The Bachman Books

heartily.

'Why did she move out? You don't have to tell me if you don't want to.' She looked at him warily, as if the price of his confession might be tiresomely high.

'The same reason I got fired off my job,' he said, sitting down.

'Because you didn't buy that plant?'

'No. Because I didn't buy a new house. '

'I voted for number two,' Soupy Sales said, 'because he looks like he'd eat a beetle if he saw one.' The audience laughed heartily.

'Didn't . . . wow. Oh, wow.' She looked at him over her drink without blinking. The expression in her eyes seemed to be a mixture of awe, admiration, and terror. 'Where are you going to go?'

'I don't know.'

'You're not working?'

'No.'

'What do you do all day?'

'I ride on the turnpike.'

'And watch TV at night?'

'And drink. Sometimes I make popcorn. I'm going to make popcorn later on tonight. '

'I don't eat popcorn.'

'Then I'll eat it.'

She punched the off button on the Space Command gadget (he sometimes thought of it as a 'module' because today you were encouraged to think of everything that zapped on and off as a module) and the picture on the Zenith twinkled down to a bright dot and then winked out.

'Let me see if I've got this straight,' she said. 'You threw your wife and your job down the drain-'

'But not necessarily in that order.'

'Whatever. You threw them away over this road. Is that right?'

He looked at the blank TV uncomfortably. Even though he rarely followed what was happening on it very closely, it made him uncomfortable to have it off. 'I don't know if it is or not,' he said. 'You can't always understand something just because you did it.'

'Was it a protest?'

'I don't know. If you're protesting something, it's because you think something else would be better. All those people protested the war because they thought peace would be better. People protest drug laws because they think other drug laws would be fairer or more fun or less harm or . . . I don't know. Why don't you turn the TV on?'

'In a minute. ' He noticed again how green her eyes were, intent, catlike. 'Is it because you hate the road? The technological society it represents? The dehumanizing effect of-'

'No, he said. It was so difficult to be honest, and he wondered why he was even bothering when a lie would end the discussion so much more quickly and neatly. She was like the rest of the kids, like Vinnie, like the people who thought education was truth: she wanted propaganda, complete with charts, not an answer. 'I've seen them building roads and buildings all my life. I never even thought about it, except it was a pain in the ass to use a detour or have to cross the street because the sidewalk was ripped up or the construction company was using a wrecking ball.'

'But when it hit home . . . to your house and your job, you said no.'

'I said no all right. ' But he wasn't sure what he had said no to. Or had he said yes? Yes, finally yes to some destructive impulse that had been part of him all along, as much a built in self-destruct mechanism as Charlie's tumor? He found himself wishing Freddy would come around. Freddy could tell her what she wanted to hear. But Fred had been playing it cool.

'You're either crazy or really remarkable,' she said.

'People are only remarkable in books,' he said. 'Let's have the TV.'

She turned it on. He let her pick the show.

'What are you drinking?'

It was quarter of nine. He was tipsy, but not as drunk as he would have been by now alone. He was making popcorn in the kitchen. He liked to watch it pop in the tempered glass popper, rising and rising like snow that had sprung up from the ground rather than come down from the sky.

'Southern Comfort and Seven-Up,' he said.

'What?'

He chuckled, embarrassed.

'Can I try one?' She showed him her empty glass and grinned. It was the first completely unselfconscious expression she had shown him since he had picked her up. 'You make a lousy screwdriver.'

'I know,' he said. 'Comfort and Seven-Up is my private drink. In public I stick to scotch. Hate scotch.'

The popcorn was done, and he poured it into a large plastic bowl.

'Can I have one?'