Dreamcatcher (39 page)

1

This was a dream.

It didn't feel like one, but it had to be. For one thing, he'd already been through March fifteenth once, and it seemed monstrously unfair to have to go through it again. For another, he could remember all sorts of things from the eight months between mid-March and mid-November—helping the kids with their homework, Carla on the phone with her friends (many from the Narcotics Anonymous program), giving a lecture at Harvard . . . and the months of physical rehab, of course. All the endless bends, all the tiresome screaming as his joints stretched themselves out again, oh so reluctantly. He telling Jeannie Morin, his therapist, that he couldn't. She telling him that he could. Tears on his face, big smile on hers (that hateful undentable
junior-miss smile), and in the end she had turned out to be right. He could, he was the little engine that could, but what a price the little engine had paid.

He could remember all those things and more: getting out of bed for the first time, wiping his ass for the first time, the night in early May when he'd gone to bed thinking
I'm going to get through this
for the first time, the night in late May when he and Carla had made love for the first time since the accident, and afterward he'd told her an old joke:
How do porcupines fuck? Very carefully.
He could remember watching fireworks on Memorial Day, his hip and upper thigh aching like a bastard; he could remember eating watermelon on the Fourth of July, spitting seeds into the grass and watching Carla and her sisters play badminton, his hip and upper leg still aching but not so fiercely; he could remember Henry calling in September—“Just to check in,” he'd said—and talking about all sorts of things, including the annual hunting trip to Hole in the Wall come November. “Sure I'm coming,” Jonesy had said, not knowing then how little he would like the feel of the Garand in his hands. They had talked about their work (Jonesy had taught the final three weeks of summer session, hopping around pretty spryly on one crutch by then), about their families, about the books they had read and the movies they had seen; Henry had mentioned again, as he had in January, that Pete was drinking too much. Jonesy, having already been through one substance-abuse war with his wife, hadn't wanted to talk about that, but when Henry passed along Beaver's suggestion that
they stop in Derry and see Duddits Cavell when their week of hunting was over, Jonesy had agreed enthusiastically. It had been too long, and there was nothing like a shot of Duddits to cheer a person up. Also . . .

“Henry?” he had asked. “We made plans to go see Duddits, didn't we? We were going on St. Patrick's Day. I don't remember it, but it's written on my office calendar.”

“Yeah,” Henry had replied. “As a matter of fact, we did.”

“So much for the luck of the Irish, huh?”

As a result of such memories, Jonesy was positive March fifteenth had already happened. There were all sorts of evidence supporting the thesis, his office calendar being Exhibit A. Yet here they were again, those troublesome Ides . . . and now, oh goddam, how was
this
for unfair, now there seemed to be more of the fifteenth than ever.

Previously, his memory of that day faded out at around ten
A.M
. He'd been in his office, drinking coffee and making a stack of books to take down to the History Department office, where there was a
FREE WITH STUDENT ID
table. He hadn't been happy, but he couldn't for the life of him remember why. According to the same office calendar on which he had spied the unkept March seventeenth appointment to go see Duddits, he'd had a March fifteenth appointment with a student named David Defuniak. Jonesy couldn't remember what it had been about, but he later found a notation from one of his grad assistants about a make-up essay from Defuniak—short-term results of the Norman
Conquest—so he supposed it had been that. Still, what was there in a make-up assignment that could possibly have made Associate Professor Gary Jones feel unhappy?

Unhappy or not, he had been humming something, humming and then scatting the words, which were close to nonsense:
Yes we can, yes we can-can, great gosh a'mighty yes we can-can.
There were a few little shreds after that—wishing Colleen, the Department secretary, a nice St. Paddy's Day, grabbing a Boston
Phoenix
from the newspaper box outside the building, dropping a quarter into the saxophone case of a skinhead just over the bridge on the Cambridge side, feeling sorry for the guy because he was wearing a light sweater and the wind coming off the Charles was sharp—but mostly what he remembered after making that stack of giveaway books was darkness. Consciousness had returned in the hospital, with that droning voice from a nearby room:
Please stop, I can't stand it, give me a shot, where's Marcy, I want Marcy.
Or maybe it had been
where's Jonesy, I want Jonesy.
Old creeping death. Death pretending to be a patient. Death had lost track of him—sure, it was possible, it was a big hospital stuffed full of pain, sweating agony out its very seams—and now old creeping death was trying to find him again. Trying to trick him. Trying to make him give himself away.

