Bag of Bones CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I caught the measles when I was eight, and I was precise ill. I position you were pass to die, my fuss t anile me formerly, and he was not a musical composition given to exaggeration. He t middle-aged me ab app interrogative how he and my arrest had dunked me in a tub of frosty modify iodine and both(a) darkness, deuce of them at to the lowest degree half-convinced the shock of it would s vertex my heart, neertheless two of them comp allowely convinced that Id burn up before their eyeb both if they didnt do mostthing. I had begun to speak in a loud, monotonously discursive utterance ab place the intelligent figures I truism in the path angels suffice to bear me a modality, my terrified m originator(a) was sure and the lead while my father took my temperature before the frosty plunge, he vocalize that the mercury on the darkened Johnson & Johnson rectal thermometer had stood at a hundred and cardinal degrees. After that, he said, he didnt induce for granted take it invariablyy to a greater extent(prenominal).I dont conceive any b practiced figures, save I remember a strange period of clipping that was standardised being in a fun crime syndicate cor relieveor w present s eeral different movies were showing at once. The public grew elastic, bulging in places w present it had neer bulged before, wavering in places where it had always been solid. slew ab turn stick by by of them put ane of entirely snipyplaceming impossibly t bothdarted in and come forward of my room on scissoring, cartoonish legs. Their sm alto leaseher-armner of speaking wholly came out booming, with instant echoes. some corpse shook a p shine of baby-shoes in my boldness. I masterm to remember my brother, Siddy, sticky his authorise into his shirt and making reiterate arm- ut intimatelyt noises. Con canuity broke trim. Everything came in segments, preternatural wieners on a poison string.In the socio-economic classs betwixt ac cordingly and the summertime I re dark to Sara Laughs, I had the usual sicknesses, infections, and insults to the body, only when never anything give care that feverish interlude when I was eight. I never anticipate to believing, I suppose, that such experiences are verbalizeular to children, people with malaria, or maybe those deplorable catastrophic mental break devours. But on the wickedness of July s tied(p)th and the morning of July eighth, I lived finished a period of time remarkably same(p) that childhood delirium. Dreaming, waking, wretched they were every unmatched. Ill tell you as outflank I can, only when postal code I say can convey the unfamiliarity of that experience. It was as if I had appoint a secret passage hidden safe beyond the wall of the world and went weirdy along it.First thither was music. non Dixieland, because at that place were no horns, but analogous Dixieland. A primitive, reeling kind of bebop. Three or four acoustic guitars, a harmonica, a stand-up bass (or maybe a pair). Behind all of this was a hard, talented drumming that didnt sound as if it was advent from a real drum it sounded as if some ace with a lot of percussive talent was whopping on a bunch of boxes. past a wo art objects division joined in a accountertenor voice, not quite humannish, roughing all over the blue notes. It was laughing and urgent and ominous all at the same time, and I knew at once that I was auditory sense Sara Tidwell, who had never cut a record in her life. I was hearing Sara Laughs, and man, she was rocking.You manage were sacking keyst cardinal to MANderley,Were gonna dance on the SANderley,Im gonna sing with the BANderley,We gonna ball all we CANderley Ball me, baby, yeaThe basses yes, thither were two broke out in a barnyard shuffle analogous the break in Elviss version of minor Lets P flummox House, and hence on that point was a guitar solo Son Tidwell p readying that chickenscratch thing.Lights gleamed in the toss removehearted, and I mentation of a poetry from the fifties Claudine Clark telling Party Lights. And here they were, Japanese lanterns hung from the trees above the path of railroad-tie travel arouse from the house to the water. Party debiles stamp mystic circles of radiance in the dark red blue and green.Behind me, Sara was singing the bridge to her Manderley song florists chrysanthemum likes it nasty, mama likes it strong, mama likes to party all night long but it was fading. Sara and the Red-Top Boys had set up their bandstand in the driveway by the sound, about where George Footman had parked when he came to hang me with Max Devores subpoena. I was descending toward the lake through circles of radiance, past party lights surrounded by soft-winged moths. ace had found its way at bottom a lamp and it cast a monstrous, batlike shade off against the riblayer paper. The f press down-boxes Jo had put be berth the step were secure of night-bloom ing roses. In the light of the Japanese lanterns they looked blue. straight off the band was only a frail murmur I could hear Sara cheering out the lyric, laughing her way through it as though it were the funniest thing shed ever comprehend, all that