NOS4A2 A Novel

Here, Iowa


WHEN MAGGIE CAME AWAKE, HER ARM WAS SLUNG OVER VIC’S WAIST and Vic’s head was resting against her breastbone. She was the most goshdarn pretty woman that Maggie had ever been in bed with, and Maggie wanted to kiss her but wouldn’t. What Maggie really wanted to do was comb Vic’s snarled, windblown hair, straighten it out, make it shine. She wanted to wash Vic’s feet and rub them with oil. Maggie wished they had had more time together and a chance to talk about something besides Charlie Manx. Not that Maggie really wanted to talk. She wanted to listen. Maggie dreaded that moment in any conversation when it was her turn to open her big, dumb m-m-mouth.

Maggie sensed she hadn’t been asleep for long and had a pretty good idea she wouldn’t be able to sleep again for hours. She untangled herself from Vic, smoothed her hair back from her face, and slipped away. It was time to spell, and now that Vic was asleep, Maggie could do what she needed to do to make the tiles behave.

She lit a smoke. She lit a candle. Arranged her fedora just so. Maggie set her Scrabble bag before her and loosed the golden thread. She considered the darkness within for a time, inhaling deeply on her cigarette. It was late, and she wanted to crush some Oxy and have a snort, and she couldn’t do it until she had done this one thing for Vic. She reached up and found the collar of her white muscle shirt and pulled it down, exposing her left breast. She removed her cigarette and shut her eyes and put it out. She held it against the top of her breast for a long time, grinding it into the tender flesh, letting out a thin, whining breath through her clenched teeth. She could smell herself burning.

She flicked the extinguished cigarette away and bent over the desk, wrists pressed against its edge, blinking at tears. The pain in her breast was sharp and intense and wonderful. Sacred.

Now, she thought, now, now. She had a brief window in which to use the tiles, to force sense out of gibberish: a minute or two at most. It seemed to her sometimes that this was the only fight that mattered: the struggle to take the world’s chaos and make it mean something, to put it to words.

She took a fistful of letters, dumped them before her, and began to sort. She moved tiles here and there. She had played this game for her entire adult life, and soon enough she had it. In a few minutes, the spelling was done, no trouble at all this time.

When she saw she had it, she let out a long, satisfied breath, as if she had just set down a great weight. She didn’t have any idea what the message meant. It had an epigrammatic quality about it, seemed less like a fact, more like the closing line of a lullaby. But Maggie was sure she had it right. She always knew when she had it right. It was as sure and simple a thing as a key clicking into a lock and turning a bolt. Maybe Vic could glean some meaning from it. She would ask her when she was awake.

She copied out the message from the Great Scrabble Bag of Fate on a sheet of water-stained Here Public Library stationery. She read it over. It was good. She was conscious of an unfamiliar glow of satisfaction, was unused to being happy with herself.

She collected her letters one at a time and returned them to the velvet bag. Her breast throbbed, nothing transcendent about the pain now. She reached for her cigarettes, not to burn herself again but just for a smoke.

A boy walked through the children’s library carrying a sparkler.

She saw him through the clouded glass of the old fish tank, a black figure against the paler darkness of the room beyond. As he walked, he swung his right arm and the sparkler spit a hot copper spray, drew red lines in the gloom. He was there for only a moment and then moved out of sight, carrying his sputtering torch with him.

Maggie leaned toward the fish tank to bang on the glass, scare the shit out of him and run him off, then remembered Vic and caught herself. Kids broke in to throw firecrackers and smoke cigarettes and cover the walls in graffiti, and she hated it. She had once come across a squad of teenagers down in the stacks, passing a jay around a campfire made of old hardcovers, and she had turned into a crazy woman, chasing them out with a busted chair leg, aware that if the peeling wallpaper caught fire, she would lose her last, best home. Book burners! she had screamed at them, and for once she had not stuttered at all. Book burners! I’ll cut off your balls and rape your women! It was five to one, but they had fled before her as if they’d seen a ghost. Sometimes she thought she was a ghost, that she had really died in the flood, died with the library and just hadn’t realized it yet.

She had a last look at Vic, huddled on the couch, fists balled under her chin. This time Maggie couldn’t help herself. The door was over there, close to the couch, and as Maggie went by, she paused, and bent over, and kissed her temple, lightly. In sleep one corner of Vic’s mouth turned up in a wry smile.

