Ow! That hurt! Doug flinched away, wide-eyed, staring at John, betrayed. He was doing what they wanted!
But John was dissatisfied. “You’re daydreaming,” he said. “You’re asleep here. Your eyes aren’t even in focus.”
“Sure they are! Sure they are!” In his renewed panic, Doug was only grateful that mean old Tom hadn’t come along. Surely, if he were present, he would right now renew his baying after Doug’s blood.
Not that the others were being pleasant. Andy, crowding in on Doug’s other side, said, “What’s Wally showed you so far?”
Doug gasped at him. “What?”
“What did you see on the computer?”
Doug groped for an answer. “The model!”
“Of what?”
Doug stared from cold face to cold face to wet face. Desperate, he blurted, “I didn’t know there was gonna be a test!”
John and Andy looked at each other as though trying to decide how best to dispose of the body. Between them, seated at his computer but twisted around to look up at Doug, Wally suddenly said, “Well, you know what it is; he’s in shock.”
John frowned at Wally. “He’s what?”
“In shock,” Wally repeated. “Look at his eyes. Feel his forehead, I bet it’s cold and wet.”
Andy pressed his palm to Doug’s forehead, made a yuk! face, and pulled his hand back. “Right you are,” he said, wiping his palm on his trouser leg.
Getting to his feet, taking Doug by the unresisting arm, Andy said, “Come on over here and sit down.”
Doug crossed obediently to the sofa and, at Wally’s urging, sat down. But then Wally said, “Bend down. Put your head between your knees.”
“Why?” Doug asked, febrile again. “What are you gonna do to me?”
“Nothing,” Wally assured him, gently pushing Doug’s head forward and down as he turned to say to the others, “What did you do to him?”
“Nothing,” Andy said, but he sounded defensive.
“Offered him sixty thousand dollars,” John said sulkily.
“Hardly anything,” Stan said.
Bent way over with his head between his knees, looking at the bolts, batteries, floppy disks, Allen wrenches, F-connectors, and other electric and electronic debris under the sofa, Doug felt oddly safe, as though he were in a cave, hidden and protected. He even felt brave enough to squeal on Stan. “Three-sixty,” he muttered.
Wally leaned down close; being Wally, he didn’t have to lean down very far to be close. He said, “What was that, Doug?”
“Three-sixty.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Stan said, “that wasn’t anything at all. That was just to amuse him.”
Sounding scientifically interested, Andy said, “Do you think that’s what put him in shock? When Stan popped the wheelie?”
“Tom,” muttered Doug.
Stan said, “What did he say?”
Wally was the translator: “He said, ‘Tom.’ ”
“Well, yeah,” Andy said. “There are times when Tom’s put me in shock, actually.”
“Myrtle,” Doug muttered.
“ ‘Myrtle,’ ” Wally translated.
“That’s the street where his girlfriend lives,” John explained.
“It’s her name,” Doug muttered, but Wally wasn’t listening this time, he was saying, “This poor fella’s had a whole lot of things happen. No wonder he’s in shock.”
John said, “How long till he starts tracking again?”
“Gee, I don’t know, John,” Wally said. “Till he gets over it, I guess.”
Doug rolled onto his side on the sofa, drew his knees up in fetal position, and closed his eyes. Not noticing him, the others kept talking. Soothing sounds. Very soothing. Surprising how soothing a soothing sound can be in its being soothing. Totally soothing.
Doug’s eyes opened. Time had passed. The room was darker. The room was empty.
Doug sat up, memory exploding in his mind like a fragmentation grenade. Myrtle. John. Angry living room. Spinning car. Television model. Soothing. And now: alone.
Alone. Even the cheese and crackers were gone. The door was over there. The apartment was silent.
Doug, pay attention. The door is over there.
Cautiously, he got to his feet, then to his toes. On tiptoe, silent as a moth in a sweater, he crossed the messy living room to the door, silently reached out to the knob, silently turned it, silently pulled the door open.
“Look out!” screamed a voice. “She’s got a knife!”
Doug shrieked and dropped to the floor.
“Goddamn mothuhfuckuh, Ah’m gone cut your mothuh fuckin BALLS off!”
Wally, startled from his dinner in the kitchen by the sudden sound of his scream alarm—haven’t heard the crazed woman with the knife for quite some time, he reflected—hurried into the living room to find the hall door wide open and Doug flat on his face on the floor. Wally crossed to Doug, tapped him on the shoulder, and Doug screamed and fainted.
Light. Voices. Doug, eyes squeezed shut, reoriented himself gradually into space and time, and on this try memory entered like a gamboling lamb, easy and sweet. He remembered everything, and even understood why he was lying on the floor. The only thing he was confused about was why he hadn’t been sliced into tiny ribbons by that crazed woman with the knife.
Don’t argue, Doug; just accept.
He rolled over onto his back, opened his eyes, squinted against the light, and sat up. And Andy’s voice said, “Here he is now. Sleeping Beauty.”
“Slipping Beauty,” said John.
Doug looked over toward the sofa and chair, and the usual four were there, gathered around the cheese and crackers: Wally, John, Andy, and Stan. The maniac woman was nowhere to be seen. “All right,” he said. “Okay. Enough.”
“I’ll go along with that,” John said. “You sane now?”
“I think so,” Doug told him. “And I’ll make a deal with you. I don’t know who that woman was, or what her problem is, or where she is now, but I’ll do whatever you want if you keep her away from me. I never want to see her again. Okay?”
They all looked at one another, as though baffled. Then they all shrugged at one another. Then John said, “It’s a deal.”
“Good,” Doug said, feeling vast relief. “Now I can do it. I’ll pay attention to the model, I’ll think about the salvage job—”
John said, “The what?”
“Salvage job,” Doug said. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? Bring up something from the bottom of the reservoir. That’s a salvage job.”
Andy, with a happy smile, said, “There, you see? A professional. As soon as you get the right guy, you got a vocabulary and everything.”
“I remember about salvage jobs,” John said, sounding irritated again. “From that book I got. Marine Salvage.”
“Great book,” Doug commented.
“You just mumbled when you said it, that’s all,” John told him. “So, okay, it’s a salvage job. So let’s get to it.”
So they got to it, and this time Doug could absorb the computer model, see how clever it was, and also see what some of the problems were going to be. At one point, he said, “How did you guys figure to find one little box buried somewhere in a field? What were you gonna do, dig up the whole field? Underwater?”
John, a little huffy, said, “We got a fix on the place from Tom. And we had a poker with us, to help find it.”
“Great,” Doug said ironically. Now that they were dealing with his area of expertise, he was losing the last remnants of panic and insecurity, was unconsciously becoming a little arrogant and dismissive. Shaking his head at John, he said to Wally, “How close a fix is this?”