Part Three 2 page

"Yes, this is the one." She looked at it once more and then handed it to me. "The pages are numbered. Start reading at about page forty."

I did, and there it was again – the funny, long-stroked italic handwriting in faded brown fountain-pen ink. There were no dates on the pages. One continuous flow. No drawings, no doodles. Only descriptions of Galen, Missouri. Galen from the east, Galen from the west, everywhere. Every store, every street, people's names and what they did for a living, whom they were related to, the names of their children. I knew so many of them.

An individual description would sometimes go on for ten or twelve pages. The line of a man's eyebrow, the color of the faint mustache shadowing a woman's lip.

I skimmed through and saw that the whole book was like that. France had done an inventory of a whole town, if that was possible. Suspiciously, I turned to the last page of the book. At the very bottom it said, "Book Two." I looked up to find Anna. She was staring out the window with her back to me.

"How many of these books are there?"

"Forty-three."

"All like this one? Lists and things?"

"Yes, in the First Series there are only lists and details."

"What do you mean, the First Series?"

"The Galen First Series. That's what he called them. He knew that the only way he could even attempt the Second Series was to begin by making up a kind of Galen encyclopedia. The town and everything in it as he perceived it. It took him over two years to finish."

I put the notebook down in my lap. The room was colder than before, so I got my shirt from under the pillow and put it on.

"But what's the Second Series, then?"

She spoke as if she hadn't heard a word I'd said. "He stopped writing The Night Races into Anna so that he could devote all of his time to that. David Louis wanted him to rewrite whole sections, but by then that book didn't mean anything to him. The only important thing that had come out of it was discovering the cats."

"Wait a minute, Anna, stop. I think that I've missed something. What about cats? Where do they plug into all of this?" I picked up the notebook and fiddled around with the silver metal spiral.

"Have you read The Night Races? The version that the people here in Galen have?"

"Yes, it's longer."

"Eighty-three pages. Do you remember what happens on the last pages of our edition?"

Embarrassed, I said no.

"The old woman, Mrs. Little, dies. But before she does, she tells her three eats to go and stay with her best friend after she's gone."

I began to remember. "That's right. And then when she does die, the cats leave her house and walk across town to her friend's house. They understand everything that's happened."

Rain was pattering on the roof. A streetlight blinked on outside, and I could see the rain slicing down through it.

"Father wrote that scene the day that Dorothy Lee died." She stopped and looked at me. "In the book, he changed Dorothy's last name to Mrs. Little. Dorothy Little." She stopped again. I waited for more, but only the rain filled the silence.

"He wrote that scene the day she died? Christ, that's a hell of a coincidence."

"No, Thomas. My father wrote her death."

My hands were freezing. The rain came across the streetlight in diagonals.

"He wrote her death, and then an hour later Dorothy's cats came over to tell us, just as he had written. That's how he discovered it. I heard them and opened the door. They stood on the bottom step of the porch and their eyes caught the hall light so that they looked like molten gold. I knew that Father hated cats, so I tried to shoo them away, but they wouldn't go. Then they started to cry and whine, and he finally came down from his workroom to find out where all of the noise was coming from. He saw them down there, crying and eyes glowing, and he understood everything in an instant. He sat down on one of the steps and started to cry, because he knew that he had killed her. He sat there, and the cats climbed up into his lap."

I sat on the edge of the chair and rubbed my arms. A wind blew around outside, whipping the trees and the rain. It died as suddenly as it came. I didn't want to understand, but I did. Marshall France had discovered that when he wrote something, it happened: it was: it came into being. Just like that.

I didn't wait for her to say anything. "That's ridiculous, Anna! Come on! That's bullshit!"

She sat down on the windowsill and put her hands underneath her sweatshirt to warm them. A picture of her bare breasts skipped blithely, incongruously across my mind. She started bumping her knees together. She continued to do it while she spoke.

"Father knew that something had changed in him after he finished The Land of Laughs. My mother told me that he was very close to having a nervous breakdown because he was so wrought up. He didn't write anything for almost two years after he finished that book. Then she died, and that almost drove him crazy. When the book was published, it became so famous that he could easily have become a big celebrity, but he didn't want that. Instead, he worked down at the supermarket for the previous owner and took his little trips to St. Louis and Lake of the Ozarks."

I wanted to tell her to cut the shit and answer my questions, but I realized that she would, sooner or later.

"I was in college by then. I wanted to be a concert pianist. I don't know if I was good enough, but I had the drive and dedication. That was right after Mother died, and sometimes I felt guilty about his being here alone in Galen, but whenever I brought the subject up with him, he would laugh and tell me not to be silly."