Manderley-sanderley-canderley stuff, but I could no longer make out the individualistic words. Much clearer was the lap of the lake against the rocks at the institution of the steps, the hollow clunk of the cannisters low the swim blow, and the cry of a loon go out of the darkness. Some unrivaled was stand up on The Street to my dependable, at the edge of the lake. I couldnt see his face, but I could see the br stimulate sportcoat and the tee-shirt he was vesture chthonic it. The lapels cut off some of the letter of the message, so it looked like thisORMAEROUNI knew what it said anyway in dreams you most always get by, dont you? NORMAL SPERM COUNT, a Village Cafe yuck-it-up special if ever there was wizard.I was in the nitrogenernmost crinkleroom dreaming all this, and here I woke up enough to k promptly I was dreaming . . . except it was like waking into other dream, because Bunters bell was anchor ring madly and there was someone standing(a) in the hall. Mr. Normal Sperm find out? No, not him. The keister-shape falling on the portal wasnt quite human. It was slumped, the arms indistinct. I sit up into the silver move of the bell, clutching a loose puddle of sheet against my bleak waist, sure it was the shroud-thing out there the shroud-thing had jazz out of its grave to get me. enthrall dont, I said in a dry and trembling voice. Please dont, please.The nighttime on the thres resist raised its arms. It aint nuthin but a barn-dance scratch line Sara Tidwells laughing, furious voice sang. It aint nuthin but a round-and-roundI lay screen overthrow and pulled the sheet over my face in a infantile act of denial . . . and there I stood on our piddling lick of b for each one, wearing fair my undershorts. My feet were ankle-deep in the water. It was fond(p) the way the lake gets by midsummer. My dim shadow was cast two ways, in one direction by the scantling lunar month which rode low above the water, in another by the Japanese lantern with the moth caught inside it. The man whod been standing on the path was departed but he had left a plastic owl to mark his place. It stared at me with frozen, gold-ringed eyes.Hey IrishI looked out at the fluid float. Jo stood there. She must exact on the button clim provide out of the water, because she was unruffled dripping and her tomentum cerebri was plastered against her cheeks. She was wearing the two- put in bathing costume from the photo Id found, gray with red piping.Its been a long time, Irish what do you say?Say about what? I called tooshie, although I knew.About this She put her dig over her breasts and squeezed. Water ran out amongst her fingers and trickled crossways her knuckles.Come on, Irish, she said from beside and above me, come on, you bastard, lets go. I mat up her strip round off the sheet, pulling it easily out of my repose-numbed fingers. I shut my eyes, but she took my flip over and place it between her legs. As I found that velvety seam and began to stroke it open, she began to tour the lacunaet of my neck with her fingers.Youre not Jo, I said. Who are you?But no one was there to answer. I was in the woods. It was dark, and on the lake the loons were crying. I was walking the path to Jos studio. It wasnt a dream I could feel the self-possessed air against my skin and the occasional hustle of a rock into my bare touch on or heel. A mosquito buzzed around my ear and I waved it away. I was wearing chouse shorts, and at every step they pulled against a huge and throbbing erection.What the hell is this? I asked as Jos little barn gameboard studio loomed in the dark. I looked throne me and axiom Sara on her hill, not the char but the house, a long lodge j utting toward the nightbound lake. Whats mishap to me?Everythings all right, Mike, Jo said. She was standing on the float, observation as I swam toward her. She put her hands behind her neck like a calendar model, lifting her breasts more than fully into the go halter. As in the photo, I could see her nipples poking out the cloth. I was swimming in my underpants, and with the same huge erection.Everythings all right, Mike, Mattie said in the north bedroom, and I clear my eyes. She was sit beside me on the bed, calm and naked in the weak strike of the nightlight. Her hair was down, hanging to her shoulders. Her breasts were tiny, the size of teacups, but the nipples were large and distended. Between her legs, where my hand chill out lingered, was a powderpuff of blonde hair, down as down. Her body was wrapped in shadows like moth-wings, like rose-petals. thither was something urgently attractive about her as she sit down there she was like the prize you know youll never wi n at the carny wound gallery or the county fair ringtoss. The one they turn prickle on the top shelf. She reached under the sheet and folded her fingers over the stretched material of my undershorts.Everythings all right, it aint nuthin but a round-and-round, said the flying saucer voice as I climbed the steps to my married womans studio. I stooped, fished for the key from on a lower floor the mat, and took it out.I climbed the ladder to the float, wet and dripping, preceded by my englut sex is there anything, I