NOS4A2(79)

He wondered what hold the man had on her to have induced her to have sex with him. Perhaps they had come to financial terms. Bing had looked the woman over at length and would not be surprised. All those tattoos. A woman could get any tattoo she liked, but they all said the same thing. They were a sign reading AVAILABLE FOR RENT.

The breeze caught the papers the boy had been looking at, and they drifted under the fat man’s car. When Carmody set his child back on the ground, the boy looked around for them and spotted them but didn’t get down on all fours to retrieve them. Those papers worried Bing. They meant something. They were important.

A scarred, scrawny, junkie-looking lady had brought those papers and tried to force them on McQueen. Bing had watched the whole thing from behind the curtain in the front room. Victoria McQueen didn’t like the junkie lady. She yelled at her and made ugly faces. She threw the papers back at her. Their voices had carried, not well but well enough for Bing to hear one of them say “Manx.” Bing had wanted to wake Mr. Manx up, but you couldn’t wake him up when he was like he was.

Because he isn’t really asleep, Bing thought, then shoved the unhappy notion aside.

He had been in the bedroom once to look at Mr. Manx, lying on top of the sheets wearing nothing but boxer shorts. A great Y was cut into his chest and held shut with coarse black thread. It was partially healed but seeped pus and pink blood, was a glistening canyon in his flesh. Bing had stood listening for minutes but did not hear him breathe once. Mr. Manx’s mouth lolled open, exuding the slightly cloying, slightly chemical odor of formaldehyde. His eyes were open, too, dull, empty, staring at the ceiling. Bing had crept close to touch the old man’s hand, and it had been cold and stiff, as cold and stiff as that of any corpse, and Bing had been gripped with the sickening certainty that Mr. Manx was gone, but then Manx’s eyes had moved, just slightly, turning to fix on Bing, to stare at him without recognition, and Bing had retreated.

Now that the crisis was past, Bing let his shaky, weak legs carry him back to the living room. He stripped off his gasmask and sat down with Mr. and Mrs. de Zoet to watch TV with them, needed some time to recover himself. He held old Mrs. de Zoet’s hand.

He watched game shows and now and then checked the street, keeping an eye on the McQueen place. A little before seven, he heard voices and a door banged shut. He returned to the front door and watched from the spyhole. The sky was a pale shade of nectarine, and the boy and his grotesquely fat father were wandering across the yard to the rent-a-car.

“We’re at the hotel if you need us,” Carmody called to Victoria McQueen, who stood on the steps of the house.

Bing didn’t like the idea of the boy leaving with the father. The boy and the woman belonged together. Manx wanted them both—and so did Bing. The boy was for Manx, but the woman was Bing’s treat, someone he could have some fun with in the House of Sleep. Just looking at her thin, bare legs made his mouth dry. One last bit of fun in the House of Sleep, and then it was on to Christmasland with Mr. Manx, on to Christmasland forever and ever.

But no, there was no reason to get in a sweat. Bing had looked at all the mail in Victoria McQueen’s mailbox and had found a bill for a day camp in New Hampshire. The kid was registered there through August. It was true, Bing was probably a few clowns short of the full circus, but he didn’t think anyone was going to sign their kid up for a camp that cost eight hundred dollars a week and then just decide to blow it off. Tomorrow was the Fourth of July. The father was probably just here to see the child for the holiday.

The father and the son drove away, leaving behind the unholy ghost of Victoria McQueen. The papers under the car—the ones that Bing wanted so badly to see—were grabbed by the Buick’s slipstream and tumbled after it.

Victoria McQueen was leaving, too. She went back into the house but left the door open, and three minutes later she came out with her car keys in one hand and sacks for the grocery store in the other.

Bing watched her until she was gone and then watched the street some more and finally let himself out. The sun had gone down, leaving an irradiated orange haze on the horizon. A few stars burned holes through the darkness above.

“There was a Gasmask Man, and he had a little gun,” Bing sang to himself softly, what he did when he was nervous. “And his bullets were made of lead, lead, lead. He went to the brook, and shot Vic McQueen, right through the middle of her head, head, head.”

He walked up and down along the curb but could find only a single sheet of paper, crumpled and stained.

Whatever he was expecting, it wasn’t a photocopy of a news story about the man from Kentucky who had arrived at Bing’s house two months ago in the Wraith, two days ahead of Mr. Manx himself. Mr. Manx had turned up, pale, starved-looking, bright-eyed, and bloody in a Trans Am with zebra-print upholstery and a big silver hammer propped next to him on the passenger seat. By then Bing already had the plates back on the Wraith and NOS4A2 was ready to roll.

The Kentucky man, Nathan Demeter, had spent quite a while in the little basement room in the House of Sleep before going on his way. Bing preferred girls, but Nathan Demeter knew just what to do with his mouth, and by the time Bing was done with him, they’d had many long, meaningful, manly talks of love.

It appalled Bing to see Nathan Demeter again, in a photo accompanying an article titled “Boeing Engineer Vanishes.” It made his tummy hurt. He could not for the life of him imagine why the junkie woman had come to Victoria McQueen with such a thing.