Excelsior!

Mr. Barbicane Takes A Trip was written between November 1st and November 30th of 2005 as part of National Novel Writing Month which challenges all comers to create a minimum of fifty-thousand words of prose during the thirty days of the event.

Are you ready for NaNoWriMo 2006?

If you're just arriving, these chapters were posted in order. To read the book from the beginning, scroll down to Chapter One. Have a nice trip.

Chapter Thirty-three

As Vivian Teller danced for her dog it was black outside the windows of the MD-80 where Diana sat on the arm rest of 4-B leaning close to Lloyd Barton. She could see her reflection in the window behind him. She thought she was sitting to great advantage. In the parking lot of The Olive Garden the growing darkness was held back by the mercury vapor lamps as Vickie and her mother walked toward the restaurant. They could see Rory waiting for them by the door.

Near Donegal, Pennsylvania, night poured into The Durwood Family Drive-In, but Mr. Barbicane did not notice.

He had made the choice not to proceed and was comfortable with that decision. As the details of the inside of the car around him grew dim and indistinguishable, he continued the process by which he gave himself over to this new condition of motionlessness.

Mr. Barbicane was becoming the still center of everything, the axis about which all else turned. All around him people moved and spun and danced, but Mr. Barbicane did none of these things. Other people might love and lose and blunder through life, but not Mr. Barbicane. He has decided to remain where he is. He will never arrive and he will not be missed. No longer the passenger, no longer in motion.

The thought of this warms Mr. Barbicane as he looks through the windshield and smiles. Ahead of him is the blank screen of the theater, becoming less distinct with every passing moment.

Soon it will be impossible to know where the screen ends and where the sky begins.

Chapter Thirty-two

The sky outside the windows of the MD-80 would be dark by the time Diana broke again with company policy and gave Lloyd Barton her telephone number. They were flying east, into the night.

But it was earlier in Dallas-Ft. Worth and there was still light in the sky when Vivian Teller took Charley for a walk through the park a half mile from her apartment building. She had purchased a leash and other items at a pet store earlier in the day. On the way out of the store she passed a vending machine that would create engraved identification tags while you wait. She inserted the appropriate money and used a keyboard on the machine to type in her information. A few minutes later she had a tag in her hand with her last name and telephone number stamped on it. She’d read that you shouldn’t put the dog’s name on such tags.

When she got home from the pet store she found Charley on the bed again. She used a pair of pliers to attach the new tag to his collar and he spent the rest of the day jingling wherever he went in the house.

Vivian listened to how different her house sounded with a dog in it and she very much liked the new background. They went for a short walk around the neighborhood in the afternoon, but Vivian decided they needed to explore on their before dinner evening walk so she tugged Charley in a different direction, toward the park.

It was a manicured multi-purpose community oriented sort of park. Rolling expanses of grass trimmed to almost golf course intensity, a globular shaped pond surrounded by a concrete walkway wide enough for silly looking, canopied, two-seater sit down bicycle contraptions you could rent by the hour from a shed near the lake. There was an area dedicated to family cook-outs with black metal barbecue grills attached to metal poles driven into the ground. Vivian’s favorite thing in the park was the small band shell set at one end of the lake, facing a hillside. They did concerts here in the summer. Light classical things, Gilbert and Sullivan, show-tunes. And on the Fourth of July they played The Stars and Stripes for a finale, supplementing the Sousa with skyrockets fired from a barge floating at the center of the pond.

Charley approved of this park to the point where Vivian had trouble keeping up with him as he ran from smell to smell. She would have let him off his new leash, but she was afraid he’d run off and get lost in this unfamiliar place and she would lose him. So she ran after him, trying to run fast enough so that the dog could move at his own pace. He went from stroll to trot to gallop, stretching his thin legs out in front and behind, ears blowing back, face up, mouth open, experiencing some rapture forbidden to lowly bipeds.

All Vivian could do was hang on, try to keep up, and laugh.

They stayed in the park a very long time, past sunset and into the beginning of twilight. They walked around the pond twice then headed up the hill above the band shell, climbing up to the near horizon. Near the crest of the hill Charley stopped and sat down. Vivian gave him water from the handsome blue walking bottle she bought for him at the pet store. Charley lapped loudly then stretched out on the grass.

Vivian sat next to the dog and felt safe enough to put down her end of the leash. She looked down at the band shell. The Fourth of July program always opened with Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man which she liked, but there was so much more Copland she liked better. There was, in particular, a piece her dancer lover used in a solo performance, a piece called Poetic, Somewhat Mournful from Copland’s works for piano and violin. At the beginning of the piece the lights would find her standing alone on stage, wearing a white danskin and a diaphanous purple cape. The music would start and she would move in fluid ways you would never think a human body could achieve. Few could do it as well as she. This sweet, sad, lost music playing and her moving alone on stage.

At first you think she’s looking for something, then you realize she’s not. She’s lost something or she’s waiting for something, but you know it’s not about searching. Vivian was never sure what the piece was about and she never asked because she was afraid her lover would think her impenetrably stupid. But she loved the piece and she loved watching her dance it. She loved the sheen of sweat across her throat and the taste of the salt when she came off stage and they kissed.
Where was her dancer now?

Vivian stood, slapped the cut grass off the backside of her jeans and slipped her hands into the back pockets. It was getting dark. They’d have to head home soon.

She took a step away from Charley and then another step and then she lifted her leg and held it in the air for a moment before she folded her knee and brought the toe of her running shoe down on the earth. She thought about how the piece set to Poetic, Somewhat Mournful began.

Vivian turned her back on Charley for a moment, and she began to dance. She was older now, older than her lover had been when they were together and she was never a dancer so she knew the movements would be slow and stiff and far removed from graceful. She just wanted to see if she could remember them. And she did. The dance came back to her, not through her memory, but from somewhere else inside her.

And as Vivian Teller danced on the side of the hill she understood the dance her lover danced so many years ago. It wasn’t about loss or searching or waiting, it was about something very different, something Vivian could never have known before she danced it herself on the darkening hill.

The light was going quickly. Vivian could barely make out the shape of Charley on the grass as she moved in front of him. But dogs see very well at twilight so while Vivian could not see Charley in detail, Charley could see her very well. He had lifted his head when she first stood, assuming this was a signal that they would be going and there might be food at the end of the journey. Then she stepped away from him and started to move in a way he’d never seen a human move before. He was fascinated and grateful as only a dog can be grateful.

You see, no one had ever danced for Charley before.

Chapter Thirty-one

The first time Diana saw the scratch on the passenger side of her car was when she turned to look back at it in the employee parking lot at Pittsburgh International Airport. She hadn’t seen it when she got in the car and backed out of her space, but she did see the empty Stoli bottle on the cement when the car cleared it. She put the VW in park, undid her seatbelt and went to pick up the bottle and throw it in the recycling. It was empty and Diana assumed the remaining contents had spilled when the bottle rolled under the car because she certainly didn’t remember finishing it. The cap, however, was securely on the empty bottle.

Diana looked down and squinted through her sunglasses. She saw the lotto ticket on the floor and started to reach down for it. Her head was suddenly filled with liquid razor blades, pumped in an amazingly high pressure. She started to straighten up then figured the hell with it and dropped to her haunches and picked up the ticket. Diana put the ticket in her bag and told her aching brain to remember it was there so she could check the numbers later.

She disposed of the bottle, got back in the car and carefully navigated out of the garage. The drive to the airport was painfully bright, but otherwise uneventful.

Diana found a parking space near the shuttle stop and was walking toward the bus shelter when she realized she couldn’t remember beeping on her car alarm. That’s when she turned, reaching for her keys, and looked back at the car and saw the scratch. She had no idea how it had gotten there. She had no memory of hitting the recycling bins, crushing the ornamental lawn sculpture of the man with the burro and the cart, and she was completely oblivious to the fact that she had severed the prehensile tale of a Virginia Opossum.

Whatever happened to her car, she believed, must have happened while she was working her last shift, the one that brought Mr. Barbicane to Pittsburgh. It couldn’t have happened at her apartment building because the passenger side of her car was against a cinderblock wall at the end of a row. Someone must have scratched her car in the parking lot and not even bothered to leave a note. The scratch must have been there last night and she was simply too tired or it was too dark to notice. That was the only way such a thing could have happened. If someone had scratched the car when she was in it, she’d have known it.

On the shuttle bus she had checked herself for any residual waves of nausea and found that everything was just fine. There was still a headache, but that’s why God made Excedrin. She had taken between four and six of the caplets since she woke up and would take some more before boarding her flight. There was also dehydration to be addressed. She drank a bottle of Gatorade on the way into the airport and would get another as she went through the terminal. Diana was a little concerned about her stuffed up sinus, they could be painful in flight, but she had some nasal spray for that. She’d use it closer to departure time. So, really, all was just fine. Except for the stupid scratch on her car.

She checked in, headed for the gate, ran into her crew mates in the concourse, talked about nothing, brushed past the early check-ins and boarded the MD-80 she would be working on, which was similar in many ways to the machines Mr. Barbicane had flown on the previous days, but older and configured for fewer passengers. She would be flying to Syracuse, New York then on to Halifax, Nova Scotia this afternoon and evening.

Diana had kept her sunglasses on until they opened the aircraft for boarding. If anyone asked she would have told them she had a little migraine, which would have helped her if later in the flight the hangover staged a second assault. But no one asked her about the sunglasses.

The only painful part of prepping the cabin was trying to read the paperwork on the meal and drink carts, the manifests detailing what food was on board. This required focus and that sent needles through the back of her eyes. Otherwise, except for just a little additional sweating which she felt on her upper lip and some tearing at the corner of her eyes which she was afraid would ruin her make-up, it was all routine.

She paid little attention to the passengers as they arrived. Few children, which was good. She slipped into the forward lavatory to swallow another three Excedrin along with most of the water bottle she was working on, then used the nasal spray to open up her sinuses. She patted the sweat off her upper lip, checked her make-up, which was really just fine, and then went back to complete the boarding process.