She pushed off from the sill and turned around to look out at the rainy night. I was trying to stop my teeth from chattering. When she spoke again, her voice, reflected off the windowpanes, sounded slightly different.

"I was seeing a boy named Peter Mexico at the time. Isn't that a funny name? He was a pianist, too, but he was great, and all of us there knew it. We could never figure out why he was still in America – he should have been in Paris studying with Boulanger or in Vienna with Weber. We were inseparable from the minute we met. We had only known each other for a week before we started living together. You've got to remember too that that was back in the early sixties, when you didn't do that sort of thing yet.

"We were totally gone on each other. We had these grand visions of living in an atelier somewhere with skylights and twin Bцsendorfer pianos in the living room." She turned from the window and came over to my chair. She sat on the wooden arm and put her hand on my shoulder. She spoke to the darkness.

"We had this terrible little apartment that we could barely afford. We both had rooms in the dormitory, but this was our secret sanctuary. We would go there after classes or at night, whenever we weren't practicing. We would sign out for the weekend and fly over there as fast as we could. And the place was so absolutely barren. We had bought two army-surplus cots and had tied the legs together to make it into a sort of double bed.

"One morning I woke up and Peter was dead."

Do you know the tone of voice of the announcer in an airport or a train station? That absolute monotone? "Train leaving on Track Seven." That was Anna's.

"The police came and did their stupid little tests and said that it was due to a heart attack.

"As soon as the funeral was over, Father came to get me and I came home to live with him. I didn't want to do anything. I didn't care about anything. I sat in my room and read heavy tomes – The Trial and Heart of Darkness, Raskolnikov…." She laughed and squeezed my shoulder. "I was so very existential in those days. I read The Stranger ten times. Poor Father. He was just recuperating from his breakdown, and I came home with my own in hand.

"But he was an angel. Father was always an angel when it came to things like that."

"What did he do?"

"What didn't he do? All of the cooking and cleaning, listening to me while I endlessly whined about how cruel and unfair life was. He even gave me the money to buy a wardrobe of black dresses. Do you know Edward Gorey's work?"

"The Unstrung Harp?"

"Yes. Well, I was like one of Gorey's dark women who stand out in the middle of a field at dusk and look off toward the horizon. I was quite a case, believe me.

"Nothing really worked to bring me out of it, so Father started The Night Races, out of desperation. It was going to be a complete departure from anything he had ever done. I was the main character, but it was going to be a mixture of truth and fantasy. He told me that when I was a little girl he would tell me stories when I woke up howling from a nightmare. He thought that maybe if he wrote a story for me now it would somehow have the same effect. He was such a wonderful man.

"That ass David Louis had been harping on him to get something new done. When he heard that Father had started this book, he wrote and told him that he wanted to come out to Galen and read what he had written.

"It just so happened that he arrived two days after Dorothy Lee died. You can imagine what it was like having him around here then!"

"Anna, these are all incredible things. You're telling me that your father was God! Or Dr. Frankenstein!"

"Do you believe me?"

"Come on, what am I supposed to say to that, huh?"

"I don't know, Thomas. I don't know what I would say if I were you. It's quite a story, isn't it?"

"Uh, yeah. Yeah. I guess you'd say that."

"Do you want more proof? Wait a minute. Petals! Petals, come in here."

When I left the France house that night, I was convinced. I had seen books, papers, journal entries. Petals even came in and talked about her "former life" as the human being Wilma Inkler.

Can you imagine that? You're sitting there in a chair and a dog is at your feet staring you right in the eye. It starts talking about being a dog in this high gravelly voice that sounds like something out of Munchkinland. And you're sitting there nodding your head like it happens to you all the time.

Dr. Dolittle in Galen. Dr. Dolittle in Cloud-Cuckooland. It was the same goddamned thing.

I taught a creative-writing course once at my school. The kids were mad for writing brutal, horrible stories about beheadings and rapes and drug overdoses. At the end of them, the only way the "authors" could get out of the blood-soaked morasses they'd created was to say, "Keith rolled over in bed and touched Diana's silky blond hair. Thank God it had all just been a dream."

Talking dogs, a modern Prometheus who used an orange fountain pen instead of clay, a sexy daughter who gave you a hard-on just brushing her teeth, who slept with you and Elmer Fudds in baseball caps, and who may or may not have given past boyfriends heart attacks. "Thomas rolled over in bed and touched the bull terrier. 'You were only having a dream, dear,' it said."

But what was I supposed to do? Go on with the research for the book? Go on writing it? I got halfway home in the car before all of it started to drive me out of my mind.

