“If it’s about the two Swedes, I’ve already heard it,” Farrell said wearily. “I want you to tell me where you go, how you get there, what it feels like when you’re there.” He glanced at his watch and added, “And I think you should do it fairly quickly, because I have to go drive my little green train.” Even my armpits hurt. I am too old for this, too old for everything.
Ben said, “Bright’s disease.” He laughed again, in the old way this time, struggling not to. “Joe, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m swarming with memories that aren’t mine. Those peanuts you gave me, I ate them here, but I tasted them in another time. Somebody tasted them.” Farrell actually felt his jaw drop, which was a new experience. “Things taste so different there, Joe; the light’s all different, the constellations, the facial expressions—even whistling sounds different, for God’s sake. Feelings. People don’t dream the way we do, nothing like us, nothing.” His voice was level enough, but his teeth were chattering. He said, “I have his dreams sometimes. I can’t wake up from those by myself. If Sia weren’t there, I’d never wake up. Nobody would know.”
“Is anybody there for Egil? When he dreams you?” Ben blinked and frowned as if he had not heard the question. Farrell said, “Technique, that’s what I want. Procedure. Do you say Shazam, do you drink something really vile, do you just stand still by yourself and think about Egil in a special way? Tell me, Ben.”
The Cape dogs danced hotly against the bars, whining with grim urgency. They smelled to Farrell of blood and horse dung and chocolate, and he wondered whether they could sense Egil, if only as a wrongness, a constant disquieting shiver in their wild logic. Ben stared back at them silently. Farrell saw his supervisor tacking shyly toward them by way of trash-can inspections. “The League. Is that the way it started, being Egil in the League? Is that the connection?”
Ben lowered his arms slowly, watching them all the way down, like the newly oiled Tin Woodman. “The League made it easier. Sort of like a singles bar.” It was Farrell’s turn to blink, and Ben smiled raggedly. “Common understandings. A sympathetic atmosphere. The luxury of knowing that only certain questions will be asked. But you’ve got it backwards, Joe. I had to invent Egil for them, as a character, an impression, just to be sure that whatever he did, people would always assume it was still me in my Viking hat. The League gave us a place to meet, you see, a place where nobody could ever think I was crazy. Whatever Egil did.”
Farrell stepped back to let a heavy woman with a walking frame pass between them, looking sideways at the dogs and wrinkling her nose. “Give them a bath sometimes, why don’t you?” she said to Farrell. “Nobody likes to stink, people like you never think about that.”
She was followed by two enlaced adolescents, trailing musk and saliva, and then by Farrell’s supervisor, who pointedly looked at his watch, bent slightly at the knees and inquired, “Woo-woo? Chugga-chugga? Ding-ding?”
“Ding-ding right away,” Farrell agreed seriously. “I just have to see my friend to his car.” When the supervisor seemed disposed to debate, Farrell explained, “He’s having dizzy spells—I think it might be something he ate at the Elephants’ Graveyard,” and left him staring anxiously after them, already settling out of court. The supervisor had worked in better zoos than Barton Park, and the strain had been showing for some time.
“You did drive here?” Farrell asked. Ben hesitated, then nodded. Farrell linked arms with him and started him moving toward the parking lot. “I mean, it’s okay for you to drive? Egil’s not likely to take over in the middle of an intersection, is he?” Trying to make a joke of it, he added, “You know how California is about expired licenses.”
“He doesn’t take me over. I told you, it’s more like an exchange.”
The patient instructor tone made Farrell flush so hotly that the skin of his face felt full of splinters. “Rubberlips, I don’t give a shit what you told me. I’ve seen him three times now, and each time you were long gone, you were busy taking him over in the ninth century.” Ben halted and opened his mouth to protest, but Farrell hurried him on. “I still don’t know what you’re really doing, or how you’re doing it, any more than that poor sucker Egil does, but I know fear, do you understand me? And I am truly ashamed of you, for the first time in my life, because I’ve never seen anybody as frightened as that man.” Except one other, the yellow-eyed man who came to Sia’s house. “You ought to be ashamed.”
“You asshole, you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about!” They might have been squabbling over the rules of boxball on a Manhattan side street. Ben said, “I’m not hurting him. I could never hurt him. I love him.”
“He was not consulted. Did he ever ask to be loved out of his own life?” Farrell was trembling himself, shaking Ben’s shoulder, peering into his eyes to find Egil’s incomprehensible torment. “He doesn’t know what’s happening to him—he must think he’s dying, going crazy, and he is going crazy, a thousand years ago. That’s an exchange? That’s love? That’s bloody fucking robbery, Ben.”
“Don’t spit. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” They had reached the parking lot, and Ben was rocking on his heels as he gazed vaguely along the fish-spine rows of stalls.
Farrell asked, “Why were you looking for me?”
“I don’t remember.” Ben set off down the nearest row with the confidently off-balance air of a man lunging after a divining rod.
Farrell followed, his voice a mosquito’s keen in his own ears. “Let it go. You have to let him go.” He touched Ben’s shoulder again and was startled anew at the sense of his friend’s cindery fragility. “Ben, it’s not good for you, either. Whatever you’re learning, whatever wonderful things, it’s not free. You can’t keep doing it, you’ll shatter, you’ll just dissolve, like him, you will. Ben, I know this.”
Ben said, “I can’t find my goddamn car.” He turned and started back the way they had come, so abruptly that Farrell had to jump aside to let him by. His face was averted, but Farrell saw that one side of his mouth was wrong, dragged up and far back, exposing teeth. He said, “I left it here, I’m looking right at it. Son of a bitch.”
They did not speak again until the car was finally located, at the far end of the lot. Ben approached it as warily as if it and he were both strange wild animals themselves. Something in that stiff, exhausted shuffle almost made Farrell cry, and he said, “I’d better drive you home. Both of you.”
Ben shook his head and got into the car. Farrell gripped the open window as he started the engine. “What about Sia?” he demanded. “How does she feel about all this, what you’re doing? She doesn’t believe it’s seizures, that takes a silly person like me. Maybe I’ll talk to her myself, shall I do that, Ben? Because I don’t think she knows the whole story. I don’t think Sia would let you go on killing Egil out of love, not if she knew.”
Ben looked up at him and then away. His free left hand moved from his throat to his mouth, a fist now, pushing as if he were trying to staunch a mortal wound. “You don’t understand. The seizures are the way, the seizures open the way. I never had them until her. They come from living in her house, sharing her bed, being in her thoughts. People aren’t supposed to do that, Joe. The gift is too great, we can’t contain it, we tear. But it’s a gift, a blessing, how can you say no to a blessing, even when it wasn’t meant for you? Don’t worry about Egil, Joe. Egil won’t die of it. It’s my blessing, after all.” The car slid through Farrell’s hands, and he was gone.