The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

Only maybe that wasn’t the truth. I flashed back to my first orgasm, in the bathtub, assisted by a bubbly handful of Ivory Soap. I hadn’t known what I was doing when I reached down and grabbed myself … only some part of me, some deep, instinctual part, had known. There’s another old adage, this one not Ben Franklin’s: When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Sometimes the teacher is inside us.

‘Wanderly was your idea,’ I pointed out. ‘So was Amos the Midnight Creeper. And by then you knew what was going to happen.’

She sat on the edge of the desk – her desk, now – and looked at me straight on, which couldn’t have been easy. ‘That much is true. But, Mike … I didn’t know it was going to spread.’

‘Neither did I.’

‘And it really is addictive. I was sitting next to you when you did it, and it was like breathing secondhand crack.’

‘I can stop,’ I said.

Hoping. Hoping.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Pretty. Now here’s one for you. Can you keep your mouth shut about this? Like, for the rest of your life?’

She did me the courtesy of thinking it over. Then she nodded. ‘I have to. I could have a good thing here at Circus, and I don’t want to bitch it up before I can get on my feet.’

It was all about her, in other words, and what else could I have expected? Katie might not be sucking on Jeroma’s eucalyptus drops, I could have been wrong about that, but she was sitting in Jeroma’s chair, behind Jeroma’s desk. Plus that new look-but-don’t-touch tumbly hairdo. As Orwell’s pigs might have said, blue jeans good, new dress better.

‘What about Penny?’

Katie said nothing.

‘Because my impression of Penny – everybody’s impression of Penny, in fact – is that she doesn’t have all four wheels on the road.’

Katie’s eyes flashed. ‘Are you surprised? She had an extremely traumatic childhood, in case you missed it. A nightmare childhood.’

‘I can relate, because I’m living my own nightmare right now. So save the support-group empathy. I just want to know if she’ll keep her mouth shut. Like, forever. Will she?’

There was a long, long pause. At last Katie said, ‘Now that he’s dead, maybe she’ll stop going to the rape survivor meetings.’

‘And if she doesn’t?’

‘I guess she might … at some point … tell someone who’s in especially bad shape that she knows a guy who could help that someone get closure. She wouldn’t do it this month, and probably not this year, but …’

She didn’t finish. We looked at each other. I was sure she could read what I was thinking in my eyes: there was one sure-shot, never-miss way to make sure Penny kept her mouth shut.

‘No,’ Katie said. ‘Don’t even think of it, and not only because she deserves her life and whatever good things there might be for her up ahead. It wouldn’t be just her.’

Based on her research, she was right about that. Penny Langston wasn’t a super-common name, either, but there are more than three hundred million people in America, and some of the Penny or Penelope Langstons out there would win a very bad lottery if I decided to power up my laptop or iPad and write a new obit. Then there was the ‘in the neighborhood’ effect. The power had taken a Wanderlee as well as a Wanderly. What if it decided to take Petula Langstons? Patsy Langfords? Penny Langleys?

Then there was my own situation. It might take only one more obit for Michael Anderson to surrender completely to that high-voltage buzz. Just thinking about it made me want to do it, because it would take away, if only temporarily, these feelings of horror and dismay. I pictured myself writing an obituary for John Smith or Jill Jones to cheer myself up, and my balls shriveled even more at the thought of the mass carnage that could follow.

‘What are you going to do?’ Katie asked.

‘I’ll think of something,’ I said.

I did.

That night I opened a Rand McNally Road Atlas to the big map of the United States, closed my eyes, and dropped my finger. Which is why I now live in Laramie, Wyoming, where I’m a housepainter. Primarily a housepainter. I actually have a number of jobs, like many people in the small cities of the heartland – what I used to refer to, with a New Yorker’s casual contempt, as ‘flyover country.’ I also work part-time for a landscaping company, mowing lawns, raking leaves, and planting bushes. In the winter, I plow out driveways and work at the Snowy Range ski resort, grooming trails. I’m not rich, but I keep my head above water. A little more above it than in New York, actually. Make fun of flyover country all you want to, but it’s a lot cheaper to live out here, and whole days go by without anyone giving me the finger.