"What the hell am I going to do now?" I slammed the still cold black steering wheel with the flat of my hand and pulled over at a gas station that had a public telephone out front.

"Anna?"

"Thomas? Hi."

I wondered if Richard was there. That would have been perfect. "Anna, what am I supposed to do now? Now that I know everything. What do you want me to do?"

"Why, write the book, of course!"

"But why? You don't want anyone to know about this. Look, even if my book turns out to be good enough to publish, the whole world will freak out when they read about it. Your Galen will become like… I don't know… Like some kind of mecca for weirdos. Your father will be a joke, because no one is ever going to believe any of it. And those who do will be the scum of the earth."

"Thomas?" Her voice floated into the telephone booth from another planet. The heat from my body started to fog the windows around me, and the illuminated face of the Pepsi-Cola clock in the gas station office had stopped at ten after four.

"Yes?"

"Thomas, there is much more that I have got to tell you about this."

I put my hand on my temple. "More? What more could there be, Anna?"

"There is. The most important part. I will tell you about it tomorrow. You're very late now, so go home and we'll talk about it then. Have a good night, my friend. And, Thomas? Everything will be all right. You know the most shocking parts now. The other things are just P.S.'s. I'll see you tomorrow morning."

The fog was just creeping up the windows. A carload of kids went by just as I was hanging up. One of them held a bottle out the window and waved at me with it. A ribbon of foamy liquid came out and hung in the air like a frozen pennant before it fell and broke on the ground.

"Thomas, I know what's going on with you and Anna."

I was working on a mouthful of acorn squash that had been topped with brown sugar and burned black in the oven. Saxony and Julia Child. I pretended to chew until I remembered that you don't really chew acorn squash – you gum it once or twice and then swallow it. I put my fork down on the edge of the yellow plate, careful to make as little noise as possible.

Sax took a roll from the bread basket and tore it in half. She picked up her knife and daintily buttered one puffy piece. The silence held. You wanted to squint your eyes and stick your fingers deep into your ears. It was coming. Something loud and explosive. She picked up the other half of her roll and wiped it around her plate, very cool.

"Did you think I didn't know?"

My heart pounded.

"No, I don't know, Saxony. I'm not good at being a secret agent."

"I'm not good either, but you know, I think I knew what was going on almost as soon as it happened. Really. Do you believe that? I'm not just saying it."

"No, I know that. I can believe you. My mother always knew when my father was… up to something. I guess when you get to know a person well, then it's not hard to see when they're acting oddly."

"Exactly." She took a short sip of 7-Up. I was able to look at her for the first time since she dropped the bomb. Her face was slightly flushed, but perhaps it was just the stuffy room. I'm sure my face looked like Chief Thunderthud's.

"Do you love her?" She kept her glass in her hand. She put it against one of her cheeks and I saw the bubbles fizzing up the side.

"Oh, Sax, I don't know. Everything is so crazy now. I'm not saying that as an excuse, please understand. Sometimes I feel like I've just been born and am having menopause at the same time."

She put the glass down and pushed it away from her. "Is that why you went to her?"

"No, no, I went with her because I wanted her. I'm not blaming that on anybody but me."

"That's very nice of you." A little venom spilled over into her voice, and I was damned glad of it. Until then she had been deadly calm and objective. I listened to the last fight my parents had before my mother walked out and took me back to Connecticut. Everything there too was so cool and calm… they could just as easily have been discussing the stock market.

"What do you want me to do, Sax? Do you want me to go?"

She blinked and fingered the tablecloth. "You can do whatever you want, Thomas. I don't own you."

"No, please, come on. What do you want?"

"What do I want? Why are you asking me that kind of question now? I wanted you, Thomas. I still do want you. But does that make any difference at this point?"

"Do you want me to stay here with you?" I balled up my napkin and looked at it in my fist. Saxony loved using real linen napkins at every meal. She hand-washed and ironed them once a week. She had bought two green, two powder-blue, two brick-colored ones that she rotated constantly. I felt like a piece of shit.

I looked up and she was staring at me. Her eyes were full. A tear spilled up over the edge and moved down her pink cheek. She held her napkin to her face and looked at me again. I couldn't meet her eyes.

"I have no right to hold you to anything, Thomas." She was breathing deeply, irregularly. She began a sentence, stopped, and didn't try again. She looked at her lap and shook her head. She brought the napkin to her eyes and said, "Oh, shit!"

I unballed my napkin and tried to fold it very carefully along its original crease mark.

A woman met me at the door. She was smiling, and grabbing my hand, squeezed it tightly.

"Uh, hi, uh, how are you?"

"You don't know who I am, do you?" Her smile was a little crazy. I wondered where Anna was.