Push back happened at the appointed time. Diana performed the safety mime in the forward cabin, something she always liked to do, then did a fast walk through to check belts before returning forward to the galley where she pulled down the starboard jump-seat and belted herself in. Ritual was removing her from any lingering discomfort.

She had worried about the climb to cruising altitude, what that might do to her head and there had been a nasty twinge as they went through twenty-thousand feet. But she shut her eyes and pressed her head back against the bulkhead and toughed it out. She breathed deeply, feeling the cool recirculated air fill her head, rushing past the artificially contracted blood vessels of her sinuses. There had been some difficulty breathing after the face lift and cheek implants which lasted longer than she expected based on what the surgeon had told her, but it eventually subsided, and the results were certainly worth the minor inconvenience.

As the plane climbed Diana thought about how well things were going, what a good point she was at in her life. She couldn’t even be bothered to work herself up over the idiot who scratched her car. You have to let that sort of thing go. You can’t sweat the little things.

She found the vibration of the plane coming through the back of her head pressed against the bulkhead to be a comforting massage, taking away what was left of the hangover. This made her smile. Now it would be unnecessary to go to the minor trouble of sneaking any restorative alcohol during the flight.

She heard the tone from the cockpit informing her that they had reached cruising altitude. She took a deep grateful breath and unstrapped herself in order to go about her job.

Diana removed her jacket and took around the drinks ordered by the first class passengers prior to take off. She took this opportunity to inquire what selections they had made from the dinner menu.

She leaned over the empty 4-B to give the man in 4-A his Diet Coke with lime. He took the cup from her, which was when she became aware the man was looking at her augmented breasts. They were much more dramatic when she took off her uniform jacket and moved around the cabin in the white blouse with the blue epaulettes. This pleased her. She asked the man what he wanted for dinner. He looked down at his menu and then back at Diana to ask for the Seafood Pasta. But as soon as he looked at her, his eyes clicked down to her breasts again, outlined against the stretched fabric of the blouse as she leaned across the open seat to hear his order. But what was sweet about this was that he didn’t seem to be embarrassed to be looking. He was impressed, but not ashamed of being impressed and Diana liked this response most of all. A man could go a great distance with a response like that without even knowing it.

She straightened up and continued through the cabin, but she continued to think about the man in 4-A who was in his late thirties, good looking, no visible wedding ring, good suit, and able to afford a first class seat. She wondered if he was getting off in Syracuse or flying on to Nova Scotia. This was going to be a lovely flight.

Diana was not wrong about the good looking man in 4-A; he had in fact been looking at her breasts and his attention was indeed indicative of respect. He very much admired her breasts and felt immediately drawn to them. It should be noted, however, that his desire was less about access and more about envy. For the man in seat 4-A was Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne engineer Lloyd Barton who found in the shape and proportions of Diana’s breasts, their apparent substance and gravity, the ideal he had always wished to somehow posses. Lloyd Barton coveted Diana’s breasts.

Later in the flight, Diana will pause before serving Lloyd’s Seafood Pasta to adjust her kerchief to one side and open the top two buttons of her blouse (this against airline regulations pertaining to the dress and deportment of employees). She will bring Lloyd his meal and once again lean across the unoccupied 4-B. She will do so with unmistakable emphasis and she will linger so long that when she finally steps back Lloyd will have been so dissembled by the proximity of what he has always wanted that it will be difficult for him to eat and he will leave much of his meal untouched. This will give Diana an additional opening to speak to him later when she collects his tray and asks if the meal was all right.

Lloyd will look up from the open neck of Diana’s blouse and they will pretend to have a conversation about airline food and good places to eat in Halifax, each of them aware that the conversation they are having has nothing to do with what they are talking about, but each unaware of what the conversation is actually about.

There is the potential here for something between Lloyd and Diana. But it is not the potential either one suspects.

Chapter Thirty

They initially had sex right there in the hallway at the base of the attic stairs. Vickie would later learn that Rory had come over to the house and let himself in when the doorbell went unanswered. Vickie couldn’t hear it up in the attic.

What she never learned, because Rory never told her, was that he was coming over to break up with her. The previous night, picking her up at the airport, the chill in the car, that had all been the last straw. It was pointless to go on like this, so Rory decided to just pull the plug. He went over after he knew Vickie’s mom would have left for the library and rang the bell. There was no answer, but he knew about the emergency key in the plastic rock next to the porch so he let himself in and called Vickie’s name from the bottom of the stairs in the entrance way.

He heard someone moving around the upper part of the house and went up the stairs. He looked down the length of the hallway and saw his oddly shaped person coming down the stairs from the ladder all bundled up in an old army uniform or something.

Rory took a couple of steps down the hall then the person reached the bottom step and turned and he saw it was Vickie swimming around in these old clothes; a jacket and pants and a man’s shirt with a tie and this army cap falling down over her eyes.

She felt there was no way she could explain this to him. She couldn’t explain it to herself. She looked down at herself, all lost in her daddy’s clothes.

For a second he thought she was going to start crying. What did she have to cry about? She lifted her arms in a sort of shrug, sort of “well” gesture and she looked at him and she started to blush. He could see the color move from her ears, across her forehead and down to her cheeks.

He wanted her to know whatever it was it was okay and he reached out for her, just to hug her, just a “don’t worry” hug. But there was something about seeing her in those clothes, seeing her look so small and lost in that uniform.

She knew she had to say something, but in the next second Rory was kissing her and the best thing to do under the circumstances was to kiss him back. She did and she felt the blush run down her neck and right into her body.

Rory unbuttoned the jacket and reached in to cup Vickie’s left breast under her father’s shirt and things progressed very rapidly. They were on the floor and Vickie was snaking out of the oversized pants, but she never got out of the shirt or the jacket before Rory was on top of her.

The cap came off her head and rolled away on the hallway carpet.

If it was weird, Vickie didn’t notice. Or if she did notice, she sort of liked it.

They moved from the hallway to Vickie’s bedroom and stayed there for three hours. In the pauses between sex Rory never asked what the hell Vickie was doing in her father’s uniform or what was the matter with her the night before, and Vickie volunteered nothing. They just sort of caught their breath.

In this manner the bargain was struck.

Rory eventually got dressed and left before Vickie’s mother got home from the library. Vickie invited him to join them at The Olive Garden.

Vickie went downstairs naked and poured a big glass of orange juice then went back to her room and took an amazingly satisfying shower. Then she got dressed and went out into the hall where she collected her father’s uniform and climbed back into the attic. Up where she put the uniform, shirt and tie back on their hangers and back into the garment bag. She rebagged the cap and put it away as well, then grabbed the shoes and sweats and t-shirt she wore when she first climbed into the attic, went back down and pushed the attic stairs shut on their thick springs.

Vickie came downstairs with her sweats and t-shirt and went the long way around to the back of the house so she could stop and look at the pictures on the mantel underneath the simulated oil portrait her parents had made out of Vickie’s high school graduation picture. One of the framed pictures over the fireplace was a picture of her dad in his uniform, standing at the entrance to Chinatown in San Francisco. He looks about twenty-five in the picture and he’s smiling for the camera.

Vickie stood there in the living room looking at the picture of her father. She took a deep breath, realizing her heart was no longer tainted by confusion. After a long moment she turned away from the picture, went into the kitchen, tossed her t-shirt and sweats in the washing machine, selected “small load” and started the washer. Then she made a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich for herself. As she did so, she started to sing Sheep May Safely Graze.

Schafe können sicher weiden,
Wo ein guter Hirte wacht.
Wo Regenten wohl regieren
Kann man Ruh und Friede spüren.

Which in English is:

Sheep may ever graze securely 
Where a worthy shepherd wakes.
Where the rulers well are ruling,
May one rest and peace discover.

The rest became humming as Vickie ate her sandwich.

Chapter Twenty-nine

The Durwood Family Drive-In was carved out of a parcel of what had been meadow and grazing for the Durwood Family goats and cows. The particular piece of land ran along what was then called Jones Mill Road, a two-lane county maintained road which literally rolled through the hills of the area South of Donegal in the part of Pennsylvania just above the border with West Virginia.

The theater was the dream of one of the Durwood sons who came back from Korea and couldn’t get his mind around farming. This was Gregory Durwood, the youngest. Gregory convinced his father to turn the pasture over to him and he would make it much more profitable than it could ever be keeping dairy cattle. His father, who hadn’t seen a movie since So Proudly We Hail which he always remembered for the scene in which Veronica Lake put grenades in her bra and marched into a band of Japanese soldiers and pulls the pins, loved his son very much and let him have the land.

Young Gregory did much of the grading of the land and building of the screen and facilities himself. He decided to leave the grass. This made the Durwood Family Drive-In one of the handful of such establishments that wasn’t essentially a lumpy macadam parking lot facing a screen. The Durwood was green. It had room for perhaps a hundred cars in five curving rows facing a thirty foot by fifty foot wooden screen that was set at the edge of the property to block the setting sun behind it.

The projection equipment was built on top of the concession stand, which offered popcorn, bottles of soda, Mrs. Durwood’s goat cheese chili, and a large variety of salted snacks such as potato chips and pretzels.

Seeing a movie at the Durwood Family Drive-In was like seeing a movie in a Pennsylvania pasture, because that was precisely what you were doing. It was unlike any movie going experience available anywhere else in the world and Gregory Durwood was exceptionally proud of that. His father saw how happy the enterprise made his son and was glad he’d made the decision even before Gregory’s prediction came true and the pocket of converted meadow became more profitable as a movie theater than it had ever been as pasture.

Throughout the late Fifties and Sixties, the Durwood operated every weekend between Memorial Day and Halloween, and every night of the week between the Fourth of July and Labor Day showing second and third run features from sunset till about midnight. Gregory Durwood was on hand for every showing, wearing a dark suit he acquired from the McCormick boys when they closed their mortuary.

