Firestarter (38 page)

(charlie—what's wrong with charlie?)

But it wasn't really a feeling that something was
wrong
with her, just a feeling that she was in danger of something happening. If he could see her, he could ask her what—

He laughed bitterly in the dark. Yes, right. And pigs will whistle, beggars will ride. Might as well wish for the moon in a mason jar. Might as well—

For a moment his thoughts stopped entirely, and then moved on—but more slowly, and with no bitterness.

Might as well wish to think businessmen into having more self-confidence.

Might as well wish to think fat ladies thin.

Might as well wish to blind one of the goons who had kidnapped Charlie.

Might as well wish for the push to come back.

His hands were busy on the bedspread, pulling it, kneading it, feeling it—the mind's need, nearly unconscious, for some sort of constant sensory input. There was no sense in hoping for the push to come back. The push was gone. He could no more push his way to Charlie than he could pitch for the Reds. It was gone.

(is it?)

Quite suddenly he wasn't sure. Part of him—some very deep part—had maybe just decided it didn't buy his conscious decision to follow the path of least resistance and give them whatever they wanted. Perhaps some deep part of him had decided not to give up.

He sat feeling the bedspread, running his hands over and over it.

Was that true, or only wishful thinking brought on by one sudden and unprovable hunch? The hunch itself might have been as false as the smoke he'd thought he smelled, brought on by simple anxiety. There was no way to check the hunch, and there was certainly no one here to push.

He drank his ginger ale.

Suppose the push
had
come back. That was no universal cure-all; he of all people knew that. He could give a lot of little pushes or three or four wallopers before he tipped himself over. He might get to Charlie, but he didn't have a snowflake's chance in hell of getting them out of here. All he would succeed in doing was pushing himself into the grave via a brain hemorrhage (and as he thought of this, his fingers went automatically to his face, where the numb spots had been).

Then there was the matter of the Thorazine they had been feeding him. The lack of it—the lateness of the dose due when the lights had gone out—had played a large part in his panic, he knew. Even now, feeling more in control of himself, he
wanted
that Thorazine and the tranquil, coasting feeling it brought. At the beginning, they had kept him off the Thorazine for as long as two days before testing him. The
result had been constant nervousness and a low depression like thick clouds that never seemed to let up … and back then he hadn't built up a heavy thing, as he had now.

“Face it, you're a junkie,” he whispered.

He didn't know if that was true or not. He knew that there were physical addictions like the one to nicotine, and to heroin, which caused physical changes in the central nervous system. And then there were psychological addictions. He had taught with a fellow named Bill Wallace who got very, very nervous without his three or four Cokes a day, and his old college buddy Quincey had been a potato-chip freak—but he had to have an obscure New England brand, Humpty Dumpty; he claimed no other kind satisfied. Andy supposed those qualified as psychological addictions. He didn't know if his craving for his pill was physical or psychological; he only knew that he needed it, he really
needed
it. Just sitting here and thinking about the blue pill in the white dish had him cotton-mouthed all over again. They no longer kept him without the drug for forty-eight hours before testing him, although whether that was because they felt he couldn't go that long without getting the screaming meemies or because they were just going through the motions of testing, he didn't know.

The result was a cruelly neat, insoluble problem: he couldn't push if he was full of Thorazine, and yet he simply didn't have the will to refuse it (and, of course, if they
caught
him refusing it, that would open a whole new can of worms for them, wouldn't it?—real nightcrawlers). When they brought him the blue pill in the white dish after this was over, he would take it. And little by little, he would work his way back to the calmly apathetic steady state he had been in when the power went off. All of this was just a spooky little side-trip. He would be back to watching
PTL Club
and Clint Eastwood on Home Box Office soon enough, and snacking too much out of the always-well-stocked fridge. Back to putting on weight.

(charlie, charlie's in danger, charlie's in all sorts of trouble, she's in a world of hurt)

If so, there was nothing he could do about it.