"No, I'm sorry, but I don't." I tried a winning smile and lost.

"Arf-arf. Bowwow." She grabbed my shoulders and hugged me.

"Petals?"

"Yes indeed, Petals! But a little different now, wouldn't you say?"

"My God! You mean you really…"

"Yes, Thomas, I told you that it was over. I'm back from that life and I'm me again. Me. Me. Me." She patted herself on her full chest. She couldn't stop beaming.

"I don't know… Jesus. I don't know what to say. I mean, uh, congratulations, I'm really happy for you. I just, uh…"

"I know, I know. Come on in. Anna is in the living room. She wanted me to meet you as a surprise."

I swallowed and tried to clear my throat. My voice sounded like chalk squeaking on a blackboard. "It's… it's, uh, some surprise."

Anna was sitting on the couch drinking coffee from a thick porcelain mug. She asked me if I wanted some, and when I said yes, she looked at Petals, or rather at Wilma, who danced out of the room to get another cup.

"Are you still upset about what I told you?"

"Saxony knows about us, Anna." I sat dawn in a chair facing her.

She picked up the cup again, and holding it in two hands, brought it to her mouth. She peeked at me over the rim. "How did she react?"

"I don't know. As you'd expect. Half-good, half-lousy. She started crying after a while, but it wasnt anything big and weepy. She's pretty tough, I guess."

"And how do you feel?" She sipped her coffee but kept her eyes on me. Thin smoke from the cup moved quickly out from beneath her breath.

"How do I feel? Shitty. How do you think I feel?"

"You're not married to her."

I grimaced and drummed my fingers on the arm of the chair. "Yes, I know – I'm not married to her, I've got no obligation to her, everybody around here is a free agent… I've gone through that whole spiel in my head a thousand times, but I still feel shitty."

She shrugged and licked the rim of her cup. "All right. I just wanted –"

"Look, Anna, don't worry about it, okay? It's my thing, and I've got to work it out."

"It is partly mine, Thomas."

"Yes, okay, fine, it's all of ours. But let's just sit on it and see what happens, okay? I just spent the whole night fighting, and I don't feel like talking any more about it this morning. Okay?"

"Okay."

Neither of us said anything until my coffee came. Then I remembered that the woman serving it to me had supposedly been a dog the night before. As she passed it to me, I secretly sniffed to see if she smelled like a dog.

Anna said something that I didn't catch. I stopped sniffing and looked at her. "Excuse me?"

She looked at the other woman. "Let us talk alone for a while, all right, Wilma?"

"Of course, Anna. I've got to get that casserole ready for dinner. I can't tell you how much fun it is to cook again. I never thought that I'd say that!" She left, but the click of her high heels going away made me think of dog's toenails skittering across wooden floors.

"Is it really true, Anna? About Wilma?"

"Yes. Father got mad at the Inklers years ago for mistreating their children. He couldn't stand any kind of child abuse. When he found out that they were beating their son, he changed them into dogs. Don't look so skeptical, Thomas. He created them – he could do whatever he wanted with them."

"So he turned them into bull terriers?"

"Yes, and they would stay that way until Gert Inkler died. Then Wilma would be changed back into a woman. Father didn't want them around together again as a human couple. If they stayed together as dogs, that didn't bother him. He hated dogs." She snickered and stretched her arms out luxuriantly to the sides.

"Then are all of the animals in Galen people?"

"Many of them. But Nails and Petals were the only ones who could speak. Father made them that way on purpose. Remember, dogs can go places and do things that people can't. That's one of the reasons why Nails was living at Goosey Fletcher's house when you came. Normally the two of them stayed here with me. You didn't know it, but Nails spent a lot of time spying on you two."

I remembered all of the times he had come in in the morning, or slept on the bed with us at night, been in the room when we had made love….

"All of the bull terriers in town are people. Father thought that they were the least offensive because they are so comical-looking. He said that they might as well be interesting to look at if we had to have them around."

I put my hand on my forehead. I was surprised to find it so cool. There were things that I wanted to say, but I had no way to say them then. I drank some coffee and it gave me back some voice.

"All right, if he didn't like them, then how come he didn't just erase them? Get out the old ink eradicator and finish them off? Christ, I don't know what the hell I'm saying here anymore. Why the fuck did you have a dog spying on me?" I wrenched up out of my chair and without looking at her walked over to the wmdow.

A little girl in a yellow rain slicker rode by on a wobbly and battered bicycle. I wondered what she had been – a canary? A carburetor? Or always just a kid?

"Thomas?"

The bicycle disappeared around a corner. I didn't feel like talking to her. I felt like taking a nap at the bottom of the ocean.

