'Upper levels? What upper levels? What building?'
'Never mind. You've forgotten, but remembering wouldn't change anything. The point is just this, Lois: they didn't want to stop Ed because thousands of people would have died if he'd hit the Civic Center dead-on. They wanted to stop him because there was one person whose life needed to be preserved at any cost . . . in their reckoning, anyway. When I was finally able to make them see that I felt the same about my kid as they did about theirs, arrangements were made.'
'That's when they cut you, wasn't it? And when you made the promise. The one you used to talk about in your sleep.'
He shot her a wide-eyed, startled, and heartbreakingly boyish glance. She only looked back.
'Yes,' he said, and wiped his forehead. 'I guess so.' The air lay in his lungs like metal shavings. 'A life for a life, that was the deal - Natalie's in exchange for mine. And--'
[Hey! Quit tryin to wiggle away! Quit it, Rover, or I'll kick your asshole square!]
Ralph broke off at the sound of that shrill, hectoring, horridly familiar voice - a voice no human being on Harris Avenue but him could hear - and looked across the street.
'Ralph? What--'
'Shhh!'
He pulled her back against the summer-dry hedge in front of the Applebaums' house. He wasn't doing anything so polite as perspiring now; his whole body was crawling with a stinking sweat as heavy as engine oil, and he could feel every gland in his body dumping a hot load into his blood. His underwear was trying to crawl up into the crack of his ass and disappear. His tongue tasted like a blown fuse.
Lois followed the direction of his gaze. 'Rosalie!' she cried. 'Rosalie, you bad dog! What are you doing over there?'
The black-and-tan beagle she had given Ralph on their first Christmas was across the street, standing (except cringing was actually the word for what she was doing) on the sidewalk in front of the house where Helen and Nat had lived until Ed had popped his wig. For the first time in the years they'd had her, the beagle reminded Lois of Rosalie #1. Rosalie #2 appeared to be all alone over there, but that did not allay Lois's sudden terror.
Oh, what have I done? she thought. What have I done?
'Rosalie!' she screamed. 'Rosalie, get over here!'
The dog heard, Lois could see that she did, but she didn't move.
'Ralph? What's happening over there?'
'Shhhh!' he said again, and then, just a little further up the street, Lois saw something which stopped her breath. Her last, unstated hope that all this was happening only in Ralph's head, that it was a kind of flashback to their previous experience, disappeared, because now their dog had company.
Holding a skip-rope looped over her right arm, six-year-old Nat Deepneau came to the end of her walk and looked down the street toward a house she didn't remember ever living in, toward a lawn where her shirtless father, an undesignated player named Ed Deepneau, had once sat among intersecting rainbows, listening to the Jefferson Airplane as a single spot of blood dried on his John Lennon spectacles. Natalie looked down the street and smiled happily at Rosalie, who was panting and watching her with miserable, frightened eyes.
20
Atropos doesn't see me, Ralph thought. He's concentrating on Rosie . . . and on Natalie, of course . . . and he doesn't see me.
Everything had come around with a sort of hideous perfection. The house was there, Rosalie was there, and Atropos was there, too, wearing a hat cocked back on his head and looking like a wiseacre news reporter in a 1950s B-picture - something directed by Ida Lupino, perhaps. Only this time it wasn't a Panama with a bite gone from the brim; this time it was a Boston Red Sox cap and it was too small even for Atropos because the adjustable band in the back had been pulled all the way over to the last hole. It had to be, in order to fit the head of the little girl who owned it.
All we need now is Pete the paperboy and the show would be perfect, Ralph thought. The final scene of Insomnia, or, Short-Time Life on Harris Avenue, a Tragi-Comedy in Three Acts. Everyone takes a bow and then exits stage right.
This dog was afraid of Atropos, just as Rosalie #1 had been, and the main reason the little bald doc hadn't seen Ralph and Lois was that he was trying to keep her from running off before he was ready. And here came Nat, headed down the sidewalk toward her favorite dog in the whole world, Ralph and Lois's Rosalie. Her jump-rope (three-six-nine, hon, the goose drank wine) was slung over her arm. She looked impossibly beautiful and impossibly fragile in her sailor shirt and blue shorts. Her pigtails bounced.
It's happening too fast, Ralph thought. Everything is happening much too fast.