Maggie went looking for the boy in the shadows. She stepped out into what had once been the children’s library and eased the door shut behind her. The carpet had been peeled up into mildewed strips and rolled over against the wall in a series of stinking bundles. The floor beneath was wet concrete. Half of an enormous globe occupied one corner of the room, the northern hemisphere upended and filled with water and pigeon feathers, sides streaked with bird crap. America turned upside down and shit on. She noticed, absentmindedly, that she was still carrying her bag of Scrabble tiles, had forgotten to put them back in the desk. Dumb.

She heard a sound not unlike butter sizzling in a pan, off somewhere to her right. Maggie started around the U-shaped walnut desk, where once she had signed out Coraline and The House with a Clock in Its Walls and Harry Potter. As she approached the stone gallery that led back to the central building, she saw a leaping yellow glare.

The boy stood at the far end of the gallery with his sparkler. A small, stocky black figure, hood pulled up to hide his face. He stood staring, his sparkler pointed down at the floor, pouring sparks and smoke. In the other hand was a long silver can of something. She smelled wet paint.

“.myself stop can’t I,” he said, in a hoarse, strange voice, and laughed.

“What?” she said. “Kid, get out of here with that.”

He shook his head and turned and wandered away, this child of shadow, moving like a figure in a dream, lighting a path into some cavern of the unconscious. He swayed drunkenly, almost careening off one wall. He was drunk. Maggie could smell the beer from here.

“Hey!” she said.

He disappeared. Somewhere ahead she heard echoing laughter. In the remote gloom of the periodicals room, she saw a new light—the guttering, sullen glare of a fire.

She began to run. She kicked syringes and bottles clattering across the concrete floor, ran past boarded-over windows. Someone, the kid possibly, had spray-painted a message in red on the wall to her right: GOD BURNED ALIVE ONLY DEV1LS NOW. The paint was still dripping, bright red, as if the walls were bleeding.

She ran into the periodicals room, a space as big as a modest-size chapel and with ceilings just as high. During the flood it had been a shallow Sargasso, a scum of magazines covering the water, a swollen mass of National Geographics and New Yorkers. Now it was a big, bare cement chamber with dried, hardened newspapers stuck to floors and walls, rotten piles of magazines drifted in the corners, some sleeping bags spread where bums had camped out—and a wire trash can, boiling with greasy smoke. The drunk little bastard had dropped his sparkler in it on top of a mess of paperbacks and magazines. Green and orange sparks spit from somewhere deep inside the burning nest. Maggie saw a copy of Fahrenheit 451 shriveling and blackening.

The boy considered her from the far side of the room, from within a dark, high stone archway.

“Hey!” she screamed again. “Hey, you little shit!”

“.late too it’s but ,can I as hard as fighting I’m,” he said, rocking from side to side. “.me follow don’t ,please ,please ,Please”

“Hey!” she said, not listening, unable to listen, none of it making any sense anyway.

She looked around for something to smother the flames, snatched up one of the sleeping bags, blue and slippery and smelling faintly of puke. She held her Scrabble sack under one arm while she crammed the sleeping bag in on top of the flames, pressing down hard, choking the fire. She flinched from the heat and the smell, an odor of cooked phosphorous and burned metal and charring nylon.

When she looked up again, the boy was gone.

“Get the f*ck out of my library, you little creep! Get the f*ck gone before I catch up to you!”

He laughed somewhere. It was hard to tell where he was. His laughter was a breathless, echoing, untraceable sound, like a bird flapping its wings high in the rafters of some abandoned church. She thought, randomly, God burned alive, only devils now.

She went on toward the lobby, her legs shaking. If she caught the crazy, drunk little bastard, he would not think God had burned alive. He would think God was a dyke librarian, and he would know the fear of her.

Maggie was halfway across the periodicals room when the rocket went off with a great whistling scream. That sound was a jolt straight to the nerve endings, made her want to scream herself and dive for cover. Instead she ran, ducked low like a soldier under fire, all the breath shooting out of her.

