Flashback

“Except for the weird spells.”

“Spells?”

“Like … I don’t know. Like I’m having memory flashes of stuff from my past. Some crazy stuff, some good stuff—when I was a kid with my aunt and uncle, at the beach, in the backyard, teachers, first girlfriends.”

“We all should have such spells.”

“Just that they’re so real. I don’t know how to explain it,” he said. “It’s more like I’m reliving them.”

“I can think of a few nights I’d like to relive.”

Jack nodded, but that wasn’t what he meant. His brain felt spongy with painkillers and he squished around for the right words. “Sometimes they’re so vivid I can’t tell if it’s memory or if I’m in some kind of replay.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“I feel like that guy in The Dead Zone who has flashes of the future, except I have flashes of the past. Dumb stuff—like taking pony rides at the Mohawk Trail. Playing kickball in the third grade. Christmas Day when I got my first bike. But they don’t feel like dreams.”

“I don’t see what the problem is. You’ve got a vivid memory.”

“I’m telling you, it’s not like memory. It’s just like … just like I’m there—feeling things, hearing stuff, smelling things. My heart races.” He looked away, frustrated at the limitations of his words. “Vince, I’m reexperiencing events that I once lived.”

Vince nodded as he took it all in.

“Christ, now you think I’m looney tunes.”

“No, I get it.”

But he didn’t. How could he?

“I have dreams all the time, and when I wake up I can swear I was there, someplace else. Everybody does.”

“Except I’m not asleep.”

“You’re not?”

“I could be outside in the sun, but when I look around I’m someplace else—on a beach or in the middle of a thunderstorm, lightning crashing all around me. Yet it’s clear blue and I feel the sun on my face, but inside it’s storming.”

Vince nodded to cover his concern. “Some kind of daydreams. I get those.”

No, you don’t, Jack thought. Nobody who’s right in his head or not on psychedelics gets these. Even with the mushrooms he had tried in college, Jack always knew he was tripping, his anchor self always lurking in the sidelines or flying the thermals just above the Disney pyrotechnics playing across his synapses. But part of him was always in the audience. But this was different, and Vince didn’t have a clue. Nor did Jack.

“What do the doctors say? It could be your medication needs adjusting or something.”

“They give me some antiseizure stuff that just makes me sleepy, and I’ve logged enough of that.”

“Ask them for something else.”

“Yeah.”

They chatted more until Jack felt himself turn drowsy. Vince said he’d be back in a few days, and Jack thanked him for coming around. Before he left, Vince gave Jack an MP3 digital player with several of his favorite artists downloaded. “It also records.”

Jack thanked him. Maybe the music would help him sleep.

What Jack did not tell Vince was how he dreaded sleeping on his own—without lorazepam or clonazepam or Naprosyn or Tegretol or whatever the hell it was to knock the teeth out of his dreams. No, not the pony rides or schoolyard romps with boyhood chums or lusty moments with Latitia Cole in Erica Hughes’s rec room—but the dark, twisted images that were slightly out of focus and just wouldn’t stick to his consciousness when he awoke but whose aftereffects left him flayed with anxiety. And as hard as he tried, he could not summon details.

It had crossed his mind that maybe those damn jellies had spot-fried his brain, leaving little lesions that put him just this side of sane—and maybe the lesions were spreading. And wasn’t that what all the neuropsycho tests were trying to determine—that maybe all of him didn’t come back?

The flash images, the voices in his head, the spells of naked fright. He had said nothing to the docs because he knew that would only prolong his convalescence. And in spite of the fine professional treatment, even after a week he wanted out. He wanted to be someplace other than in this recovery room, this nursing home, away from drip bags and stethoscopes, beeping monitors, and institutional green walls. But more than that, he wanted to be out of his head, because it was like being locked in a room lousy with ghosts.

That’s some mouse.

He looked out the window, and from behind the unbroken blue sky he heard thunder.

Shit! It came back to him like a tic. Thunder and lightning on a cloudless day.

He buzzed the nurse for something to sleep on, and Marcy came and gave him a white pill that he gobbled. down. And when he was alone again, he turned his head away from the sunshine and the rainstorm raging in his pillow, and he pressed his eyes shut and thought of Beth eight years ago and put her on the moon-washed beach with a sultry breeze and her arms pulling him to her, the heat of her breast lighting his heart.

And he closed his eyes and waited for the Xanax to seep through his brain like sap and douse the lights.

49

Darien, Connecticut

“DID YOU EVER DO IT?”

“Did I ever do what?” Rodney Blake felt his insides clench as he darkly sensed what his cousin Nora was asking him.

“Oh, come on, Rod, you know what I mean, a good-looking boy like you. Did you ever screw a girl?”

The words passed through him like sparks. Even though it was 1946 he had never heard a girl speak of such matters or use such language. But, then again, most girls were not his cousin Nora, who lived in the sticks of Pennsylvania with farm animals. Besides, she was fourteen, and older than most girls her age, and a year older than him.

“Not really.”

“Well, you musta made out with girls.”

“Yeah, sure, of course,” he lied. He’d never even had a girlfriend. Only kissed a girl in Spin the Bottle, and that was a dry peck in front of other kids.

They were silent for a few minutes. They were lying in his backyard looking at the stars. They had asked their parents if they could sleep in the tents that night—one for her and one for him, even though either tent could hold two people. But parents said it wasn’t proper to share a tent, a boy and girl at their age, even cousins. So they lay on the blanket between the tents. The glow of his family’s house through the bushes gave them light so he could see Nora studying him.

“I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t? How come?”

“I just don’t,” Nora said. “You must jerk off.”

(Did girls really talk this way? Or just Nora?)

Another numbing moment as he tried to conjure up the right response. If he sounded shocked, he’d look namby-pamby, to use his mother’s term. Yet to admit he had done that was mortifying, especially to a girl who was also his first cousin. Father Cardarelli, who had taught him catechism and who had given Rodney his missal with the red leather cover and the prayerful inscription, had warned that “abusing oneself” was a sin in God’s eyes but not as bad as doing “it”—which was “mortal” and punishable by eternal damnation, which meant something like those old paintings of demons carving people with long, evil knives.

In truth, Rodney had played with himself but only experienced pre-orgasmic sensations, which