This time around, though, all that merciful darkness in the middle is gone. This time around he not only wishes Colleen a happy St. Paddy's Day, he tells her a joke:
What do you call a Jamaican proctologist? A Pokémon.
He goes out, his future self—his
November
self—riding
in his March head like a stowaway. His future self hears his March self think
What a beautiful day it turned out to be
as he starts walking toward his appointment with destiny in Cambridge. He tries to tell his March self that this is a bad idea, a
grotesquely
bad idea, that he can save himself months of agony just by hailing a Red Top or taking the T, but he can't get through. Perhaps all the science-fiction stories he read about time travel when he was a teenager had it right: you can't change the past, no matter how you try.

He walks across the bridge, and although the wind is a little cold, he still enjoys the sun on his face and the way it breaks into a million bright splinters on the Charles. He sings a snatch of “Here Comes the Sun,” then reverts to the Pointer Sisters:
Yes we can-can, great gosh a'mighty.
Swinging his briefcase in rhythm. His sandwich is inside. Egg salad. Mmm-mmmm, Henry said. SSDD, Henry said.

Here is the saxophonist, and surprise: he's not on the end of the Mass Ave Bridge but farther up, by the MIT campus, outside one of those funky little Indian restaurants. He's shivering in the cold, bald, with nicks on his scalp suggesting he wasn't cut out to be a barber. The way he's playing “These Foolish Things” suggests he wasn't cut out to be a horn-player, either, and Jonesy wants to tell him to be a carpenter, an actor, a terrorist, anything but a musician. Instead, Jonesy actually encourages him, not dropping the quarter he previously remembered into the guy's case (it's lined with scuffed purple velvet), but a whole fistful of change—these foolish things, indeed. He blames it on
the first warm sun after a long cold winter; he blames it on how well things turned out with Defuniak.

The sax-man rolls his eyes to Jonesy, thanking him but still blowing. Jonesy thinks of another joke:
What do you call a sax-player with a credit card? An optimist.

He walks on, swinging his case, not listening to the Jonesy inside, the one who has swum upstream from November like some time-traveling salmon. “
Hey Jonesy, stop. Just a few seconds should be enough. Tie your shoe or something.
(No good, he's wearing loafers. Soon he will be wearing a cast, as well.)
That intersection up there is where it happens, the one where the Red Line stops, Mass Ave and Prospect. There's an old guy coming, a wonked-out history professor in a dark blue Lincoln Town Car and he's going to clean you like a house.
”

But it's no good. No matter how hard he yells, it's no good. The phone lines are down. You can't go back, can't kill your own grandfather, can't shoot Lee Harvey Oswald as he kneels at a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, congealing fried chicken on a paper plate beside him and his mail-order rifle aimed, can't stop yourself walking across the intersection of Mass Ave and Prospect Street with your briefcase in your hand and your copy of the Boston
Phoenix
—which you will never read—under your arm.
Sorry, sir, the lines are down somewhere in the Jefferson Tract, it's a real fuckarow up there, your call cannot go through
—

And then, oh God, this is new—the message
does
go through! As he reaches the corner, as he stands there on the curb, just about to step down into the crosswalk, it
does
go through!

