Dreamcatcher

after making that stack of giveaway books was darkness. Consciousness had returned in the hospital, with that droning voice from a nearby room:
Please stop, I can’t stand it, give
me a shot, where’s Marcy, I want Marcy
. Or maybe it had been
where’s Jonesy, I want
Jonesy
. Old creeping death. Death pretending to be a patient. Death had lost track of him-sure, it was possible, it was a big hospital stuffed full of pain, sweating agony out its very

seams-and now old creeping death was trying to find him again. Trying to trick him.
Trying to make him give himself away.
This time around, though, all that merciful darkness in the middle is gone. This time
around he not only wishes Colleen a happy St. Paddy’s Day, he tells her a joke:
What do
you call a Jamaican proctologist? A Pokemon
. He goes out, his future self-his
November
self-riding in his March head like a stowaway. His future self hears his March self think

foat a beautiful day it turned out to be as he starts walking towards his appointment with
destiny in Cambridge. He tries to tell his March self that this is a bad idea, a grotesquely
bad idea, that he can save himself months of agony just by hailing a Red Top or taking the
T, but he can’t get through. Perhaps all the science-fiction stories he read about time when
he was a teenager had it right: you can’t change the past, no matter how you try.

He walks across the bridge, and although the wind is a little cold, he still enjoys the
sun on his face and the way it breaks into a million bright splinters on the Charles. He sings a snatch of “Here Comes the Sun,” then reverts to the Pointer Sisters:
Yes we cancan,
great gosh a’mighty.
Swinging his briefcase in rhythm. His sandwich is inside. Egg salad.
Mmm-mmmm, Henry said. SSDD, Henry said.

Here is the saxophonist, and surprise: he’s not on the end of the Mass Ave Bridge but
farther up, by the MIT campus, outside one of those funky little Indian restaurants. He’s
shivering in the cold, bald, with nicks on his scalp suggesting he wasn’t cut out to be a barber. The way he’s playing “These Foolish Things” suggests he wasn’t cut out to be a

horn-player, either, and Jonesy wants to tell him to be a carpenter, an actor, a terrorist, anything but a musician. Instead, Jonesy actually encourages him, not dropping the quarter
he previously remembered into the guy’s case (it’s lined with scuffed purple velvet), but a
whole fistful of change-these foolish things, indeed. He blames it on the first warm sun after a long cold winter; he blames it on how well things turned out with Defuniak.

The sax-man rolls his eyes to Jonesy, thanking him but still blowing, Jonesy thinks of
another joke:
What do you call a sax-player with a credit card? An optimist
.
He walks on, swinging his case, not listening to the Jonesy inside, the one who has
swum upstream from November like some time-travelling salmon. “
Hey Jonesy, stop. Just
a few seconds should be enough. Tie your shoe or something
. (No good, he’s wearing loafers. Soon he will be wearing a cast, as well.)

That intersection up there is where it
happens, the one where the Red Line stops, Mass Ave and Prospect. There’s an old guy
coming, a wonked-out history professor in a dark blue Lincoln Town Car and he’s going to
clean you like a house.”
But it’s no good. No matter how hard he yells, it’s no good. The phone lines are down. You can’t go back, can’t kill your own grandfather, can’t shoot Lee Harvey Oswald

as he kneels at a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, congealing fried chicken on a paper plate beside him and his mail-order rifle aimed, can’t stop yourself walking across the intersection of Mass Ave and Prospect Street with your
briefcase in your hand and your copy of the Boston
Phoenix-
which you will never read-
under your arm.
Sorry, sir, the lines are down somewhere in the Jefferson Tract, it’s a real

fuckarow up there, your call cannot go through-And then, oh God, this is new-the message does go through! As he reaches the corner, as he stands there on the curb, just about to step down into the crosswalk, it does
go through!

“What?” he says, and the man who was stopped beside him, the first one to bend over

him in a past which now may be blessedly canceled, looks at him suspiciously and says “I

didn’t say anything,” as though there might be a third with them. Jonesy barely hears him

because there is a third, there is a voice inside him, one which sounds suspiciously like his own, and it’s screaming at him to stay on the curb, to stay out of the street-Then he hears someone crying. He looks across to the far side of Prospect and oh God, Duddits is there, Duddits Cavell naked except for his Underoos, and there is brown stuff smeared all around his mouth. It looks like chocolate, but Jonesy knows better. It’s

dogshit, that bastard Richie made him eat it after all, and people over there are walking back and forth regardless, ignoring him, as if Duddits wasn’t there.

