Firestarter

Mrs. Gurney had gone from three hundred to two-eighty to two-seventy, confessing with mixed fear and delight that she didn’t seem to want second helpings anymore. The second helping just didn’t seem to taste good. Before, she had always kept bowls and bowls of snacks in the refrigerator (and doughnuts in the breadbox, and two or three Sara Lee cheesecakes in the freezer) for watching TV at night, but now she somehow… well, it sounded almost crazy, but… she kept forgetting they were there. And she had always heard that when you were dieting, snacks were all you could think of. It certainly hadn’t been this way, she said, when she tried Weight Watchers.

The other three women in the group had responded eagerly in kind. Andy merely stood back and watched them, feeling absurdly paternal. All four of them were astounded and delighted by the commonality of their experience. The toning-up exercises, which had always seemed so boring and painful before, now seemed almost pleasant. And then there was this weird compulsion to walk. They all agreed that if they hadn’t walked a good bit by the end of the day, they felt somehow ill at ease and restless. Mrs. Gurney confessed that she had got into the habit of walking downtown and back every day, even though the round trip was more than two miles. Before, she had always taken the bus, which was surely the sensible thing to do, since the stop was right in front of her house.

But one day she had taken it-because her thigh muscles did ache that much-she had got to feeling so uneasy and restless that she had got off” at the second stop. The others agreed. And they all blessed Andy McGee for it, sore muscles and all.

Mrs. Gurney had dropped to two-fifty at her third weigh-in, and when her six-week course ended, she was down to two hundred and twentyfive pounds. She said her husband was stunned at what had happened, especially after her failure with countless dieting programs and fads. He wanted her to go see a doctor; he was afraid she might have cancer. He didn’t believe it was possible to lose seventy-five pounds in six weeks by natural means. She showed him her fingers, which were red and callused from taking in her clothes with needle and thread. And then she threw her arms around him (nearly breaking his back) and wept against his neck.

His alumni usually came back, just as his more successful college students usually came back at least once, some to say thanks, some merely to parade their success before him-to say, in effect, Look here, the student has outraced the teacher… something that was hardly as uncommon as they seemed to think, Andy sometimes thought.

But Mrs. Gurney had been one of the former. She had come back to say hello and thanks a lot only ten days or so before Andy had begun to feel nervous and watched in Port City. And before the end of that month, they had gone on to New York City.

Mrs. Gurney was still a big woman; you noticed the startling difference only if you had seen her before-like one of those before-and-after ads in the magazines. When she dropped in that last time, she was down to a hundred and ninety-five pounds. But it wasn’t her exact weight that mattered, of course. What mattered was that she was losing weight at the same measured rate of six pounds a week, plus or minus two pounds, and she would go on losing at a decreasing rate until she was down to one hundred and thirty pounds, plus or minus ten pounds. There would be no explosive decompression, and no lingering hangover of food horror, the sort of thing that sometimes led to anorexia nervosa. Andy wanted to make some money, but he didn’t want to kill anyone doing it.

“You ought to be declared a national resource for what you’re doing,” Mrs. Gurney had declared, after telling Andy that she had effected a rapprochement with her children and that her relations with her husband were improving. Andy had smiled and thanked her, but now, lying on his bed in the darkness, growing drowsy, he reflected that that was pretty close to what had happened to him and Charlie: they had been declared national resources.

Still, the talent was not all bad. Not when it could help a Mrs. Gurney.

He smiled a little.

And smiling, slept.

10

He could never remember the details of the dream afterward. He had been looking for something. He had been in some labyrinthine maze of corridors, lit only by dull red trouble lights. He opened doors on empty rooms and then closed them again. Some of the rooms were littered with balls of crumpled paper and in one there was an overturned table lamp and a fallen picture done in the style of Wyeth. He felt that he was in some sort of installation that had been shut down and cleared out in one hell of a tearing hurry.

And yet he had at last found what he was looking for. It was… what? A box? A chest? It was terribly heavy, whatever it was, and it had been marked with a white- stenciled skull and crossbones, like a jar of rat poison kept on a high cellar shelf. Somehow, in spite of its weight (it had to weigh at least as much as Mrs. Gurney), he managed to pick it up. He could feel all his muscles and, tendons pulling taut and hard, yet there was no pain.

Of course there isn’t, he told himself. There’s no pain because it’s a dream. You’ll pay for it later. You’ll have the pain later.

He carried the box out of the room where he had found it. There was a place he had to take it, but he didn’t know what or where it was-

You’ll know it when you see it, his mind whispered.