Gregory married one of the McCormick girls, Sybil, and they had two children Janet and Harley, named after Sybil’s mother and Gregory’s dad who died of a stroke in 1964.

Gregory Durwood was one of the many who felt the movie business change in the 70s. He was getting older, the crowds were getting thinner, and less interested in the movies. And the movies themselves were no longer the things Gregory felt were appropriate for projection in a pasture.

So, in October of 1979 The Durwood Family Drive-In ceased operation after the final showing of The Adventures of Stella Star featuring Caroline Munro, Marjoe Gortner and Christopher Plummer which had been produced in Italy under the title Scontri stellari oltre la terza dimensione.

The theater closed but was not torn down. It remained in the pasture adjacent to Jones Mill Road essentially the way it was on that long ago night of dubbed galactic adventure. This was due to Gregory’s decision to paint the place every now and then and cut the grass when he thought to do it. He continues to live in the house on the other side of the stand of trees to the north of the theater. Sybil is still alive. The two kids moved out after college. Harley is gay. He hasn’t told his parents, but they sort of know.

So when Mr. Barbicane eased his rented Ford Fusion off the county road and along the grass choked approach to the ticket booth, then into the rows with their metal stalks for the speakers long since removed, his was the first car to face the white wooden screen in more than twenty years.

Mr. Barbicane had recovered control when he felt the wheels of his car easing onto the shoulder across from the farm stand, but he still felt profoundly shaken, too shaken to proceed just then. He took the first turn off he found and that lead him to the Durwood Family Drive-In which seemed a good place to stop and collect himself.

Mr. Barbicane parked at the center of the theater, halfway between the screen and the concession stand/projection booth. There he turned off the engine and, still holding the steering wheel, tried to collect himself.

He had been deeply disturbed by the sight of the farm stand, particularly the sight of the old Franklin stove set by the side of the road. But he didn’t know why. The dream he had in the hotel room only a few hours earlier was unavailable to his conscious mind. He had a sense that something had distressed him while he slept, he knew that from the unease he’d felt when he took the band-aid off his finger. But, as with the band-aid, he was unable to associate the anxiety produced by the Franklin stove with the sequence of events acted out in his dream.

All he knew is that he was afraid. Afraid to move forward.

His inability to recall the dream was probably a kindness. Because if he had remembered the specifics of what he saw in his sleep and how they matched up with the reality he saw on the road, he would have been a good deal more frightened than he was at the moment. And he was not in a condition where he could take much more.

He thought for sure he was going to die as he drove through the Pennsylvania countryside. Driving he had experienced the pain he always feared, not the idea of the pain, but the reality of it.

There were still ghosts of that pain as he sat in his car facing the blank screen of The Durwood Family Drive-in, echoes of the squeezing intensity that bent him over the wheel of the car a few miles back. If the sight of the Franklin stove hadn’t stopped him, then the pain surely would have.

But now that he had stopped, now that he was no longer in motion, the pain was subsiding. Something irrational told him that the pain would return the moment he started the engine and resumed his trip. He was certain of this although he had no way or reason to know this.

He was at a loss. He had to keep going, but if he kept going he would die. Death would be awkward enough, but he was expected. People were waiting for him to arrive. He had to do something. Imagine what would happen if he, Mr. Barbicane, failed to arrive.

And he stopped to imagine just that.

A cloud drifted across the drive-in movie theater that was once a pasture and covered Mr. Barbicane’s car. And with the cloud came Mr. Barbicane’s conclusion, the result of imagining a world in which he did not arrive.

If Mr. Barbicane didn’t arrive, no one would notice.

His hands slipped off the steering wheel. The events of his dream were still out of reach, but more of their feelings, their emotions came to him. The feeling of being not only late, but too late. Of thinking he was part of something then seeing it seemed to be going along just fine without him. Of arriving and finding he had been tricked into arriving. That the thing he was going to was not what he thought it was.

The image of the young woman in the open coffin remained unavailable to his conscious mind and, really, that was a good thing. If her face returned to his memory now, if she came swimming up to his eyes and he remembered, considering the state he was in, it would not help him at all. Neither in the short term nor the long term.

He thought he would be filled with anger at the thought of no one noticing he wasn’t there, but surprisingly he discovered he wasn’t. He searched his heart for some rancor over being overlooked in his absence and found none. Rather the emotions he found were oddly comforting, like the sweet anonymity of traveling. Traveling without ever having to arrive.

There was, after all, a tremendous burden related to arriving. There were expectations he would be measured against, responsibilities he would be pressured to take on as his own. All this from people, he suddenly realized, didn’t really want him there at all.

It was all a trap. He was being lured someplace. He knew this, or thought he knew this when really it was just another trace of the dream pricking at his memory.

Mr. Barbicane realized this situation would require a substantial amount of concentrated thought if he was to discern the best possible way to proceed. So he sat there, considering all the factors, while the Duratec 2.3 liter, 16 valve I4 engine of his Ford Fusion clicked and ticked as it cooled in the afternoon breeze.

Chapter Twenty-eight

Diana attacked her hangover with the usual combination of Vitamin C and Vitamin B, several thousand milligrams of each, and four Extra Strength Excedrin washed down with most of a bottle of room temperature Coca-Cola. She supplemented the face cloth soaked in cold water placed over her eyes with a Zip-Lock sandwich bag filled with crushed ice and balanced on her nose as she stretched out on her bed. She’d checked her bloody nose when she got out of the shower and while it looked a little swollen it didn’t look as bad as she thought it was going to look.

She spent most of the late morning and early afternoon in bed, turning over the cloth on her eyes every few minutes or so, adjusting the bag of ice and keeping it on her nose even after the ice had melted, and breathing.

In retrospect it might not have been such a good idea to stop for the bottle of vodka on the way home. In was almost certainly a mistake to pull over that one time to have more of the Stoli half way home when really, the buzz was going quite well at that moment.

But she had purchased the bottle and she had stopped on the way home and that’s just how things happen sometimes. She was suffering enough without beating herself up over a decision that was made so long ago.

Each time she lifted the cloth to flip it, to put the freshly evaporated and therefore cooler side against her eyes, she looked over at the Seusss-like alarm clock she bought at Ikea when she was furnishing the apartment. She watched the morning and then the afternoon go buy in fifteen, twenty and occasional forty minute increments.

She would have to get up at some point and try to put something in her stomach. The very thought of this tightened her throat and brought a thread of something burning into her mouth. She swallowed it down.

The process would have to begin by three o’clock. She needed to be back at the airport for the first leg of her new shift by six. Diana considered calling in sick, but there had been a run of last minute cancellations due to health on her part and she thought for the sake of appearances she better show up. She certainly didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize her job. Not now. Not when things were going so well for her and she had so much of her life together.

Outside her bedroom window children were playing in the courtyard. Happy, enthusiastic children, shrieking with energy. She wanted them all to die. She wanted them to fall down dead in mid-stride and just be quiet. She wished for the reaper to arrive and drive them into the earth so they would stop hurting her head. They didn’t know they were hurting her, but they were and that’s why their young lives needed to be cut short. “With up so floating many bells down.”

She did not sleep. She was too uncomfortable to sleep. So she studied the dark red mud behind her eyelids and listened to the hideous children playing tag or something. Go away. Go somewhere else. Go play in traffic.

She pushed herself up in bed and reached for the glass of Coca-Cola she brought from the kitchen. She took a sip and found it was not only room temperature but flat. It tasted sweet and soothing and she remembered how her mother always gave her flat Coke when she was sick. When she was sick as a child her mother would give her flat Coke and buttered toast cut in strips with the crusts taken off. And her mother would put a scarf over the lamp on her dresser in the room where she was a child. The lamp was meant to look like an old fashioned oil lamp with a white frosted chimney over which her mother draped a red and gold scarf that aged the light and turned it into something warm and antique as it went around the room.

She drank the last of the soda and put her head back on the pillow. At three o’clock she would start putting herself together. She would go downstairs and if there was any bread in the house she would make toast, butter it, cut it in strips and trim the crusts. And, depending on how she felt, she’d check on the vodka in the back of the freezer.

Chapter Twenty-seven

While Vivian Teller was saying Charley’s name, Vickie was listening to her mother’s car pulling out of the driveway and heading off to the library where she volunteered twice a week. Vickie had stayed in bed, offering fatigue as the reason she couldn’t come down for breakfast. Her mother said she understood, she was just happy to have her daughter home and they’d go The Olive Garden tonight and celebrate and catch up on everything.

When the sounds of her mother’s Toyota had faded, Vickie got out of bed, pulled on a pair of sweat-pants and a pair of running shoes and left her bedroom. She went to the far end of the hall and reached up to grab the length of rope attached to the base of the stairs leading up into the attic and pulled. There was a twangy complaint from the thick springs holding the stairs in place then that section of the ceiling folded down in front of her. She flipped the last few steps into position and then climbed up into the attic.

The attic of the house was an unfinished place of dark, orange wood and thick baffles of insulation, some held in place by sheet rock. It was a place of off season clothes and Christmas decorations, unfinished projects and the remains of childhood. The space smelled of camphor and dust.

Sunlight came through a circular window at the front of the house, but Vickie needed more light. She pulled the string attached to the chain attached to the switch of a bare hundred watt bulb hanging from a beam. Shadows were instantly everywhere.

She had a fair idea where the thing she was looking for could be found. She went to a run of garment bags, bulky plastic things like so many fat bats hanging from a pole set between two beams. She went through the bags, through the formals and comforters, the ski clothes and the extra blankets, until she found the bag she was looking for. She pushed the garment bags on either side away and twisted the one she wanted so the zipper faced her. Vickie opened the bag and reached inside. She reached past several items until she found the right hangers and pulled them out. Vickie took a step back and hooked the hanger around the edge of a beam.

