easy. All of those images were stuck in his head, all those neat plots and resolutions, and he was forever flipping between them like competing TV shows, searching for a perfect fit he couldn’t find.
And he couldn’t turn it off. It wasn’t going to work, despite the Jack Daniel’s and all that had gone before it. He wasn’t going to sleep. He wasn’t going to dream. Not tonight. It wasn’t going to happen.
April Louise Destino was dead.
The dreamweaver was gone.
Steve Austin opened his eyes and found himself in his fortress of solitude. Hidden away from prying eyes. Head bowed, eyes on the dead bulge in his Levi’s. (“Hey, Joe Camel,” he whispered, and laughed.) Eyes moving, focusing on the yearbook photograph: the young, perfect, pre-downfall body of April Destino. (April cheering him on in that practiced little roar of hers- “Our spirit is SKY HIGH! Your spirit is SO LOW!”) He tried to feel something. He wanted to feel something more than anything else. His eyes locked on the black hole where April’s head should have been. (Black holes…and worm holes…and five-year missions that never seemed to end…too many sleepless nights spent with his ass planted in front of a TV set, enjoying the familiar company of Kirk and Spock and McCoy, each character more familiar to him than any of his neighbors.) Eyes locked on the shadowy figure peering through a biology lab window behind the cheerleaders. (A memory from the last gasp of AM radio: I like dreamin’, ‘cause dreamin’ can make you mine… ). Steve Austin’s eyes on Steve Austin’s silhouette, eighteen years old and watching April Destino and never dreaming that life would turn her beautiful face into a black hole and her beautiful body into a cavern for graveyard worms.
Eighteen years old and wanting to feel something while he was awake.
Eighteen years old and wanting to sleep with April Destino in a way that no one else could understand.
Eighteen years old and wanting to dream.
Even now, even with all that water under the ubiquitous bridge he felt that everything would be different if only he could see that yearbook picture, and April Louise Destino, in just the right way. If only he could see the missing pieces that eluded him in those ads with the hidden messages.
If only that asshole Rudy Wells had designed a better computer chip for his wounded brain…
…he could be like everyone else if he could learn that one simple skill. He could…
Suddenly, Steve Austin could see that something else was there in the picture, hiding just above April in the shadows that climbed the wall of the biology lab. Dull black ink on slate shadow. Open, looping letters. Words that he hadn’t noticed when he opened the book earlier in the evening and looked at the picture for the first time in years.
Dream a little dream of me!
Love, April
The tiny ice cubes that came from Safeway rattled in his empty glass. The sound was not at all pleasant, but The Six Million Dollar Man couldn’t stop it because he couldn’t stop his big hand from shaking.
He couldn’t stop shaking, but there was something he could do.
He twisted open a prescription bottle, and he swallowed several of April Destino’s Halcion tablets.
Five pills, right down his gullet.
And then he drank.
He closed the yearbook and put it away. The fluorescent tube buzzed overhead. Neon white faded to storm-shadow gray. The room was a basement, and then it was a fortress of solitude.
The man with the brain of a machine didn’t move from the La-Z-Boy
But neither did he sleep.
1:38 A.M.
The sex was great. Amy Peyton-Price was sure of that.
Ethan Russell lay at her side, so enamored of her that he couldn’t even blink. “I know men aren’t supposed to say this kind of thing anymore,” he began, “but you’ve got the greatest body…you really drive me nuts…you’re perfect.”
“I weigh the same as the day I graduated high school.” Amy took Ethan’s hand, guided it over her flat belly. “Women aren’t supposed to brag about that kind of thing anymore, either, but I’m proud of it. So I guess we’re even on the political incorrectness scale.”
Amy laughed as Ethan’s hand drifted lower, tickling now. She wasn’t lying about her weight. But she wasn’t going to tell Ethan that she had graduated from high school eighteen years ago. He was only twenty-two, and she didn’t want to scare him off. Half of those eighteen years didn’t show, anyway. On a good day-or in the afterglow of good sex, as tonight-a few more years could be subtracted.
And sex with Ethan was more than good. It was great. Amy was sure of that. She snatched his fingers, stopped his tickling. A smile played at the corners of her lips. She knew her smile meant everything to him.
“You could do a lot better than me, you know,” he said. “I mean, sometimes I wonder what you see in me. I’m just a guy who sells ties.”
“No you’re not.” Her smile turned evil. “You’re a tie salesman who happens to be outstanding between the sheets.”
It was the wrong thing to say. He pulled away.
Amy almost laughed. And men thought that they were so tough.
“I’m sorry.” She chose another tack. “I wish I could explain how much you mean to me, Ethan. God, even your name is wonderful. Ethan. You’re a world away from all those Bill’s and Bob’s and Danny’s and Doug’s I dated when I was younger. And you want to do all the things I used to dream of doing. You want to visit Paris, live in New York. I’d almost forgotten those dreams. You’re young, but you’re not like the young men I used to know who wanted me just because I was blonde and pretty and would look good on their arm while they grew old. You want to do more than fill your father’s shoes at the shipyard. You don’t talk about the NFL or Playboy centerfolds or multi-barreled carburetors.” She took his hand in hers. “I know what this town can do to people. How it can steal their dreams, make them feel so small. That’s what happened to me before I met you. I’d fallen into a life that made me wonder what I was doing, and why. You gave me back my dreams.”
Ethan shook his head. “I gave you the dreams of a tie salesman.”
Want to hear a confession?” Amy asked, and he nodded. “When I was twenty-two, I was a bank teller.”
He laughed. “I can’t picture that. Not the way you spend money.
“Oh, that’s why I took the job. See, my first husband was all talk. He sold cars, if you can believe that. Well, he sold Jaguars, but when you come right down to it a car salesman is a car salesman. You should have seen him. Always grinning while he gave me the details: what a shark he’d been selling this Jag, the pound of flesh he’d sliced low-balling that Triumph trade-in, how he’d jack the price on said pound of flesh the next time a wannabe Brit wearing one of those little tweed touring caps came into the showroom. He was full of big plans and clever patter, but it never amounted to much.”
“So you got the bank job to make some extra money?”
“No. I divorced husband number one. I got the job to pick out husband number two. I know it sounds awful and calculating and all that, but I was scared of having nothing. I want to snag a guy who was more than hot air, and I wanted a look at his bank statements to make sure I was getting what I bargained for. You know what I got.”
Ethan didn’t say anything. Neither did Amy. She’d told him all about husband number two. He was a corporate lawyer who spoke the same language as husband number one, but his bank account backed it up. He had everything squared away in that department. But there were just some things a sixty-four-year-old man couldn’t square away for a thirty-five-year-old woman. Not a woman like Amy, anyway. No matter how hard he tried, husband number two couldn’t make her feel young the way that Ethan Russell, stud-puppy tie salesman, could.
She hugged Ethan, hoping he knew how much he meant to her, hoping her confession had proven that he was the man she’d waited so long to possess.
Ethan didn’t return her hug. His eyes were wary, brimming with tears.