[Not at all, Ralph! You did splendidly five years ago; you'll do splendidly now.]
It sounded like Clotho, but there was no time to look. A green car was coming slowly down Harris Avenue from the direction of the airport, moving with the sort of agonized care which usually meant a driver who was very old or very young. Agonized care or not, it was unquestionably the car; a dirty membrane hung over it like a shroud.
Life is a wheel, Ralph thought, and it occurred to him that this was not the first time the idea had occurred to him. Sooner or later everything you thought you'd left behind comes around again. For good or ill, it comes around again.
Rosie made another abortive lunge for freedom, and as Atropos yanked her back, losing his hat, Nat knelt before her and patted her. 'Are you lost, girl? Did you get out by yourself? That's okay, I'll take you home.' She gave Rosie a hug, her small arms passing through Atropos's arms, her small, beautiful face only inches from his ugly, grinning one. Then she got up. 'Come on, Rosie! Come on, sugarpie.'
Rosalie started down the sidewalk at Nat's heel, looking back once at the grinning little man and whining uneasily. On the other side of Harris Avenue, Helen came out of the Red Apple, and the last condition of the vision Atropos had shown Ralph was fulfilled. Helen had a loaf of bread in one hand. Her Red Sox hat was on her head.
Ralph swept Lois into his arms and kissed her fiercely. 'I love you with all my heart,' he said. 'Remember that, Lois.'
'I know you do,' she said calmly. 'And I love you. That's why I can't let you do it.'
She seized him around the neck, her arms like bands of iron, and he felt her breasts push against him hard as she drew in all the breath her lungs would hold.
'Go away, you rotten bastard!' she screamed. 'I can't see you, but I know you're there! Go away! Go away and leave us alone!'
Natalie stopped dead in her tracks and looked at Lois with wide-eyed surprise. Rosalie stopped beside her, ears pricking.
'Don't go into the street, Nat!' Lois screamed at her. 'Don't--'
Then her hands, which had been laced together at the back of Ralph's neck, were holding nothing; her arms, which had been locked about his shoulders in a deathgrip, were empty.
He was gone like smoke.
21
Atropos looked toward the cry of alarm and saw Ralph and Lois standing on the other side of Harris Avenue. More important, he saw Ralph seeing him. His eyes widened; his lips parted in a hateful snarl. One hand flew to his bald pate - it was crisscrossed with old scars, the remnants of wounds made with his own scalpel - in an instinctive gesture of defense that was five years too late.
[Fuck you, Shorts! This little bitch is mine!]
Ralph saw Nat, looking at Lois with uncertainty and surprise. He heard Lois shrieking at her, telling her not to go into the street. Then it was Lachesis he heard, speaking from someplace close by.
[Come up, Ralph! As far as you can! Quickly!]
He felt the clench in the center of his head, felt that brief swoop of vertigo in his stomach, and suddenly the whole world brightened and filled with color. He half-saw and half-felt Lois's arms and locked hands collapse inward, through the place where his body had been a moment before, and then he was drawing away from her - no, being carried away from her. He felt the pull of some great current and understood, in a vague way, that if there was such a thing as a Higher Purpose, he had joined it an
d would soon be swept downriver with it.
Natalie and Rosalie were now standing directly in front of the house which Ralph had once shared with Bill McGovern before selling up and moving into Lois's house. Nat glanced doubtfully at Lois, then waved tentatively. 'She's okay, Lois - see, she's right here.' She patted Rosalie's head. 'I'll cross her safe, don't worry.' Then, as she started into the street, she called to her mother. 'I can't find my baseball cap! I think somebody stoled it!'
Rosalie was still on the sidewalk. Nat turned to her impatiently. 'Come on, girl!'
The green car was moving in the child's direction, but very slowly. It did not at first look like much of a danger to her. Ralph recognized the driver at once, and he did not doubt his senses or suspect he was having a hallucination. In that instant it seemed very right that the approaching sedan should be piloted by his old paperboy.
'Natalie!' Lois screamed. 'Natalie, no!'
Atropos darted forward and slapped Rosalie #2 on the rump.
[Get outta here, mutt! G'wan! Before I change my mind!]
Atropos spared Ralph one final grimacing leer as Rosie yelped and darted into the street . . . and into the path of the Ford driven by sixteen-year-old Pete Sullivan.
