NOS4A2(13)
NINE HOURS LATER BING CAME AWAKE IN HIS BED TO THE TREMULOUS sound of violins and then a man singing in a voice as smooth and creamy as vanilla cake frosting. It was his namesake, Bing Crosby. Mr. Crosby was dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones he used to know.
Bing pulled the blankets close to his chin, listening intently. Mingled with the song was the gentle scratch of a needle on vinyl.
He slid out of his bed and crept to the door. The floor was cold under his bare feet.
Bing’s parents were dancing in the living room. His father had his back to him and was dressed in his mustard-colored fatigues. His mother rested her head on John’s shoulder, her eyes shut, her mouth open, as if she were dancing in her sleep.
The presents waited under the squat, homely, tinsel-smothered tree: three big green dented tanks of sevoflurane, decorated with crimson bows.
His parents turned in their slow circle, and as they did, Bing saw that his father was wearing a gasmask and his mother was naked. She really was asleep, too. Her feet dragged across the boards. His father clutched her around the waist, his gloved hands on the curve of her white buttocks. His mother’s bare white can was as luminous as a celestial object, as pale as the moon.
“Dad?” Bing asked.
His father kept dancing, turning away, and taking Bing’s mother with him.
“COME ON DOWN, BING!” cried a deep, booming voice, a voice so loud that the china chattered in the armoire. Bing lurched in surprise, his heart misfiring in his chest. The needle on the record jumped, came back down close to the end of the song. “COME ON DOWN! LOOKS LIKE CHRISTMAS CAME EARLY THIS YEAR, DOESN’T IT! HO, HO, HO!”
A part of Bing wanted to run back to his room and slam the door. He wanted to cover his eyes and his ears at the same time but couldn’t find the willpower to do either. He quailed at the thought of taking another step, yet his feet carried him forward, past the tree and the tanks of sevoflurane, past his father and mother, down the hall, and to the front door. It swung open even before he put his hand on the knob.
The foil flowers in his yard spun softly in the winter night. He had one foil flower for every year he had worked at NorChemPharm, gifts for the custodial staff, bestowed at the annual holiday party.
Christmasland waited beyond the yard. The Sleighcoaster rumbled and crashed, and the children in the karts screamed and lifted their hands to the frozen night. The great Ferris wheel, the Arctic Eye, revolved against a backdrop of unfamiliar stars. All the candles were lit in a Christmas tree as tall as a ten-story building and as wide across as Bing’s own house.
“MERRY GODDAMN CHRISTMAS, BING, YOU CRAZY THING!” hollered that great booming voice, and when Bing looked into the sky, he saw that the moon had a face. A single bulging bloodshot eye gaped from that starved skullface, a landscape of crater and bone. It grinned. “BING, YOU CRAZY MOTHERFUCKER, ARE YOU READY FOR THE RIDE OF YOUR LIFE?!?”
Bing sat up in bed, his heart pistoning in his chest—waking for real this time. He was so slicked with sweat that his G.I. Joe pajamas were sticking to his skin. He noticed, distantly, that his cock was so hard it hurt, poking through the front of his pants.
He gasped, as if he had not awoken but surfaced, after a long time underwater.
His room was full of the cool, pale, bone-colored light of a faceless moon.
Bing had been swallowing air for almost half a minute before he realized he could still hear “White Christmas.” The song had followed him right out of his dream. It came from a long way off and seemed to be getting fainter by the moment, and he knew if he didn’t get up to look, it would soon be gone, and tomorrow he would believe he had imagined it. He rose and walked on unsteady legs to the window, for a look into the yard.
An old car, at the end of the block, was easing away. A black Rolls-Royce with sideboards and chrome fixtures. Its taillights flashed red in the night and illuminated the license plate: NOS4A2. Then it turned the corner and disappeared, taking the joyful noise of Christmas with it.
NorChemPharm
BING KNEW THAT THE MAN FROM CHRISTMASLAND WAS COMING, well before Charlie Manx showed up to ask Bing to take a ride with him. He knew, too, that the man from Christmasland would not be a man like other men and that a job with Christmasland security would not be a job like other jobs, and on these matters he was not disappointed.
He knew because of the dreams, which seemed to him more vivid and real than anything that ever happened to him in the course of his waking life. He could never step into Christmasland in these dreams, but he could see it out his windows and out his door. He could smell the peppermint and cocoa, and he could see the candles burning in the ten-story Christmas tree, and he could hear the karts bashing and crashing on the sprawling old wooden Sleighcoaster. He could hear the music, too, and how the children screamed. If you didn’t know better, you would think they were being butchered alive.
He knew because of the dreams, but also because of the car. The next time he saw it, he was at work, out on the loading dock. Some kids had tagged the back of the building, had spray-painted a big black cock and balls, spewing black jizz on a pair of great red globes that might’ve been boobs but that looked, to Bing’s eye, like Christmas ornaments. Bing was outside in his rubber hazmat suit and industrial gasmask, with a bucket of diluted lye, to peel the paint off the wall with a wire brush.
Bing loved working with lye, loved to watch it melt the paint away. Denis Loory, the autistic kid who worked the morning shift, said you could use lye to melt a human person down to grease. Denis Loory and Bing had put a dead bat in a bucket of lye and left it one day, and the next morning there had been nothing in there but fake-looking semitransparent bones.