NOS4A2 A Novel

NorChemPharm


BING KNEW THAT THE MAN FROM CHRISTMASLAND WAS COMING, well before Charlie Manx showed up to ask Bing to take a ride with him. He knew, too, that the man from Christmasland would not be a man like other men and that a job with Christmasland security would not be a job like other jobs, and on these matters he was not disappointed.

He knew because of the dreams, which seemed to him more vivid and real than anything that ever happened to him in the course of his waking life. He could never step into Christmasland in these dreams, but he could see it out his windows and out his door. He could smell the peppermint and cocoa, and he could see the candles burning in the ten-story Christmas tree, and he could hear the karts bashing and crashing on the sprawling old wooden Sleighcoaster. He could hear the music, too, and how the children screamed. If you didn’t know better, you would think they were being butchered alive.

He knew because of the dreams, but also because of the car. The next time he saw it, he was at work, out on the loading dock. Some kids had tagged the back of the building, had spray-painted a big black cock and balls, spewing black jizz on a pair of great red globes that might’ve been boobs but that looked, to Bing’s eye, like Christmas ornaments. Bing was outside in his rubber hazmat suit and industrial gasmask, with a bucket of diluted lye, to peel the paint off the wall with a wire brush.

Bing loved working with lye, loved to watch it melt the paint away. Denis Loory, the autistic kid who worked the morning shift, said you could use lye to melt a human person down to grease. Denis Loory and Bing had put a dead bat in a bucket of lye and left it one day, and the next morning there had been nothing in there but fake-looking semitransparent bones.

He stepped back to admire his work. The balls had mostly vanished to reveal the raw red brick beneath; only the big black prick and the boobs remained. As he stared at the wall, he saw, all of a sudden, his shadow appear, crisp, sharply delineated against the rough brick.

He turned on his heel to look behind him, and the black Rolls was there: It was parked on the other side of the chain-link fence, its high, close-set headlights glaring at him.

You could look at birds all your life without ever knowing what was a sparrow and what was a blackbird, but we all know a swan when we see it. So it was with cars. Maybe you could not tell a Firebird from a Fiero, but when you saw a Rolls-Royce, you knew it.

Bing smiled to see it and felt his heart fill with a rush of blood, and he thought, Now. He will open the door, and he will say, “Are you the young man, Bing Partridge, who wrote about a job at Christmasland?”—and my life will begin. My life will begin at last.

The door did not open, though . . . not then. The man behind the wheel—Bing could not see his face past the brilliance of the headlights—did not call out or roll down his window. He flashed his high beams, though, in genial greeting, before turning the car in a wide circle, to point it away from the NorChemPharm building.

Bing removed his gasmask, put it under his arm. He was flushed, and the cool, shady air was pleasant on his exposed skin. Bing could hear Christmas music trickling from the car. “Joy to the World.” Yes. He felt that way, exactly.

He wondered if the man behind the wheel wanted him to come. To leave his mask, leave his bucket of lye, slip around the fence, and climb into the passenger seat. But no sooner had he taken a step forward than the car began to ease away up the road.

“Wait!” Bing cried. “Don’t go! Wait!”

The sight of the Rolls leaving him—of that license plate, NOS4A2, shrinking steadily as the car glided away—shocked him.

In a state of dizzy, almost panicked excitement, Bing screamed, “I’ve seen it! I’ve seen Christmasland! Please! Give me a chance! Please come back!”

The brake lights flashed. The Rolls slowed for a moment, as if Bing had been heard—and then glided on.

“Give me a chance!” he shouted. Then, screaming: “Just give me a chance!”

The Rolls slid away down the road, turned the corner, and was gone, left Bing flushed and damp with sweat and his heart clapping in his chest.

He was still standing there when the foreman, Mr. Paladin, stepped out on the loading dock for a smoke.

“Hey, Bing, there’s still quite a bit of cock on this wall,” he called. “You working this morning or are you on vacation?”

Bing stared forlornly down the road.

“Christmas vacation,” he said, but in a low voice so Mr. Paladin couldn’t hear him.


HE HAD NOT SEEN THE ROLLS IN A WEEK, WHEN THEY CHANGED HIS schedule and he had to pull a double at NorChemPharm, six to six. It was ungodly hot in the storerooms, so hot that the iron tanks of compressed gas would sear you if you brushed up against them. Bing caught his usual bus home, a forty-minute ride, the vents blowing stinky air and an infant squalling the whole way.

He got off on Fairfield Street and walked the last three blocks. The air was no longer gas but liquid—a liquid close to boiling. It streamed up off the softening blacktop and filled the air with distortion, so that the line of houses at the end of the block wavered like reflections bobbing in a pool of unsteady water.

“Heat, heat, go away,” Bing sang to himself. “Boil me some other—”

The Rolls sat across the street, in front of his house. The man behind the wheel leaned out of the right-hand window and twisted his head to look back at Bing and smiled, one old friend to another. He motioned with a long-fingered hand: Hurry up now.

Bing’s own hand shot into the air helplessly in a nervous return wave, and he came on down the street in a jiggling fat man’s jog. It rattled him in some way, to find the Rolls idling there. A part of him had believed that eventually the man from Christmasland would come for him. Another part, however, had begun to worry that the dreams and his occasional sightings of The Car were like crows circling over something sick and close to collapse: his mind. Every step he took toward NOS4A2, he was that much more certain it would begin to move, to sail away and vanish yet again. It didn’t.

The man in the passenger seat was not sitting in the passenger seat at all, because of course the Rolls-Royce was an old English car, and the steering wheel was on the right-hand side. This man, the driver, smiled benevolently upon Bing Partridge. At first glance Bing knew that although this man might have passed for forty or so, he was much older than that. His eyes had the soft, faded look of sea glass; they were old eyes, unfathomably old. He had a long, harrowed face, wise and kindly, although he had an overbite and his teeth were a little crooked. It was the sort of face, Bing supposed, that some people would describe as ferretlike, but in profile it also would’ve looked just fine on currency.

“Here he is!” cried the man behind the wheel. “It is the eager young Bing Partridge! The man of the hour! We are overdue for a conversation, young Partridge! The most important conversation of your life, I’ll bet!”

“Are you from Christmasland?” Bing asked in a hushed voice.

The old or maybe ageless man laid a finger to one side of his nose. “Charles Talent Manx the Third at your service, my dear! CEO of Christmasland Enterprises, director of Christmasland Entertainment, president of fun! Also His Eminence, the King Shit of Turd Hill, although it doesn’t say that on my card.” His fingers snapped and produced a card out of thin air. Bing took it and looked down at it.

“You can taste those candy canes if you lick the card,” Charlie said.

Bing stared for a moment, then lapped his rough tongue across the card. It tasted of paper and pasteboard.

“Kidding!” Charlie cried, and socked Bing in the arm. “Who do you think I am, Willy Wonka? Come around! Get in! Why, son, you look like you are about to melt into a puddle of Bing juice! Let me take you for a bottle of pop! We have something important to discuss!”

“A job?” Bing asked.

“A future,” Charlie said.