And even if there was, even if he could somehow conquer the monkey on his back and get them out of here—pigs will whistle and beggars will ride, why the hell not?—any ultimate solution concerning Charlie's future would be as far away as ever.

He lay back on his bed, spread-eagled. The small department of his mind that now dealt exclusively with Thorazine continued to clamor restlessly.

There were no solutions in the present, and so he drifted into the past. He saw himself and Charlie fleeing up Third Avenue in a kind of slow-motion nightmare, a big man in a scuffed cord jacket and a little girl in red and green. He saw Charlie, her face strained and pale, tears running down her cheeks after she had got all the change from the pay phones at the airport …she got the change and set some serviceman's shoes on fire.

His mind drifted back even further, to the storefront in Port City, Pennsylvania, and Mrs. Gurney. Sad, fat Mrs. Gurney, who had come into the Weight-Off office in a green pantsuit, clutching at the carefully lettered slogan that had actually been Charlie's idea.
You Will Lose Weight or We Will Buy Your Groceries for the Next Six Months.

Mrs. Gurney, who had borne her truck-dispatcher husband four children between 1950 and 1957, and now the children were grown and they were disgusted with her, and her husband was disgusted with her, and he was seeing another woman, and she could understand that because Stan Gurney was still a good-looking, vital, virile man at fifty-five, and she had slowly gained one hundred and sixty pounds over the years since the second-to-last child had left for college, going from the one-forty she had weighed at marriage to an even three hundred pounds. She had come in, smooth and monstrous and desperate in her green pantsuit, and her ass was nearly as wide as a bank president's desk. When she looked down into her purse to find her checkbook, her three chins became six.

He had put her in a class with three other fat women. There were exercises and a mild diet, both of which Andy had researched at the Public Library; there were mild pep talks, which he billed as “counseling”—and every now and then there was a medium-hard push.

Mrs. Gurney had gone from three hundred to two-eighty to two-seventy, confessing with mixed fear and delight that she didn't seem to want second helpings anymore. The second helping just didn't seem to taste good. Before, she had always kept bowls and bowls of snacks in the refrigerator (and doughnuts in the breadbox, and two or three Sara Lee cheesecakes in the freezer) for watching TV at night, but now she somehow … well, it sounded almost crazy,
but … she kept
forgetting
they were there. And she had always heard that when you were dieting, snacks were all you
could
think of. It certainly hadn't been this way, she said, when she tried Weight Watchers.

The other three women in the group had responded eagerly in kind. Andy merely stood back and watched them, feeling absurdly paternal. All four of them were astounded and delighted by the commonality of their experience. The toning up exercises, which had always seemed so boring and painful before, now seemed almost pleasant. And then there was this weird compulsion to
walk
. They all agreed that if they hadn't walked a good bit by the end of the day, they felt somehow ill at ease and restless. Mrs. Gurney confessed that she had got into the habit of walking downtown and back every day, even though the round trip was more than two miles. Before, she had always taken the bus, which was surely the sensible thing to do, since the stop was right in front of her house.

But the one day she had taken it—because her thigh muscles did ache
that
much—she had got to feeling so uneasy and restless that she had got off at the second stop. The others agreed. And they all blessed Andy McGee for it, sore muscles and all.

Mrs. Gurney had dropped to two-fifty at her third weigh-in, and when her six-week course ended, she was down to two hundred and twenty-five pounds. She said her husband was stunned at what had happened, especially after her failure with countless dieting programs and fads. He wanted her to go see a doctor; he was afraid she might have cancer. He didn't believe it was possible to lose seventy-five pounds in six weeks by natural means. She showed him her fingers, which were red and callused from taking in her clothes with needle and thread. And then she threw her arms around him (nearly breaking his back) and wept against his neck.

