Harriet adores him. It's beautiful to see. Fran and I can think of no more natural therapy, no simpler recommendation of life and living, than to be with a baby as it makes its first acquaintance with the world… I don't know about this 'exponential' business. Maybe there's just more of every kind of crap these days. I've been badly disturbed by that case of the four-year-old girl and her stepfather, step-uncle, and step-grandfather. Every night they-No. Clearly, we cannot think about that. But we can think about this: the great eyes of the child when they open and focus, as the first of the men enters the room. Thought the weather was breaking. Wrong. We will obviously have to take this heat until the end of time. Saw Benson Holloway sailing out of town in the jeep. He must have been doing sixty-five. Dan's bites are back.
Dan's Notebook
Only the mosquitoes love me. Only the mosquitoes love my blood.
I look up from writing those words and on the other side of the wire screen eight or nine of them are clustered, two feet away, forming the shape of my face as surely as the stars delineate Draco, the firebreather, up in the circumpolar heavens. They are waiting. Soon I will go to them, my pretty ones. With the help of my size inconstancy they will change, in far less than a second, from flecks of foulness to horn-nosed hummingbirds as they settle and sip (heat-seeking, blood-seeking) on my open face.
The pile of the lake grows critical. And the baby is asking me why I am waiting.
'Tyramine,' she will typically begin (after calling my name for hour after hour). 'Bufotenine. Sorotonin. Malvaria. Reserpine. Spermadine. Tyramine.'
Later I looked up and the 'baby' was standing over my bed. With tears stinging the bites on my cheeks I begged her to return quietly to her room and cease this miserable experiment, but her eyes were lit by all the glitter-sizzle of schizophrenia as she told me how-together-we might end our trial by fire. She wants me to take her out into the sleeping warhead of Flame Lake, and so foreclose the great suspense. Even now, in the dead of night, as we both knew, the water would be black and boiling like vulcan pitch while, above, the leptons of the stars warily encircled the waiting Earth and its strong force. Toward dawn she left me, with a warning. But I know tonight I must decide.
I think it's cruel and senseless that in the daytime, when we might discuss things rather more sensibly, the baby just lies there smiling and pretends to be a baby.
Ned's Diary
August 6. I ought to describe this morning's events in as much detail as I can muster. I rose at eight and fixed a pot of coffee, Fran being something of a late starter, since the baby. Apparently Dan was not yet up, which surprised me -he is usually there in the kitchen, patiently waiting. I drank a cup and looked out into Flame Lake. And into broken weather. The water was heavily cured in mist, its colorlessness touched with dabs of silver, dabs of gold. I remember thinking: So the lake was a dud, a fizzle-it never quite went off. I opened the door to Dan's room and the coffee cup dropped from my hand and broke, silently, so it seemed. The bedclothes and curtains had been torn to pieces, torn to rags. As I stood there and stared I had the sense of great violence, violence compressed and controlled -everything was scrunched up, squeezed, strangled, impacted, imploded. Yes, and there were bites on the wooden surfaces, deep bites, and long scratch marks on the walls. I went outside and at once I saw his thin body, face-down in the shallows… I woke Fran. I called Sheriff Groves. I called Dr. Slizard, who showed shock but no surprise. Then we straightened the whole thing out. Fortunately it would seem that the baby slept through it all. She's fine, and the commotion hasn't appeared to unsettle her. She just looks around every now and then, wonderingly-for him, for Dan. Sweet Jesus, the poor, poor kid. He would have been thirteen in January.
I don't know what is wrong. I have just read Dan's notebook, before sending it off to Slizard at the Section, as requested. I feel a fool, and an old one. To a culpable extent I lacked-I lacked insight. And what else? I have just read Dan's notebook and all I have in my head is a thought straight out of left field. Yesterday, at breakfast, Dan was there. As he drank his juice he gazed at the backs of the cereal boxes. What could be more-what could be more natural? I used to do that myself as a kid: toy-aircraft designs, send-in competitions, funnies, waffle and cookie recipes. But now? On the back of the high-fiber bran package there are dietary tips for avoiding cancer. On the back of the half-gallon carton of homogenized, pasteurized, vitamin D-fortified milk there are two mugshots of smiling children, gone, missing. (Have You Seen Them?). Date of birth, 7/ 7/79. Height, 3'6'. Hair, brown. Eyes, blue. Missing, and missed, too, I'll bet-oh, most certainly. Done away with, probably, fucked and thrown over a wall somewhere, fucked and murdered, yeah, that's the most likely thing. I don't know what is wrong.
THE TIME DISEASE
Twenty-twenty, and the time disease is epidemic. In my credit group, anyway. And yours too, friend, unless I miss my guess. Nobody thinks about anything else anymore. Nobody even pretends to think about anything else anymore. Oh yeah, except the sky, of course. The poor sky… It's a thing. It's a situation. We all think about time, catching time, coming down with time. I'm still okay, I think, for the time being.
I took out my hand mirror. Everybody carries at least one hand mirror now. On the zip trains you see whole carloads jackknifed over in taut scrutiny of their hairlines and eye sockets. The anxiety is as electric as the twanging cable above our heads. They say more people are laid low by time-anxiety than by time itself. But only time is fatal. It's a problem, we agree, a definite feature. How can you change the subject when there's only one subject? People don't want to talk about the sky. They don't want to talk about the sky, and I don't blame them.
I took out my hand mirror and gave myself a ten-second scan: lower gumline, left eyelash count. I felt so heartened that I moved carefully into the kitchen and cracked out a beer. I ate a hero, and a ham salad. I lit another cigarette. I activated the TV and keyed myself in to the Therapy Channel. I watched a seventy-year-old documentary about a road-widening scheme in a place called Orpington, over in England there… Boredom is meant to be highly prophylactic when it comes to time. We are all advised to experience as much boredom as we possibly can. To bore somebody is said to be even more sanative than to be bored oneself. That's why we're always raising'our voices in company and going on and on about anything that enters our heads. Me I go on about time the whole time: a reckless habit. Listen to me. I'm at it again.
The outercom sounded. I switched from Therapy to Intake, No visual. 'Who is it?' I asked the TV. The TV told me. I sighed and put the call on a half-minute hold. Soothing music. Boring music… Okay-you want to hear my theory? Now, some say that time was caused by congestion, air plague, city life (and city life is the only kind of life there is these days). Others say that time was a result of the first nuclear conflicts (limited theater, Persia v. Pakistan, Zaire v. Nigeria, and so on, no really big deal or anything: they took the heat and the light, and we took the cold and the dark; it helped fuck the sky, that factor) and more particularly of the saturation TV coverage that followed: all day the screen writhed with flesh, flesh dying or living in a queer state of age. Still others say that time was an evolutionary consequence of humankind's ventures into space (they shouldn't have gone out there, what with things so rocky back home). Food, pornography, the cancer cure… Me I think it was the twentieth century that did it. The twentieth century was all it took.
'Hi there, Happy,' I said. 'What's new?'
'… Lou?' her voice said warily. 'Lou, I don't feel so good.'
'That's not new. That's old.'
'I don't feel so good. I think it's really happening this time.'
'Oh, sure.'
Now this was Happy Farraday. That's right: the TV star. The Happy Farraday. Oh, we go way back, Happy and me.
'Let's take a look at you,' I said. 'Come on, Happy, give me a visual on this.'
The screen remained blank, its dead cells seeming to squirm or hover. On impulse I switched from Intake to
