Liberty held her breath, then slowly exhaled.
“This wouldn’t be us, of course,” Charlie said.
“Charlie.”
“You love me!” Charlie cried.
“I love Willie.”
“Love takes time, I’m willing to admit. Certain kinds of love. But I know you’ll be able to find a place for me in your love, and when you do, we’ll just move right into it … the hound, Reverdy, you and me. You’ve got to get the kid out of his daddy’s house, Liberty. Duane’s nuts. When I was speaking with him the other night, he said, ‘Charlie, buddy, if I ever found out that a man was messing with my Janiella, I’d tear out both their hearts. I’d tear off their hands and roast them and eat them, the palms of the hands being the only thing worth having off a human being.’ ”
“You’re the one who’d best get out of Teddy’s daddy’s house,” Liberty said lightly. But she was frightened. She heard Charlie crunching ice with his teeth.
“Everything’s cyclic,” Charlie said. “The desire to live is cyclic. Why don’t you tell me I give good phone? Come on, talk to me. Silence indicates a considerable nada. You’ve been associating with that dog of yours too much. Heavy nada there. Not that I don’t think he’s great. But the eye with which one sees nada is the eye with which one sees one. You know?”
“I’m a silent married woman,” Liberty said.
“I have the television set on here in my room,” Charlie said. “It’s a game show. Husbands can apparently win fabulous prizes by scaling a gigantic greased washboard. The husbands’ wives are at the top of the washboard urging them on. Whoops. None of the husbands seem to be making it.”
“I have to go, Charlie.”
“No, wait, I’ll change the channel. Uh-oh. Wow, that’s disgusting … heart just popped right out. When is all this supposed to be taking place? In the long, long ago. In the days of sorcerers and the bicameral mind … what’s this!..”
“Charlie—”
“No, wait, I’ll turn it off. There, it’s off. Do you want me to read to you? I used to like to read these tawdry doomsday books, the kind with virulent bacilli and climatic melt where millions die, there is sex and savagery and man’s inherent dignity never comes up?… But I’ve changed my habits. It’s all part of my alteration process. I’m working my way through seventeenth-century verse and prose now. Andrew Marvell, Sir Thomas Browne, Sir John Suckling.”
“Donne, of course.”
“ ‘If God could be seen and known in hell, hell in an instant would be heaven.’ That’s Donne.”
“ ‘Miserable riddle,’ ” Liberty said, “ ‘when the same worm must be my mother and my sister and my self.’ Donne.”
“Let’s drop the seventeenth century,” Charlie said. “Too much morbid imagery. Too much sensual asceticism. Turn the light off and I’ll turn the light off. There. It’s dark. Now let’s diffuse the dark into little pinpoints of light, tiny brief explosions of light with words of love. Seriously, when can I see you?”
“You can’t.”
“I will,” Charlie said. “I will see you. Has your old man returned?”
“No,” Liberty said.
“Where does he go? Where do you go? I saw in the paper that two kids had been saved from a burning house in the Panhandle by an unidentified man. Do you think Willie traveled up there to do that? Could that have been our Willie? He saved the children. I think he even saved the aged collie. Do you know if Willie gives blood?”
“I don’t think he’s ever given blood.”
“Too minor probably. There’ll always be blood, right? I think he’ll be donating his living organs soon, important living organs. Then he’ll open the zoos and prisons. I have a theory. I think Willie saves people as a kind of joke.”
“That would be terrible,” Liberty said.
“Really. A joke. Willie thinks abstractly. He thinks in opposition to his brain. Actually, Willie doesn’t give a shit. Now myself, I think concretely. Your past is irredeemable, but it’s not over yet. Here’s what I want to tell you. I went out and bought us a car with the money I just made, a finny old Caddy, big enough to hold us all, the means by which we will make good our escape. Blinding chrome everywhere, my favorite color. And the trunk! Wait until you see the size of the trunk! I’ve begun filling it with stuff for us. Butterfingers, hot sauce, Chuckles, hominy, potted meats. When we’re ready to go, I’ll fill the cooler with limesickles for the kid.”
“All this is impossible, Charlie,” Liberty said.
“We’ll have to start out by car. It’s only reasonable. Then we’ll determine other means of travel. The kid doesn’t like limesickles, I’ll fill it with Creamsicles.”
“He likes the ice cream with the polar bears on them, actually,” Liberty said. “He collects the wrappers.” But he wouldn’t need the wrappers if they went away, she thought. They’d leave all that behind.
“All right!” Charlie said.
“Those polar bears kind of depress me, really,” Liberty said. “I imagine the real thing. And then I see the real thing far from its ice floe home, lying flat, jaws agape, on the floor of a Dallas mansion.”
“Liberty, you mustn’t allow yourself to be brought down by an ice cream sandwich.”
She laughed.
“Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, you think going away is just a feverish fancy of mine, but it’s not. Why would I want to deceive us? We have to begin. What I’m going to do is give up drinking. This is my last drink. This one right here, this luminous lovely, unlike all the others and more precious because it is the last …”
Liberty heard the sound of breaking glass.
“Oh no, oh shit, I dropped it,” Charlie cried. They both clung to the phone in silence. Then there was a click. Charlie had hung up.
Clem gazed at her from the floor, his forepaws curled beneath him. Liberty’s hands were sweating. It was quiet. Someone could break into this house, and it would be like herself breaking into the house of another. It would be someone just like herself. What is it that you want? she would ask the intruder.
When the phone rang again, she stared at it. There was something wrong with it, surely.
“I’ve been on a very pretty inlet,” the voice began, “the tide comes in, goes slack, pours back out. Very peaceful there.”
“Willie,” Liberty said.
“One sinks gently from nothingness to nothingness. No bubbles.”
“You’ve been gone for days,” Liberty said.
“It always amazes me. There’s nobody out here.”
“There’s nobody out there, I thought that’s what we always said.”
“We have our parts, don’t we,” Willie said. “Our lines.”
“Please come back. I’m missing you.”
“Come to me,” Willie said. “I called earlier, but the line was busy. Who was that?”
“Charlie.”
“Charlie is a tragic figure, but dimly, only dimly so. Have you been seeing him?”
“No.” Liberty looked at some daisies she had cut and put in a glass.
“He believes that everything’s meant to be forgotten,” Willie said.
Liberty watched the daisies. There had been daisies in such a glass for years and years, everywhere.