I was dry, dry, dry, and he was overwhelmed by my scent. I was earth and altitude, the smell of cold astringency and absence, of life itself, unstained. His urge to fill the dryness with himself was overwhelming, an army marshaled to slaughter reasoned thought; compared to this, the urge to procreate was a pebble in his shoe. I was drawing him like a source of gravity, capillary action absorbing him into the dream, and the barn filled with water, I filled with water …
And I was kicking to the surface, which was thick with a skin of dust and straw. I punctured it, reached for the beam, and Slade was there, his tail twitching, the water still rising, and what did Slade do? He flew. I held tight to his small soft body and we soared through the loft doors, above the water, and as we escaped the roaring ocean consuming the topography below, dialing up the sides of houses and sinking the peaks of roofs, swallowing trees, telephone poles, flattening and darkening the world, I turned my head to the side and I saw a lone jag of rock jutting out of the dark sea. We flew closer and I saw that atop the angle of stone there was a birdbath, and sparrows were perched there, dipping their small bodies and flipping diamonds of water off their wings, oblivious to the flood.
Slade and I zoomed away from the water but not in fear, for we could fly forever, we could live in the sky, but it was troubling me, the water’s gelid menace. It was alive. It could send up a silvery palm and slap us out of the sky, and I urged Slade higher, until we were so high I was sure we were unreachable, as high as the tallest buildings I knew of, the World Trade towers. Good Slade!
I knew that Albert, like a dog that had treed a raccoon, snarling jaws white with foam, would starve, freeze, burn, waste away waiting for me to descend. I knew it was him, the old man who lived downstairs, trying to tempt me down, cooing liquid sibilance, Devonian soundings that rose and fell like wind, mere Hertzian insinuations because, after all, he was already in my head. That is to say, even in the dream, I knew that he already inhabited me, and the clear eyes I once used to view the world clouded and I was awash in metaphor. Yes, I understood the water was not water but Albert, and also that his voice was not a voice but a song in my memory, that I was dreaming, that nothing in the world was only itself, but a twin, that everything, even my own self, had divided into the real and the imagined, and that the two were interchangeable and that it was impossible to tell which was which.
33.
Real or imagined: I was the only credible witness to the murder of John Caldwell. Yes, John, who had turned back to the hospital to make peace with the counterman, driven by a strange attraction to difficulty, or by a sense of guilt, or a need to be forgiven, or by that flaw universal among those who are drawn to the stage: a desperate desire to be loved by strangers. And then propelled again to his father’s building by the same impulse. John, whose impeccable and atrocious timing, whose every second at the hospital making amends to the counterman from the Cosmic, whose every snowbound step over to West End and then north to pick up his dining table from the package room at the Apelles, or to check to see if his father had returned, or some other mix of bad fate and benevolence (conjecture, as he’s unavailable for interview, long gone), whose every hitch, every lurch, every scarf adjustment, whose every pause to clear his nostrils became, on the timeline of his existence, overweighted with import as he approached the Apelles, accreting dread suspense, as his path drew him ever closer to the spot in the snow where his father, traveling at a high rate of speed on the x-axis, would intersect finally with his own plot on the y-axis, an empty set fixed at an exact point on the night’s grid.
When John reached the Apelles, he saw the Vornados’ terrace-tossed furniture sticking out of the snow. He stopped to pull a teak chair out of a drift. He found the little French café table. Another chair. His apartment had only a fire escape landing, certainly no outdoor space for patio furniture. For whatever reason, he was arranging the chairs in a row when his father came down out of the sky and crushed him.
Egon Larder and his wife, Saska, acquaintances of Bo’s, had just skied up, and were only about twenty feet away. Under his parka Egon was dressed in a suit and tie, and had skied down from 89th wearing a plastic Tricky Dick