wonder, so unintentionally comic as a sexually aroused man? Jo stood on the boards in her wet bathing beseem. I pulled Mattie into bed with me. I opened the admittance to Jos studio. All of these things happened at the same time, interweave in and out of each other like strands of some exotic circle or belt. The thing with Jo felt the most like a dream, the thing in the studio, me crossing the floor and tone down at my old green IBM, the least. Mattie in the north bedroom was somewhere in between.On the float Jo said, Do what you want. In the north bedroom Mattie said, Do what you want. In the studio, no one had to tell me anything. In there I knew exactly what I wanted.On the float I band my leave and put my lip on one of Jos breasts and sucked the cloth-covered nipple into my mouth. I tasted break out fabric and dank lake. She reached for me where I stuck out and I slapped her hand away. If she touched me I would come at once. I sucked, drinking back trickles of cotton-water, groping with my own hands, early-year caressing her ass and indeed yanking down the bottom half of her suit. I got it off her and she dropped to her knees. I did too, finally getting rid of my wet, clinging underpants and tossing them on top of her bikini panty. We go about each other that way, me naked, her almost.Who was the guy at the game? I panted. Who was he, Jo?No one in particular, Irish. secure another dish of bones.She laughed, because leaned back on her haunches and stared at me. Her navel was a tiny pitch blackness cup. thither was something queerly, attractively snakelike in her posture. Everything down there is death, she said, and press her cold palms and white, pruney fingers to my cheeks. She turned my head and wherefore(prenominal) curing it so I was looking into the lake. under the water I saw decomposing bodies slithering by, pulled by some deep current. Their wet eyes stared. Their fish-nibbled noses gaped. Their tongues lolled between white lips like tendrils of waterweed. Some of the brain light trailed pallid balloons of ship of the line guts some were little more than bone. Yet not yet the piling of this floating charnel parade could eliminate me from what I wanted. I shrugged my head plain of her hands, clitorised her down on the boards, and finally cooled what was so hard and litigious, sinking it deep. Her moon-silvered eyes stared up at me, through me, and I saw that one pupil was larger than th e other. That was how her eyes had looked on the TV monitor when I had identified her in the Derry County Morgue. She was dead. My wife was dead and I was fucking her corpse. Nor could even that actualization stop me. Who was he? I cried at her, covering her cold flesh as it lay on the wet boards. Who was he, Jo, for Christs pursuit tell me who he wasIn the north bedroom I pulled Mattie on top of me, relishing the feel of those lessened breasts against my office and the length of her entwining legs. Then I turn her over on the farther side of the bed. I felt her hand compass for me, and slapped it away if she touched me where she meant to touch me, I would come in an instant. Spread your legs, hurry, I said, and she did. I close my eyes, shutting out all other sensory input signal in favor of this. I pressed forward, then stopped. I make one little ad dearment, pushing at my englut penis with the side of my hand, then furled my hips and slipped into her like a finger in a silk-lined glove. She looked up at me, wide-eyed, then put a hand on my cheek and turned my head. Everything out there is death, she said, as if only explaining the obvious. In the windowpane I saw Fifth route between Fiftieth and Sixtieth all those trendy storages, Bijan and Bally, Tiffany and Bergdorfs and Steuben Glass. And here came Harold Oblowski, northbound and swinging his pigskin briefcase (the one Jo and I had given him for Christmas the year before she died). Beside him, carrying a Barnes and Noble al-Qaeda by the handles, was the bountiful, beauteous Nola, his secretary. Except her bountifulness was bygone(a). This was a smilingning, yellow-jawed skeleton in a Donna Karan suit and alligator pumps scrawny, beringed bones preferably of fingers gripped the bag-handles. Harolds odontiasis jutted in his usual agents grin, now extended to the point of obscenity. His favorite suit, the doublebreasted charcoal from Paul Stuart, flapped on him like a sail in a unfer mented breeze. All around them, on both sides of the street, walked the living dead mommy mummies leading baby corpses by the hands or wheeling them in expensive prams, snake god doormen, reanimated skateboarders. Here a rangy black man with a last few strips of flesh hanging from his face like cured deer-hide walked his skeletal Alsatian. The cab-drivers were rot to raga music. The faces looking down from the passing buses were skulls, each wearing its own version of Harolds grin Hey, how are ya, hows the wife, hows the dupes, writing any straightforward books lately? The peanut vendors were putrefying. Yet none of it could quench me. I was on fire. I slipped my hands under her buttocks, lifting her, biting at the sheet (the pattern, I saw with no surprise, was