“Duddits!” Jonesy calls. “Duddits, hang on, man, I’m coming!”

And he plunges into the street without looking, the passenger inside helpless to do anything but ride along, understanding at last that this was exactly how and why the accident happened-the old man, yes, the old man with early-stage Alzheimer’s who had no

business behind the wheel of a car in the first place, but that had only been part of it. The

other part, concealed in the blackness surrounding the crash until now, was this: he had

seen Duddits and had simply bolted, forgetting to look.

He glimpses something more, as well: some huge pattern, something like a

dreamcatcher that binds all the years since they first met Duddits Cavell in 1978, something that binds the future as well.

Sunlight twinkles on a windshield; he sees this in the comer of his left eye. A car coming, and too fast. The man who was beside him on the curb, old Mr I-Didn’t-Say-Anything, cries out: “Watch it, guy, watch it!” but Jonesy barely hears him. Because there

is a deer on the sidewalk behind Duddits, a fine big buck, almost as big as a man. Then,

just before the Town Car strikes him, Jonesy sees the deer is a man, a man in an orange

cap and an orange flagman’s vest. On his shoulder, like a hideous mascot, is a legless weasel-thing with enormous black eyes. Its tail-or maybe it’s a tentacle-is curled around the man’s neck. How in God’s name could I have thought he was a deer? Jonesy thinks,

and then the Lincoln strikes him and he is knocked into the street. He hears a bitter, muffled snap as his hip breaks.

2

There is no darkness, not this time; for better or worse, arc-sodiums have been

installed on Memory Lane. Yet the film is confused, as if the editor took a few too many

drinks at lunch and forgot just how the story was supposed to go. Part of this has to do with the strange way time has been twisted out of shape: he seems to be living in the past,

present, and future all at the same time.

This is how we travel, a voice says, and Jonesy realizes it is the voice he heard weeping for Marcy, for a shot. Once acceleration passes a certain point, all travel becomes time travel. Memory is the basis of every journey.

The man on the corner, old Mr I-Didn’t-Say-Anything, bends over him, asks if he’s

all right, sees that he isn’t, then looks up and says, “Who’s got a cell phone? This guy needs an ambulance.” When he raises his head, Jonesy sees there’s a little cut under the guy’s chin, old Mr I-Didn’t-Say-Anything probably did it that morning without even

realizing it. That’s sweet, Jonesy thinks, then the film jumps and here’s an old dude in a rusty black topcoat and a fedora hat-call this elderly dickweed old Mr What’d-l-Do. He’s

wandering around asking people that. He says he looked away for a moment and felt a thump-what’d I do? He says he has never liked a big car what’d I do? He says he can’t remember the name of the insurance company, but they call themselves the Good Hands

People-what’d I do? There is a stain on the crotch of his trousers, and as Jonesy lies there

in the street he can’t help feeling a kind of exasperated pity for the old geezer-wishes he

could tell him You want to know what you did, take a look at your pants. You did Number

One, Q-E-fuckin-D.

The film jumps again. Now there are even more people gathered around him. They

look very tall and Jonesy thinks it’s like having a coffin’s-eye view of a funeral. That

makes him remember a Ray Bradbury story, he thinks it’s called “The Crowd,” where the people who gather at accident sites-always the same ones determine your fate by what they say. If they stand around you murmuring that it isn’t so bad, he’s lucky the car swerved at the last second, you’ll be okay. If, on the other hand, the people who make up

the crowd start saying things like He looks bad or I don’t think he’s going to make it, you’ll die. Always the same people. Always the same empty, avid faces. The lookie-loos who just have to see the blood and hear the groans of the injured.

In the cluster surrounding him, just behind old Mr I-Didn’t-Say-Anything, Jonesy

sees Duddits Cavell, now fully dressed and looking okay-no dogshit mustache, in other words. McCarthy is there, too. Call him old Mr I-Stand-at-the-Door-and-Knock, Jonesy thinks. And someone else, as well. A gray man. Only he’s not a man at all, not really; he’s

the alien that was standing behind him while Jonesy was at the bathroom door. Huge black

eyes dominate a face which is otherwise almost featureless. The saggy dewlapping

elephant’s skin is tighter here; old Mr ET-Phone-Home hasn’t started to succumb to the environment yet. But he will. In the end, this world will dissolve him like acid.