Natalie didn't see the car; she was looking at Lois, whose face was all red and scary. It had finally occurred to Nat that Lois wasn't screaming about Rosie at all, but something else entirely.
Pete registered the sprinting beagle; it was the little girl he didn't see. He swerved to avoid Rosalie, a maneuver that ended with the Ford aimed directly at Natalie. Ralph could see two frightened faces behind the windshield as the car veered, and he thought Mrs Sullivan was screaming.
Atropos was leaping up and down, doing an obscenely joyful hornpipe.
[Yahh, Short-Time! Silly white-hair! Toldja I'd fix you!]
In slow motion Helen dropped the loaf of bread she was holding. 'Natalie, LOOK OUUUUUUTTT!' she shrieked.
Ralph ran. Again there was that clear sensation of moving by thought alone. And as he closed in on Nat, now diving forward with his hands stretched out, aware of the car looming just beyond her, kicking bright arrows of sun through its dark deathbag and into his eyes, he clenched his mind again, bringing himself back down to the Short-Time world for the last time.
He fell into a landscape that rang with splintered screams: Helen's mingled with Lois's mingled with the ones being made by the tires of the Ford. Weaving its way through them like an outlaw vine was the sound of Atropos's jeers. Ralph got a brief glimpse of Nat's wide blue eyes, and then he shoved her in the chest and stomach as hard as he could, sending her flying backwards with her hands and feet thrust out in front of her. She landed sitting up in the gutter, bruising her tailbone on the curb but breaking nothing. From some distant place, Ralph heard Atropos squawk in fury and disbelief.
Then two tons of Ford, still travelling at twenty miles an hour, struck Ralph and the soundtrack dropped dead. He was heaved upward and backward in a low, slow arc - it felt slow, anyway, from inside - and went with the Ford's hood ornament imprinted on his cheek like a tattoo and one broken leg trailing behind him. There was time to see his shadow sliding along the pavement beneath him in a shape like an X; there was time to see a spray of red droplets in the air just above him and to think that Lois must have splattered more paint on him than he had thought at first. And there was time to see Natalie sitting at the side of the street, weeping but all right . . . and to sense Atropos on the sidewalk behind her, shaking his fists and dancing with rage.
I believe I did pretty damned good for an old geezer, Ralph thought, but now I think I could really do with a nap.
Then he came back to earth with a terrible mortal smack and rolled - skull fracturing, back breaking, lungs punctured by brittle thorns of bone as his ribcage exploded, liver turning to pulp, intestines first coming unanchored and then rupturing.
And nothing hurt.
Nothing at all.
22
Lois never forgot the awful thud that was the sound of Ralph's return to Harris Avenue, or the bloody splash-marks he left behind as he cartwheeled to a stop. She wanted to scream but dared not; some deep, true voice told her that if she did that, the combination of shock, horror, and summer heat would send her unconscious to the sidewalk, and when she came to again, Ralph would be beyond her.
She ran instead of screaming, losing one shoe, marginally aware that Pete Sullivan was getting out of the Ford, which had come to rest almost exactly where Joe Wyzer's car - also a Ford - had come to rest after Joe had hit Rosalie #1 all those years ago. She was also marginally aware that Pete was screaming.
She reached Ralph and fell on her knees beside him, seeing that his shape had somehow been changed by the green Ford, that the body beneath the familiar chino pants and paint-splattered shirt was fundamentally different from the body which had been pressed against hers less than a minute ago. But his eyes were open, and they were bright and aware.
'Ralph?'
'Yes.' His voice was clear and strong, unmarked by either confusion or pain. 'Yes, Lois, I hear you.'
She started to put her arms around him and hesitated, thinking about how you weren't supposed to move people who had been badly injured because you might hurt them even worse or kill them. Then she looked at him again, at the blood pouring from the sides of his mouth and the way his lower body seemed to have come unhinged from the upper part, and decided it would be impossible to hurt Ralph more than he had been hurt already. She hugged him, leaning close, leaning into the smells of disaster: blood and the sweet-sour acetone odor of spent adrenaline on the outrush of his breath.
'You did it this time, didn't you?' Lois asked. She kissed his cheek, his blood-soaked eyebrows, his bloody forehead where the skin had been peeled away from his skull in a flap. She began to cry. 'Look at you! Shirt torn, pants torn . . . do you think clothes grow on trees?'