His alumni usually came back, just as his more successful college students usually came back at least once, some to say thanks, some merely to parade their success before him—to say, in effect, Look here, the student has outraced the teacher … something that was hardly as uncommon as they seemed to think, Andy sometimes thought.

But Mrs. Gurney had been one of the former. She had come back to say hello and thanks a lot only ten days or so before Andy had begun to feel nervous and watched in Port City. And before the end of that month, they had gone on to New York City.

Mrs. Gurney was still a big woman; you noticed the startling difference only if you had seen her before—like one of those before-and-after ads in the magazines. When she dropped in that last time, she was down to a hundred and ninety-five pounds. But it wasn't her exact weight that mattered, of course. What mattered was that she was losing weight at the same measured rate of six pounds a week, plus or minus two pounds, and she would go on losing at a decreasing rate until she was down to one hundred and thirty pounds, plus or minus ten pounds. There would be no explosive decompression, and no lingering hangover of food horror, the sort of thing that sometimes led to
anorexia nervosa
. Andy wanted to make some money, but he didn't want to kill anyone doing it.

“You ought to be declared a national resource for what you're doing,” Mrs. Gurney had declared, after telling Andy that she had effected a rapprochement with her children and that her relations with her husband were improving. Andy had smiled and thanked her, but now, lying on his bed in the darkness, growing drowsy, he reflected that that was pretty close to what had happened to him and Charlie: they had been declared national resources.

Still, the talent was not all bad. Not when it could help a Mrs. Gurney.

He smiled a little.

And smiling, slept.

He could never remember the details of the dream afterward. He had been looking for something. He had been in some labyrinthine maze of corridors, lit only by dull red trouble lights. He opened doors on empty rooms and then closed them again. Some of the rooms were littered with balls of crumpled paper and in one there was an overturned table lamp and a fallen picture done in the style of Wyeth. He felt that he was in some sort of installation that had been shut down and cleared out in one hell of a tearing hurry.

And yet he had at last found what he was looking for. It was … what? A box? A chest? It was terribly heavy, whatever it was, and it had been marked with a white-stenciled skull and crossbones, like a jar of rat poison kept on a high
cellar shelf. Somehow, in spite of its weight (it had to weigh at least as much as Mrs. Gurney), he managed to pick it up. He could feel all his muscles and tendons pulling taut and hard, yet there was no pain.

Of course there isn't,
he told himself.
There's no pain because it's a dream. You'll pay for it later. You'll have the pain later.

He carried the box out of the room where he had found it. There was a place he had to take it, but he didn't know what or where it was—

You'll know it when you see it, his mind whispered.

So he carried the box or chest up and down endless corridors, its weight tugging painlessly at his muscles, stiffening the back of his neck; and although his muscles didn't hurt, he was getting the beginnings of a headache.

The brain is a muscle,
his mind lectured, and the lecture became a chant like a child's song, a little girl's skipping rhyme:
The brain is a muscle that can move the world. The brain is a muscle that can move
—

Now all the doors were like subway doors, bulging outward in a slight curve, fitted with large windows; all these windows had rounded corners. Through these doors (if they were doors) he saw a confusion of sights. In one room Dr. Wanless was playing a huge accordion. He looked like some crazed Lawrence Welk with a tin cup full of pencils in front of him and a sign around his neck that read
THERE ARE NONE SO BLIND AS THOSE WHO WILL NOT SEE
. Through another window he could see a girl in a white caftan flying through the air, screaming, careering off the walls, and Andy hurried past that one quickly.

Through another he saw Charlie and he became convinced again that this was some sort of pirate dream—buried treasure, yo-ho-ho and all of that—because Charlie appeared to be talking with Long John Silver. This man had a parrot on his shoulder and an eyepatch over one eye. He was grinning at Charlie with a kind of smarmy false friendship that made Andy nervous. As if in confirmation of this, the one-eyed pirate slipped an arm around Charlie's shoulders and cried hoarsely, “We'll do 'em yet, Kid!”