She kicked off her shoes, pulled down her sweat-pants and stepped out of them. Then she crossed her arms, took hold of the hem of her t-shirt and pulled it off over her head. Then she reached for the first hanger, slipped the jacket off and set it aside so she could unbutton the shirt. She took the shirt off the hanger and slipped her arms into the sleeves.

It was voluminous on her. The tail of the shirt fell half-way down her thighs and her hands were lost above the cuffs. She buttoned the shirt, tugged up the sleeves and reached in for the trousers. She opened the French fly and held the pants in front of her.

Vickie lifted her right leg and slipped it into the trousers. They were too long and she had to pull the fabric up in order to get her right foot back on the ground. This done she lifted her left foot and stepped into that leg. She pulled the trousers up to her waist, tucked in the shirt and fastened the fly.

The pants started to slip off her hips. She grabbed the waistband and pulled them up. Then she fastened the belt and pulled it tight around her waist. It looked like there was as much belt left over as there was going around her.

Vickie took the tie from the hanger and put it around her neck. She fastened the top button of the shirt. The collar swam around her like the collar on something worn by a clown. She tied a serviceable 4-in hand and slid the knot snug against her throat.

She took the jacket from the top of the trunk where she’d set it aside and put her right arm through the right sleeve. There was much more jacket than their was Vickie.

Then she put her left arm into the left sleeve. She fastened the metal buttons and tugged at the hem of the jacket to make it fall straighter.

Vickie was not so much wearing her father’s uniform as she was enveloped by it. Her shape was lost in all the blue-gray material.

She shrugged down into the jacket and shirt like a turtle withdrawing into a shell. She could smell the sweet camphor but nothing else. No sense of sweat or anything left behind. Vickie folded her arms, hugging herself, hugging the uniform, hugging the uniform against herself, and closed her eyes. She felt the fabric against her legs, the mechanics of the French fly brushing her.

Sometime in the night, after the storm passed and she woke up and saw the moon, sometime after that she started thinking about the uniform. She thought about it up in the attic and how she wanted to see it. Then she started to think about what it would be like to put the uniform on. And the thought of that ran down her spine. Her reaction to the thought startled her, startled her to the point where she was suddenly afraid to go upstairs and look for the uniform. The uniform didn’t frighten her, it was the strength of her reaction to the idea of going up there and putting it on. Things were, she believed at the time, confusing enough. In this respect, she was wrong.

She slept a little after that, but not very deeply. She missed dawn itself and opened her eyes to a room full of sun and sounds of her mother in the bathroom and then getting dressed and coming along the hall and tapping on her door. Her mother came to her and they hugged and that’s when Vickie told her she was going to take a pass on breakfast and her mother told her not to worry.

Her mother kissed her and went downstairs.

For the next forty minutes Vickie stayed in bed, turned on her side, hugging her pillow and listening to the sounds coming up to her from the first floor of the house where her mother made several phone calls, listen to NPR on the kitchen radio, went out the back door to move the recycling bins and then came up to say goodbye to her daughter.

Alone in the attic, Vickie released her hug and leaned over at the waist. The clothes enveloping her shifted and she felt her nipples brushing against the inside of her father’s shirt. Vickie was very unsure about where this was all going.

She looked down at her feet, at her bare toes peeking out from the billowing pants. She wiggled her toes. Then she straightened up and reached into the garment bag for her father’s cap, which was in a separate plastic bag. She took the cap out of the bag. It was much more substantial than she was expecting it to be. It was wool with a leather brim and a satin lining. There was a metal emblem on the front showing a particularly aggressive looking American eagle.

Vickie took the cap by the sides and lifted it over her head then slowly lowered it. It dropped down over her eyes.

“This must have been how the wicked witch of the west felt when she started to melt.”

She pushed the cap back and looked around for a mirror. There was none in the attic. Gathering up the oversized pants as if she were gathering a skirt, Vickie moved to the steps. She was going to go downstairs and look at herself in the mirrors attached to the sliding doors of the closet in her old room.

The wool of the pants was rough against her legs and the cap kept slipping forward covering her eyes. The clothes were swallowing her up, consuming her.

She got to the top of the stairs, turned and started down backwards.

She didn’t know where the sense of wickedness was coming from. The tingle of being alone in the house and dressing up. It was like a thrill of childhood, but she knew there was really nothing childish about why she’d gone up to the attic and put on the uniform. Something had come undone somewhere inside her, or rather something had come together and she was trying to figure out if it meant anything.

Suppose it did? What the hell would she be able to do about it?

Reaching the bottom of the stairs the cap dropped over her eyes again as she turned toward the hallway. She stopped and lifted the cap. That’s when she saw Rory standing in the hallway looking at her in her father’s army uniform.

Chapter Twenty-six

Earlier that morning, after having walked the dog she rescued around the neighborhood and consequently had her first experience with picking up after a pet with a plastic grocery bag, Vivian Teller returned to her apartment and tried to find ways not to call the man she knew who worked in cargo at the Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport. But by the time Mr. Barbicane was checking out of the Hyatt Regency she realized there was no point in putting off the inevitable. With the poodle stretched out in front of her on the living room carpet, Vivian made the call.

Her friend came to the phone and when she asked him about any dogs being transferred through the airport the previous night he told her the story of the five octave cross strung harp falling on a dog’s crate and the animal’s subsequent escape. Vivian’s heart sank; her orphan was no longer an orphan.

She asked her friend if the owners had been contacted. He snorted and said he’d made the call himself, not that he wanted to be the one to tell them their beloved pet was lost, but the thing had happened on his shift and he was responsible, so he made the call. The people in Orlando didn’t seem too put out by the disappearance of the dog. They hadn’t even gone to the airport to meet the flight when it was scheduled to arrive; they figured they’d get the dog the next day sometime.

Vivian’s friend told the people in Orlando that he would talk to airport security and the local animal control office in the hope of finding the dog. That’s when the people in Orlando asked if there was going to be any charge for that because if it was going to cost any money to look for the dog, they’d just as soon forget about the whole thing. It’s not like it was their dog. It had belonged to a distant relative who died. They didn’t really know her and she certainly didn’t leave any money to take care of the animal. They were just sort of talked into taking the dog as a favor since none of the relative’s friends could keep him, but if he’s gone, well, then he’s gone.

When Vivian’s friend in cargo hung up the phone with those people he thought to himself, “I don’t know where that mutt is, but I don’t think he’d be any happier in Orlando.”

Vivian’s friend asked her why she was asking about the dog. Had she seen him? Vivian thought about lying, but there didn’t seem to be much point to that so she told her friend how she found the dog and how he was with her in the apartment.

“Lucky pooch,” is what her friend said. Then there was a pause on his side of the line and he asked her if she wanted him to call the people in Orlando and tell them they’d found the dog.

The dog didn’t belong to her. She had no right to keep him and if she told her friend not to call the people in Orlando that would make him an accomplice or something. After all, the dog did belong to an airline customer and her job was to satisfy airline customers, not steal their property.

“Do you have to call them?” she asked.

Vivian listened for his answer. For several seconds all she heard were the sounds of cargo being moved around on forklifts inside the cavernous freight facility. Finally:

“I think I’ll wait and see if they call me back.”

In this fashion the decision was taken away from Vivian.

She told her friend in cargo that sounded like a good idea. They were just about to hang up when Vivian thought to ask if the dog’s name was mentioned anywhere on the shipping paperwork. Her friend told her to hang on a minute. She could hear him flipping through the pages of the manifest. Then he came back on the line and told her that the dog’s name was Charley. Vivian thanked her friend and said she owed him lunch. He said they should make it dinner and she said, why not?

Vivian Teller hung up the phone and looked at the dog in front of her. He was on his stomach, his jaw resting on the floor, fore legs stretched out in front of him. It took Vivian the better part of a minute to work up the nerve to clear her throat and say to the dog:

“Charley?”

The dog, who had not heard that word in quite sometime and who associated it with such things as food, walking, treats, ear scratches, belly rubs, and running around after things, lifted his head and looked at Vivian. Vivian smiled at the dog.

“Hello, Charley,” she said.

Chapter Twenty-five

Mr. Barbicane looked at his breakfast consisting of scrambled eggs, four slices of crisp bacon, a toasted English muffin with an assortment of jams and jellies and felt ill at ease. His state of vague dissatisfaction came not from the food in front of him, but from the experience he had in the bathroom shortly after stepping out of his shower. An experience he found difficult to explain and impossible to shake.

He had turned off the water, stepped out of the shower and had begun to dry himself with the white hotel towel. The room was cloudy after the shower and the expanse of mirror over the vanity was a vague, misty square through which Mr. Barbicane could make out his movements across the bathroom. He wrapped the towel around his waist and moved to the sink in preparation to brush his teeth. Reaching for his toothbrush inside his travel kit he noticed the hot water had loosened the band-aide around his index finger. Mr. Barbicane pinched the exposed edge of the bandage between his fingernails and pulled it off his finger. Underneath he found his skin pale, the thin slice of the cut still visible.

And in that moment something from his forgotten dream bubbled up inside him. It was unable to bring Mr. Barbicane any of the specific, albeit unorthodox, narrative of the drive, the cemetery, the coffin, the fall down the hill and the rest of it, but it was able to communicate some of the unformed sadness, the despair the dreaming Mr. Barbicane experienced upon seeing the flesh under the band-aide. The waking Mr. Barbicane now felt surprised by a welling up of inconsolable loss, somehow triggered by the sight of his wounded finger. He had a sense that something had happened to him, that he had experienced something, something he couldn’t reconstruct, but something that had dissembled him in a basic and irreparable way. He stood there in the bathroom, staring at his finger trying to remember. The towel came lose from his waist and dropped to the floor. Mr. Barbicane didn’t notice. He just stood there, naked, looking at his finger, trying to understand, trying to figure out why he felt so suddenly empty. He stood there for what felt to him a very long time, then he left the bathroom, dressed quickly and dashed out of the hotel room, as if to leave the dark feelings behind.

