He smiled a little.
And smiling, slept.
10
He could never remember the details of the dream afterward. He had been looking for something. He had been in some labyrinthine maze of corridors, lit only by dull red trouble lights. He opened doors on empty rooms and then closed them again. Some of the rooms were littered with balls of crumpled paper and in one there was an overturned table lamp and a fallen picture done in the style of Wyeth. He felt that he was in some sort of installation that had been shut down and cleared out in one hell of a tearing hurry.
And yet he had at last found what he was looking for. It was… what? A box? A chest? It was terribly heavy, whatever it was, and it had been marked with a white-stenciled skull and crossbones, like a jar of rat poison kept on a high cellar shelf. Somehow, in spite of its weight (it had to weigh at least as much as Mrs. Gurney), he managed to pick it up. He could feel all his muscles and, tendons pulling taut and hard, yet there was no pain.
Of course there isn’t, he told himself. There’s no pain because it’s a dream. You’ll pay for it later. You’ll have the pain later.
He carried the box out of the room where he had found it. There was a place he had to take it, but he didn’t know what or where it was-
You’ll know it when you see it, his mind whispered.
So he carried the box or chest up and down endless corridors, its weight tugging painlessly at his muscles, stiffening the back of his neck; and although his muscles didn’t hurt, he was getting the beginnings of a headache.
The brain is a muscle, his mind lectured, and the lecture became a chant like a child’s song, a little girl’s skipping rhyme: The brain is a, muscle that can move the world. The brain is a muscle that can move-
Now all the doors were like subway doors, bulging outward in a slight curve, fitted with large windows; all these windows had rounded corners. Through these doors (if they were doors) he saw a confusion of sights. In one room Dr. Wanless was playing a huge accordion. He looked like some crazed Lawrence Welk with a tin cup full of pencils in front of him and a sign around his neck that read
THERE ARE NONE SO BLIND AS THOSE WHO WILL NOT SEE. Through another window he could see a girl in a white caftan flying through the air, screaming, careering off the walls, and Andy hurried past that one quickly.
Through another he saw Charlie and he became convinced again that this was some sort of pirate dream-buried treasure, yo-ho-ho and all of that because Charlie appeared to be talking with Long John Silver. This man had a parrot on his shoulder and an eyepatch over one eye. He was grinning at Charlie with a kind of smarmy false friendship that made Andy nervous. As if in confirmation of this, the one-eyed pirate slipped an arm around Charlie’s shoulders and cried hoarsely, “We’ll do “em yet, kid!”
Andy wanted to stop there and knock on the window until he attracted Charlie’s attention-she was staring at the pirate as if hypnotized. He wanted to make sure she saw through this strange man, to make sure she understood that he wasn’t what he seemed.
But he couldn’t stop. He had this damned
(box? chest?)
to
(???)
to what? Just what the hell was he supposed to do with it? But he would know when it was time. He went past dozens of other rooms-he could’t remember all of the things he saw-and then he was in a long blank corridor that ended in a blank wall. But not entirely blank; there was something in the exact center of it, a big steel rectangle like a mail slot.
Then he saw the word that had been stamped on it in raised letters, and understood.
DISPOSAL, it read.
And suddenly Mrs. Gurney was beside him, a slim and pretty Mrs. Gurney with a shapely body and trim legs that looked made for dancing all night long, dancing on a terrace until the stars went pale in the sky and dawn rose in the east like sweet music. You’d never guess, he thought, bemused, that her clothes were once made by Omar the Tentmaker.
He tried to lift the box, but couldn’t. Suddenly it was just too heavy. His headache was worse… It was like the black horse, the riderless horse with the red eyes, and with dawning horror he realized it was loose, it was somewhere in this abandoned installation, and it was coming for him, thudding, thudding
“I’ll help you,” Mrs. Gurney said. “You helped me; now I’ll help you. After all, you are the national resource, not me.”
“You look so pretty,” he said. His voice seemed to come from far away, through the thickening headache.
“I feel like I’ve been let out of prison,” Mrs. Gurney responded. “Let me help you.”
“It’s just that my head aches-”
“Of course it does. After all, the brain is a muscle.”
Did she help him, or did he do it himself? He couldn’t remember. But he could remember thinking that he understood the dream now, it was the push he was getting rid of, once and for all, the push. He remembered tipping the box against the slot marked DISPOSAL, tipping it up, wondering what it would look like when it came out, this thing that had sat inside his brain since his college days. But it wasn’t the push that came out; he felt both surprise and fear as the top opened. What spilled into the chute was a flood of blue pills his pills, and he was scared, all right; he was, in the words of Granther McGee, suddenly scared enough to shit nickels.
“No!” he shouted.
“Yes,” Mrs. Gurney answered firmly. “The brain is a muscle that can move the world.”
Then he saw it her way.
It seemed that the more he poured the more his head ached, and the more his head ached the darker it got, until there was no light, the dark was total, it was a living dark, someone had blown all the fuses somewhere and there was no light, no box, no dream, only his headache and the riderless horse with the red eyes coming on and coming on.
Thud thud, thud…
11
He must have been awake a long time before he actually realized he was awake. The total lack of light made the exact dividing line hard to find. A few years before, he had read of an experiment in which a number of monkeys had been put into environments designed to muffle all their senses. The monkeys had all gone crazy. He could understand why. He had no idea how long he had been sleeping, no concrete input except
“Oww, Jesus!”
Sitting up drove two monstrous bolts of chromium pain into his head. He clapped his hands to his skull and rocked it back and forth, and little by little the pain subsided to a more manageable level.
No concrete sensory input except this. rotten headache. I must have slept on my neck or something, he thought. I must have
No. Oh, no. He knew this headache, knew it well. It was the sort of headache he got from a medium-to-hard push… harder than the ones he had given the fat ladies and shy businessmen, not quite as hard as the ones he had given the fellows at the turnpike rest stop that time.
Andy’s hands flew to his face and felt it all over, from brow to chin. There were no spots where the feeling trailed away to numbness. When he smiled, both corners of his mouth went up just as they always had. He wished to God for a light so he could look into his own eyes in the bathroom mirror to see if either of them showed that tell-tale blood sheen…
Push? Pushing?
That was ridiculous. Who was there to push?
Who, except
His breath slowed to a stop in his throat and then resumed slowly.
He had thought of it before but had never tried it. He thought it would be like overloading a circuit by cycling a charge through it endlessly. He had been scared to try it.
My pill, he thought. My pill is overdue and I want it, I really want it, I really need it. My pill will make everything all right.