More Stories from the Twilight Zone (48 page)

And you say that you've never—”

“Look, Doc, I'm a Catholic, maybe not such a good one, but if I had, wouldn't I be telling this at confession to a priest, not to a shrink?”

“We're bound by an oath to maintain doctor-patient confidentiality, too.” He gives me this oily grin. “I'm from Vienna, you can trust me,” he says like I'm supposed to laugh.

“Huh?”

“Just a little inside joke.”

I made this guy for a sleazy scam artist as soon as I walked into his office. The building's a dump, there's no couch like there's supposed to be, just a leather-upholstered easy chair seen better days, a desk looked like secondhand from my high-school principal's office with which I had been all too familiar, and this guy in maybe his late fifties behind it in a cheap gray suit with an open-necked white shirt needed a trip to the dry cleaner's, hippie-style wire-rim glasses, graying ponytail to match behind a high bald forehead reaching about halfway back.

Maggie had found this shrink's ad in one of her magazines, said something about how he had trained with L. Ron Hubbard or Dr. Phil or another of those heavyweight psychiatry stars could get themselves on
Oprah,
but offered bargain-basement rates. And the whole thing was Maggie's idea, not mine anyway, I never believed in this stuff, I went along mostly to get her off my back.

“If
Tony Soprano
can take his problems to a shrink, then why the hell can't you?”

“
Hello?
Jesus Christ, Maggie, there ain't no Tony Soprano, he's just a character in a TV series, remember?”

“
So?
So
you're
just a character in your dreams. Unless . . .”

“Unless?
Unless
what?
How many times do I have to tell you
I've never killed anybody!”

“You sure, Joe?”

“Am I sure? You think it would just slip my mind?”

“Maybe. Like I read in
Psychology Today,
a guilty conscience could push it out of your waking memory and into your dreams. I mean, in your line of work. . . .”

Well, Maggie has a lot of time on her hands to watch daytime television with the kids gone off to college and all, and she likes the phony judge crap and the talk-show bullshit better than the soaps, and she reads these chick lit romances, and those damn self-help
magazines full of starvation diets, fortune-telling astrology, New Wage fruitcakery, an' all, and while it's all a load if you ask me, which she doesn't, at least I gotta admit she might know a little more about this dream interpretation stuff than I do.

I mean about all I know about it is the dream books some of the marks read to pick numbers, and once in a while one of them dreams something that
does
give them a winning number, or so they claim.

And the dreams . . .

By this time they're really getting to me.

“Always different, always the same, sort of, Doc, know what I mean?”

“Sort of,” says the shrink. “Why don't you give me three examples? One's just a dream, two could be a coincidence, three establishes a pattern, game theory, know what I mean?”

“Sort of,”
I grunt, but I kind of do. Like when some bar owner's late with the protection money, well, sometimes shit happens, a second time the month after just might be coincidence, but the third time, gotta give him a Dutch uncle session or it's gonna degenerate into a serious enforcement issue.

He gives me a go-ahead nod and a rolling hand signal, and I'm paying by the hour, now ain't I, so . . .

“I've always dreamed I'm a kid again a lot—”

“You're back in the fifth grade in your eleven-year-old body, but you're really an adult, the teacher's giving you a hard time, or you're out there in the schoolyard with the older kid that's always bullied you but you know karate—”

“Wow! Amazing! Howdya know that, Doc?”

“Quite common in the literature, a lot of people have dreams like that. Sometimes they're wish fulfillment dreams, sometimes they're—”

“Bummers. Yeah, well, they used to be mostly fun stuff, like you say, kickin' the crap out of fuckin' Tommy Murphy, gettin' my
grown-up hands into Mary Coangelo's thirteen-year-old pants, winnin' the ballgame with a grand slam in the bottom of the ninth, like that. But three, four months ago maybe, they started to go bad . . . come to think of it, I think that's how this whole damned thing started . . .”

“You began killing people as a kid in your dreams?”

“I told you I've never killed anyone, damn it!” I shout like an asshole. Like I've been taking to shouting it at Maggie in a way that's starting to make her think I'm keeping some hit from my youth from her all these years. Like if I was to lose it that way being questioned by the cops all I'd succeed in doing was convincing them I was hiding half a dozen stiffs in the basement.

“Not even in your dreams?”

“Not even in my dreams, Doc,” I tell him, getting ahold of myself. “Well, not exactly, but . . .”

“But?”

“But, well, I've
already
done it when the dream starts. It's never my fault, you understand, Doc, I had to do it to protect myself, or the son of a bitch was just asking for it, or . . .”

I gotta stop and take a long deep breath, three or four actually, because talking about it is like puttin' me right back in there body-wise, I'm startin' to feel that nervous lump in my gut, that hollow behind my eyes, that cold sweat comin' out on my nuts, that twitchy-itchy feeling that I've forgotten something, that they're closing in on me, that they're gonna find out . . .

“Go on . . .” the shrink says in this nothing nerdish way.

This guy don't give away much with his mouth, but there's something about the way he's hunching forward a little, something about the way his eyes are getting glossy behind those hippie glasses like he's stoned on reefer and getting off on this somehow, a pervo thing, or like some down-on-his-luck grifter hoping that this is gonna somehow turn into the main chance.

Or maybe that's part of the job, like you gotta not exactly be sympatico if you expect to make it as an enforcer, what do I know about this shit, and I'm paying for this, ain't I, so . . .