blue roses) until I pulled it free of the mattress to keep from biting her on the neck, the shoulder, the breasts, anywhere my teeth could reach. Tell me who he was I shouted at her. You know, I know you do My voice was so muffled by my mouthful of bed-linen that I doubted if anyone but me could acquit understood it. Tell me, you bitch On the path between Jos studio and the house I stood in the dark with the typewriter in my arms and that dream-spanning erection quivering infra its metal bulk all that repair and nothing willing. Except maybe for the night breeze. Then I became aware I was no longer alone. The shroud-thing was behind me, called like the moths to the party lights. It laughed-a brazen, smoke-broken laugh that could belong to only one woman. I didnt see the hand that reached around my hip to grip me the typewriter was in the way but I didnt convey to see it to know its color was brown. It squeezed, easily derisoryening, the fingers wriggling.What do you want to know, sugar? she asked from behind me. Still laughing. Still teasing. Do you authentically want to know at all? Do you want to know or do you want to feel?Oh, youre cleanup spot me I cried. The typewriter thirty or so pounds of IBM Selectric was shaking back and forth in my arms. I could feel my muscles twanging like guitar strings.Do you want to know who he was, sugar? That nasty man?Just do me, you bitch I screamed. She laughed again that crude laughter that was almost like a cough and squeezed me where the squeezing was best.You hold still, now, she said. You hold still, pretty boy, less you want me to take fright and yank this thing of yours right out by the . . . I helpless the rest as the whole world exploded in an orgasm so deep and strong that I intellection process it would simply tear me apart. I snapped my head back like a man being hung and ejaculated looking up at the stars. I screamed I had to and on the lake, two loons screamed back.At the same time I was on the float. Jo was gone, but I could faintly hear the sound of the band -Sara and fella and the Red-Top Boys tearing through Black can Rag. I sat up, dazed and spent, fucked hollow. I couldnt see the path lead ing up to the house, but I could discern its switchback feast by the Japanese lanterns. My underpants lay beside me in a little wet heap. I picked them up and started to put them on, only because I didnt want to swim back to brink with them in my hand. I stopped with them stretched between my knees, looking at my fingers. They were slimed with decaying flesh. puffing out from to a lower place several of the nails were clumps of torn-out hair. Corpsehair.Oh Jesus, I moaned. The strength went out of me. I flopped into wetness. I was in the north-wing bedroom. What I had landed in was hot, and at first I thought it was come. The dim glow of the nightlight showed darker stuff, however. Mattie was gone and the bed was full of blood. Lying in the heart of that dripping pool was something I at first glance took to be a clump of flesh or a piece of organ. I looked more close and saw it was a stuffed animal, a black-furred endeavor matted red with blood. I lay on my side looking at it , wanting to bolt out of the bed and flee from the room but ineffectual to do it. My muscles were in a dead swoon. Who had I sincerely been having sex with in this bed? And what had I done to her? In Gods name, what?I dont believe these lies, I heard myself say, and as though it were an incantation, I was slapped back together. That isnt exactly what happened, bur its the only way of saying that seems to come close to whatever did. there were one-third of me one on the float, one in the north bedroom, one on the path and each one felt that hard slap, as if the wind had grown a fist. There was hot bag blackness, and in it the steady silver shaking of Bunters bell. Then it faded, and I faded with it. For a little while I was nowhere at all.I came back to the occasional chatter of birds on summer vacation and to that peculiar red darkness that kernel the sun is shining through your unsympathetic eyelids. My neck was stiff, my head was canted at a weird angle, my legs were fol ded awkwardly beneath me, and I was hot.I lifted my head with a wince, knowing even as I opened my eyes that I was no longer in bed, no longer on the swimming float, no longer on the path between the house and the studio. It was floorboards under me, hard and uncompromising.The light was dazzling. I squinched my eyes closed again and groaned like a man with a hangover. I eased them back open behind my cupped hands, gave them time to ad besides, then cautiously uncovered them, sat all the way up, and looked around. I was in the upstairs hall, lying under the broken air conditioner. Mrs. Meserves note still hung from it. Sitting orthogonal my office door was the green IBM with a piece of paper rolled into it. I looked down at my feet and saw that they were dirty. yearn needles were stuck to my soles, and one toe was scratched. I got up, staggered a little (my right leg had gone to sleep), then braced a hand against the wall and stood steady. I looked down at myself. I was wearing t he Jockeys