Dreamcatcher (40 page)

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 red-gold 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 différence
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, never 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.