But the feelings came with him. They rode down to the lobby with him in the elevator and walked past the reception desk and into the bright restaurant with its picture windows offering the panorama of parking lot and access roads. A waitress named Claudine took his order although he felt no appetite.

Mr. Barbicane looked around the room and saw perhaps fifteen other people, some in couples, most sitting alone over their breakfasts and coffees, some with newspapers, some with laptops already open and ready for business. Among this number was Lloyd Barton who, like Mr. Barbicane, scanned the others in the restaurant.

Although he didn’t know it, Mr. Barton was looking for Mr. Barbicane, in that he was trying to guess if the person who made the passionate noise in the room next to him was in the dining room. He was looking for men with a particularly satisfied look on their faces, so when he saw the distracted expression on Mr. Barbicane’s face he immediately checked him off the list of possibilities and continued to search the room.

Claudine returned with Mr. Barbicane’s breakfast along with complimentary hot coffee and Mr. Barbicane was pleasantly surprised to find the aroma of the food brought back his appetite. He started to eat, all the while still plucked by the indefinable experience he’d had in the bathroom.

Eventually he chalked it up to the wistfulness of the journey winding down. He would finish breakfast, go up to his room, pack, check out, then pick up his rental car and head east. Once the rental car contract was signed the only part of the trip left (before the return loop) would be checking into the motel close to where he was expected.

In a few hours he would arrive at his final destination, a place where things would be expected of him, things more complex than his compliance with federal regulation as regards to tampering with lavatory smoke detectors during flight.

By the time he finished his meal he had almost convinced himself that the sadness he felt, although sadness did nothing to indicate the scale of what he’d felt, was related to nothing more than approaching a journey’s end.

And really, there was the return to look forward to. Another trip altogether! All the steps needed to take him back to his car patiently parked by the runway in Burbank. There would be business to take care of, matters that needed his attention, duties to fulfill, but they could be dealt with more easily if he stayed focused on the comforting fact that at the end he would once again take on the mantle of passenger, that he would be able to drop back into that blissful status of no longer being a person, but of being simply a confirmation number.

He tried to convince himself that such positive thoughts had braced him enough for the tasks of the day.

With breakfast finished he returned to his room and prepared to leave. He had taken little out of his suitcase except the fresh clothes he was wearing and his travel kit. Yesterday’s shirt and underwear were placed in one of the hotel’s laundry bags and tucked into a corner of the case. He folded his jacket and pants and placed them in the bag along with his kit. He then closed his suitcase. Mr. Barbicane put the unopened can of Diet Coke in the outer pocket of the case then sat on the edge of the bed to finish the ice tea he’d opened earlier.

According to the clock radio it was 10:43 A.M., more than an hour before check out time. Mr. Barbicane intended to leave once he finished his tea so he was in no danger of overstaying his reservation.

His tea finished, Mr. Barbicane used the bathroom one last time, washed his hands, then made a final check of the room, looking in closets he had not previously opened, checking drawers he had not used, as if his possessions might have unpacked themselves and hidden in the room during the night or while he was downstairs having breakfast. There was nothing of his in the closets or the drawers. No one would ever know Mr. Barbicane had been there.

Mr. Barbicane took hold of the handle of his ruthlessly practical rolling carry on bag and went to the door. He opened it, stepped into the hallway and paused to look back into the room, back into all that comforting uniformity, all that undemanding anonymity. It called to him. It offered protection. And he longed to answer that call.

But he had miles to go before he would sleep again in another room so similar, but not the same room. Never the same room again.

He pulled his bag across the threshold, let the door close and was moving down the carpeted hallway when he heard the door sigh shut and click behind him.

There was, as Mr. Barbicane expected, a different Hyatt employee at the desk when he stopped there to check out. He handed his plastic key card to the young woman. This was now a symbolic act, the returning of the key. The information that made the card a key, that communicated with the sensors in the individual door locks, was all stored on the magnetic strip on the back of the card. When Mr. Barbicane checked in, the key became his key when it was passed through a special machine the size of an electric pencil sharpener and sitting on the reception desk. Since the hotel computer knew when Mr. Barbicane was supposed to leave, the information on his key was set to expire at the appropriate moment. After that the key card would be useless. It would not open the door to the room that had been Mr. Barbicane’s, or the room next to his, which was still occupied by Mr. Barton, or any other door in the building. So it really didn’t matter if Mr. Barbicane returned his key or forgot to return it or simply kept it as a souvenir; it would no longer be a key.

Still, Mr. Barbicane returned the key card. The young woman checking him out of the hotel opened a drawer in the counter in front of her and tossed the card into the confusions of other such cards waiting to be re-coded and returned to usefulness.

Once keys in hotels were made of metal. They were usually attached to plastic fobs, usually in the shape of a distended diamond. Before they were made of plastic they were made of pressed cellulose or bakelite or metal or in some cases wood. They would have the name of the hotel embossed on them in some way as well as the number of the room to which they would permit access.

You carried these keys around in your pocket while you were visiting an unfamiliar city. It would take up space in your pocket, this awkward shape clicking up against your own keys, keys to things you were far away from. They served to remind you that, stranger though you might be, you had a place in this city. A very specific space. Not only an address, but a room location.

Now hotel room keys do their best to help you remain anonymous in a different city. The intention, at least in part, is to keep you safe: If you lost one of the old style keys the finder would have immediate access to your room and any belongings you might have left behind when you exited in the morning to attend an important meeting or perhaps just to see the sights. But these blank pieces of plastic, while they may reveal your choice of hotel, would be mute as to the place in that building where your toothbrush was.

A copy of Mr. Barbicane’s bill was printed and handed to him for examination and approval. He had not used room service nor made any local calls. He had paid cash at the restaurant when he had breakfast and had no use for any additional services such as dry cleaning or in room massage from an employee of the hotel’s fitness center. So there was nothing on his bill except the charge for his single night’s stay and applicable taxes.

He told the young woman the bill was in order and, yes, he would like to leave the charges on the same credit card he had used when he arrived. Mr. Barbicane signed the credit card form and the bill and was given copies of each, which he took, folded and placed in his pocket. He then turned and left the hotel, crossing the lobby and going up the ramp to the moving walkway waiting to carry him back to the terminal.

Sun poured down on Mr. Barbicane as the endless rubber tread of the walkway pulled him toward the terminal. It came down on him from the glass ceiling of the structure containing the walkway and reminded Mr. Barbicane of how long he’d been in the travel tunnel.

He stepped off the walkway at the terminal end and went downstairs to the level where various forms of ground transportation were arranged. There he found the counter for the rental car agency he had chosen for his needs and began a process very similar to the one used to check into the hotel, but in this instance also requiring the presentation by Mr. Barbicane of his driver’s license.

The transaction went smoothly and Mr. Barbicane was handed a folder containing his rental contract, a useful area map, and the keys to a 2006 Ford Fusion. He was told he would find the car that fit the keys in the rental car agencies special parking area directly across from the main entrance to the terminal. He would find the way clearly indicated by signs incorporating the rental agency’s logo and corporate colors.

Mr. Barbicane thanked the agent, who was male, aged twenty-six and named Brett, took the folder and his suitcase and went to the automatic doors of the terminal.

The doors opened ahead of Mr. Barbicane who stepped out into the real world for the first time since he entered the travel tunnel by boarding the first MD-87 in Burbank. He was immediately aware of the difference, of how the air smelled and moved, how the light was different, how, in spite of the municipal architecture all around him, unstructured it all felt. And there was more sound. It was disturbing and disappointing after such an extended period of living in a controlled environment.

Mr. Barbicane pushed on. He went to the curb and obeyed the traffic signal, which helped him cross the access road and enter the parking structure on the other side. There he found that the signage he had been promised would help him locate his car was in fact as helpful and clear as he had been led to believe.

In a matter of moments he located the parking slot the number of which corresponded to the number printed on his rental folder form with a Sharpie by young Brett. The slot contained a cherry red Ford Fusion, a mid-size sedan with more chrome accents than any other car in its class based on the amount of standard and available exterior chrome accents in a mid-size sedan.

The Fusion has a Duratec 2.3 liter, 16 valve I4 engine capable of delivering one hundred and sixty horsepower (at six thousand two hundred and fifty revolutions per minute) with an Environmental Protection Agency fuel rating of twenty-three miles per gallon for city driving and thirty-one miles per gallon when driving on the open highway. The automobile Mr. Barbicane was renting had direct acting mechanical bucket valve lifters and a sequential multi-port electronic fuel injection system. It had a double balljoint SLA front suspension and a multilink independent rear suspension that employed stabilizer bars for increased comfort and control. Mr. Barbicane had accepted the car with a full tank of gas and was expected to return the car with the same amount of fuel as when he left.

Mr. Barbicane pulled on the handle of the driver’s door and found it unlocked as was the rear passenger door, which he opened in order to put his bag on the back seat. Then he folded himself behind the steering wheel, closed the driver’s door, put the key in the ignition, and started the car.

He was instantly assaulted by a chest pounding blast coming from the sedan’s Premium Sound System with in-dash six-disc CD/MP3 changer. Mr. Barbicane desperately searched the dashboard for the sound system’s controls while Between Me and You performed by Ja Rule (born Jeffery Atkins in Hollis, Queens on February 29, 1976) with guest vocals by Christina Milian, one of the hits of his second album, Rule 3:36, assaulted his senses. He found the volume and turned it down. This did not help his appreciation of the music and he turned the system off completely. He’d worry about selecting alternative radio stations once he’d driven off airport property.

Mr. Barbicane buckled his seatbelt, adjusted the side-view and rear-view mirrors as well as the angle of the steering wheel, then pulled the car into drive and started to follow the arrows painted on the floor of the garage which he was promised would take him out of the parking structure.

