Duma Key

"You often have a redness about you, muchacho, " Wireman said. "I don't think it's an aura, exactly, and it's not exactly a thought... except when it is. I've gotten it from you as a word as well as a color on three or four occasions. And yes, once when I was off Duma Key. When we were at the Scoto."

"When I was stuck for a word."

"Were you? I don't remember."

"Neither do I, but I'm sure that was it. Red 's a mnemonic for me. A trigger. From a Reba McEntyre song, of all things. I found it almost by accident. And there's something else, I guess. When I forget stuff I tend to get... you know..."

"A little pissed off?"

I thought of how I'd taken Pam by the throat. How I'd tried to choke her.

"Yeah," I said. "You could say that."

"Ah."

"Anyway, I guess that red must have gotten out and stained my... my mental suit of clothes? Is that what it's like?"

"Close. And every time I sense that around you, in you, I think of waking up after putting a bullet in my temple and seeing the whole world was dark red. I thought I was in hell, that that was what hell was going to be like, an eternity of deepest scarlet." He paused. "Then I realized it was just the apple. It was lying right in front of me, maybe an inch from my eyes. It was on the floor and I was on the floor."

"I'll be damned," I said.

"Yes, that's what I thought, but it wasn't damnation, only an apple. 'In Adam's fall, sinned we all.' I said that out loud. Then I said, 'Fruit-bowl.' I remember everything that happened and everything that was said over the next ninety-six hours with perfect clarity. Every detail." He laughed. "Of course I know some of the things I remember aren't true, but I remember them with exquisite precision, all the same. No cross-examination could trip me up to this very day, not even concerning the pus-covered roaches I saw crawling out of old Jack Fineham's eyes, mouth, and nostrils.

"I had a hell of a headache, but once I got over the shock of the apple close-up, I felt pretty much okay otherwise. It was four in the morning. Six hours had gone by. I was lying in a puddle of congealed blood. It was caked on my right cheek like jelly. I remember sitting up and saying, 'I'm a dandy in aspic' and trying to remember if aspic was some kind of jelly. I said, 'No jelly in the fruit-bowl.' And saying that seemed so rational it was like passing a sanity test. I began to doubt that I'd shot myself. It seemed more likely that I'd gone to sleep at the dining room table only thinking of shooting myself, fallen off my chair, and hit my head. That's where the blood came from. In fact, it seemed almost certain, given the fact that I was moving around and talking. I told myself to say something else. To say my mother's name. Instead I said, 'Cash crop in the groun, lan'lord soon be roun.'"

I nodded, excited. I had had similar experiences, not once but countless times, after coming out of my coma. Sit in the buddy, sit in the chum.

"Were you angry?"

"No, serene! Relieved! I could accept a little disorientation from a knock on the head. Only then I saw the gun on the floor. I picked it up and smelled the muzzle. There's no mistaking the smell of a recently fired gun. It's acrid, a smell with claws. Still, I held onto the falling-asleep-and-hitting-my-head idea until I got into the bathroom and saw the hole in my temple. Little round hole with a corona of singe-marks around it." He laughed again, as people do when remembering some crazy boner they've pulled - forgetting to open the garage door, for instance, and then backing into it.

"That's when I heard the last number clicking into place, Edgar - the Powerball Number! And I knew I was going to Disney World, after all."

"Or a reasonable facsimile," I said. "Christ, Wireman."

"I tried to wash the powder-burns off, but bearing down with a facecloth hurt too much. It was like biting down on a bad tooth."

Suddenly I understood why they'd X-rayed him instead of sticking him in the MRI machine. The bullet was still in his head.

"Wireman, can I ask you something?"

"All right."

"Are a person's optic nerves... I don't know... bass-ackwards?"

"Indeed they are."

"So that's why your left eye is fucked up. It's like..." For a moment the word wouldn't come, and I clenched my fists. Then it was there. "It's like contracoup."

"I guess so, yeah. I shot myself in the right side of my stupid head, but it's my left eye that's fucked up. I put a Band-Aid over the hole. And took some aspirin."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. Wireman smiled and nodded.