“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, any"way. 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 dealNatalie’s in exchange for mine. And-” [Hell.” Quit trying 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! right hedge in front of the He pulled her back against the Applebaums’ summer 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 dogi 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 farther up the street, unstated Lois saw something which stopped her breath Her last, 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.
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 how 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 Rosie. Her jumprope (three-six-nine lion the goose drank wine) was slung over her arm.
She looked impossibly beautiful and impossibly fragile in her sailor shirt and bine shorts. Her pigtails bounced. fast, Ralph thought. Everything Is happening it’s happening too much too fast.
[Not at all, Ralph! You did splendidly five ’wears 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 I 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 ’ n-Forgood or ill, it comes around again -n. ortive lunge for freedom, and as Atropos Rosie made another ah 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’tThen 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.
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 something great if there was such a current and understood, in a vague way, that as a Higher Purpose, he had joined it and would soon be swept down river with it.