'Is he all right?' Helen asked from behind her. Lois didn't turn around, but she saw the shadows on the street: Helen with her arm around her weeping daughter's shoulders, and Rosie standing by Helen's right leg. 'He saved Nat's life and I didn't even see where he came from. Please, Lois, say he's all r--'
Then the shadows shifted as Helen moved to a place where she could actually see Ralph, and she pulled Nat's face against her blouse and began to wail.
Lois leaned closer to Ralph, caressing his cheeks with the palms of her hands, wanting to tell him that she had meant to come with him - she had meant to, yes, but in the end he had been too quick for her. In the end he had left her behind.
'Love you, sweetheart,' Ralph said. He reached up and copied her gesture with his own palm. He tried to raise his left hand as well, but it would only lie on the pavement and twitch.
Lois took his hand and kissed it. 'Love you, too, Ralph. Always. So much.'
'I had to do it. You see?'
'Yes.' She didn't know if she did see, didn't know if she would ever see . . . but she knew he was dying. 'Yes, I see.'
He sighed harshly - that sweet acetone smell wafted up to her again - and smiled.
'Miz Chasse? Miz Roberts, I mean?' It was Pete, speaking in hitching gasps. 'Is Mr Roberts okay? Please say I didn't hurt him!'
'Stay away, Pete,' she said without turning around. 'Ralph is fine. He just tore his pants and shirt a little . . . didn't you, Ralph?'
'Yes,' he said. 'You bet. You'll just have to hosswhip me for--'
He broke off and looked to her left. No one was there, but Ralph smiled anyway. 'Lachesis!' he said.
He put out his trembling, blood-grimy right hand, and as Lois, Helen, and Pete Sullivan watched, it rose and fell twice in the empty air. Ralph's eyes moved again, this time to the right. Slowly, very slowly, he moved his hand in that direction. When he spoke this time, his voice had begun to fade. 'Hi, Clotho. Now remember: this . . . doesn't . . . hurt. Right?'
Ralph appeared to listen, and then smiled.
'Yep,' he whispered, 'any way you can get her.'
His hand rose and fell again in the air, then dropped back to his chest. He looked up at Lois with his fading blue eyes.
'Listen,' he said, speaking with great effort. Yet his eyes blazed, would not let hers go. 'Every day I woke up next to you was like waking up young and seeing . . . everything new.' He tried to raise his hand to her cheek again, and could not. 'Every day, Lois.'
'It was like that for me, too, Ralph - like waking up young.'
'Lois?'
'What?'
'The ticking,' he said. He swallowed and then said it again, enunciating the words with great effort. 'The ticking.'
'What ticking?'
'Never mind, it's stopped,' he said, and smiled brilliantly. Then Ralph stopped, too.
23
Clotho and Lachesis stood watching Lois weep over the man who lay dead in the street. In one hand Clotho held his scissors; he raised the other to eye-level and looked at it wonderingly.
It glowed and blazed with Ralph's aura.
Clotho: [He's here . . . in here . . . how wonderful!]
Lachesis raised his own right hand. Like Clotho's left, it looked as if someone had pulled a blue mitten over the normal green-gold aura which swaddled it.
Lachesis: [Yes. He was a wonderful man.]
Clotho: [Shall we give him to her?]
Lachesis: [Can we?]
Clotho: [There's one way to find out.]
They approached Lois. Each placed the hand Ralph had shaken on one side of Lois's face.
24
'Mommy!' Natalie Deepnau cried. In her agitation, she had reverted to the patois of her babyhood. 'Who those wittle men? Why they touchin Roliss?'
'Shh, honey,' Helen said, and buried Nat's head against her breast again. There were no men, little or otherwise, near Lois Roberts; she was kneeling alone in the street next to the man who had saved her daughter's life.
25
Lois looked up suddenly, her eyes wide and surprised, her grief forgotten as a gorgeous feeling of (light blue light) calmness and peace filled her. For a moment Harris Avenue was gone. She was in a dark place filled with the sweet smells of hay and cows, a dark place that was split by a hundred brilliant seams of light. She never forgot the fierce joy that leaped up in her at that moment, nor the sure sense that she was seeing a representation of a universe that Ralph wanted her to see, a universe where there was dazzling light behind the darkness . . . couldn't she see it through the cracks?