There was a brief inspection of his rental agreement by a uniformed guard at a gate guarding the exit from the parking structure. The guard checked the stated level of the gas tank against the level shown on the dashboard gauge then handed the rental agreement folder back to Mr. Barbicane and pushed a concealed button inside his small toll-booth of a guard station thus opening the gate and permitting Mr. Barbicane to leave the parking structure.

He drove the sedan out of the parking structure and into the Pennsylvania morning. For the first time in more than twenty-four hours, Mr. Barbicane was at the wheel and in command. He watched the signage on the airport loop road carefully and merged onto Route 60 South.

He switched to I-79 south in order to bypass Pittsburgh proper. This choice lengthened the actually mileage of the last leg of Mr. Barbicane’s trip, but it would permit him to complete it in less time. He drove south through Collier and South Fayette where he decided to try the radio again.

Mr. Barbicane touched the on-off button tentatively.

A voice on the radio told him:

You niggaz got me fucked up, it's time to go to war
Nigga so what's up, I bust up, any muh'fucker feelin he rougher
I can't get enough of, showin niggaz what time it is
Go inside his crib, find his kids 'til we find the shit
Go ahead and keep buyin shit, act like you run the town
On the worst day, your birthday, that's when I cut you down.

Mr. Barbicane stabbed the scan button on the tuner, silencing Young Buck and Rizin Sun. The radio then set about the orderly task of shifting through the available stations, stopping each time it found a strong enough signal and giving Mr. Barbicane several seconds to decide if this was a station he would like to listen to. If so, he would push the scan button again and the radio would stay tuned to the selected frequency. If not, the radio would go on to the next signal in the spectrum.

In this way Mr. Barbicane heard the local radio market in a series of arbitrary snapshots; snatches of songs and commercials and commentators. The brief stops usually contained no real information leaving Mr. Barbicane to decided based on a tone of voice more than what the voice might be saying, on the energy of a song instead of its lyrical content.

Nothing caught Mr. Barbicane’s ear and he left the radio on scan for several minutes before he turned the machine off and drove on with nothing but the sound of the car and the highway as company.

The countryside Mr. Barbicane drove through was once a whispering forest of oak and hickory, birch and sugar maple, black cherry and hemlock, home to Elk and Whitetail Deer. Now flat boxy buildings crowded the near horizons of the valleys he drove through. This was now a place of light industry and discount saving centers.

We are so used to seeing so much of our country looking like this that it seems natural, as if the six lane highways were always there and then someone came along and merely added the stores, the E-Z On and Off gas stations and the McDonald’s with their sin absorbing Big Macs.

Mr. Barbicane drove on, past Houston and Chartiers to South Strabane where he transitioned to the east bound 70. Now the industrial parks and shopping centers started to fall away and he was driving through what was once farmland.

He was getting closer. This fact did not produce happy anticipation, but rather created a sense of foreboding buried in his stomach, like the early signs of the phantom pain he was so afraid would some day fell him in a hotel room a thousand miles from home.

Past the cut offs for Bealsville and Fallowfield, on through Allenport and Dunlevy heading for Rostraver and New Stanton. And with every passing mile the discomfort grew until he noticed that it had ceased to be like the phantom pain, and was becoming the pain, the actual suffering he so dreaded. He realized he was hunched forward in the driver’s seat, almost doubled over the steering wheel as he drove. It felt like something was twisting inside him, turning on itself, knotting itself somehow.

It had come for him, not in the comfort of a hotel room or an airplane, but behind the steering wheel of a rented Ford, rappers spewing obscenities from the stereo speakers all around him. And he was so close to where he was going, so close to where he was ultimately expected.

He would push on. He would make the effort, find some reserve of untapped inner strength and complete his journey.

It was at that moment of fortitude and self-determination when Mr. Barbicane saw the farm stand.

It was a large, long, open sided shed sort of building with rows of produce and a large display of sweet corn and gallon jugs of cloudy apple cider placed close to the roadside. There were hand painted signs announcing the availability of Jams and Jellies and Candy Apples as well as Pumpkins. And in front of the establishment, right at the edge of the road, was a big Franklin stove painted red, clearly connected to nothing. There was a jug of cider on top of the stove, an additional indication that this was not an operating stove, but one used as some sort of rustic advertisement.

Mr. Barbicane was staring at the Franklin stove when his tires started drifting onto the shoulder of the road.

Chapter Twenty-four

When the clock radio snapped on at 8:30 A.M. with Gary Wright singing “Dream Weaver,” Mr. Barbicane awoke with no memory of his nightmare. He had entered three additional periods of REM sleep following the episode in the cemetery and all memory of the previous dreams had evaporated long before he pulled back the covers and sat on the edge of the bed in contemplation of the day ahead.

He stood, went to the window and opened the drapes to look out at an almost empty parking lot, shadowless under an overcast sky. His time as a traveler was diminishing. He knew this, but there was nothing he could do about it.

Mr. Barbicane pulled the curtains and drapes completely opened and let the vague gray light into his room. Then he went to the dresser where he’d left the ice bucket. He lifted the lid and found the plastic bucket filled with cold water and the few transparent shards of ice. Mr. Barbicane dipped his hand into the water and scooped up the ice. The water was painfully cold against his skin. He dropped the ice in one of the glasses on the tray then took the can of iced tea from the mini bar, opened it and poured some over the ice.

Sipping the tea he walked from the bedroom to the bathroom where he turned on the lights surrounding the vanity mirror, put down the glass at the edge of the sink then went to the shower. He pushed the door to one side and reached in to start the flow of water from the tub faucet. He put the same hand he’d used to scoop the ice from the bucket under the flow of water into the tub. His fingers were so cold that the warm water felt like it was scalding his fingers. Mr. Barbicane pulled his hand away and looked at it. Then he used his other hand to judge the temperature of the water. When it arrived at a comfortable point he pulled the bit of metal jutting out of the faucet. This redirected the flow of water and in a moment there was a gurgling sound above his head and the water shot out of the small, adjustable shower head.

Mr. Barbicane stepped back, pulled his t-shirt off over his head, pulled down and removed his boxer shorts and stepped into the shower, sliding the door shut after him. He turned his face to the spray from the shower head and closed his eyes as the water brought him the rest of the way to wakefulness.

He opened the small bar of soap he found in the niche cut in the wall of the shower stall and used it to lather his body. He rinsed the soap off then put his head under the shower to wet his hair. Lifting his head out of the water he turned to the niche again where he found and picked up a small bottle of shampoo. He half squeezed half shook its honey-like contents into his hand then, after setting aside the bottle, lifted his hands to the top of his head and started to wash his hair. He closed his eyes during this procedure and could feel tendrils of lather crawling down his face, sliding down his forehead and along the left side of his nose. He felt the lather touch the inside corner of his left eye and a moment, a surprisingly long moment, later, felt the sting of the shampoo in his eye and squeezed both eyes tighter against the irritant.

Once he felt he had done a satisfactory job of washing his hair, Mr. Barbicane leaned his head under the showerhead again and rinsed out the lather, making sure to wash his face again to avoid additional irritation to his eyes. This done he opened his eyes and straightened up, pushing his wet hair back along the top of his head.

Mr. Barbicane considered using the small bottle of post-shampoo hair conditioner he found in the shower, but decided against doing so.

He turned his back to the showerhead and backed up into the flow until it was striking him at the back of his neck. He closed his eyes and savored the water and the heat.

There were, at that moment, seventy-five other guests at the Hyatt Regency taking showers. And in her bathroom in her apartment in Cranberry Township north of Pittsburgh, Diana stood in her shower, leaning forward, her hands on either side of the wall with the showerhead, letting the water strike her head. Her hair fell around her face, pulled down by the weight of the water that streamed off her head. Her head was a source of great pain. In particular, the area behind her right eye, which seemed to be the primary focus of her hangover’s attention.

She woke at almost the same moment as Mr. Barbicane and looked around to find that while she had gotten home, she had not succeeded in either getting undressed or reaching her bedroom. Diana had opened her eyes and recognized the fabric of her sofa. She turned over to see the living room with the lights on and the t.v. playing with the sound off. On the television screen a handful of men and women were trying to escape from a large mechanical man with an implacable screen where his face should have been. The people and the mechanical man were in black and white.

Diana had no specific memory of arriving home, parking her car, coming up from the garage, unlocking her front door, coming into the apartment, turning on the lights and the television and sitting down on the sofa. At her feet were the remains of the package of Pepperidge Farm cookies, but no sign of either the lotto ticket, the milk, or the bottle of vodka she bought when she left the airport. But the important thing was that she was where she was supposed to be and not somewhere else. That would make things easier.

She was, however, not feeling well. Her head was pounding and she felt as if something was trying to push her right eye from inside her skull, trying to push it completely out of the socket. She put her right hand over her eye as if to hold it in as she stood up. This only made the pain more intense, synchronizing the pounding with the beating of her heart.

Reaching out in front of her with her left hand, Diana made careful progress across the living room and down the hall to her bedroom and bathroom. She passed her flight bag by the door and was glad to see it had made it from the car with her. In the bedroom she closed her eyes and the darkness made her dizzy. So, she squinted out at her bedroom, at her still made bed, and undressed. She leaned down to take off her stockings and fell back across the bed. She felt sweat suddenly pour from her skin and knew she was seconds away from being violently ill.

Diana rolled off the bed and, still in her skirt and stockings, pitched herself toward the bathroom where she found the toilet and relieved herself of much yellow bile. It was one of those great contractions, one of those times of illness when you feel the crushing hand of a giant squeezing the life out of you, squeezing you like a tube of toothpaste.

She felt incrementally better after throwing up, took off the rest of her clothes and got into the shower. She turned the water up to its maximum pressure and let it beat on her head. She slowly turned under the water, letting it cross her shoulders and neck. Then she leaned forward again, pressing her hands on the walls of the shower to keep herself in place and let the water have at her head. She closed her eyes and tried to breath which is when she realized how stuffed up her nose felt.

