Karl says, “We don’t know the whole story yet. Maybe he found out something about Fox while he was a teapot.” Elizabeth’s mom says, “He’s under a spell. I bet you anything.” They’ll be talking about it all week.
Talis is in the kitchen, making a Velveeta-and-pickle sandwich.
“So what did you think?” Jeremy says. It’s like having a hobby, only more pointless, trying to get Talis to talk. “Is Fox really dead?”
“Don’t know,” Talis says. Then she says, “I had a dream.”
Jeremy waits. Talis seems to be waiting, too. She says, “About you.” Then she’s silent again. There is something dreamlike about the way that she makes a sandwich. As if she is really making something that isn’t a sandwich at all; as if she’s making something far more meaningful and mysterious. Or as if soon he will wake up and realize that there are no such things as sandwiches.
“You and Fox,” Talis says. “The dream was about the two of you. She told me. To tell you. To call her. She gave me a phone number. She was in trouble. She said you were in trouble. She said to keep in touch.”
“Weird,” Jeremy says, mulling this over. He’s never had a dream about The Library. He wonders who was playing Fox in Talis’s dream. He had a dream about Talis, once, but it isn’t the kind of dream that you’d ever tell anybody about. They were just sitting together, not saying anything. Even Talis’s T-shirt hadn’t said anything. Talis was holding his hand.
“It didn’t feel like a dream,” Talis says.
“So what was the phone number?” Jeremy says.
“I forgot,” Talis says. “When I woke up, I forgot.”
Kurt’s mother works in a bank. Talis’s father has a karaoke machine in his basement, and he knows all the lyrics to “Like a Virgin” and “Holiday” as well as the lyrics to all the songs from Godspell and Cabaret. Talis’s mother is a licensed therapist who composes multiple-choice personality tests for women’s magazines. “Discover Which Television Character You Resemble Most.” Etc. Amy’s parents met in a commune in Ithaca: her name was Galadriel Moon Shuyler before her parents came to their senses and had it changed legally. Everyone is sworn to secrecy about this, which is ironic, considering that this is Amy.
But Jeremy’s father is Gordon Strangle Mars. He writes novels about giant spiders, giant leeches, giant moths, and once, notably, a giant carnivorous rosebush who lives in a mansion in upstate New York, and falls in love with a plucky, teenaged girl with a heart murmur. Saint Bernard-sized spiders chase his characters’ cars down dark, bumpy country roads. They fight the spiders off with badminton rackets, lawn tools, and fireworks. The novels with spiders are all bestsellers.
Once a Gordon Strangle Mars fan broke into the Marses’s house. The fan stole several German first editions of Gordon Strangle’s novels, a hairbrush, and a used mug in which there were two ancient, dehydrated tea bags. The fan left behind a betrayed and abusive letter on a series of Post-It Notes, and the manuscript of his own novel, told from the point of view of the iceberg that sank the Titanic. Jeremy and his mother read the manuscript out loud to each other. It begins: “The iceberg knew it had a destiny.” Jeremy’s favorite bit happens when the iceberg sees the doomed ship drawing nearer, and remarks plaintively, “Oh my, does not the Captain know about my large and impenetrable bottom?”
Jeremy discovered, later, that the novel-writing fan had put Gordon Strangle Mars’s used tea bags and hairbrush up for sale on eBay, where someone paid forty-two dollars and sixty-eight cents, which was not only deeply creepy, but, Jeremy still feels, somewhat cheap. But of course this is appropriate, as Jeremy’s father is famously stingy and just plain weird about money.
Gordon Strangle Mars once spent eight thousand dollars on a Japanese singing toilet. Jeremy’s friends love that toilet. Jeremy’s mother has a painting of a woman wearing a red dress by some artist, Jeremy can never remember who. Jeremy’s father gave her that painting. The woman is beautiful, and she looks right at you as if you’re the painting, not her. As if you’re beautiful. The woman has an apple in one hand and a knife in the other. When Jeremy was little, he used to dream about eating that apple. Apparently the painting is worth more than the whole house and everything else in the house, including the singing toilet. But art and toilets aside, the Marses buy most of their clothes at thrift stores.
Jeremy’s father clips coupons.
On the other hand, when Jeremy was twelve and begged his parents to send him to baseball camp in Florida, his father ponied up. And on Jeremy’s last birthday, his father gave him a couch reupholstered in several dozen yards of heavy-duty Star Wars-themed fabric. That was a good birthday.
When his writing is going well, Gordon Strangle Mars likes to wake up at 6 A.M. and go out driving. He works out new plot lines about giant spiders and keeps an eye out for abandoned couches, which he wrestles into the back of his pickup truck. Then he writes for the rest of the day. On weekends he reupholsters the thrown-away couches in remaindered, discount fabrics. A few years ago, Jeremy went through his house, counting up fourteen couches, eight love seats, and one rickety chaise lounge. That was a few years ago. Once Jeremy had a dream that his father combined his two careers and began reupholstering giant spiders.
All lights in all rooms of the Mars house are on fifteen-minute timers, in case Jeremy or his mother leave a room and forget to turn off a lamp. This has caused confusion—and sometimes panic—on the rare occasions that the Marses throw dinner parties.
Everyone thinks that writers are rich, but it seems to Jeremy that his family is only rich some of the time. Some of the time they aren’t.
Whenever Gordon Mars gets stuck in a Gordon Strangle Mars novel, he worries about money. He worries that he won’t, in fact, manage to finish the current novel. He worries that it will be terrible. He worries that no one will buy it and no one will read it, and that the readers who do read it will demand to be refunded the cost of the book. He’s told Jeremy that he imagines these angry readers marching on the Mars house, carrying torches and crowbars.
It would be easier on Jeremy and his mother if Gordon Mars did not work at home. It’s difficult to shower when you know your father is timing you, and thinking dark thoughts about the water bill, instead of concentrating on the scene in the current Gordon Strangle Mars novel, in which the giant spiders have returned to their old haunts in the trees surrounding the ninth hole of the accursed golf course, where they sullenly feast on the pulped entrail-juices of a brace of unlucky poodles and their owner.
During these periods, Jeremy showers at school, after gym, or at his friends’ houses, even though it makes his mother unhappy. She says that sometimes you just need to ignore Jeremy’s father. She takes especially long showers, lots of baths. She claims that baths are even nicer when you know that Jeremy’s father is worried about the water bill. Jeremy’s mother has a cruel streak.
What Jeremy likes about showers is the way you can stand there, surrounded by water and yet in absolutely no danger of drowning, and not think about things like whether you screwed up on the Spanish assignment, or why your mother is looking so worried. Instead you can think about things like if there’s water on Mars, and whether or not Karl is shaving, and if so, who is he trying to fool, and what the statue of George Washington meant when it said to Fox, during their desperate, bloody fight, “You have a long journey ahead of you,” and, “Everything depends on this.” And is Fox really dead?