Had he really?

Ralph cast his mind back to the previous morning, Sitting down in this same chair with a cup of tea and thinking Let the play begin.

And then he had seen those two little bald bastards come out, dammit, he had seen them come out of May Locher’s house.”

Except maybe that was wrong, because he hadn’t really been looking at Mrs. Locher’s house; he had been pointed more in the direction of the Red Apple. He’d thought the flicker of movement in the corner of his eye was probably Rosalie, and had turned his head to check. That was when he’d seen the little bald doctors on the stoop of May Locher’s house. He was no longer entirely sure he had seen the front door open; maybe he had just assumed that part, and by not? They sure as hell hadn’t come up Mrs. Locher’s walk.

You can’t be sure of that, Ralph.

Except he could. At three in the morning, Harris Avenue was as still as the mountains of the moon-the slightest movement anywhere within the range of his vision registered.

Had Doc #1 and Doc #2 come out the front door? The longer Ralph thought about it, the more he doubted it.

Then what happened, Ralph? Did they maybe step out from behind the Gardol Invisible Shield? Or-how’s this?-maybe they walked through the door, like those ghosts that used to haunt Cosmo Topper in that old TV show And the craziest thing of all was that felt just about right.

What? That they walked through the fucking DOOR? Oh, Ralph, you need help. You need to talk to someone about what’s happening to you.

Yes. That was the one thing of which he was sure: he needed to spill all this to someone before it drove him crazy. But who? Carolyn would have been best, but she was dead. Leydecker? The problem there was that Ralph had already lied to him about the 911 call.

Why? Because the truth would have sounded insane. It would have sounded, in fact, as if he had caught Ed Deepneau’s paranoia like a cold. And wasn’t that really the most likely explanation, when you looked at the situation dead-on?

“But that’s not it,” he whispered. “They were real. The auras, too.” It’s a long ivalk hack to Eden, sweetheart… and watch out lo)r those green-gold white-man tracks while you’re on the way.

Tell someone. Lay it all out. Yes. And he ought to do it before John Leydecker listened to that 911 tape and showed up asking for an explanation. Wanting to know, basically, why Ralph had lied, and what Ralph actually knew about the death of May Locher.

Tell someone. Lay it all out.

But Carolyn was dead, Leydecker was still too new, Helen was lying low at the WomanCare shelter somewhere out in the willywags, and Lois Chasse might gossip to her girlfriends. Who did that leave?

The answer became clear once he put it to himself that way, but Ralph still felt a surprising reluctance to talk to McGovern about the things which had been happening to him. He remembered the day he had found Bill sitting on a bench by the softball field, crying over his old friend and mentor, Bob Polhurst. Ralph had tried to tell Bill about the auras, and it had been as if McGovern couldn’t hear him; he had been too busy running through his well-thumbed script on the subject of how shitty it was to grow old.

Ralph thought of the satiric raised eyebrow. The unfailing cynicism.

The long face, always so gloomy. The literary allusions, which usually made Ralph smile but often left him feeling a tad inferior, as well. And then there was McGovern’s attitude toward Lois: condescending, even a touch cruel.

Yet this was a long way from being fair, and Ralph knew it. Bill McGovern was capable of kindness, and-perhaps far more important in this case-understanding. He and Ralph had known each other for over twenty years; for the last ten of those years they had lived in the same building. He had been one of Carolyn’s pallbearers, and if Ralph couldn’t talk to Bill about what had been happening to him, who could he talk to?

The answer seemed to be no one.

CHAPTER 10

The misty rings around the streetlamps were gone by the time daylight began to brighten the sky in the east, and by nine o’clock the day was clear and warm-the beginning of Indian summer’s final brief passage, perhaps. Ralph went downstairs as soon as Good Morning America was over, determined to tell McGovern what had been happening to him (or as much as he dared, anyway) before he could lose his nerve.

Standing outside the door of the downstairs apartment, however, he could hear the shower running and the mercifully distant sound of William D. McGovern singing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

Ralph went out to the porch, stuck his hands in his back pockets, and read the day like a catalogue. There was nothing, he reflected, really nothing in the world like October sunshine; he could almost feel his night-miseries draining away. They would undoubtedly be back, but for now he felt all right-tired and muzzy-headed, yes, but still pretty much all right. The day was more than pretty; it was downright gorgeous, and Ralph doubted that there would be another as good before next May. He decided he would be a fool not to take advantage of it.

A walk up to the Harris Avenue Extension and back again would take half an hour, forty-five minutes if there happened to be someone up there worth batting a little breeze with, and by then Bill would be showered, shaved, combed, and dressed.

Also ready to lend a sympathetic ear, if Ralph was lucky.

He walked as far as the picnic area outside the County Airport fence without quite admitting to himself that he was hoping to come across Old Dor. If he did, perhaps the two of them could talk a little poetry-Stephen Dobyns, for instance-or maybe even a bit of philosophy.

They might start that part of their conversation with Dorrance explaining what “long-time business” was, and why he believed Ralph shouldn’t “mess in” with it.

Except Dorrance wasn’t at the picnic area; no one was there but Don Veazie, who wanted to explain to Ralph why Bill Clinton was doing such a horrible job as President, and why it would have been better for the good old U.S. of A. if the American people had elected that fiscal genius Ross Perot. Ralph (who had voted for Clinton and actually thought the man was doing a pretty good job) listened long enough to be polite, then said he had an appointment to have his hair cut. It was the only thing he could think of on short notice.

“Something else, too!” Don blared after him. “That uppity wife of his! Woman’s a lesbian! I can always tell! You know how? I look at their shoes! Shoes is like a secret code with em! They always wear those ones with the square toes and-”

“See you, Don!” Ralph called back, and beat a hasty retreat.

He had gone about a quarter of a mile back down the hill when the day exploded silently all around him.

He was opposite May Locher’s house when it happened. He stopped dead in his tracks, staring down Harris Avenue with wide, unbelieving eyes. His right hand was pressed against the base of his throat and his mouth hung open. He looked like a man having a heart attack, and while his heart seemed all right-for the time being, anyway-he certainly felt as if he were having some kind of an attack.

Nothing he had seen this fall had prepared him for this. Ralph didn’t think anything could have prepared him for this.

That other world-the secret world of auras-had come into view again, and this time there was more of it than Ralph had ever dreamed… so much that he wondered fleetingly if it was possible for a person to die of perceptual overload. Upper Harris Avenue was a fiercely glowing wonderland filled with overlapping spheres and cones and crescents of color. The trees, which were still a week or more away from the climax of their fall transformation, nonetheless burned like torches in Ralph’s eyes and mind. The sky had gone past color; it was a vast blue sonic boom.