Jonathan was dazzled. Something alive seemed to stir in him, made out of joy. With a kind of twist and a flip of his hands, he folded, out of the corner of the tablecloth, a dog's head. It had little knots for ears, a snout, and a punched-in, toothless mouth.
"We're not in Kansas anymore," said Jonathan, stroking the dog's head. The dog turned around and looked at Cher and cocked its head with curiosity. Its ears rose up, attentive. The dog was alive.
"That's terrific," said Cher.
"I only wish I would stop losing all this weight," Jonathan said to Toto.
A week or two later, he went in for tests.
Ira didn't show up. Jonathan hated driving now, but he drove to Bill's house by himself anyway, alone in the dark, and got horribly lost. He missed the exchange onto the freeway, and he missed the turn off the freeway, and then he wandered aimlessly up and down Topanga Canyon. The roads on the map wriggled under his eyes like worms.
He arrived in a panic, sick at being lost and alone, horrified at how fragile his illness had made him.
"I drove round and round for hours! I couldn't find where I was!" He was sobbing. He had to sit down.
"Muffy, get a whisky, could you?" asked Bill.
Bill took Jonathan in his arms. It was a great comfort to be held. But it was an enfeebling comfort. Jonathan had been reduced to needing to be hugged after a simple drive in the car. Jonathan wiped his cheeks and tried to pull away, patting Bill on his great bare arms.
"There you go, buddy," said Bill, and let him go.
And Bill's wife Muffy was there, holding out a glass of whisky. A glass of whisky in Waterford crystal. Jonathan was terrified he might drop it.
"You must think I'm a real wimp," he said.
"I think you're scared," said Muffy. "It's not pleasant, being alone and lost."
It was alarming how people were the only island of safety he had against terror. As soon as he was around people, the fear went. Most of the time in L.A., he was alone.
"I couldn't read the map," he said, gulping whisky and snot.
"Let me show you around the house," said Bill.
The house was a museum. It was a great old farmhouse from the days when L.A. was a Western settlement of farmers and fruit trees. There were huge wooden spoons on the wall that had been used for stirring vats of lye soap. There were old homemade candles. There were shoes people had made themselves out of hides. There were family Bibles, with names of parents and grandparents.
"Look at this! Look at this!" Jonathan exclaimed. "I didn't know you were into all of this!"
How can you cover so many bases? Jonathan thought, looking at Bill Davison's face. You can talk shop to a ball player, history to a historian. With a face like yours, you ought to be some Reaganite businessman in favor of defense budgets. With money like you make, you ought to be slick and sharp and spouting horrible, phony relation-speak.
"All these things," said Bill Davison. "They're from Kansas. I kind of collect them."
"I only take photographs," said Jonathan.
Muffy walked with them, commenting quietly on the implements. "That object there is for firing pills down horses' throats." There was something European about her. She was plump and pale, with undyed hair, no makeup, and yet there was something forcefully sensual about her. Even Jonathan felt it. Her breasts hung loose, her hips wobbled under the peasant dress. Jonathan found that he was glad for Bill, glad that he had a wife who was his match.
Muffy had gone with Bill on his expeditions to Kansas. She talked about the samplers on the walls. She knew about the people who had made them. One of them had been singed in the fire at Lawrence. Made by Millie Branscomb, aged eight.
"This is the strangest thing," Muffy said. "When we researched this, we found out it was done by the mother of someone Bill knew."
"The mother of a patient of mine. My first patient, you might say," said Bill. "It's all very strange. I got to know a woman about eighty-something. She was living in a Home. She thought she was Dorothy Gale."
It took a moment. "From Oz," said Jonathan.
"Turned out," said Bill, "that she was. She knew Frank Baum."
There was that icy vapor again, from the snow, from the cold. It rose up from the floorboards. Jonathan saw it at his feet.
Later, when Muffy was in the kitchen, they sat at the table and Jonathan said, "I'm having visions, Bill."
"What?"
"I'm seeing things. I'm hallucinating. You're a psychiatrist. You tell me what that means."
Bill went very silent. In front of him was a rush place mat. He traced its spiral pattern with the blade of a knife. "It all depends," said Bill Davison, "on whether the visions are true or not."
Jonathan thought a minute and then said, "I think they are."
Muffy had cooked a Turkish meal. The main course was made of eggplants and onions. They waited awhile before dessert, hoping that Ira would come. Drinking whisky had been a mistake. Jonathan felt himself go quiet and slightly confused. He listened.
Bill talked about the history of Kansas. The Old West, he said, had stringent gun-control laws. You checked your firearms before you came into town. Wichita, Kansas, was the town of Wyatt Earp, of Bat Masterson, the town of all those TV shows along with Dodge City, also in Kansas. For the whole decade of the 1870s, when Wichita was one of the wildest cowtowns, the total number of people murdered in it was four. Four people killed in ten years. In Los Angeles, it was four a day.
"It was the cities Back East that made up the Wild West," said Bill. "The penny-dreadful magazines, and the movies after them."
"What about Billy the Kid? He was real."
"Looks as if he may have been born in New York City."
Jonathan began to hear cattle lowing, somewhere up the canyon perhaps.
"Tell me more about Dorothy," he said.
"She was from a farming community called Zeandale, near a place called Manhattan, Kansas. Its other claim to fame is that Damon Runyon was born there."
"What was she like?"
"Well," said Bill, looking into his wineglass. "It was as if she lived in Oz all the time. She lived in a world of her own. Maybe that was what Baum saw in her, maybe not. I wrote to the Baum Estate to find out more about it. All they could tell me was that Baum had been a substitute teacher there for a short while. They thought it more likely that the character in the book was named after Baum's niece."
He told Jonathan the story, as much as he knew. He told him how Dorothy had died. The room seemed to fill with the low smoky light that comes on winter afternoons, sun through silver mist.
"One day," said Bill, "I might just go to Manhattan and see what else I can find out about her. Speaking of which, how are you and Oz getting on?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Oz. Remember our contract?"
Jonathan had forgotten.
Ira finally arrived in his own car. He was gray with fatigue, and he stared coldly at Jonathan.
"I rang and rang. Where were you?" he asked, as he sat down.
Jonathan's eyes were round, unblinking, feverish. He didn't answer.
Ira turned to Bill. "I'm really sorry, Bill. I wanted to call and say I was going to be late, but I didn't have your home number."