She made it to the vast central room, with the sixty-foot-high ceilings, in time to see the bottle rocket hit the roof, spin, bounce off an arch, and ricochet down toward the dull marble floor: a missile of emerald flame and crackling sparks. A chemical-smelling smoke coiled throughout the room. Embers of fey green light tumbled from above, falling like flakes of some infernal, radioactive snow. Burn the place down—the f*cking pint-size lunatic was in here to burn the place down. The rocket was still flying, hit the wall to her right, and exploded in a bright, fizzling flash, with a crack like a gunshot, and she shouted and ducked and covered the side of her face. An ember touched the bare skin of her right forearm, and she flinched at the sharp stab of pain.

In the far room, the reading room, the boy laughed breathlessly and ran on.

The rocket was out, but the smoke in the lobby still flickered, glowing an unearthly jade hue.

Maggie charged after him, beyond thought now, rattled and angry and afraid. The boy couldn’t escape through the front door—that was locked from the outside with a chain—but there was a fire door in the reading room that the bums kept propped open. Beyond was the eastern parking lot. She could catch him there. She didn’t know what she’d do with him when she had her hands on him, and a part of her was scared to find out. As she hit the reading room, she saw the door to the outside already settling shut.

“You shit,” she whispered. “You shit.”

She slammed through the door and out into the parking lot. Across the paved expanse, a single functioning streetlamp cast a nimbus of light. The center of the lot was brightly lit, but the edges were in darkness. The boy waited beside the lamppost. Little bastard had another sparkler going and was standing not far from a Dumpster filled with books.

“Are you out of your goshdarn mind?” Maggie said.

The boy shouted, “I see you through my magic window!” He drew a burning hoop in the air, at the level of his face. “Now your head is burning!”

“You st-st-start a fire in there and someone could get killed, you little a*shole!” Maggie said. “Like you!”

She was short of breath and trembling, and her extremities prickled strangely. She clutched her Scrabble bag in one sweat-damp hand. She began stalking across the lot. Behind her the fire door clicked shut. Goddamn it. The kid had kicked away the stone that kept it from locking. She’d need to go all the way around the building to get back inside now.

“Look!” the child cried. “Look! I can write in flames!”

He slashed the tip of the sparkler in the air, a white spoke of light so intense it left a glowing afterimage on Maggie’s optic nerve, creating the illusion of pulsing letters in the air.

R

U

N

“Who are you?” she asked, swaying a little herself, catching in place halfway across the lot—not sure she had just seen what she thought she’d seen. That he had spelled what she thought he’d spelled.

“Look! I can make a snowflake! I can make Christmas in July!” And he drew a snowflake in the air.

Her arms bristled with gooseflesh.

“Wayne?”

“Yes?”

“Oh, Wayne,” she said. “Oh, God.”

A pair of headlights snapped on in the shadows beyond the Dumpster, off to her right. A car idled along the curb, an old car with close-set headlamps, so black she had not seen it in the greater darkness around it.

“Hello!” called a voice from somewhere behind those headlights. He was on the passenger side of the car—no, wait, the driver’s side; it was all reversed on a British car. “What a night to go driving! Come on over, Ms. Margaret Leigh! It is Margaret Leigh, isn’t it? You look just like your photograph in the paper!”

Maggie squinted into the headlights. She was telling herself to move, get out of the middle of the parking lot, but her legs were stuck in place. The fire door was an impossible distance away, twelve steps that might as well have been twelve hundred, and anyway, she had heard it clap shut behind her.

It occurred to her that there was, at best, a minute or so left to her life. She asked herself if she was ready for it. Thoughts darted like sparrows racing in the dusk just when she most desperately wanted her mind to be still.

He doesn’t know Vic is here, she thought.

And: Get the boy. Get the boy and get him away.

And: Why doesn’t Wayne just run?

Because he couldn’t anymore. Because he didn’t know he was supposed to. Or he knew but couldn’t act on it.

But he had tried to tell her to run, had written it in flame, on the darkness. Had maybe even been trying, in his garbled way, to warn her in the library.

“Mr. Manx?” Maggie called, still unable to move her feet.

“You have been looking for me all your life, Ms. Leigh!” he shouted. “Well! Here I am at last! I am sure you have lots of questions for me. I know I have lots of questions for you! Come sit with us. Come have an ear of corn!”

“Let the b-b-b-b—” Maggie began, then choked up, couldn’t force it out, her tongue as helpless as her legs. She wanted to say, Let the boy go, but her stammer wouldn’t let her have that.

