Ludzie pragną czasami się rozstawać, żeby móc tęsknić, czekać i cieszyć się z powrotem.
What strikes Jack most deeply, however, is the perfection of the field
around him. There’s a matted circle where he fell on his knees, the dew-
heavy grass crushed to the ground. But there is no path leading to the
circle, not a mark of passage through the wet and tender grass. He might
have dropped out of the sky. That’s impossible, of course, more
Seabrook Island stuff, but—
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“I did sort of fall out of the sky, though,” Jack says in a remarkably
steady voice. “I came here from Wisconsin. I flipped here.”
Richard’s voice protests this strenuously, exploding in a flurry of
hrrumph s and ba-haaa s, but Jack hardly notices. It’s just good old Ratio-
nal Richard, doing his Rational Richard thing inside his head. Richard
had lived through stuff like this once before and come out the other side
with his mind more or less intact . . . but he’d been twelve. They’d both
been twelve that fall, and when you’re twelve, the mind and body are
more elastic.
Jack has been turning in a slow circle, seeing nothing but open fields
(the mist over them now fading to a faint haze in the day’s growing
warmth) and blue-gray woods beyond them. Now there’s something
else. To the southwest, there’s a dirt road about a mile away. Beyond it,
at the horizon or perhaps just beyond, the perfect summer sky is a little
stained with smoke.
Not woodstoves, Jack thinks, not in July, but maybe small manufactories.
And . . .
He hears a whistle—three long blasts made faint with distance. His
heart seems to grow large in his chest, and the corners of his mouth
stretch up in a kind of helpless grin.
“The Mississippi’s that way, by God,” he says, and around him the
field moths seem to dance their agreement, lace of the morning. “That’s
the Mississippi, or whatever they call it over here. And the whistle,
friends and neighbors—”
Two more blasts roll across the making summer day. They are faint
with distance, yes, but up close they would be mighty. Jack knows this.
“That’s a riverboat. A damn big one. Maybe a paddle wheeler.”
Jack begins to walk toward the road, telling himself that this is all a
dream, not believing a bit of that but using it as an acrobat uses his bal-
ance pole. After he’s gone a hundred yards or so, he turns and looks
back. A dark line cuts through the timothy, beginning at the place
where he landed and cutting straight to where he is. It is the mark of his
passage. The only mark of it. Far to the left (in fact almost behind him
now) are the barn and the windmill. That’s my house and garage, Jack
thinks. At least that’s what they are in the world of Chevrolets, Mideast war-
fare, and the Oprah Winfrey show.
He walks on, and has almost reached the road when he realizes there
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is more than smoke in the southwest. There is a kind of vibration, as
well. It beats into his head like the start of a migraine headache. And it’s
strangely variable. If he stands with his face pointed dead south, that un-
pleasant pulse is less. Turn east and it’s gone. North and it’s almost gone.
Then, as he continues to turn, it comes all the way back to full. Worse
than ever now that he’s noticed it, the way the buzz of a fly or the knock
of a radiator in a hotel room is worse after you really start to notice it.
Jack turns another slow, full circle. South, and the vibration sinks.
East, it’s gone. North, it’s starting to come back. West, it’s coming on
strong. Southwest and he’s locked in like the seek button on a car radio.
Pow, pow, pow. A black and nasty vibration like a headache, a smell like
ancient smoke . . .
“No, no, no, not smoke,” Jack says. He’s standing almost up to
his chest in summer grass, pants soaked, white moths flittering around
his head like a half-assed halo, eyes wide, cheeks once more pale. In this
moment he looks twelve again. It is eerie how he has rejoined his
younger (and perhaps better) self. “Not smoke, that smells like . . .”
He suddenly makes that urking sound again. Because the smell—not
in his nose but in the center of his head—is rotted baloney. The smell of
Irma Freneau’s half-rotted, severed foot.
“I’m smelling him,” Jack whispers, knowing it’s not a smell he
means. He can make that pulse whatever he wants . . . including, he re-
alizes, gone. “I’m smelling the Fisherman. Either him or . . . I do n’t
know.”
He starts walking, and a hundred yards later he stops again. The pulse
in his head is indeed gone. It has faded out the way radio stations do
when the day warms and the temperature thickens. It’s a relief.
Jack has almost reached the road, which no doubt leads one way to
some version of Arden and the other way to versions of Centralia and
French Landing, when he hears an irregular drumming sound. He feels
it as well, running up his legs like a Gene Krupa backbeat.
He turns to the left, then shouts in mingled surprise and delight.
Three enormous brown creatures with long, lolloping ears go leaping
past Jack’s position, rising above the grass, sinking back into it, then ris-
ing above it again. They look like rabbits crossed with kangaroos. Their
protruding black eyes stare with comic terror. Across the road they go,
their flat feet (white-furred instead of brown) slapping up dust.
“Christ!” Jack says, half-laughing and half-sobbing. He whacks him-
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self in the center of his forehead with the heel of his palm. “What was
that, Richie-boy? Got any comments on that?”
Richie, of course does. He tells Jack that Jack has just suffered an ex-
tremely vivid . . . ba-haaa! . . . hallucination.