Diana put her hand to her face, squeezed the bridge of her nose then touched the nostrils with one finger tip. She opened her eye and looked at her fingertip and saw that it was red. She touched her nostrils again and the finger came away redder than before.

Her nose was not bleeding at that moment, rather the hot water was reaching the dried blood plugging her nostril and rehydrating it.

Diana brushed the back of her hand under her nose and looked at the red streak this motion left on her skin. She assumed that whatever had happened to cause the nosebleed had happened since she fell asleep, or more accurately passed out, on her sofa. This was not the case.

Outside Diana’s apartment, forming a subtle trail to her front door, was a series of small brown drops, the dried residue of blood that had dripped from her nose between the time she got out of her car and the time she reached her threshold. There was a larger drop of blood on floor of the garage next to the driver’s door of Diana’s car. There was also blood in the car, on the gear-shift and turn-signal levers, the door handle, the center armrest and on the upper part of the steering wheel the impact with which was the source of Diana’s injury. She struck her face against the top of the steering wheel when she went over a curb on her way home. The impact was not sufficient to set of the deceleration sensors responsible for firing the air bag system so Diana was able to continue on her way, once she got the car off the lawn and back onto the street again.

As Diana stood in the shower dripping water and old blood, her car rested in the garage dripping bright green anti-freeze from the holes she ripped in her radiator when she drove over the ornamental statuary of the small Mexican man with his burro and cart loaded with flowers. There was now a crease along much of the passenger’s side where the car side-swiped a row of garbage cans a block away from the apartment building. And pressed into the treads of the right rear tire was a strange, gray snakelike thing which at first might appeared to be the remains of a tremendous worm but was actually the severed tail of a possum, or more accurately a Virginia Opossum (Didelphis virginiana) the only marsupial found in North America, that had been exploring the garbage cans at the time of impact. Injured and furious, the animal escaped and survived.

The empty bottle of Stoli was under the car along with the lotto ticket, which was worth $360,000 to anyone who might find it and wanted to go to the trouble of checking the numbers.

Chapter Twenty-three

The sounds Mr. Barbicane made were not restricted to his dream. They escaped into the real world as he slept in his bed in the room at the Hyatt Regency hotel at Pittsburgh International Airport. His moan and his groan were startlingly load and while they were not loud enough to wake Mr. Barbicane they were loud enough to be heard through the wall to which the headboard of his bed was bolted.

The sounds of Mr. Barbicane’s distress were heard in the room next to him by a thirty-six-year old man named Lloyd Barton, an engineer for Rocketdyne Corporation, a major NASA contractor and at one time a company owned by the Boeing Corporation, builders of the MD-87 aircraft that had transported Mr. Barbicane from Burbank to Pittsburgh. Rocketdyne is no longer part of the Boeing family, having been acquired in 2005 by United Technologies Corporation where it was combined with the Pratt & Whitney Space Propulsion Division, the resulting corporate entity to be known as Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne.

Mr. Barton was not asleep at the time, but was sitting up in bed going over the specifications of a new dual-mode scramjet which allows an engine to function as a subsonic combustion ramjet at low supersonic speeds, say between Mach 3 and Mach 5, and as a supersonic combustion ramjet at high supersonic speeds, those speeds greater than Mach 5.

To Mr. Barton, Mr. Barbicane’s sounds did not sound like the sounds of someone in emotional pain. Mr. Barton mistook the sounds for the sounds of pleasure and assumed someone was having sexual intercourse in the room next to his.

He set down his papers and turned his head slightly, angling his ear to the wall to hear any subsequent sounds. There were none forthcoming. He sat there. Listening. Poised.

Mr. Barton imagined sex was taking place behind his back. He imagined a man and woman on the other side of the wall. And as he waited to hear more audible evidence of their activities he imagined who they were and how they got there.

He imagined a male traveler, not unlike himself, in the bar of the hotel, just off the lobby. He has returned from an afternoon and evening of meetings. He had dinner with co-workers but is too wound up from the day’s activities to simply go up to his room, so he has stopped at the bar for a cocktail, something to help him unwind.

He orders a drink and looks along the length of the bar and sees an astonishing woman. She is tall and voluptuous in a way that makes the man think of movie starlets from the 1960s. Her hair is a cascade of platinum. She wears a scandalously short canary yellow dress with a halter top that barely covers her prodigious breasts and reveals her arms and shoulders and most of her back. The dress is crocheted and there are glimpses of the woman’s flesh through the gaps in the pattern. She is wearing make-up worthy of a showgirl and sips a green martini through a straw to protect her carmine lips. In the dim bar the woman seems to give off light, a sort of sexual bioluminescence. She sits provocatively on a stool, her long legs deliberately crossed, her feet in yellow high-heel pumps the color of her dress.

This is not the sort of creature you see in the bar of the average Hyatt. She is breathtaking in her ability to embody so many male fantasies in one dramatically curved form.

The man is drawn to her. They speak. He buys her a drink. Even though he knows it’s against local law, Mr. Barton imagines the man lighting a cigarette for the woman. She takes the smoke deep into her and slowly releases it as though whistling it away through her moist lips.

Mr. Barton leans his head against the wall behind his bed and imagines the man and woman leaving the bar together. The man puts his arm around her waist and draws the woman against him. She presses her hip against his as they move to the elevator. He pushes the call button, she looks at herself in the mirror between the elevators and inspects her perfection.

The elevator comes. They step into the car and the doors close after them. They are the only ones on the elevator as it rises up into the hotel. She leans against the wall opposite the man so he can see her. He looks at her and as he looks at her she seems to change. Her hips grow more pronounced and her breasts appear to grow, straining against the canary yellow fabric and she makes a small moaning sound as if these changes bring her pleasure. Mr. Barton imagines these changes are linked directly to the desire of the businessman.

The elevator stops at the floor where Mr. Barton and Mr. Barbicane are staying and the two people get out and start down the hallway, past the sconces spaced for perfect illumination. He tells her to walk ahead of him, he wants to watch her ass. She smiles and steps ahead of him, rolling her hips as she walks. She feels his eyes on her and runs her hands along her contours for his enjoyment.

They reach the room next to Mr. Barton’s. The man opens the door for the woman and they step inside. The man turns on one light and stretches out on the bed. The woman stands at the foot of the bed in her canary yellow dress.

He asks her to walk back and forth at the foot of the bed. She does so, pacing back and forth, moving her hands along her breasts and hips and ass as she does so. She does this for quite sometime, apparently never tiring of putting herself on display in this fashion. Then the man swings his legs over the side of the bed and tells her to come to him. She does.

The woman kneels in front of the man and arches her back to present herself to him like some sort of exotic bird.. The man reaches forward and places an open hand on each of the woman’s breasts, pressing gently. The woman makes a purring, groaning sound that one might consider to be a disproportionate amount of response to the pleasure possibly derived from this touch, but it isn’t. Her head goes back, she closes her eyes and her lips part. She is lost in ecstasy and nothing moves for a moment. Then she lowers her head and opens her eyes, her carefully made-up eyes, and looks at the man with a combination of challenge and invitation. Then she reaches for the belt on the man’s trousers.

All this Mr. Barton imagines as prelude to the brief sounds he misinterpreted coming from Mr. Barbicane’s room. And all the while he is imagining these things, Mr. Barton projects himself into the extrapolated scenario. But, it must be noted, Mr. Barton imagined himself not as the businessman, but as the woman in the yellow dress.

Because throughout his life, ever since a crystallizing childhood moment in front of a television set watching an old movie, Lloyd Barton, a man who has helped peel back the outer layers of heaven itself, has had but one profound wish: To be Irma La Douce. To be the sort of woman who populates the full page cartoons of mid-sixties issues of “Playboy.” Mr. Barton dreams of being voluptuous.

He presses the side of his head against the wall separating him from the room of the now peacefully sleeping Mr. Barbicane and listens. He listens and dreams of being long of leg and ample of breast. Someone who in the morning will walk into the pre-dawn grayness with five hundred dollars cash for her work.

Mr. Barton has told no one of his desire to be transformed. And he never will. He will guard it as closely as Vickie will forever hold the secrets of her dream and for many of the same reasons.

Perhaps the fantasy is worse than the act. It’s certainly harder to control. You can stop yourself from taking action, that’s easy. But how do you stop yourself from dreaming?

Mr. Barton touches the wall with his fingertips and closes his eyes.

In Farmers Branch, Vickie opens her eyes to see that the storm has cleared and the moon has come out, full and blue. Her room is filled with moonlight. Dangerous moonlight.

If Vickie knew of Mr. Barton and his dream she might have told him to look for the stream where Salmacis embraced Hermaphroditus and how the water had been cursed in a way to make the engineer’s dream come true.

If man he entered, he may rise again
Supple, unsinewed, and but half a man!

But Vickie knew nothing of Lloyd Barton and he knew nothing of her.

Tired of waiting, Mr. Barton finally gave up the hope of hearing more sex from Mr. Barbicane’s room. He put his paperwork aside, turned out the light and stretched out under the covers and thought about what it would be like to be desired.

As Mr. Barton considered this, Vickie looked up through the dormer window of her bedroom and thought about a poem Ovid didn’t write.

I see the moon,
The Moon sees me
God bless the moon,
And God bless me.

Chapter Twenty-two

In his dream, Mr. Barbicane has already arrived at his destination. He is at the church with no memory of traveling there. He finds the church empty and doesn’t know if he’s late or early or if he has come to the wrong church because, in the dream, he doesn’t have his suitcase with all his information, his itinerary. There is no one in the church to ask.

In his dream, Mr. Barbicane walks across the street and goes into the funeral home and asks the man there if he knows where Mr. Barbicane is supposed to be and when he’s supposed to be there. The man tells Mr. Barbicane that there’s been a change of plans and the others have gone ahead, leaving the funeral parlor and going directly to the cemetery without going to the church. The church service has been canceled. No reason for this cancellation is offered and Mr. Barbicane doesn’t ask for one.