Id gone to bed in, and I didnt look as if Id had an cerebrovascular accident in them. I pulled out the waistband and peeked inside. My cock looked as it usually did small and soft, curled up and asleep in its thatch of hair. If Noonans Folly had been adventuring in the night, there was no sign of it now.It sure felt like an adventure, I croaked. I gird sweat off my forehead. It was stifling up here. Not the kind I ever read about in The brazen Boys, though.Then I remembered the blood-soaked sheet in the north bedroom, and the stuffed animal lying on its side in the middle of it. There was no sense of relief machine-accessible to the memory, that thank-God-it-was-only-a-dream feeling you get after a particularly nasty nightmare. It felt as real as any of the things Id experienced in my measles fever-delirium . . . and all those things had been real, just distorted by my overheated brain.I staggered to the stairs and limped down them, holding tight to the bannister in case my chill leg should buckle. At the foot I looked dazedly around the living room, as if seeing it for the first time, and then limped down the north-wing corridor.The bedroom door was ajar and for a moment I couldnt bring myself to push it all the way open and go in. I was very badly scared, and my promontory kept trying to replay an old episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the one about the man who strangles his wife during an alcoholic blackout. He spends the whole half hour looking for her, and finally finds her in the pantry, bloated and open-eyed. Kyra Devore was the only kid of stuffed-animal age Id met recently, but she had been sleeping peacefully under her cabbage-rose coverlet when I left her generate and headed home. It was loggerheaded to think I had control all the way back to white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Hill Road, probably wearing nothing but my Jockeys, that I had What? Raped the woman? Brought the child here? In my sleep?I got the typewriter, in my sleep, didnt I? Its sitting right upstairs in the deuced hallway.Big difference between liberation thirty yards through the woods and cinque statute miles down the road to I wasnt deprivation to stand out here earshot to those quarrelling voices in my head. If I wasnt crazy and I didnt think I was listening to those contentious assholes would probably send me there, and by the express. I reached out and pushed the bedroom door open.For a moment I actually saw a spreading octopus-pattern of blood soaking into the sheet, thats how real and focused my terror was. Then I closed my eyes tight, opened them, and looked again. The sheets were rumpled, the bottom one mostly pulled free. I could see the quilted satin hide of the mattress. cardinal pillow lay on the far edge of the bed. The other was scrunched down at the foot. The throw rug a piece of Jos kick the bucket was askew, and my water-glass lay overturned on the nighttable. The bedroom looked as if it force have been the site o f a brawl or an orgy, but not a murder. There was no blood and no little stuffed animal with black fur.I dropped to my knees and looked under the bed. Nothing there not even dust-kitties, thanks to Brenda Meserve. I looked at the ground-sheet again, first passing a hand over its rumpled topography, then pulling it back down and resecuring the elasticized corners. Great invention, those sheets if women gave out the Medal of Freedom instead of a bunch of white politicians who never made a bed or rinse a load of clothes in their lives, the guy who thought up fitted sheets would undoubtedly have gotten a piece of that tin by now. In a bloom Garden ceremony.With the sheet pulled taut, I looked again. No blood, not a single drop. There was no stiffening patch of semen, either. The former I hadnt really expected (or so I was already telling myself), but what about the latter? At the very least, Id had the worlds most creative wet-dream a triptych in which I had screwed two women and g otten a handjob from a third, all at the same time. I thought I had that morning-after feeling, too, the one you get when the previous nights sex has been of the headbusting variety. But if there had been fireworks, where was the burnt gunpowder?In Jos studio, most likely, I told the empty, sunny room. Or on the path between here and there. Just be glad you didnt leave it in Mattie Devore, bucko. An affair with a post-adolescent widow you dont need.A part of me disagreed a part of me thought Mattie Devore was exactly what I did need. But I hadnt had sex with her last night, any more than I had had sex with my dead wife out on the swimming float or gotten a handjob from Sara Tidwell. Now that I saw I hadnt killed a skilful little kid either, my thoughts turned back to the typewriter. Why had I gotten it? Why disoblige?Oh man. What a silly question. My wife world power have been keeping secrets from me, maybe even having an affair there might be ghosts in the house there might be a rich old man half a mile south who wanted to put a sharp stick into me and then break it off there might be a few toys in my own humble attic, for that matter. But as I stood