Your head exploded, Jonesy tries to tell the gray man, but no words come out; his mouth won’t even open. And yet old Mr ET-Phone-Home seems to hear him, because that

gray head inclines slightly.

He’s passing out, someone says, and before the film jumps again he hears old Mr What’d-I-Do, the guy who hit him and smashed his hip like a china plate in a shooting gallery, telling someone People used to say I look like Laurence Welk.

3
He’s unconscious in the back of an ambulance but watching himself, having an actual

out-of-body experience, and here is something else new, something no one bothers to tell

him about later: he goes into V-tach while they are cutting his pants off, exposing a hip that looks as 1 if someone had sewn two large and badly made doorknobs under it. V-tach,

he knows exactly what that is because he and Carla never miss an episode of ER, they even watch the reruns on TNT, and here come the paddles, here comes the goo, and one of

the EMTs is wearing a gold crucifix around his neck, it brushes Jonesy’s nose as old Mr

EMT bends over what is essentially a dead body, and holy fuck he died in the ambulance!

Why did no one ever tell him that he died in the fucking ambulance? Did they think that

maybe he wouldn’t be interested, that maybe he’d just go Ho-hum, been there, done that,

got the tee-shirt?

“Clear!” shouts the other EMT, and just before they hit him the driver looks back and

he sees it’s Duddits’s Mom. Then they whack him with the juice and his body jumps, all

that white meat shakin on the bone, as Pete would say, and although the Jonesy watching

has no body, he feels the electricity just the same, a great big pow that lights up the tree of his nerves like a skyrocket. Praise Jesus and get-down hallelujah.

The part of him on the stretcher jumps like a fish pulled from the water, then lies still.

The EMT crouched behind Roberta Cavell looks down at his console and says, “Ah, man,

no, flatline, hit him again.” And when the other guy does, the film jumps and Jonesy’s in

an operating room.

No, wait, that’s not quite right. Part of him’s in the OR, but the rest of him is behind a piece of glass and looking in. Two other doctors are here, but they show no interest in

the surgical team’s efforts to put Jonesy-Dumpty back together again. They are playing cards. Above their heads, wavering in the airflow from a heating-vent, is the dreamcatcher

from Hole in the Wall.

Jonesy has no urge to watch what’s going on behind the glass-he doesn’t like the

bloody crater where his hip was, or the bleary gleam of shattered bone nosing out of it.

Although he has no stomach to be sick to in his disembodied state, he feels sick to it just

the same.

Behind him, one of the card-playing does says, Duddits was how we defined

ourselves. Duddits was our finest hour. To which the other replies, You think so? And Jonesy realizes the docs are Henry and Pete.

He turns toward them, and it seems he’s not disembodied after all, because he catches

a ghost of his reflection in the window looking into the operating room. He is not Jonesy

anymore. Not human anymore. His skin is gray and his eyes are black bulbs staring out of his noseless face. He has become one of them, one of the-One of the grayboys

, he thinks.
That’s what they call us, the grayboys. Some of them
call us the space-niggers.
He opens his mouth to say some of this, or perhaps to ask his old friends to help him-
they have always helped each other, if they could-but then the film jumps again (goddam
that editor, drinking on the job) and he’s in bed, a hospital bed in a hospital room, and someone is calling
Where’s Jonesy, I want Jonesy
.
There
, he thinks with wretched satisfaction,

I always knew it was Jonesy, not Marcy.
That’s death calling, or maybe Death, and I must be very quiet if I’m to avoid him, he
missed me in the crowd, made a grab for me in the ambulance and missed again, and now
here he is in the hospital, masquerading as a patient.
Please stop, crafty old Mr Death groans in that hideous coaxing monotone,
I can’t
stand it, give me a shot, where’s Jonesy, I want Jonesy. I’Il just lie here until he stops