“C-c-cat got your t-t-tongue?” Manx shouted.

“F*ck you,” she said. There. That came out clean and clear. And f had always been one of her toughest letters.

“Get over here, you scrawny bitch,” Charlie Manx said. “Get in the car. Either you’re riding with us or we’re riding over you. Last chance.”

She breathed deeply and smelled waterlogged books, the perfume of rotting cardboard and paper that had dried beneath the furnace of the July sun. If a single breath could summarize an entire life, she supposed that would do. It was almost time.

It came to her then that she had nothing left to say to Manx. She had said it all. She turned her head and fixed her gaze on Wayne.

“You have to run, Wayne! Run and hide!”

His sparkler had gone out. A grimy smoke trickled away from it.

“Why would I do that?” he said. “.sorry I’m” He coughed. His frail shoulders jumped. “We’re going to Christmasland tonight! It’s going to be fun! .sorry so I’m” He coughed again, then shrieked, “How about you run instead! That would be a fun game! !myself to on hold can’t I”

Tires whined shrilly on the asphalt. Her paralysis broke. Or maybe she had never been paralyzed. Maybe her muscles and nerves—the meat and wiring—had always understood what the conscious mind didn’t want to know, that it was already too late to get out of the way. She bolted across the lot, toward Wayne, some unformed, absurd notion in her head that she could get to him, pull him into the woods, into safety. She crossed in front of the Wraith. An icy light rose around her. The engine roared. She glanced sidelong, thinking, Please let me be ready, and the car was there, the grille so close that her heart seemed to fill her mouth. He was not aiming the Rolls at her but instead rushing up alongside and past her. He had one hand on the wheel and was stretching his upper body out the open window. The wind sucked his black hair back from his high, bare brow. His eyes were wide and avid with hilarity, and there was a look of triumphant joy stamped across his face. In his right hand, he held a silver hammer as big as God.

She did not feel the mallet connect with the back of her neck. There was a sound, like she had stepped on a lightbulb, a pop and a crack. She saw a flash, a white, brilliant blink of light. Her fedora whirled away like a tossed Frisbee. Her feet continued racing over the blacktop, but when she looked down they were pedaling in air. She had been lifted right off the ground.

Maggie hit the side of the car as she came down. She spun and struck the asphalt and rolled, arms flying. She went over and over and wound up against the far curb, on her back. Her cheek was pressed to the rough blacktop. Poor Maggie, Maggie thought, with genuine if somewhat muted sympathy.

She found she could not lift her head or even turn it. At the periphery of her vision, she could see that her left leg was bent inward at the knee, the hinge folding in a direction in which it was never meant to go.

Her velvet sack of letters had hit near her head and vomited tiles across the parking lot. She saw an H, an M, a U, some other letters. You could spell HUM with that. Do you know you’re dying, Ms. Leigh? No, but HUM a few bars and I’ll fake it, she thought, and coughed in a way that might’ve been laughter. She blew a pink bubble from her lips. When had her mouth got all full of blood?

Wayne stepped down into the parking lot, swinging his arms back and forth. His face had a white, sick gleam to it, but he was smiling to show a mouthful of shiny new teeth. Tears tracked down his face.

“You look funny,” he said. “That was funny!” Blinking at tears. He wiped the back of one hand, thoughtlessly, across his face, spreading a bright streak across his downy cheek.

The car idled, ten feet away. The driver’s-side door opened. Boots scraped on the blacktop.

“I did not think there was anything funny about her falling into the side of the Wraith!” Manx said. “There is one hell of a dent in the side of my Wraith now. To be fair, there is a bigger dent in this scrawny bitch. Back in the car, Wayne. We have to make some miles if we’re going to reach Christmasland before sunup.”

Wayne sank to one knee beside her. His tears had left red lines on his pale cheeks.

Your mother loves you, Maggie imagined telling him, but all that came out was a wheeze and blood. She tried to tell him with her eyes instead. She wants you back. Maggie reached for his hand, and Wayne took hers and squeezed.

“.sorry I’m,” he said. “.it help Couldn’t”

“’S all right,” she whispered, not really saying it, just moving her lips.

Wayne let go of her hand. “You rest,” he said to her. “You just rest here. Dream something nice. Dream about Christmasland!”