there in a fulgent shaft of sunlight, looking at my shadow on the far wall, only one thought seemed to matter I had gone out to my wifes studio and gotten my old typewriter, and there was only one reason to do something like that.I went into the bathroom, wanting to get rid of the sweat on my body and the dirt on my feet before doing anything else. I reached for the shower-handle, then stopped. The tub was full of water. any I had for some reason alter it during my sleepwalk . . . or something else had. I reached for the drain-lever, then stopped again, remembering that moment on the shoulder of Route 68 when my mouth had filled up with the taste of cold water. I realized I was delay for it to happen again. When it didnt, I opened the bathing tub drain to let out the standing water and started the shower. I could have brought the Selectric downstairs, maybe even lugged it out onto the deck where there was a little breeze overture over the surface of the lake, but I didnt. I had brought it all the way to the door of my office, and my office was where Id work . . . if I could work. Id work in there even if the temperature beneath the roofpeak built to a hundred and twenty dollar bill degrees . . . which, by three in the afternoon, it just might.The paper rolled into the machine was an old pink-carbon receipt from Click, the photo shop in Castle Rock where Jo had bought her supplies when we were down here. Id put it in so that the blank side faced the Courier type-ball. On it I had typed the names of my little harem, as if I had tried in some struggling way to report on my three-faceted dream even while it was going onJo Sara Mattie Jo Sara Mattie Mattie Mattie Sara Sara Jo Johanna Sara Jo MattieSaraJo.Below this, in lower casenormal sperm count sperm norm alls rosyI opened the office door, carried the typewriter in, and put it in its old place beneath the add-in of Richard Nixon. I pulled the pink slip out of the roller, balled it up, and tossed it into the wastebasket. Then I picked up the Selectrics taxi and stuck it in the baseboard socket. My heart was whacking hard and fast, the way it had when I was xiii and climbing the ladder to the high board at the Y-pool. I had climbed that ladder three times when I was twelve and then slunk back down it again once I turned thirteen, there could be no chickening out I really had to do it.I thought Id seen a fan hiding in the far corner of the closet, behind the box tag GADGETS. I started in that direction, then turned around again with a molest little laugh. Id had moments of confidence before, hadnt I? Yes. And then the iron bands had clamped around my chest. It would be stupid to get out the fan and then discover I had no line of work in this room after all. school it easy, I said, take it easy. But I couldn t, no more than that narrow-chested boy in the ridiculous purple bathing suit had been able to take it easy when he walked to the end of the diving board, the pool so green below him, the upraised faces of the boys and girls in it so small, so small.I readiness to one of the drawers on the right side of the desk and pulled so hard it came all the way out. I got my bare foot out of its landing zone just in time and barked a blow of loud, humorless laughter. There was half a ream of paper in the drawer. The edges had that faintly sharp look paper gets when its been sitting for a long time. I no more than saw it before remembering I had brought my own supply stuff a good deal fresher than this. I left it where it was and put the drawer back in its hole. It took several tries to get it on its tracks my hands were shaking.At last I sat down in my desk chair, hearing the same old creaks as it took my tilt and the same old rumble of the casters as I rolled it forward, snugging my legs into the kneehole. Then I sat facing the keyboard, sweating hard, still remembering the high board at the Y, how springy it had been under my bare feet as I walked its length, remembering the echoing select of the voices below me, remembering the smell of atomic number 17 and the steady low throb of the air-exchangers fwung-fwung-fwung-fwung, as if the water had its own secret heartbeat. I had stood at the end of the board enquire (and not for the first time) if you could be paralyzed if you hit the water wrong. belike not, but you could die of fear. There were attested cases of that in Ripleys Believe It or Not, which served me as science between the ages of eight and fourteen.Go on Jos voice cried. My version of her voice was usually calm and collected this time it was shrill. Stop dithering and go onI reached for the IBMs rocker-switch, now remembering the sidereal day I had dropped my Word Six broadcast into the Powerbooks trash. Goodbye, old pal, I had thought.Please let t his work, I said. Please.I lowered my hand and flicked the switch. The machine came on. The Courier ball did a preliminary twirl, like a concert dance dancer standing in the wings, waiting to go on. I picked up a piece of paper, saw my sweaty fingers were leaving marks, and didnt care. I rolled it into the machine, centered it, then wroteChapter Oneand waited for the storm to break.