, Jonesy thinks,
I can’t get up anyway, just had two pounds of metal put in my hip and it’ll
be days until I’m able to get up, maybe a week.
But to his horror he realizes he
is
getting up, throwing the covers aside and getting out of bed, and although he can feel the sutures in his hip and across his belly straining and breaking open, spilling what is undoubtedly donated blood down his leg and into his

pubic hair, soaking it, he walks across the room without a limp, through a patch of sunlight that casts a brief but very human shadow on the floor (not a grayboy now, there is
that to be grateful for, at least, because the grayboys are toast), and to the door. He strolls unseen down a corridor, past a parked gumey with a bedpan on it, past a pair of laughing,
talking nurses who are looking at photographs, passing them from hand to hand, and

toward that droning voice. He is helpless to,top and understands that he is in the cloud.
Not a redblack cloud, as both Pete and Henry sensed it, however; the cloud is gray and he
floats within it, a unique particle that is not changed by the cloud, and Jonesy thinks:
I’m
what they were looking for, I don’t know how it can be, but I am just what they were
looking for. Because… the cloud doesn’t change me?
Yes, sort of

He passes three open doors. The fourth is closed. On it is a sign which reads COME
IN, THERE IS NO INFECTION HERE, IL N’Y A PAS D’INFECTION ICI.
You lie
, Jonesy thinks.
Cruise or Curtis or whatever his name is may be a madman,
but he’s right about one thing: there is infection.
Blood is pouring down his legs, the bottom half of his johnny is now a bright scarlet
(
the claret has really begun to flow

, the old boxing announcers used to say), but he feels no pain. Nor does he fear infection. He is unique and the cloud can only carry him, not change him. He opens the door and goes inside.
4
Is he surprised to see the gray man with the big black eyes lying in the hospital bed?
Not even a little bit. When Jonesy turned and discovered this guy standing behind him back at Hole in the Wall, the sucker’s head exploded. That was, all things considered, one

hell of an Excedrin headache. It would put anyone in the hospital. The guy’s head looks
okay now, though; modem medicine is wonderful.
The room is crepitant with fungus, florid with red-gold growth. It’s growing on the floor, the windowsill, the slats of the venetian blinds; it has bleared its way across the surface of the overhead light fixture and the glucose bottle (Jonesy assumes it’s glucose)

on the stand by the bed; little reddish-gold beards dangle from the bathroom doorknob and
the crank at the foot of the bed.
As Jonesy approaches the gray thing with the sheet pulled up to its narrow hairless chest, he sees there is a single get-well card on the bedtable. FEEL BETTER SOON! is printed above a cartoon picture of a sad-looking turtle with a Band-Aid on its shell. And
below the picture: FROM STEVEN SPIELBERG AND ALL YOUR PALS IN
HOLLYWOOD.

This is a dream, full of a dream’s tropes and in-jokes
, Jonesy thinks, but he knows better. His mind is mixing things, pureeing them, making them easier to swallow, and that
is the way of dreams; past, present, and future have all been stirred together, which is also
like dreams, but he knows that he’d be wrong to dismiss this as nothing but a fractured fairy-tale from his subconscious. At least some of it is happening.

The bulbous black eyes are watching him. And now the sheet stirs and humps up
beside the thing in the bed. What emerges from beneath it is the reddish weasel-thing that
got the Beav. It is staring at him with those same glassy black eyes as it propels itself with its tail up the pillow, where it curls itself next to that narrow gray head. It was no wonder
McCarthy felt a little indisposed, Jonesy thinks.

Blood continues to pour down Jonesy’s legs, sticky as honey and hot as fever. It
patters on to the floor and you’d think it would soon be sprouting its own colony of that
reddish mold or fungus or whatever it is, a regular jungle of it, but Jonesy knows better.
He is unique. The cloud can carry him, but it cannot change him.
No bounce no play
, he thinks, and then, immediately:
Shhh, shhh, keep that to
yourself

The gray creature raises its hand in a kind of weary greeting. On it are three long fingers ending in rosy-pink nails. Thick yellow pus is oozing from beneath them. More of
this stuff gleams loosely in the folds of the guy’s skin, and from the comers of his-its?-
eyes.
You’re right, you do need a shot, Jonesy says.
Maybe a little Drano or Lysol,
something like that. Put you out of your mi-

A terrible thought occurs to him then; for a moment it’s so strong he is unable to resist the force moving him toward the bed. Then his feet begin to move again, leaving big
red tracks behind him.
You’re not going to drink my blood, are you? Like a vampire?
The thing in the bed
smiles without smiling.
We are, so far as can express it in your terms, vegetarians. Yeah,
but what about Bowser there?

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