"Thomas, are you listening to me? Do you know why I'm letting you do this? Why I am letting you write this biography? Why I'm giving you all of this information on my father?"

I turned around and looked at her. The phone rang and brought its shrill curtain down between us. She didn't answer it. We waited five-six-seven rings for it to stop: it finally did. I wondered if it might have been Saxony.

"Over there on my desk is a black notebook. Pick it up and look at page 342."

The notebook was unlike the one I had seen the night before. It was gigantic. It must have been fourteen inches long and had five or six hundred pages in it. I leafed through from the very back, and all of the pages were filled with the France scribble. The pages under my left thumb leaped from page 363 to 302, so I had to stop and flip back.

The ink color changed throughout the book; 342 was written in a kind of violent green: "The great problem here is that whatever I have created in Galen may only be a figment of my imagination. If I die, is it then possible that they will die along with me because they have come from my imagination? An intriguing and horrible thought. I must look into this possibility and make provision for it. What an incredible waste that would be!"

I closed the book on my index finger and looked at Anna. "He was afraid that Galen would disappear after he died?"

"No, not the physical Galen – only the people and the animals that were his. He didn't create the town – only the people."

"I guess he was wrong then, huh? I mean, everybody is still here, aren't they?" Way off in the outside distance a train hooted.

"Yes, but not completely. Before Father died, he had written the history of the town up until the year three thousand –"

"Three thousand?"

"Yes, three thousand and fourteen. He was still working on it when he died. Absolutely unexpectedly. He lay down for a nap one afternoon and died. It was horrible. Everyone here was terrified that they all would disappear the moment he passed away, so when it actually did happen and things remained the same, we were jubilant."

"Anna, do you know the story by Borges, 'The Circular Ruins'?"

"No."

"A guy wants to create a man in his dreams, but not just a little dream man – a real flesh-and-blood man. The real thing."

"Does he do it?" She smoothed her hand across the top of the couch.

"Yes."

There's a point where even a sponge can't absorb any more water but reaches a saturation point. Too much stimulus, too many things happening all at once, all of them incredible, but taken together, they made my brain play five-dimensional chess.

She patted the cushion beside her. "Come on, Thomas, come here and sit down next to me."

"I don't think I want to right now."

"Thomas, I want you to know everything. I want to try to be totally honest with you. I want you to know about me, Galen, Father, everything.

"Do you know why?" She shifted completely around so that she faced me over the back of the sofa. Her damned breasts rested on that soft shelf. "A couple of years ago everything that Father had written was still happening. If someone was supposed to give birth to a boy on Friday, the ninth of January, it happened. Everything went as he had written it down in his Galen Journals. It was Utopian –"

"Utopian? Really? Well, then, what about dying? Aren't people here a little afraid of dying?"

She closed her eyes and shook her head. The dumb student was asking a dumb question again. "Not at all, because death is nothingness."

"Oh, come on, Anna. Don't get heavy and religious with me now, all right? Just answer the question."

"No, Thomas, you misunderstand me. Remember that when one of them dies, it isn't the same thing as when a normal person dies. When we go, there is a chance that there's a heaven or a hell. For the people in Galen, Father didn't create an afterlife for them, so there is no question in their minds. They just disappear. Poof!" She flung her unclenched hands up as if releasing fireflies.

"An existentialist's delight, eh?"

"Yes, and since they know that nothing comes afterward for them, they don't worry about it. Nobody is going to judge them or throw them into a fiery pit. They live and they die. As a result, most of them spend their lives trying to be as happy as possible."

"But doesn't anyone rebel? Don't at least some of them want to live longer?"

"Of course, but that isn't possible. They have to get used to it."

"And nobody complains? Nobody runs away?"

"Any Galener who tries to leave, dies."

"Uh-oh, now, look –"

She laughed and fluttered a hand at me. "No, no, I don't mean it that way. This was part of Father's security system. As long as the people live here, everything will be fine for them. But if they try to leave and they're gone for more than one week, then they die of heart attacks or cerebral hemorrhages, fulminating hepatitis…." The hand fluttered again and floated, weightless, back down to the couch. "It's silly to talk about, because no one ever tries to leave, because it hasn't been written –"

"Written! Written! So all right, so where is this great almightly oracle of his?"

"You will see it in a little while, but I want you to know the story of it first, so that when you do see it, you will understand everything better."

"Ha! Fat chance of that. I'm not understanding things now!"

Anna's story was fantastic and involved, and she made a hundred detours along the way. I ended up sitting next to her on the couch, but only after I'd spent an hour perched uncomfortably on the hot radiator beneath the windowsill.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 611