Duma Key(10)

Coming back into the house, shucking my clothes and climbing into the shower, I'd been able to mistake the flutters in my stomach for nausea - it seemed like a reasonable explanation. By the time I was rinsing away the soap, though, the flutters had settled into a steady low rumble like the idle of a powerful motor. The drugs had damped it down a little bit, but now it was back, worse than ever. If I'd ever been this hungry in my life, I couldn't remember when.

I flipped the grotesquely large meat-patty and tried to count to thirty. I figured a thirty-count on high heat would be at least a nod in the direction of what people mean when they say "cooking meat." If I'd thought to flip on the fan and vent the aroma, I might have made it. As it was, I didn't even get to twenty. At seventeen I snatched a paper plate, flipped the hamburger onto it, and wolfed the half-raw ground beef while I leaned against the cabinet. About halfway through I saw the red juice seeping out of the red meat and got a momentary but brilliant picture of Gandalf looking up at me while blood and shit oozed from the wrecked remains of his hindquarters, matting the fur on his broken rear legs. My stomach didn't so much as quiver, just cried impatiently for more food. I was hungry.

Hungry.

xi

That night I dreamed I was in the bedroom I had shared for so many years with Pam. She was asleep beside me and couldn't hear the croaking voice coming from somewhere below in the darkened house: "Newly wed, nearly dead, newly wed, nearly dead." It sounded like some mechanical device stuck in a groove. I shook my wife but she just turned over. Turned away from me. Dreams mostly tell the truth, don't they?

I got up and went downstairs, holding the banister to compensate for my bad leg. And there was something odd about how I was holding that familiar length of polished rail. As I approached the bottom of the staircase, I realized what it was. Fair or not, it's a rightie's world - guitars are made for righties, and school desks, and the control panels on American cars. The banister of the house I'd lived in with my family was no exception; it was on the right because, although my company had built the house from my plans, my wife and both our daughters were right-handers, and majority rules.

But still, my hand was trailing down the banister.

Of course, I thought. Because it's a dream. Just like this afternoon. You know?

Gandalf was no dream, I thought back, and the voice of the stranger in my house - closer than ever - repeated "Newly wed, nearly dead" over and over. Whoever it was, the person was in the living room. I didn't want to go in there.

No, Gandalf was no dream, I thought. Maybe it was my phantom right hand having these thoughts. The dream was killing him.

Had he died on his own, then? Was that what the voice was trying to tell me? Because I didn't think Gandalf had died on his own. I thought he had needed help.

I went into my old living room. I wasn't conscious of moving my feet; I went in the way you move in dreams, as if it's really the world moving around you, streaming backward like some extravagant trick of projection. And there, sitting in Pam's old Boston rocker, was Reba the Anger-Management Doll, now grown to the size of an actual child. Her feet, clad in black Mary Janes, swung back and forth just above the floor at the end of horrible boneless pink legs. Her shallow eyes stared at me. Her lifeless strawberry curls bounced back and forth. Her mouth was smeared with blood, and in my dream I knew it wasn't human blood or dog's blood but the stuff that had oozed out of my mostly raw hamburger - the stuff I had licked off the paper plate when the meat was gone.

The bad frog chased us! Reba cried. It has TEEF!

xii

That word - TEEF! - was still ringing in my head when I sat up with a cold puddle of October moonlight in my lap. I was trying to scream and producing only a series of silent gasps. My heart was thundering. I reached for the bedside lamp and mercifully avoided knocking it on the floor, although once it was on, I saw that I'd pushed the base halfway out over the drop. The clock-radio claimed it was 3:19 AM.

I swung my legs out of bed and reached for the phone. If you really need me, call me, Kamen had said. Any time, day or night. And if his number had been in the bedroom phone's memory, I probably would've. But as reality re-asserted itself - the cottage by Lake Phalen, not the house in Mendota Heights, no croaking voice downstairs - the urge passed.

Reba the Anger-Management Doll in the Boston rocker, and grown to the size of an actual child. Well, why not? I had been angry, although at Mrs. Fevereau rather than at poor Gandalf, and I had no idea what toothy frogs had to do with the price of beans in Boston. The real question, it seemed to me, was about Monica's dog. Had I killed Gandalf, or had he just expired?

Or maybe the question was why I'd been so hungry afterward. Maybe that was the question.

So hungry for meat.

"I took him in my arms," I whispered.

Your arm, you mean, because now one is all you've got. Your good left.

But my memory was taking him in my arms, plural. Channeling my anger

( it was RED )

away from that foolish woman with her cigarette and cell phone and somehow back into myself, in some kind of crazy closed loop... taking him in my arms... surely a hallucination, but yes, that was my memory.

Taking him in my arms.

Cradling his neck with my left elbow so I could strangle him with my right hand.

Strangle him and put him out of his misery.

I slept shirtless, so it was easy to look at my stump. I only had to turn my head. I could wiggle it, but not much more. I did that a couple of times, and then I looked up at the ceiling. My heartbeat was slowing a little.