He runs faster, away from the chewed and bloody sneaker lying on the porch of the perfect house, away from his own horror. But that sense of coming climax stays with him. Faces begin to rise in his mind, each with its own accompanying snippet of sound track. Faces and voices he has ignored for twenty years or more. When these faces rise or those voices mutter, he has until now told himself the old lie, that once there was a frightened boy who caught his mother's neurotic terror like a cold and made up a story, a grand fantasy with good old Mom-saving Jack Sawyer at its center. None of it was real, and it was forgotten by the time he was sixteen. By then he was calm. Just as he's calm now, running across his north field like a lunatic, leaving that dark track and those clouds of startled moths behind him, but doing it calmly.
Narrow face, narrow eyes under a tilted white paper cap: If you can run me out a keg when I need one, you can have the job. Smokey Updike, from Oatley, New York, where they drank the beer and then ate the glass. Oatley, where there'd been something in the tunnel outside of town and where Smokey had kept him prisoner. Until —
Prying eyes, false smile, brilliant white suit: I've met you before, Jack . . . where? Tell me. Confess. Sunlight Gardener, an Indiana preacher whose name had also been Osmond. Osmond in some other world.
The broad, hairy face and frightened eyes of a boy who wasn't a boy at all: This is a bad place, Jacky, Wolf knows. And it was, it was a very bad place. They put him in a box, put good old Wolf in a box, and finally they killed him. Wolf died of a disease called America.
"Wolf!" the running man in the field gasps. "Wolf, ah, God, I'm sorry!"
Faces and voices, all those faces and voices, rising in front of his eyes, dinning into his ears, demanding to be seen and heard, filling him with that sense of climax, every defense on the verge of being washed away like a breakwater before a tidal wave.
Nausea roars through him and tilts the world. He makes that urking sound again, and this time it fills the back of his throat with a taste he remembers: the taste of cheap, rough wine. And suddenly it's New Hampshire again, Arcadia Funworld again. He and Speedy are standing beside the carousel again, all those frozen horses ("All carousel horses is named, don't you know that, Jack?"), and Speedy is holding out a bottle of wine and telling him it's magic juice, one little sip and he'll go over, flip over —
"No!" Jack cries, knowing it's already too late. "I don't want to go over!"
The world tilts the other way and he falls into the grass on his hands and knees with his eyes squeezed shut. He doesn't need to open them; the richer, deeper smells that suddenly fill his nose tell him everything he needs to know. That, and the sense of coming home after so many dark years when almost every waking motion and decision has in some way been dedicated to canceling (or at least postponing) the arrival of this very moment.
This is Jack Sawyer, ladies and gentlemen, down on his knees in a vast field of sweet grass under a morning sky untainted by a single particle of pollution. He is weeping. He knows what has happened, and he is weeping. His heart bursts with fear and joy.
This is Jack Sawyer twenty years along, grown to be a man, and back in the Territories again at last.
It is the voice of his old friend Richard — sometimes known as Rational Richard — that saves him. Richard as he is now, head of his own law firm (Sloat & Associates, Ltd.), not Richard as he was when Jack perhaps knew him best, during long vacation days on Seabrook Island, in South Carolina. The Richard of Seabrook Island had been imaginative, quick-spoken, fast on his feet, mop-topped, skinny as a morning shadow. The current Richard, Corporate Law Richard, is thinning on top, thick in the middle, much in favor of sitting and Bushmills. Also, he has crushed his imagination, so brilliantly playful in those Seabrook Island days, like a troublesome fly. Richard Sloat's life has been one of reduction, Jack has sometimes thought, but one thing has been added (probably in law school): the pompous, sheeplike sound of hesitation, particularly annoying on the phone, which is now Richard's vocal signature. This sound starts with the lips closed, then opens out as Richard's lips spring wide, making him look like an absurd combination of Vienna choirboy and Lord Haw-Haw.
Now, kneeling with his eyes shut in the vast green reach of what used to be his very own north field, smelling the new, deeper smells that he remembers so well and has longed for so fiercely without even realizing it, Jack hears Richard Sloat begin speaking in the middle of his head. What a relief those words are! He knows it's only his own mind mimicking Richard's voice, but it's still wonderful. If Richard were here, Jack thinks he'd embrace his old friend and say, May you pontificate forever, Richie-boy. Sheep bray and all.
Rational Richard says: You realize you're dreaming, Jack, don't you? . . . ba-haaaa . . . the stress of opening that package no doubt . . . ba-haaaa . . . no doubt caused you to pass out, and that in turn has caused . . . ba-HAAAA! . . . the dream you are having now.
Down on his knees, eyes still closed and hair hanging in his face, Jack says, "In other words, it's what we used to call — "
Correct! What we used to call . . . ba-haaaa . . . "Seabrook Island stuff." But Seabrook Island was a long time ago, Jack, so I suggest you open your eyes, get back on your feet, and remind yourself that should you see anything out of the ordinary . . . b'haa! . . . it's not really there.