His mouth went slack, and for a second I saw something like awareness in his eyes. Then his lips began moving again. I bent down to hear what he was saying.
'… standing on the corner and my brother had a toothpick in his mouth because he thought it made him look tough. All it did was make him look like a fool, and I told him so. I said, you know why those fools hang around in front of Armistead's with toothpicks in their mouths? So people will think they just ate a big dinner there. I guess everybody can recognize a fool except one of its own kind. And my aunt came out and said, You're making your brother cry, when are you ever going to learn to control that mouth of yours?'
I straightened up and rested my left hand on his shoulder. 'Alan, talk to me. It's Tim Underhill. I want to say good-bye to you.'
He turned his head very slightly in my direction. 'Do you remember me?' I asked.
Recognition flared in his eyes. 'You old son of a gun. Aren't you dead? I shot the hell out of you.'
I knelt beside him, the sheer weight of my relief pushing me close to tears. 'Alan, you only hit me in the shoulder.'
'
'You can't stay in this dump,' I said. 'We have to get you out of here.'
'Listen, kiddo.' A smile stretched the loose mouth, and the shrunken face and enormous eyebrows summoned me nearer. 'All I have to do is get out of this bed. There's a place I once showed my brother, over by the river. If I can watch my big motormouth, uh…' He blinked. Fluid wobbled in the red wells of his eyelids. 'Curse of my life. Talk first, think later.' Alan closed his eyes and sank into the pillow.
I said, 'Alan?' Tears leaked from his closed eyelids and slipped into the gauze of his whiskers. After a second, I realized that he had fallen asleep.
When I let myself back into the car, Mangelotti glowered at me. 'I guess you don't have a watch.'
I said, 'If you bitch one more time, I'll ram your teeth down your throat with this cast.'
PART FIFTEEN
When I got back to New York, I did my best to settle back into my abnormal normal life, but settling was exactly what I couldn't do. Everything had been taken away while I was gone and replaced with other objects that only appeared to resemble them—the chairs and couches, my bed and writing table, even the rugs and bookshelves, were half an inch narrower or shorter, the wrong width or height, and subtly shifted in a way that turned my loft into a jigsaw puzzle solved by forcing pieces into places where other pieces belonged. Part of this sense of dislocation was the result of having to type with only the index finger of my left hand, which refused to work in the old way without the assistance of its partner, but all the rest of it, most of it, was simply me. I had returned from Millhaven so disarranged that I no longer fit my accustomed place in the puzzle.
Wonderfully, my friends distracted me from this sense of disarrangement by fussing over my injury and demanding to hear the story of how I had managed to get myself shot in the shoulder by a distinguished professor of religion. The story was a long story, and it took a long time to tell. They wouldn't settle for summations, they wanted details and vivid recreation. Maggie Lah was particularly interested in what had happened on the morning I got lost in the fog and told me that it was simple, really. 'You walked into your book. You saw your character, and he was yourself. That's why you told the man in the ambulance that your name was Fee Bandolier. Because what else is the point of this book you're writing?'
'You're too smart,' I said, flinching a little at her perception.
'You better write this book, get it out of your system,' she answered, and that was perceptive, too.
When Vinh brought plates of delicious Vietnamese food up from Saigon's kitchen—an internal takeout— Maggie insisted that he go back downstairs for soup. 'This is a person who requires a great deal of soup,' she said, and Vinh must have agreed, because he went right back down and came back with enough soup to feed us all for a week, most of it parceled out into containers that he put into my refrigerator.
Michael Poole wanted to know about the Franklin Bachelor period of Fee Bandolier's life and if I thought I understood what had happened when John Ransom reached Bachelor's encampment. 'Didn't he say that he got there two days before the other man? What did he do there, for two whole days?'
'Eat soup,' Maggie said.
These friends clustered around me like a family, which is what they are, at various times and for various periods, separately and together, for two or three days, and then, because they knew I needed it, began giving me more time by myself.
Using one finger, turned at an unfamiliar angle to the keyboard, I started typing what I had written in John's house into the computer. What would normally have taken me about a week dragged out to two weeks. The hooks and ratchets in my back heated up and rolled over, and every half hour or so I had to stand up and back into the wall to press them back into place. My doctor gave me a lot of pills that contained some codeine, but after I discovered that the codeine slowed me down even further and gave me a headache, I stopped using them. I typed on for another couple of days, trying to ignore both the pain in my back and the sensation of a larger disorder.
Byron Dorian's painting arrived via UPS, and five days later April's Vuillard turned up, wrapped in foot-thick bubble wrap within a wooden case. The men who delivered it even hung it for me—all part of the service. I put the paintings on the long blank wall that faced my desk, so that I could look up and see them while I worked.
Tom Pasmore called, saying that he was still 'fooling around,' whatever that meant. John Ransom called with the news that he had found a place for Alan in Golden Manor, a nursing home with lake views from most of the rooms. 'The place looks like a luxury hotel and costs a fortune, but Alan can certainly afford it,' John said. 'I hope I can afford it, or something like it, when I'm his age.'
'How is he doing?' I asked.
'Oh, physically, he's improved a lot. He's up and around, he doesn't look so
'And mentally?'
'Mentally, he goes in and out. Sometimes, it's like talking to the old Alan, and other times, he just disconnects and talks to himself. To tell you the truth, though, I think that's happening less and less.' Without transition, he asked if I had received the painting. I said I had and thanked him for it.
'You know it cost about a thousand bucks to get it packed and shipped by those guys?'
Around eight o'clock one night, three in the morning for him, Glenroy Breakstone called me from France and announced that he wanted to talk about Ike Quebec. He talked about Ike Quebec for forty minutes. Whatever Glenroy was using these days, they had a lot of it in France. When he had finished, he said, 'You're on my list now, Tim. You'll be hearing from me.'
'I hope I will,' I said, telling him nothing but the truth.
The next morning, I finished typing out everything I had written in Millhaven. To celebrate, I went straight to bed and slept for an hour—I'd hardly been able to sleep at night ever since I'd returned. I went downstairs and ate lunch at Saigon. After I got back up to my loft, I started writing new scenes, new dialogue again. And that's when my troubles really began.
Sleeplessness must have been part of the trouble. In the same way that the fingers of my left hand had
