Dreamcatcher

talking about roast lamb again, or roast chicken, or roast duck with orange sauce. Back to the inventory. Hence Henry knows nothing about Barry’s parents, certainly not about the day Barry’s mother died, falling out of bed and pissing on the carpet, still calling and calling, three hundred pounds and so disgustingly fat, calling and calling. He can know nothing about that because he hasn’t been told, but he does know. And Barry was thinner then. A relatively svelte one-ninety.

This is Henry’s version of the line. Seeing the line. Henry hasn’t seen it for maybe five years now (unless he sometimes sees it in dreams), thought all that was over, and now here it is again.

“You sat there in front of the TV, listening to her yell,” he says. “You sat there watching Ricky Lake and eating-what?-a Sara Lee cheesecake? A bowl of ice cream? I don’t know. But you let her yell.”

“Stop it!”

“You let her yell, and really, why not? She’d been crying wolf her whole life. You are not a stupid man and you know that’s true. This sort of thing happens. I think you know that, too. You’ve cast yourself in your own little Tennessee Williams play simply because you like to eat. But guess what, Barry? It’s really going to kill you. In your secret heart you don’t believe that, but it’s true. Your heart’s already beating like a premature burial victim beating his fists on the lid of a coffin. What’s it going to be like eighty or a hundred pounds from now?”

“Shut-”

“When you fall, Barry, it’s going to be like the fall of Babel in the desert. The people who see you go down will talk about it for years. Man, you’ll shake the dishes right off the shelves-”

“Stop it!” Barry is sitting up now, he hasn’t needed Henry to give him a hand this time, and he is deadly pale except for little red roses, one growing in each check.

“-you’ll splash the coffee right out of the cups, and you’ll piss yourself just like she did-”

“STOP IT!” Barry Newman shrieks. “STOP IT, YOU MONSTER!”

But Henry can’t. Henry can’t. He sees the line and when you see it, you can’t unsee it.

“-unless you wake up from this poisoned dream you’re having. You see, Barry-”

But Barry doesn’t want to see, absolutely will not see. Out the door he runs, vast buttocks

jiggling, and he is gone.At first Henry sits where he is, not moving, listening to the departing thunder of the one-man buffalo herd that is Barry Newman.The outer room is empty; he has no receptionist, and with Barry gone, the week is over. Just as

well. That was a mess. He goes to the couch and lies down on it.

“Doctor,” he says, “I just fucked up. “How did you do that, Henry?

“I told a patient the truth.

“lf we know the truth, Henry, does it not set us free?

“No,” he replies to himself, looking up at the ceiling. “Not in the slightest.

“Close your eyes, Henry.

“All right, doctor.”

He closes his eyes. The room is replaced by darkness, and that is good. Darkness has become his friend. Tomorrow he will see his other friends (three of them, anyway), and the light will once more seem good. But now… now…

“Doctor?

“Yes, Henry.

“This is a bona fide case of same shit, different day. Do you know that?

“What does that mean, Henry? What does that mean to you?

“Everything,” he says, eyes closed, and then adds: “Nothing.” But that’s a lie. Not the first one that was ever told in here.He lies on the couch, eyes closed and hands folded on his chest, and after a little while he sleeps.

The next day the four of them drive up to Hole in the Wall, and it is a great eight days. The great hunting trips are coming to an end, only a few left, although they of course do not know this. The real darkness is still a few years away, but it is coming.

The darkness is coming.

2001: JONESY’S STUDENT-TEACHER CONFERENCE

We don’t know the days that will change our lives. Probably just as well. On the day that will change his, Jonesy is in his third-floor John Jay College office, looking out at his little slice of Boston and thinking how wrong T.S. Eliot had been to call April the cruelest month just because an itinerant carpenter from Nazareth supposedly got himself crucified then for fomenting rebellion. Anyone who lives in Boston knows that it’s March that’s the cruelest, holding out a few clays of false hope and then gleefully hitting you with the shit. Today is one of the untrustworthy ones when it looks as if spring might really be coming, and he’s thinking about taking a walk when the bit of impending nastiness just ahead is over. Of course at this point, Jonesy has no idea how nasty a day can get; no idea that he is going to finish this one in a hospital room, smashed up and fighting for his goddam life.

