Larry left around five o'clock. His parting from Harold was friendly; Harold shook his hand, grinned, told him to come back often. But Larry had somehow gotten the feeling that Harold could give a shit if he never came back.
He walked slowly down the cement path to the sidewalk and turned to wave, but Harold had already gone back inside. The door was shut. It had been very cool in the house because the venetian blinds were drawn, and inside that had seemed all right, but standing outside it occurred to him suddenly that it was the only house he'd been inside in Boulder where the blinds and curtains were drawn. But of course, he thought, there were still plenty of houses in Boulder where the shades were drawn. They were the houses of the dead. When they got sick, they had drawn their curtains against the world. They had drawn them and died in privacy, like any animal in its last extremity prefers to do. The living - maybe in subconscious acknowledgment of that fact of death - threw their shutters and their curtains wide.
He had a slight headache from the wine, and he tried to tell himself that the chill he felt came from that, part of a little hangover, righteous punishment administered for guzzling good wine as if it was cheap muscatel. But that wouldn't quite get it - no, it wouldn't. He stared up and down the street and thought: Thank God for tunnel vision. Thank God for selective perception. Because without it, we might as well all be in a Lovecraft story.
His thoughts became confused. He became suddenly convinced that Harold was peeping at him from between the slats of his blinds, his hands opening and closing in a strangler's grip, his grin turned into a leer of hatred... Every dog has its day. At the same time he was remembering the night in Bennington, sleeping on the stage of the bandshell, waking up to the horrible feeling that someone was there... and then hearing (or only dreaming it?) the dusty sound of bootheels moving off to the west.
Stop it. Stop freaking yourself out.
Boot Hill, his mind free-associated. Chrissake, just stop it, wish I'd never thought about the dead people, the dead people behind all those closed blinds and pulled drapes and shut curtains, in the dark, like in the tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel, Christ, what if they all started to move, to stir around, Holy God, cut it out -
And suddenly he found himself thinking of a trip to the Bronx Zoo with his mother when he had been small. They had gone into the monkey-house and the smell in there had hit him like a physical thing, a fist driven not just at his nose but into it. He had turned to bolt out of there, but his mother had stopped him.
Just breathe normal, Larry, she had said. In five minutes you won't notice that nasty smell at all.
So he had stayed, not believing her, just fighting not to puke (even at the age of seven, he had hated to puke worse than anything), and it turned out she was right. When he looked down at his watch the next time, he saw that they had been in the monkey-house for half an hour, and he couldn't understand why the ladies who came in the door were suddenly clapping their hands over their noses and looking disgusted. He said as much to his mother, and Alice Underwood had laughed.
Oh, it still smells bad, all right. Just not to you.
How come, Mommy?
I don't know. Everybody can do it. Now just say to yourself, "I'm going to smell how the monkey-house REALLY is again," and take a deep breath.
So he did, and the stink was there, the stink was even bigger and badder than it had been when they first came in, and his hotdogs and cherry pie started to come up on him again in one big sickening whipped bubble, and he had charged for the door and the fresh air beyond it and managed - barely - to hold everything down.
That's selective perception, he thought now, and she knew what it was even if she didn't know what it's called. This thought had no more than completed itself in his mind before he heard his mother's voice saying, Just say to your self, "I'm going to smell how Boulder REALLY smells again." And he was smelling it - just like that, he was smelling it. He was smelling what was behind all the closed doors and drawn shades and pulled blinds, he was smelling the slow corruption that was going on even in this place which had died almost empty.
He walked faster, not running but getting closer and closer to it, smelling that fruity, rich reek which he - and everyone else - had stopped consciously smelling because it was everywhere, it was everything, it was coloring their thoughts, and you didn't pull your shades even if you were making love because the dead lie behind drawn shades and the living still want to look out on the world.
It wanted to come up on him, not hotdogs and cherry pie now but wine and a Payday candy bar. Because this was one monkey-house he was never going to be able to get out of, not unless he moved to an island where no one had ever lived, and even though he still hated to puke worse than anything, he was going to now -