He needs to get to the cemetery and the man at the funeral parlor tells him to drive straight down the road just outside and he’ll see the cemetery on his right. Mr. Barbicane does not ask how he will find the people he’s looking for once he gets to the cemetery, he simply leaves, gets in his car and starts driving.

The rental car he is driving has no glass. It has no windshield, no rear window, no side windows. Wind blows into the car and makes it very difficult to drive. Normally, Mr. Barbicane would wonder what led him to except a car in this condition from the car rental company, but this is a dream and therefore beyond the usual challenge of logic.

The imperative that put Mr. Barbicane behind the wheel of a car with no windshield is the same irrefutable force that brought Vickie’s father back from the dead, which in turn resulted in her father and her boyfriend making out in the movie theatre while she grew a penis.

This is one of the ways dreams can be exceptionally cruel, how they can deprive us of context, logic and often our clothes. How they can drop us into ghastly situations and make us suffer pain and embarrassment and loss all for the sheer, perverse pleasure of watching us suffer.

But, really, we do it to ourselves, don’t we? Dreams. They’re supposed to be the random discharges of a sleeping brain that we try to forge into some kind of narrative, even if the narrative changes from moment to moment. All the terror and confusion we carry around in our own heads, ready to victimize us, waiting for the chance to torture us, waiting for us to be at our most vulnerable, waiting for us to fall asleep.

Mr. Barbicane squints into the wind as he drives down the road. Up ahead he sees the beginning of the cemetery fence and presses harder on the gas pedal, trying to look ahead, trying to locate the gate so he can get onto the cemetery grounds. He drives what seems a long time without seeing a gate.

The other side of the road does not seem to be moving past Mr. Barbicane at the same rate as the side with the fence. In fact, the other side, the driver’s side of the road, doesn’t seem to be moving at all. Over there, motionless, is a large farm stand. A large, long, open sided shed sort of a building with rows of produce and a large display of sweet corn and gallon jugs of cloudy apple cider close to the road. Signs announce JAMS AND JELLIES and CANDY APPLES and PUMPKINS and PICKLED GARLIC. There are barrels labeled CRACKERS, and a big Franklin stove painted red and connected to nothing, just standing there, at the entrance to the farm stand. There is a jug of cider on top of the stove, an additional indication that this was not an operating stove, but one used as some sort of rustic advertisement.

Behind the farm stand, and Mr. Barbicane was able to see behind the farm stand in his dream and it didn’t seem unusual that he could, was a small sort of carrousel. Not a carrousel with horses, but a round tank of water with some sort of carrousel apparatus at the center that pulled eight small boats around the tank in a counter clockwise circle. Each boat was big enough for two children. There was a length of rope from the seats to the bow of the boat which was attached to a brass bell that the child could ring as he or she imagined they were piloting the boat. The bottom and sides of the tank had been painted a dark blue to give the impression of an ocean. But the painting of the interior surfaces was done some time ago and the paint has flaked off in many areas, making the bottom of the tank look like a neglected fresco. All this Mr. Barbicane could see from his moving car as he drove along the side of the cemetery looking for the gate. He never questioned this peculiarly omniscient point of view.

There’s a little girl in one of the boats and she’s dropped something in the water and she’s very upset, but not one is paying attention to her. Mr. Barbicane wants the people standing around the farm stand and the boat ride to stop and listen and help the little girl. He knows the thing she’s dropped is a ring, but he doesn’t know how he knows that because he didn’t see her drop it. Then up ahead he sees the entrance to the cemetery and he’s already so late he has to push on. Her can not help the little girl.

Mr. Barbicane turns in at the entrance to the cemetery. He looks around and sees no one. He has no idea where he is supposed to go, how he is supposed to catch up with his family. But he doesn’t worry about this, he just drives deeper into the cemetery until he sees a row of black cars parked behind a hearse on one of the narrow roads winding through the headstones and crypts like little courthouses.

He parks behind the last car in the row and gets out of the car with no glass and looks around for the service. He sees people off in the distance, standing at the crest of a hill, about ten or twelve of them standing in a group. and he starts up the hill to reach them. He knows this is where he is supposed to be although he doesn’t know why he knows, nor does he question why he knows without knowing how he knows.

When he gets to the top of the hill he’s surprised to find that the casket is open. The people are standing around an open casket and they don’t seem to think it’s odd at all. He realizes the casket is very plain, a pine box actually. Like the coffins you see in old westerns. Like the sort of box they put you in before they take you up to old Boot Hill.

There is no fabric lining the casket, but there is a blanket and a pillow supporting the head of the woman in the casket. The woman in the casket does not look like she’s asleep. She looks like she’s made of wax. She looks to Mr. Barbicane the way she looked when they first met, when they were both in their twenties. She is younger, now that she is dead. Her eyes are closed and her hair is blonde again the way it used to be. She has high cheek bones and her lips are slightly parted like the lips of the young woman on the airplane listening to her iPod, and she wears lipstick the color of plums like the cabin attendant who brought Mr. Barbicane his filet mignon and later bought vodka to drink in the parking lot of the convenience store. Just something to get her home. Something she had earned.

The woman in the coffin is surprisingly casually dressed, in black jeans and a lime colored sweater with a floppy sort of open neck. Who picked out these clothes for her? Certainly this wasn’t what she would have chosen for herself. He wonders if it was too late to change her clothes so she could go to her grave in something more dignified. Then he realizes it really doesn’t matter. At that point, the lime colored sweater with the floppy sort of open neck would do as well for a shroud as anything else. Her hands are folded just below her breasts and she is holding a rosary, the small silver crucifix carefully placed against the back of her right hand. Her expression is not one of sleep or peace. She looks like she was preparing to sneeze. She does not look comfortable in this box, on this blanket, her head on this pillow. In death she does not look at all comfortable.

In the dream, Mr. Barbicane was not expecting to see this woman dead. He was unaware that it was her funeral to which he was traveling. In the waking world it would have been impossible, or at best highly unlikely, that Mr. Barbicane would go to a funeral without being aware of whose funeral it was. He is surprised to see her here, to see her young and dead and about to be buried.

In his dream Mr. Barbicane looks up from the pretty woman in the coffin and realizes everyone is looking at him. They say nothing, but he knows they hold him responsible for this. Something he did or failed to do led to this and everybody knows it.

And in the dream, somehow, Mr. Barbicane knows they’re right. He feels suddenly filled with guilt. Filled not in a metaphorical way, but a physical one. He feels engorged with guilt. He feels bloated with the foul stuff, packed with it, in his bowels, in his stomach, bubbling up through his esophagus, burning his throat.

He should have stayed where he was. He should never have left his house and come to this place. It wouldn’t have made any difference to her if he came or stayed, so really what had he accomplishing with all this traveling? He got to look in an open coffin which really shouldn’t have been open at the gravesite, and see what she looked like, see that she was dead with his own eyes, not that he had any doubts, not that he had known it was her funeral before he arrived and looked in the coffin.

They invited him without telling him who was to be buried, knowing he would not come if he knew the truth and now that he’s shown up they look at him like this. That is the moment Mr. Barbicane realizes that he has been tricked into coming. This was not consideration, this was punishment. He had been compelled to this place by a conspiracy of lies in order to be confronted by what he did and exposed to the world for his crimes.

He turns away from her, from the coffin, from the rest of them and starts down the hill, starts back to the car with no windshield, no glass at all. He is afraid to turn back, to look around, afraid they might be coming down the hill after him. He knows enough about how dreams worked that if he tried to run it would do him no good. Running never works in dreams.

But in spite of knowing this he starts walking faster. Or at first he thinks he’s walking faster then he realizes the hill is now much steeper than it was when he first walked up it to the grave and the coffin and the dead woman. It gets steeper as he walks, as if someone were tipping it up under his feet. He has to go faster in order to keep his balance. He is afraid in a moment he will fall and a second later he does trip and start to pitch forward, his hands going out in front of him and his whole body starting to twist to one side.

His hands hit the ground, the wet grass, and then his face. He gets the smell of dirt in his nose. He feels the friction of pebbles against the palms of his hands and he slides and falls and starts to roll down the hill.

Mr. Barbicane rolls down the hill. What he sees takes on the characteristics of what one might see looking out from a carrousel, a repeating loop of a landscape. There is the wet grass and dark almost muddy earth close to his eyes, then that arcs away and he is looking up the hill up at the grave and sees that the people up there aren’t chasing him, they’ve turned away from him, turned back to the pine box with the dead woman in it. Then the hill top is gone and everything is blue gray sky for an instant. Black branches slash through his field of vision. The trees multiply and the ground rushes up, but now he’s looking down the hill, down to the road where he can see the rental car behind the rest of the funeral cars. The ground pushes the cars away and again there’s nothing but wet grass and earth, then the top of the hill again, then the sky again, then the trees followed by more trees followed by the car and then the earth again. Mr. Barbicane is caught in the loop. With each rotation the people at the top of the hill get small and his car gets bigger until the last few orbits where the car looms bigger than the sky and he finally stops, hitting the side of his car, his head banging against the right rear tire. His head bounces of the tire and he drops down, wedging himself between the wheel and the curb.

Mr. Barbicane’s vision is swimming in a most disconcerting way. He tries to focus on something. He sees his hand on the plastic wheel cover and tries to focus on in. His hand is filthy from the hillside. Mr. Barbicane reaches up to the edge of the band-aide he put on his finger at the Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport and pulls it off. The flesh underneath the band-aide is white and shriveled, cold and dead, like the inside of a fish. The line of the cut is still visible, like a thin red filament. It is if that little part of him had died and this was a preview of what was unavoidably ahead for him.

In his dream, Mr. Barbicane put his face down, pressing his eyes into the fabric of his charcoal gray suit jacket and makes a sound somewhere between a moan and a groan and then he proceeded to weep.