case. Look it up.
Until that moment, Jack had been barely conscious of remembering the outrages committed by the bizarre Mr. Albert Fish. Butchers more up-to-date — Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer — had eclipsed Albert Fish, not to mention exotics like Edmund Emil Kemper III, who, after committing eight murders, decapitated his mother, propped her head on his mantel, and used it as a dartboard. (By way of explanation, Edmund III said, "This seemed appropriate.") Yet the name of Albert Fish, an obscure back number, had surfaced in Jack's mind, and into Wendell Green's ready ear he had uttered it.
What had gotten into him? Well, that was the question, wasn't it?
Whoops, the omelette. Jack grabs a plate from a cabinet, silverware from a drawer, jumps to the stove, turns off the burner, and slides the mess in the pan onto his plate. He sits down and opens the Herald to page 5, where he reads about Milly Kuby's nearly winning third place at the big statewide spelling bee, but for the substitution of an i for an a in opopanax, the kind of thing that is supposed to be in a local paper. How can you expect a kid to spell opopanax correctly, anyhow?
Jack takes two or three bites of his omelette before the peculiar taste in his mouth distracts him from the monstrous unfairness done to Milly Kuby. The funny taste is like half-burned garbage. He spits the food out of his mouth and sees a wad of gray mush and raw, half-chewed vegetables. The uneaten part of his breakfast does not look any more appetizing. He did not cook this omelette; he ruined it.
He drops his head and groans. A shudder like a loose electrical wire travels here and there through his body, throwing off sparks that singe his throat, his lungs, his suddenly palpitating organs. Opopanax, he thinks. I'm falling apart. Right here and now. Forget I said that. The savage opopanax has gripped me in its claws, shaken me with the fearful opopanax of its opopanax arms, and intends to throw me into the turbulent Opopanax River, where I shall meet my opopanax.
"What is happening to me?" he says aloud. The shrill sound of his voice scares him.
Opopanax tears sting his opopanax eyes, and he gets groaning up off his opopanax, dumps the swill into the garbage disposal, rinses the plate, and decides that it is damn well time to start making sense around here. Opopanax me no opopanaxes. Everybody makes mistakes. Jack examines the door of the refrigerator, trying to remember if he still has an egg or two in there. Sure he does: a whole bunch of eggs, about nine or ten, had nearly filled the entire row of egg-shaped depressions at the top of the door. He could not have squandered all of them; he wasn't that out of it.
Jacks closes his fingers around the edge of the refrigerator door. Entirely unbidden, the vision of lights reflected on a black man's bald head.
Not you.
The person being addressed is not present; the person being addressed is scarcely a person at all.
No, no, not you.
The door swings open under the pressure of his fingers; the refrigerator light illuminates the laden shelves. Jack Sawyer regards the egg holders. They appear to be empty. A closer look reveals, nested within the rounded depression at the end of the first row, the presence of a small, egg-shaped object colored a pale and delicate shade of blue: a nostalgic, tender blue, quite possibly the half-remembered blue of a summer sky observed in early afternoon by a small boy lying face-up on the quarter acre of grass located behind a nice residential property on Rox-bury Drive in Beverly Hills, California. Whoever owns this residential property, boy, you can put your money on one thing: they're in the entertainment business.
Jack knows the name of this precise shade of blue due to an extended consideration of color samples undertaken in the company of Claire Evinrude, M.D., an oncologist of lovely and brisk dispatch, during the period when they were planning to repaint their then-shared bungalow in the Hollywood Hills. Claire, Dr. Evinrude, had marked this color for the master bedroom; he, recently returned from a big-deal, absurdly selective VICAP course of instruction at Quantico, Virginia, and newly promoted to the rank of lieutenant, had dismissed it as, um, well, maybe a little cold.