“Okay, Doc, so I admit it, I've
already
killed someone when it starts, even in the kid dreams, I've disposed of the body in a professional manner, I've gotten rid of whatever leads to me, I've done such a good job that
I've forgotten I've done it myself, until—
”

“You've killed someone and you don't remember?”

He gives me a halfway freaked-out look and you don't need to be a shrink or a mind-reader to know what he's thinking, like if this guy can forget he offed someone in a dream, how can he be so sure he's not forgetting he's done it for real? Maybe more than once? How do I know I'm not sitting across my desk from a homicidal maniac so far gone he doesn't even know it?

Is that a question so good he don't even have to ask it? For sure, this is the first time I've found myself asking it. Is that what you pay shrinks for? Is it such a good idea?

I sit there looking at him for a long time saying nothing and neither does he as I run back through my memory looking for any holes. There aren't any. Or any that I can . . . remember. But would I know if there was . . . ?

“Until what . . . ?” he finally says.

“Until it begins to fall apart, and the dreams sorta run backwards,” I tell him, and it's like magic or something, I'm right back there in one of these kid dreams, it's really happening, well, sort of, except that I'm awake, and I know it, and I'm babbling it across the desk as it's happening, or maybe it's the babbling of it that's making it happen, or maybe it's somehow both . . .

 

I'm thirteen years old, I'm upstate, in the country, where we used to spend the summers when I was a kid, or anyway me and Mom and my sisters did in the cabin we rented in this bungalow colony,
with Pop staying in the city to work on the docks and come up only on the weekends.

I love it up here, there's a bunch of kids more or less running wild, ball fields, handball courts, woods, a lake, wild blackberry brambles everywhere, orchards not that big a hike away to steal apples from, and best of all two whole months with no school, no homework, only two days a week of Pop givin' me crap about studying hard so I can go to college so I don't end up like him or worse even though I'm not even in high school yet.

Not that I intend to do either. In fact I
know
I'm not going to because I haven't, I'm
me
inside the little punk's head, the grown-up me that's talking to you now, remembering everything that's going to happen, what's gonna be the future for this kid.

Right now, sunset is coming on, and I'm sitting at one of the picnic tables outside the kind of candy store-bar-pinball parlor, where there's enough light from the windows so we can keep playing poker, me, my main man Richie, Dominick, and Ted, and Richie and me are giving the usual secret hand signals that let us know who's holding the best hand so we can control the bidding between us and split our winnings. Not like this is
cheating,
Doc, it's
teamwork,
and ain't that what made America great?

Yeah, okay, so I'm a little wiseguy already, we all are, poker games, craps, running this and that on kids younger than you are, same kind of stuff the bigger boys running on you, beatings sometimes when you don't cough up your allowance money or your gambling winnings when you got 'em, the law of every jungle, asphalt or otherwise.

Worst of us is Big Al, almost sixteen, and that's what all the guys call the big fat prick if they know what's good for them and even if they don't, because, yeah, he may be overweight, but most of it's muscles, he's built like a gorilla with a brain to match, and if you don't watch your ass when you're around him, and even if you do, every once in a while he's gonna kick the crap out of you
when it's your turn, just to remind everyone who's the top all-beef hotdog around here.

But Big Al, he ain't too bright, else why would he be hanging around with kids mostly a couple years younger than him, and it's usually Big Al who Richie and me take the lion's share of our winnings off in these poker games, not
cleaning him out
all the time—
that
he'd not be stupid enough not to notice, and
we're
not stupid enough to try.

But Al's not here now for some reason I can almost remember, has something to do with Richie's black eye, I think, which makes for a crummy game of seven-card stud, not just because me and Richie are missing our main mark, but also because a four-handed game don't work as well as a five somehow, if you know anything about poker.

And oh shit, here comes Big Al's mother with the local deputy sheriff, which gives me a kind of hollow feeling in my gut and sucks my balls up tight into my scrotum, but doesn't surprise me at all, why the hell is that?

“You bums seen my Al?”

Dominic and Ted shrug.

Richie and me exchange looks and try not to look nervous.

Why is that?

Oh yeah, we haven't seen Big Al for a couple of days now, strange, come to think of it.

So why ain't it surprising?

“Come on, where is he?” Big Al's mom screeches. “You think I don't know he plays cards with you here every afternoon before dinner?”

“Yeah, kind of weird, come to think of it, ain't seen him at all for a couple of days,” Richie tells her, but it don't sound very convincing, Richie's not a very good liar. And besides—

“Yeah yourself, Richie,” she snaps back at him, “then how did you get that fresh shiner?”

Of course the bitch
knows
her son's the main bully around here, she's
proud
of it, after all there's nothing else about him she can be proud of, and it's better than even money that when a kid shows up with a black eye that he got it from Big Al.

“Uh . . . playing softball . . . got hit by a line drive. . . .”

Big Al's mom don't know squat about softball, so she doesn't know Richie is a hotshot shortstop not likely to take a liner in the face. The deputy probably knows from softball but not that Richie's an ace shortstop, so maybe Richie gets away with a lame one like that if it doesn't take him what seems like a year to think it up and slowly spit out. Like I said, Richie is a lousy liar.

He's gonna get us caught.

'Cause Richie's not the bravest guy around either. Even these country cops can get it out of him, probably won't even have to bring on the rubber hoses.

Caught doing what . . . ?

I'm almost remembering . . .

“Ah hate t' haveta say this, Miz Fiorellio,” Deputy Dawg drawls, “but looks like we'd better dredge the bat cave.”