Half a dozen wires-four thin, two moderately thick-snaked between the radio (its instruction sheet also tacked neatly to the table) and the opened gut of the SilverChime.
Gardener looked at this for some time and then passed on.
Breakdown. She's had a very odd sort of mental breakdown. The kind Pat Summerall would love.
Here was something else he recognized-a furnace accessory called a rebreather. You attached it to the flue and it was supposed to recirculate some of the heat that ordinarily got wasted. It was the sort of gadget Bobbi would see in a catalogue, or maybe in the Augusta Trustworthy Hardware Store, and talk about buying. She never actually would, though, because if she bought it she would have to install it.
But now she apparently had bought it and installed it.
You can't say she's having a breakdown and “that's all,” because when someone who's really creative highsides it, it's rarely a case of “that's all.” Crackups are probably never pretty, but when someone like Bobbi tips over, it can be sort of amazing. Just look at this shit.
Do you believe that?
Yeah, I do. I don't mean that creative people are somehow finer, or more sensitive, and thus have finer, more sensitive nervous breakdowns-you can save that horseshit for the Sylvia Plath worshippers. It's just that creative people have creative breakdowns. If you don't believe it, I repeat: look at this shit.
Over there was the water heater, a white, cylindrical bulk to the right of the root-cellar door. It looked the same, but…
Gardener went over, wanting to see how Bobbi had souped it up so radically.
She's gone on a mad home-improvement kick. And the nuttiest thing is that she doesn't seem to have differentiated between things like fixing the water heater and customizing doorbells. New banister. Fresh dirt brought in and raked over the floor of the root cellar. Christ knows what else. No wonder she's exhausted. And just by the bye, Gard, exactly where did Bobbi come by the know-how to do all this stuff? If it was a correspondence course from Popular Mechanix, she must have really crammed.
His first dazed surprise at coming on this nutty workshop in Bobbi's basement was becoming deepening unease. It wasn't just the evidences of obsessive behavior that he saw along that table-heaps of equipment too neatly organized, all four corners of the instruction sheets tacked down-that bothered him. Nor was it the evidence of mania in Bobbi's apparent failure to discriminate between worthwhile renovations and nonsensical (apparently nonsensical, Gardener amended) ones.
What gave Gardener the creeps was thinking about-trying to think about-the huge, the profligate amounts of energy that had been expended here. To have done just those things he had seen so far, Bobbi must have blazed like a torch. There were projects like the fluorescent lights which had already been completed. There were the ones still pending. There were the trips to Augusta she must have needed to make to get all the equipment, hardware, and batteries. Plus getting sweet dirt to replace the sour. Don't forget that.
What could have driven her to it?
Gardener didn't know, he didn't like to imagine Bobbi here, racing back and forth, working on two different do-it-yourself projects at once, or five, or ten. The image was too clear. Bobbi with the sleeves of her shirt rolled up and the top three buttons undone, beads of sweat trickling down between her breasts, her hair pulled back in a rough horsetail, eyes burning, face pale except for two hectic red patches, one in each cheek. Bobbi looking like Ms Wizard gone insane, growing more haggard as she screwed screws, bolted bolts, soldered wires, trucked in dirt, and stood on her stepladder, bent backwards like a ballet dancer, sweat running down her face, cords standing out in her neck as she hung up the new lights. Oh, and while you're at it, don't forget Bobbi putting in the new wiring and fixing the hot-water tank.
Gardener touched the tank's enamel side and pulled his hand back fast. It looked the same, but it wasn't. It was hot as hell. He squatted and opened the hatch at the bottom of the tank.
That was when Gardener really sailed off the edge of the world.
Before, the water heater had run on LP gas. The small-bore copper tubes which fed gas to the tank's burner ran from tanks in a hook-up behind the house. The delivery truck from Dead River Gas in Derry came once a month and replaced the tanks if they needed replacing-usually they did, because the tank was wasteful as well as inefficient… two things that went together more often than not, now that Gard thought about it. The first thing Gardener noticed was that the copper tubes were no longer hooked into the tank. They hung free behind it, their ends stuffed with cloth.
Holy shit, how's she heating her water? he thought, and then he did look into the hatch, and then for a little while he froze completely.
His mind seemed clear enough, yes, but that disconnected, floating sensation had come back-that feeling of separation. Ole Gard was going up again, up like a child's silver Puffer balloon. He knew he felt afraid, but this knowledge was dim, hardly important, compared to that dismal feeling of coming untethered from himself. No, Gard, Jesus! a mournful voice cried from deep inside him.
He remembered going to the Fryeburg Fair when he was a little kid, no more than ten. He went into the Mirror Maze with his mother, and the two of them had gotten separated. That was the first time he had felt this odd sensation of separation from self, of drifting away, or above, his physical body and his physical (if there was such a thing) mind. He could see his mother, oh yes-five mothers, a dozen, a hundred mothers, some short, some tall, some fat, some scrawny. At the same time he saw five, a dozen, a hundred Gards. Sometimes he'd see one of his reflections join one of hers and he would reach out, almost absently, expecting to touch her slacks. Instead, there was only empty air… or another mirror.
He had wandered for a long time, and he supposed he had panicked, but it hadn't felt like panic, and so far as he could remember, no one had acted like he had been in a panic when he finally floundered his way out-this only after fifteen minutes of twisting, turning, doubling back, and running into barriers of clear glass. His mother's brow had furrowed slightly for a moment, then cleared. That was all. But he had felt panic, just as he was feeling it now: that sensation of feeling your mind coming unbolted from itself, like a piece of machinery falling apart in zero-g.
It comes… but it goes. Wait, Gard. Just wait for it to be over.
So he squatted on his hunkers, looking into the open hatch at the base of Anderson's water tank, and waited for it to be over, as he had once waited for his feet to lead him down the correct passage and out of that terrible Mirror Maze at the Fryeburg Fair.
The removal of the gas ring had left a round hollow area at the base of the tank. This area had been filled with a wild tangle of wires-red, green, blue, yellow. In the center of the tangle was a cardboard egg carton. HILLCREST FARMS, the blue printing read. GRADE A JUMBO. Sitting in each of the egg cradles was an EverReady alkaline D-cell battery, + terminals up. A tiny funnel-shaped gadget capped the terminals, and all of the wires seemed to either start-or end-in these caps. As he looked longer, in a state that did not precisely feel like panic, Gardener saw that his original impression-that the wires were in a wild jumble-was no more true than his original impression that the stuff on Bobbi's worktable was in a litter. No, there was order in the way the wires came out of or went into those twelve funnel-shaped caps-as few as two wires coming in or going out of some, as many as six coming in or going out of others. There was even order in the shape they made-it was a small arch. Some of the wires bent back into the funnels capped over other batteries, but most went to circuit boards propped against the sides of the water tank's heating compartment. They were from electronic toys made in Korea, Gardener surmised -too much cheap, silvery solder on corrugated fiberboard. A weird Gyro Gearloose conglomeration if ever there had been one… but this weird conglomeration of components was doing something. Oh yes. It was heating water fast enough to raise blisters, for one thing.