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had bubbled.
Memory within a memory:
Stealing dimes from his mother's purse. His father had gone to work, and she
lay in bed, catching an extra hour before starting the housework. Silent
Willoughby, Iowa morning. He knew at just what level of weariness her mind
floated, and like a soldier in a movie he had stealthily opened the
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.txt bedroom door just enough to slip through, had gone to his stomach on the
rug, and pull-crawled himself across the room. Her big brown handbag stood on
the dressing table bench, and smoothly he had lifted it down, dragged it
noiselessly across the floor to the foot of the bed. (If she wakes up and
looks out of the bedclothes, I'll be hidden by the foot of the bed and quiet;
she'll go back to sleep.) Seven years old. Already accomplished. He had stolen
forty cents in dimes. (She never inspects her change, never knows how much she
has.) Always "she," seldom by name, why?
He had replaced the purse and turned to start the crawl back to the door,
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downstairs, outside to his bike, to Woolworth's for things worth forty cents
he didn't really need. He had turned.
His mother was staring at him.
Breath clogged like the vacuum cleaner when it's full. Dust in his mouth, a
haze through his brain, unbelievable fear. Her face was a mixture of fury and
pity, sorrow and revenge.
Before he could move, she was out of the bed, the heels of her feet bed-red
and horny, hitting the floor, and her soft hand sliced air and caught him
across the cheek. "Why do you do it!" she moaned. He had hurt her, he knew it.
That made it all the worse. He didn't know why! And she wasn't really asking.
Then dragged by the collar to Daddy's clothes closet, poised on the lip of the
mothball-smelling cavern, and the pit of his stomach turned to ice. "No,
please, Mommy. nonono-
-"
Whipped inside, garbage hidden from view, door slammed and you'll stay in
there till I find out what your father wants me to do with you I can't control
you I don't know what to do with you, door slammed. Lock clicked as the
skeleton key--maintained in that never-needed-to-be-locked door for just this
purpose--turned turned quickly turned.
Back in there. Darkness. Oppressive, stuffed like a wad of cotton inside the
toe of a sock.
Ceiling invisible up there, pressing down, ready to flatten him. His little
fist went into his mouth, cries floated to the surface of his mind but were
never loosed; he was busy listening to someone else in the closet moaning
piteously, whelp-cries for help, to be let out. He knew it was himself, but he
could not feel himself making the muscular contractions needed for the sounds.
What fear in the Pit, in the darkness. Sounds of sightlessness, of terror at
being closed in, unable to see. Indescribable. One memory melded to a thousand
others, of basements (primarily! the most terrible of all!), of the trunk of
the Plymouth once, of eyes open yet unseeing ... memories
... of other closets, of tiny hotel rooms where he slept better because the
great neon OTE flashed on OTE and off OTE at regular intervals,
metronomically, soothing him ... memories ... of beds with women in them,
sometimes laughing, sometimes surly, sometimes uneasy, because he made love in
the light, not in the faceless darkness they had come to trust, when their
bodies and their egos were stripped naked for pleasure.
All of these memories, swirling: a paperweight globe of a pristine town that
never existed. ankle-
deep in snow, turned upside-down. shaken: thoughts swirling, memories like
snow, cold, chilling, swirling.
Back from a memory within a memory, to merely a memory:
As Arnie had lain in that bed, the floodgates of his fears had been pried
open. After years of having troweled the mud of forgetfulness over the scars,
after years of subconsciously sinking the traumas in the silt of other
experiences, maturity, pleasures, more pertinent fears ... now freed, they
thundered forth, and locked inside the bandages, he knew terror once more. He
was blind!
The darkness that was deeper than darkness engulfed him, swallowed him whole, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]