Duma Key(81)

"Did you cheat?"

Wireman smiled. "A fair question. If you mean did I peek, the answer is no. If you mean did I memorize the geography of the fruit in the bowl..." He shrugged. " Qui n sabe? In any case, I picked an apple: in Adam's fall, sinned we all. I didn't have to bite it or smell it; I could tell what it was by the skin. So without opening my eyes or giving myself any chance to think I picked up the gun and put it to my temple." He mimed this with the hand I no longer had, cocking the thumb and placing the first finger against the small circular scar that his long, graying hair usually hid. "My last thought was, 'At least I won't have to listen to that refrigerator anymore, or eat one more gourmet shepherd's pie out of it.' I don't remember any bang. Nevertheless, the whole world went white, and that was the end of Wireman's other life. Now... would you like the hallucinogenic shit?"

"Yes, please."

"You want to see if it matches yours, don't you?"

"Yes." And a question occurred to me. One of some import, maybe. "Wireman, did you have any of these telepathic bursts... weird receptions... whatever you want to call them... before you came to Duma Key?" I was thinking of Monica Goldstein's dog, Gandalf, and how I seemed to have choked him with an arm I no longer had.

"Yes, two or three," he said. "I may tell you about them in time, Edgar, but I don't want to stick Jack with Miss Eastlake for too long. All other considerations aside, she's apt to be worried about me. She's a dear thing."

I could have said that Jack also sort of a dear thing would probably be worried, too, but instead I only told him to go on.

"You often have a redness about you, muchacho, " Wireman said. "I don't think it's an aura, exactly, and it's not exactly a thought... except when it is. I've gotten it from you as a word as well as a color on three or four occasions. And yes, once when I was off Duma Key. When we were at the Scoto."

"When I was stuck for a word."

"Were you? I don't remember."

"Neither do I, but I'm sure that was it. Red 's a mnemonic for me. A trigger. From a Reba McEntyre song, of all things. I found it almost by accident. And there's something else, I guess. When I forget stuff I tend to get... you know..."

"A little pissed off?"

I thought of how I'd taken Pam by the throat. How I'd tried to choke her.

"Yeah," I said. "You could say that."

"Ah."

"Anyway, I guess that red must have gotten out and stained my... my mental suit of clothes? Is that what it's like?"

"Close. And every time I sense that around you, in you, I think of waking up after putting a bullet in my temple and seeing the whole world was dark red. I thought I was in hell, that that was what hell was going to be like, an eternity of deepest scarlet." He paused. "Then I realized it was just the apple. It was lying right in front of me, maybe an inch from my eyes. It was on the floor and I was on the floor."

"I'll be damned," I said.

"Yes, that's what I thought, but it wasn't damnation, only an apple. 'In Adam's fall, sinned we all.' I said that out loud. Then I said, 'Fruit-bowl.' I remember everything that happened and everything that was said over the next ninety-six hours with perfect clarity. Every detail." He laughed. "Of course I know some of the things I remember aren't true, but I remember them with exquisite precision, all the same. No cross-examination could trip me up to this very day, not even concerning the pus-covered roaches I saw crawling out of old Jack Fineham's eyes, mouth, and nostrils.

"I had a hell of a headache, but once I got over the shock of the apple close-up, I felt pretty much okay otherwise. It was four in the morning. Six hours had gone by. I was lying in a puddle of congealed blood. It was caked on my right cheek like jelly. I remember sitting up and saying, 'I'm a dandy in aspic' and trying to remember if aspic was some kind of jelly. I said, 'No jelly in the fruit-bowl.' And saying that seemed so rational it was like passing a sanity test. I began to doubt that I'd shot myself. It seemed more likely that I'd gone to sleep at the dining room table only thinking of shooting myself, fallen off my chair, and hit my head. That's where the blood came from. In fact, it seemed almost certain, given the fact that I was moving around and talking. I told myself to say something else. To say my mother's name. Instead I said, 'Cash crop in the groun, lan'lord soon be roun.'"

I nodded, excited. I had had similar experiences, not once but countless times, after coming out of my coma. Sit in the buddy, sit in the chum.

"Were you angry?"

"No, serene! Relieved! I could accept a little disorientation from a knock on the head. Only then I saw the gun on the floor. I picked it up and smelled the muzzle. There's no mistaking the smell of a recently fired gun. It's acrid, a smell with claws. Still, I held onto the falling-asleep-and-hitting-my-head idea until I got into the bathroom and saw the hole in my temple. Little round hole with a corona of singe-marks around it." He laughed again, as people do when remembering some crazy boner they've pulled forgetting to open the garage door, for instance, and then backing into it.

"That's when I heard the last number clicking into place, Edgar the Powerball Number! And I knew I was going to Disney World, after all."