He hopped to his feet and trotted out of sight. A door opened. A door closed.

Maggie’s gaze shifted to Manx’s boots. He was almost standing on her scattering of Scrabble tiles. She could see other letters now: a P, an R, a T, an I. Could make TRIP with that. I think he broke my neck—what a TRIP! she thought, and smiled again.

“What are you smiling about?” Manx asked, his voice shuddering with hate. “You have nothing to smile about! You are going to be dead, and I am going to be alive. You could’ve lived, too, you know. For another day anyway. There were things I wanted to know . . . like who else you told about me. I wanted—Don’t you look away from me when I am talking to you!”

She had shut her eyes. She didn’t want to stare at his upside-down face from here on the ground. It wasn’t that he was ugly. It was that he was stupid. It was the way his mouth hung open to show his overbite and his crooked brown teeth. It was the way his eyes bulged from his skull.

He put his boot in her stomach. If there was any justice, she wouldn’t have been able to feel it, but there was no justice and never had been, and she screamed. Who knew you could hurt so bad and not pass out from it?

“You listen, now. You did not have to die like this! I am not such a bad fellow! I am a friend to children and wish no ill will on anyone except those who would try to stop my work! You did not have to line up against me. But you did, and look where it has got you. I am going to live forever, and so is the boy. We will be living the good life while you are turning to dirt in a box. And—”

She got it then. Strung the letters together, saw what they spelled. She got it, and she made a huffing sound, blowing a spray of blood on Manx’s boots. It was an unmistakable sound: the sound of laughter.

Manx scuttled backward half a foot, as if she had tried to bite him.

“What’s funny? What’s so funny about you dying and me living? I am going to drive away, and no one is going to stop me, and you are going to bleed to death here, and where is the big laugh in that?”

She tried to tell him. She moved her lips in the shape of the word. But all she could do was wheeze and spray more blood. She had lost all power of speech, and at this notion she felt a sweet tingle of relief. No more stammering. No more trying desperately to make herself understood while her tongue refused to cooperate.

Manx rose to his full height, kicking the letters as he stood, scattering them, scattering what they spelled, if you took the time to see how to put them together: TRIUMPH.

He walked quickly away, pausing only to collect her hat from the pavement, dust off the brim, and set it on his own head. A door slammed. The radio turned on. She heard the jingle of Christmas bells and a warm, male voice singing, “Dashing through the snow . . .”

The car jolted into gear and started to move. Maggie closed her eyes.

TRIUMPH: 45 points if you could line it up with the triple word and a double letter. TRIUMPH, Maggie thought. Vic wins.





Hampton Beach, New Hampshire


VIC PUSHED THROUGH THE DOOR INTO TERRY’S PRIMO SUBS, WHERE the air was warm and damp and heavy with the smell of onion rings broiling in the deep-fat fryer.

Pete was working the counter—good old Pete, his face badly sunburned, a line of zinc down his nose.

“I know what you’re here for,” Pete said, reaching under the counter. “I’ve got something for you.”

“No,” Vic said. “I don’t give a f*ck about my mother’s bracelet. I’m looking for Wayne. Did you see Wayne?”

It confused her to find herself back in Terry’s, ducking under the ribbons of flypaper. Pete couldn’t help her find Wayne. She was angry with herself, wasting time here when she needed to be out there looking for her boy.

A police siren shrieked out on the avenue. Maybe someone had seen the Wraith. Maybe they had found her son.

“No,” Pete said. “It’s not a bracelet. It’s something else.” He ducked behind the cash register, then stood up and put a silver hammer down on the counter. There was blood and hair stuck to the business end.

Vic felt the dream drawing tight around her, as if the world were a giant cellophane bag and it was suddenly wrinkling and pulling in from all sides.

“No,” Vic said. “I don’t want it. That’s not what I came for. That’s no good.”

Outside, the police siren cut off with a strangled squonk!

“I think it’s good,” said Charlie Manx, his hand on the crosshatched handle. It had been Charlie Manx on the other side of the counter all along, Charlie Manx dressed like a cook, in a bloodstained apron and a cocked white hat, a line of zinc down his bony nose. “And what’s good stays good, no matter how many heads you split open with it.”

He lifted the hammer, and Vic screamed and threw herself back from him and right out of the dream, into