Jack moved stuff around the apartment to keep Burke’s memory fresh—if he rearranged things, Burke did not try to rent out his room. He sorted through the stack. Nothing but bills, all in Burke’s name. With returning confidence, Jack stood in the middle of his small bedroom and practiced juggling three of his four rats, along with two hammers. The rats took this with accustomed patience, and when he returned them to their cage, they squeaked happily. He fed them. They were bright-eyed. Their whiskers twitched.
Satisfied his reflexes had not been affected, he packed the hammers back in a lower dresser drawer, blinked to adjust his eyes, and watched the drawer fill in with bowling pins, Bocce and billiard balls, bricks, and rubber chickens.
With some difficulty, he managed to push the drawer shut.
Just two weeks ago an attractive older woman, Ellen Crowe, had invited him to her house on Capitol Hill. Food—conversation—sympathy. Jack was used to the attention of older women. He felt the stiffness of her note in his shirt pocket, pulled it out, and rubbed his finger over the silver curlicue design on fancy cream board. The card carried a second invitation to dinner, no date specified. When you’re ready, Ellen had written. On the back, she had neatly penned the phone number of a free clinic.
Perhaps he had told her too much over the shrimp risotto. He rubbed the card again, feeling for misfortune and feeling none—not from the card, not from Ellen.
Sitting on the back porch, he tracked a receding V of identical gray and brown porches under low, rapid black clouds, sipped a cup of chamomile tea steeped from a thrice-used bag, and listened to the steady rain. Jack had come to think he was finally happy. Poor, but that didn’t matter. Now a real worry clouded his cheer. He was blanking out too often. He had even mentioned it to Ellen Crowe. And he was seeing things. Giant earwigs.
He balanced the second hammer on one finger, tossed it, and caught the flat of its handle on the tip of his thumb, where it stayed with hardly a wiggle.
Jack laid the hammer on his lap and sighed.
“Tomorrow I will visit a doctor,” he announced, and pulled up a woolen blanket. When the wind wasn’t blowing, he liked to sleep on the porch. For a moment he stared at the blanket’s felted fibers, magnified them in his mind’s eye, saw them hooked to each other every which way, packing off in all directions. Life was less like the felt and more like a bundle of cables, crammed up against other bundles with hardly any distance between. Some cables were short. Some ran on for ages. All hooked up with others in ways few could predict. But Jack could feel those hookups, those points of crossing, long before they arrived.
His eyes grew heavy. As the sky darkened, he napped right there on the porch, cradling the hammer in his lap, under the blanket. His sleep was deep and normal. He snored. For once, oblivion. His legs slumped, but the hammer did not fall.
Jack never dropped anything.
CHAPTER 3
Wallingford
Something huge slammed the beggar into the low, wet gray brush. He rolled on his side and stared up at the flat steel panel of a big green garbage truck. The truck’s diesel grumbled and belched black smoke. The driver poked his bald head out of the cab. “Hey, freeloader! Get a job!”
The blow had left the beggar with a knuckling throb in his gut. His head hurt, too. He couldn’t remember his name, only that he’d been running from something painful and ugly. That much sang like a tuning fork in the middle of tangled thoughts—
He had stretched, reached out too far.
Trying to escape.
The beggar decided that the garbage truck driver wouldn’t act so cocky if he had actually struck a pedestrian—even a freeloader. Nothing had hit him. He was just here, lying unexpectedly by the side of a road, one booted foot stretched to the curb, the other bent almost to his butt—owlishly observing a line of traffic backed up at an intersection.
His thoughts came together like a puzzle—but something rose up and tried to blow them apart again, something sharing the tight volume behind his eyes…another mind, scared, resentful. The beggar expertly crushed this companion as he would an insect, and focused on important details. First, where was he? A thick branch snapped and he crunched deeper into the brush. He felt a bundle dig into his back—knapsack, coat, sweatshirt, plastic bottle. Part of him—the part he was trying to suppress—still remembered stashing them there. He felt like a half sweater, somehow mated to another half, the yarns two different colors and everything in the middle—in between—unraveling. What would he be doing in any better world, stashing clothes and water in the bushes?