So he carried the box or chest up and down endless corridors, its weight tugging painlessly at his muscles, stiffening the back of his neck; and although his muscles didn’t hurt, he was getting the beginnings of a headache.

The brain is a muscle, his mind lectured, and the lecture became a chant like a child’s song, a little girl’s skipping rhyme: The brain is a, muscle that can move the world. The brain is a muscle that can move-

Now all the doors were like subway doors, bulging outward in a slight curve, fitted with large windows; all these windows had rounded corners. Through these doors (if they were doors) he saw a confusion of sights. In one room Dr. Wanless was playing a huge accordion. He looked like some crazed Lawrence Welk with a tin cup full of pencils in front of him and a sign around his neck that read

THERE ARE NONE SO BLIND AS THOSE WHO WILL NOT SEE. Through another window he could see a girl in a white caftan flying through the air, screaming, careering off the walls, and Andy hurried past that one quickly.

Through another he saw Charlie and he became convinced again that this was some sort of pirate dream-buried treasure, yo-ho-ho and all of that because Charlie appeared to be talking with Long John Silver. This man had a parrot on his shoulder and an eyepatch over one eye. He was grinning at Charlie with a kind of smarmy false friendship that made Andy nervous. As if in confirmation of this, the one-eyed pirate slipped an arm around Charlie’s shoulders and cried hoarsely, “We’ll do “em yet, kid!”

Andy wanted to stop there and knock on the window until he attracted Charlie’s attention-she was staring at the pirate as if hypnotized. He wanted to make sure she saw through this strange man, to make sure she understood that he wasn’t what he seemed.

But he couldn’t stop. He had this damned

(box? chest?)

to

(???)

to what? Just what the hell was he supposed to do with it? But he would know when it was time. He went past dozens of other rooms-he could’t remember all of the things he saw-and then he was in a long blank corridor that ended in a blank wall. But not entirely blank; there was something in the exact center of it, a big steel rectangle like a mail slot.

Then he saw the word that had been stamped on it in raised letters, and understood.

DISPOSAL, it read.

And suddenly Mrs. Gurney was beside him, a slim and pretty Mrs. Gurney with a shapely body and trim legs that looked made for dancing all night long, dancing on a terrace until the stars went pale in the sky and dawn rose in the east like sweet music. You’d never guess, he thought, bemused, that her clothes were once made by Omar the Tentmaker.

He tried to lift the box, but couldn’t. Suddenly it was just too heavy. His headache was worse… It was like the black horse, the riderless horse with the red eyes, and with dawning horror he realized it was loose, it was somewhere in this abandoned installation, and it was coming for him, thudding, thudding

“I’ll help you,” Mrs. Gurney said. “You helped me; now I’ll help you. After all, you are the national resource, not me.”

“You look so pretty,” he said. His voice seemed to come from far away, through the thickening headache.

“I feel like I’ve been let out of prison,” Mrs. Gurney responded. “Let me help you.”

“It’s just that my head aches-”

“Of course it does. After all, the brain is a muscle.”

Did she help him, or did he do it himself? He couldn’t remember. But he could remember thinking that he understood the dream now, it was the push he was getting rid of, once and for all, the push. He remembered tipping the box against the slot marked DISPOSAL, tipping it up, wondering what it would look like when it came out, this thing that had sat inside his brain since his college days. But it wasn’t the push that came out; he felt both surprise and fear as the top opened. What spilled into the chute was a flood of blue pills his pills, and he was scared, all right; he was, in the words of Granther McGee, suddenly scared enough to shit nickels.

“No!” he shouted.

“Yes,” Mrs. Gurney answered firmly. “The brain is a muscle that can move the world.”

Then he saw it her way.

It seemed that the more he poured the more his head ached, and the more his head ached the darker it got, until there was no light, the dark was total, it was a living dark, someone had blown all the fuses somewhere and there was no light, no box, no dream, only his headache and the riderless horse with the red eyes coming on and coming on.

Thud thud, thud…

11

He must have been awake a long time before he actually realized he was awake. The total lack of light made the exact dividing line hard to find. A few years before, he had read of an experiment in which a number of monkeys had been put into environments designed to muffle all their senses. The monkeys had all gone crazy. He could understand why. He had no idea how long he had been sleeping, no concrete input except

“Oww, Jesus!”

Sitting up drove two monstrous bolts of chromium pain into his head. He clapped his hands to his skull and rocked it back and forth, and little by little the pain subsided to a more manageable level.

No concrete sensory input except this. rotten headache. I must have slept on my neck or something, he thought. I must have

No. Oh, no. He knew this headache, knew it well. It was the sort of headache he got from a medium-to-hard push… harder than the ones he had given the fat ladies