? kinh h?i. Terror. I was in rùng r?n. Horror. I closed the windows. I closed the doors. I went around to the guest house and gathered up my belongings in my dufflebag and one suitcase. I put them in the trunk of my car. Then I went back to the stoop and waited, clicking the top of the lighter up and down. Lightning panfried the lake and thunder rolled. After about ten minutes the rain started, at first just pattering down, the storm’s foreplay. I opened the door. The gas was a stench. I flicked the Zippo and got a flame and tossed it and ran for my car. I got there and had just decided nothing was going to happen when the kitchen exploded. The rain came in a deluge as I drove away. In my rearview I saw the house burning like a candle under a black sky cut with lightning. There were houses and summer cottages on Lake Road but no one was out in the storm and if anyone was looking out a window they would have seen nothing but an amorphous car-shaped blob behind headlights. I drove out of Castle Rock and into Harlow. The rain slackened, then stopped. In my rearview mirror, just before the sun sank behind the mountains in New Hampshire, I saw a rainbow. Then the sun was gone and the rainbow clicked off like a neon sign. I stayed the night at a motel in Gates Falls and drove to Portland the next morning, to the roominghouse where I had been living when I worked at Temp-O. There was a rooms for rent sign in the front window. I rang the bell and Mrs. Blake answered.

“You again.”

“Yes. Sign says you’ve got a room.”

“That’s right, but not your room. It’s on the third floor and there’s no air conditioning.”

“Is it cheaper than the one on the second?”

“No.”

“I’ll take it.”

The next day I went back to Temp-O and got rehired. I had no plans to spend very long working for Mrs. Frobisher, but I wanted to have a job when the cops came. Pearson was in the break room. So was Diane. There was a talk show on the TV. Diane gave me a crooked little smile and said, “Once more into the breach, dear friends.” Pearson was reading the paper, sections piled up around his shoes. He took one look at me and raised the paper again.

“So you came back,” I said to Diane.

“So did you. Didn’t work out at Elgin’s house?”

“It did for awhile, then didn’t. He started getting strange when his experiments didn’t work out.”

“And here we are. All roads lead to Temp-O.”

Mrs. Frobisher came in. “Who wants a depo at Brune and Cathcart?” She didn’t wait for an answer, just pointed to a new woman I didn’t know. “You, Janelle. Chop-chop.”

Pearson was done with the local section of the paper so I picked it up. On the bottom of page 1B was a story headlined CASTLE ROCK MAN DIES IN GAS EXPLOSION AT DARK SCORE LAKE. It said the case was being investigated as an accident or possible suicide. It said that because of heavy rain, the fire hadn’t spread.

I said, “Holy shit, my last boss is dead,” and showed Diane the story.

“Bad luck for him, good luck for you.” She read the story. “Was he suicidal?”

I had to think that over. “I don’t know.”

The next day I had court. When I went back to the roominghouse, two cops were waiting for me in the parlor. One was in uniform, the other was a detective. They introduced themselves and asked how long I had worked for Elgin. I told them about a month. I told them what I had told Diane, that Elgin started to get dinky-dau when his experiments hadn’t been panning out, so I left. Yes, I had been living in the guest house but moved out when I quit the job. No, I hadn’t been there when his house blew up. They asked me if I knew a man named Burton Devereaux. I said I knew the name, it had been on Elgin’s list of test subjects, but not the man. I had never seen him. The detective gave me his card and asked me to call him if I thought of anything. I said I would. I asked if the detective thought Elgin had killed himself.

“Would that surprise you, Mr. Davis?”

“Not a lot.”

“He turned on the gas stove and we found a melted chunk of lighter on what was left of the kitchen floor, so what do you think?”

What I thought was a smart detective might have wondered if they found the remains of the Zippo in the kitchen, how Elgin could be on his subjects’ couch in the dining room. But I guess he wasn’t that smart.

I worked at Temp-O until September, then quit and drove to Nebraska. No reason for Nebraska, it was just where I went. I got temporary work on a farm, one of those big agribusiness spreads, and the foreman kept me on after the harvest season passed. I’m here now. It’s snowing a blizzard. I-80 is shut down. I sit at this desk thinking of galaxies beyond galaxies. In a little while I will close this notebook and turn out the lights and go to bed. The sound of the wind will lull me off to sleep. Sometimes I dream of the boondocks and men screaming in fire. Sometimes women screaming in fire. Children. Nahn tu, they cry. Nahn tu, nahn tu. Those are the good dreams. You might not believe it but it’s true. In the bad dreams I am standing outside a red house with a green door. If I tried that door, it would open. I know this and know one day I will go in and kneel at the living room doorway. Nahn tu, I will cry, nahn tu, but when this final dream comes there will be no mercy. Not for me.

Thinking of Cormac McCarthy and Evangeline Walton