He became aware then, as if it had materialized out of nowhere, of the roar of a panel truck as it crossed the bridge. The rumble sent a chill through him, a frisson of fear. Strangely, his wife came to mind, and he hoped she was all right, hoped that whatever stranger she had taken to her bed the night before had been kind to her, tender, and had not given her what she craved. He turned his back to the vehicle, but its wake of cold air blasted over him. He wiped the dampness from the corner of his eye.
The troopers were watching him, waiting. Their stillness angered him. But he bit down hard on his anger. It was an old anger, he knew, and misdirected. “All right, let’s get to it!” he shouted. “I want Thomas Huston sitting in the back of my vehicle, alive and well and cuffed, by the time the sun goes down on this fine October day.”
Three
On a low hillock nearly a hundred yards back from the water, in a shallow cave beneath an overhanging rock, a depression only five feet wide, two feet high, and maybe three feet deep, behind three boughs of spruce he had broken off and dragged to the cave at dusk the night before, Thomas Huston lay curled tight, his knees drawn close to his chest. Through the fragrant needles, he watched a thin light seeping into the forest. He knew that if he stretched his legs, numb from lack of movement, both feet tingling, a chill would rattle through him, cutting all the way to the bone. Then he would have to crawl out of his burrow, climb to his feet like a human being, try to make some sense of the world. This, he did not want to do. He did not feel capable of either the necessary decisions or the action. He believed that if he moved, he would probably start vomiting again, and there was nothing left in his stomach to expel. There was only blood and bile, the viscera itself, though he felt himself to be eviscerated already, as hollowed out as the four Cornish game hens he had made for dinner on Saturday night, the last meal he had prepared; those four tiny carcasses he had rinsed in cold water, patted dry, stuffed with bread crumbs and mushrooms spiced with sage and basil and thyme. No, he would not mind dry heaving if it resulted in unconsciousness, if he could annihilate all sentience through dry heaving, send himself into oblivion. He had only to let one of the four horrible images float to the surface of his mind and a pain like none he had ever experienced would seize him and double him up again, twist him into a rigid knot of agony whose only release, short-lived and painful itself, would be an animallike scream.
Think about dinner, he told himself, the last time you had anything to eat. Go back to where it started. Think it all through.
The four naked little birds lay lined up on a cutting board, their chests split open. A handful of stuffing. Slip it inside, work it in snugly. The scents of sweet basil and chopped onion. The heat rising from the oven. In the living room, sitting cross-legged around the coffee table, Claire and Tommy and Lissie played Monopoly. Tommy was the real estate baron; he snapped up every property he could get his hands on. And little Davy, sweet, tireless Davy—time after time after time after time, he pulled the string on his Barnyard See’n Say. The cow says Moo! The rooster says Cock-a-doodle-doo!
Yes, that was real. Saturday night was real. But the rest of it… How could it be?
Fricatives, he thought. Affricates. Diphthongs.
Those were the words he had turned over in his mind that night, first during dinner, then later, in bed with his wife. He had intended to write them down, add them to the list he was compiling for his protagonist. His protagonist was a logophile, a man who liked words for their sounds more than their meanings, a man who would walk around saying “fricatives” just for the pleasure of it. The words had come to Huston while he was thinking about his protagonist, trying to envision and create a nuanced portrait of him. As often happened when Huston got into the head of a character, words would come to him as if straight from the character’s mouth, words that Huston might have no conscious understanding of, no clear idea as to their meaning. He would hear the words and write them down and, as he had meant to do on Saturday night, would later look up their meanings to be certain he had used the words correctly. Invariably, he would discover that he had, and what a pleasing discovery it would be, this mystery of creation, this sense of story as a gift from somewhere else.
But on Saturday night, he had not had an opportunity to reassure himself as to the precise meanings of the new words his protagonist had given him. Now the protagonist was silent, and now Huston was numb with cold and hunger and disbelief, a man in a cave in a situation that could only be fictional, was too horrific to be believed.
The story had changed. No computer, no pen. No ink, no paper.
“Fricatives,” Huston whispered to the tangerine light as it bled through the spruce bows. “Affricates. Diphthongs.”
A click inside his head. A screen shot filling his field of vision. He winced and pulled away, turned his face to the dirt. Image as pain. Memory a thrust and stab, a thousand synchronized blades.