His left arm came into view, the dirty green coat sleeve crusted with what looked like snot. The garbage truck turned left and rumbled on. He knew the area—a street fed by an off-ramp from Interstate 5, near Forty-fifth. Once, he had driven it every day to get home, turning at this very corner. But these cars looked wrong.
He got to his feet, stiff and sore. His stomach throbbed with a snaky, coiling pain—something this body was used to. That shook him. Thisbody. Chronic pain.
Two names circled like prize fighters, until one punched the other down—sheer experience and stubbornness winning out over dismay and indignation. A whimpering inside, then—silence. None of it felt right. Something had gone wrong.
I am Daniel.
I am Daniel Patrick Iremonk.
The snake did flip-flops. He whirled and was sick in the bushes. He refused to look at what came up. Other cars whizzed past, their designs sleek, bubbled, chopped—slick magazine parodies of the cars he knew. Their drivers stared in disgust or did not see him at all—eyes on the upcoming turn. This was scary— Danielwas frightened. The other fellow was beyond caring. Not too strong to begin with, he had quickly been beaten down into a set of mud-colored memories. It had never been this way before. Of course, Daniel had never tried to jump so far. Look around. Maybe you haven’t left the Bad Place after all.
Daniel—Daniel Patrick Iremonk—had always escaped—jaunted, that was the word he used—long before the situation went totally sour. That was his talent. He had never before waited for things to get so awful. Make sure it isn’t still after you—the dust, slime, scrambled books, the hundreds of cryptids—all the impossible things happening at once, and everyone staring at you, like you’ve walked into a horrible, hushed surprise party.
They drag you in, lock the door, start with the nasties…fun and games…
Ineed to remember, I really do—but I don’twant to.Daniel wiped his mouth and rotated slowly, orienting himself. Sunshine, clouds, mud from recent rain. Across the street stood a wide, blocky beige building, three stories tall—condos on top, shops on the bottom. He knew it well. Minutes ago, it had been a run-down hotel. Cars burped and jerked to a stop again as the traffic light changed. Usually, when he jaunted—willed himself from one strand to another—only one thing or a few subtle things were different: the circumstances that he wished to change. Daniel had never moved into a version of himself that had gone so far downhill.
The window of the nearest car rolled down and an elderly woman smiled and held out a one-dollar bill. A whiff of gardenia and stale cigarettes curled out with the warm air. He blinked but did not move. The elderly woman scowled and pulled in her arm.
The light turned green.
The beggar shoved his hands into his pockets, allowing this body to show him where the important things were—the motions its muscles made every day. Filthy fingers clenched a wad of cash. He withdrew a plastic bag containing a tight roll of ones, a five, and some change. On the opposite corner stood a woman in layers of sweaters and vests and a long skirt over faded jeans. Her fuzzy, cherry-cheeked doll’s head poked up from a smudged collar. Her arms and legs resembled a bundle of sticks wrapped in felt. She clutched a sign asking for money, but ignored the one driver who had stopped and waved a dollar bill out the window. The driver honked. She seemed to wake up, snatched his money, and the car veered right to merge with the traffic on the freeway. Cheap bastards. Dollar bills. You eat nothing but burgers and hot dogs and feel your gut rot.Daniel wasn’t wearing glasses, but even across the intersection, he had clearly made out the denomination. He felt the bridge of his nose, cringing at the touch of his grimy fingers. No creases—no mark where glasses had ever perched. This body, whatever its problems, boasted decent eyesight. In every strand Daniel had visited, he—and all the other Daniels—had been plagued with miserable eyes—but good health. Fingernails—on these hands, worn and encrusted, but not bitten to the quick. All Daniels bit their nails.