Same shit, different day, he thinks, but this will be different shit indeed. That’s when the phone rings, and he grabs it at once, filled with a hopeful premonition: it’ll be the Defuniak kid, calling to cancel his eleven-o'clock. He’s gotten a whiff of what’s in the wind,

Jonesy thinks, and that is very possible. Usually it’s the students who make appointments to see the teacher. When a kid gets a message saying that one of his teachers wants to see him… well, you don’t have to be a rocket-scientist, as the saying goes.

“Hello, it’s Jones,” he says.

“Hey, Jonesy, how’s life treating you?”

He’d know that voice anywhere. “Henry! Hey! Good, life’s good!”

Life does not, in fact, seem all that great, not with Defuniak due in a quarter of an hour, but it’s all relative, isn’t it? Compared to where he’s going to be twelve hours from now, hooked up to all those beeping machines, one operation behind him and three more ahead of him, Jonesy is, as they say, farting through silk.

“Glad to hear it.”

Jonesy might have heard the heaviness in Henry’s voice, but more likely it’s a thing he senses.

“Henry? What’s wrong?”

Silence. Jonesy is about to ask again when Henry answers.

“A patient of mine died yesterday. I happened to see the obit in the paper. Barry Newman, his name was.” Henry pauses. “He was a couch man.”

Jonesy doesn’t know what that means, but his old friend is hurting. He knows that.

“Suicide?”

“Heart attack. At the age of twenty-nine. Dug his grave with his own fork and spoon.”

“I’m sorry.”

“He hasn’t been my patient for almost three years. I scared him away. I had one of those things. Do you know what I’m talking about?” Jonesy thinks he does. “Was it the line?'Henry sighs. It doesn’t sound like regret to Jonesy. It sounds like relief “Yeah. I kind of socked it to him. He took off like his ass was on fire.”

“That doesn’t make you responsible for his coronary.”

“Maybe you’re right. But that’s not the way it feels.” A pause. And then, with a shade of amusement: “Isn’t that a line from a Jim Croce song? Are you all right, Jonesy?” “Me? Yeah. Why do you ask?” “I don’t know,” Henry says. “Only… I’ve been thinking about you ever since I opened the paper and saw Barry’s picture on the obituary page. I want you to be careful.” Around his bones (many of which will soon be broken), Jonesy feels a slight coldness. “What exactly are you talking about?” “I don’t know,” Henry says. “Maybe nothing. But…”

“Is it the line now?” Jonesy is alarmed. He swings around in his chair and looks out the window at the chancy spring sunlight. It crosses his mind that maybe the Defuniak kid is disturbed, maybe he’s carrying a gun (packing heat, as they say in the mystery and suspense novels Jonesy likes to read in his spare time) and Henry has somehow picked this up.

“I don’t know. The most likely thing is that I’m just having a displaced reaction from seeing Barry’s picture on the all-done page. But watch yourself the next little while, would you?”

“Well… yeah. I can do that.”

“Good.”

“And you’re okay?”

“I’m fine.”

But Jonesy doesn’t think Henry is fine at all. He’s about to say something else when someone clears his throat behind him and he realizes that Defuniak has probably arrived.

“Well, that’s good,” he says, and swivels around in his chair. Yep, there’s his eleven-o'clock in the doorway, not looking dangerous at all: just a kid bundled into a big old duffel coat that’s too heavy for the day, looking thin and underfed, wearing one earring and a punky haircut that spikes over his worried eyes. “Henry, I’ve got an appointment. I’ll call you back-”

“No, that’s not necessary. Really.”

“You’re sure?”

“I am. But there’s one other thing. Got thirty more seconds?”

“Sure, you bet.” He holds up a finger to Defuniak and Defuniak nods. But he just goes on standing there until Jonesy points to the one chair in the little office besides his own that isn’t stacked with books. Defuniak goes to it reluctantly. Into the phone, Jonesy says, “Shoot.”

“I think we ought to go back to Derry. Just a quick trip, just you and me. See our old friend.”

“You mean-?” But he doesn’t want to say that name, that baby-sounding name, with a stranger in the room.