“What?” he says, and the man who has stopped beside him, the first one to bend over him in a past which now may be blessedly cancelled, looks at him suspiciously and says “
I
didn't say anything,” as though there might be a third with them. Jonesy barely hears him because there
is
a third, there is a voice inside him, one which sounds suspiciously like his own, and it's screaming at him to stay on the curb, to stay out of the street—

Then he hears someone crying. He looks across to the far side of Prospect and oh God,
Duddits
is there, Duddits Cavell naked except for his Underoos, and there is brown stuff smeared all around his mouth. It looks like chocolate, but Jonesy knows better. It's
dogshit,
that bastard Richie made him eat it after all, and people over there are walking back and forth regardless, ignoring him, as if Duddits wasn't there.

“Duddits!” Jonesy calls. “Duddits, hang on, man, I'm coming!”

And he plunges into the street without looking, the passenger inside helpless to do anything but ride along, understanding at last that this was exactly how and why the accident happened—the old man, yes, the old man with early-stage Alzheimer's who had no business behind the wheel of a car in the first place, but that had only been part of it. The other part, concealed in the blackness surrounding the crash until now, was this: he had seen Duddits and had simply bolted, forgetting to look.

He glimpses something more, as well: some huge pattern, something like a dreamcatcher that binds all
the years since they first met Duddits Cavell in 1978, something that binds the future as well.

Sunlight twinkles on a windshield; he sees this in the corner of his left eye. A car coming, and too fast. The man who was beside him on the curb, old Mr.
I
-Didn't-Say-Anything, cries out: “Watch it, guy, watch it!” but Jonesy barely hears him. Because there is a deer on the sidewalk behind Duddits, a fine big buck, almost as big as a man. Then, just before the Town Car strikes him, Jonesy sees the deer
is
a man, a man in an orange cap and an orange flagman's vest. On his shoulder, like a hideous mascot, is a legless weasel-thing with enormous black eyes. Its tail—or maybe it's a tentacle—is curled around the man's neck.
How in God's name could I have thought he was a deer?
Jonesy thinks, and then the Lincoln strikes him and he is knocked into the street. He hears a bitter, muffled snap as his hip breaks.

2

There is no darkness, not this time; for better or worse, arc-sodiums have been installed on Memory Lane. Yet the film is confused, as if the editor took a few too many drinks at lunch and forgot just how the story was supposed to go. Part of this has to do with the strange way time has been twisted out of shape: he seems to be living in the past, present, and future all at the same time.

This is how we travel,
a voice says, and Jonesy realizes it is the voice he heard weeping for Marcy, for a shot.
Once acceleration passes a certain point, all travel
becomes time travel. Memory is the basis of every journey.

The man on the corner, old Mr.
I
-Didn't-Say-Anything, bends over him, asks if he's all right, sees that he isn't, then looks up and says, “Who's got a cell phone? This guy needs an ambulance.” When he raises his head, Jonesy sees there's a little cut under the guy's chin, old Mr.
I
-Didn't-Say-Anything probably did it that morning without even realizing it.
That's sweet,
Jonesy thinks, then the film jumps and here's an old dude in a rusty black topcoat and a fedora hat—call this elderly dickweed old Mr. What'd-I-Do. He's wandering around asking people that. He says he looked away for a moment and felt a thump—what'd I do? He says he has never liked a big car—what'd I do? He says he can't remember the name of the insurance company, but they call themselves the Good Hands People—what'd I do? There is a stain on the crotch of his trousers, and as Jonesy lies there in the street he can't help feeling a kind of exasperated pity for the old geezer—wishes he could tell him
You want to know what you did, take a look at your pants. You did Number One, Q-E-fuckin-D.

The film jumps again. Now there are even more people gathered around him. They look very tall and Jonesy thinks it's like having a coffin's-eye view of a funeral. That makes him remember a Ray Bradbury story, he thinks it's called “The Crowd,” where the people who gather at accident sites—always the same ones—determine your fate by what they say. If they stand around you murmuring that it isn't so bad, he's lucky the car swerved at the last second, you'll be okay. If, on the other hand, the people who make up
the crowd start saying things like
He looks bad
or
I don't think he's going to make it,
you'll die. Always the same people. Always the same empty, avid faces. The lookie-loos who just have to see the blood and hear the groans of the injured.