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McGrath awoke suddenly, just in time to see a huge mouth filled with small, sharp teeth closing in his side. In an instant it was gone, even as he shook himself awake.
Had he not been staring at the flesh, at the moment his eyes opened from sleep, he would have missed the faintest pink line of closure that remained only another heartbeat, then faded and was gone, leaving no indication the mouth had ever existed; a second—secret—mouth hiding in his skin.
At first he was sure he had wakened from a particularly nasty dream. But the memory of the thing that had escaped from within him, through the mouth, was a real memory—not a wisp of fading nightmare.
He had felt the chilly passage of something rushing out of him. Like cold air from a leaking balloon. Like a chill down a hallway from a window left open in a distant room. And he had seen the mouth. It lay across the ribs vertically, just below his left nipple, running down to the bulge of fat parallel to his navel. Down his left side there had been a lipless mouth filled with teeth; and it had been open to permit a breeze of something to leave his body.
McGrath sat up on the bed. He was shaking. The Tensor lamp was still on, the paperback novel tented open on the sheet beside him, his body naked and perspiring in the August heat. The Tensor had been
aimed directly at his side, bathing his flesh with light, when he had unexpectedly opened his eyes; and in that waking moment he had surprised his body in the act of opening its secret mouth.
He couldn't stop the trembling, and when the phone rang he had to steel himself to lift the receiver.
“Hello,” he heard himself say, in someone else's voice.
“Lonny,” said Victor Kayley's widow, “I'm sorry to disturb you at this hour...”
“It's okay,” he said. Victor had died the day before yesterday. Sally relied on him for the arrangements, and hours of solace he didn't begrudge. Years before, Sally and he ... then she drifted toward Victor, who had been McGrath's oldest, closest ... they were drawn to each other more and more sweetly till ... and finally, McGrath had taken them both to dinner at the old Steuben Tavern on West 47th, that dear old Steuben Tavern with its dark wood booths and sensational schnitzel, now gone, torn down and gone like so much else that was ... and he had made them sit side by side in the booth across from him, and he took their hands in his ... I love you both so much, he had said ... I see the way you move when you're around each other ... you're both my dearest friends, you put light in my world ... and he laid their hands together under his, and he grinned at them for their nervousness...
“Are you all right; you sound so, I don't know, so strained ?” Her voice was wide awake. But concerned.
“I'm, yeah, I'm okay. I just had the weirdest, I was dozing, fell asleep reading, and I had this, this weird —” He trailed off. Then went back at it, more sternly: “I'm okay. It was a scary dream.”
There was, then, a long measure of silence between them. Only the open line, with the sound of ions decaying.
“Are you okay?” he said, thinking of the funeral service day after tomorrow. She had asked him to select the casket. The anodized pink aluminum “unit” they had tried to get him to go for, doing a bait-and-switch, had nauseated him. McGrath had settled on a simple copper casket, shrugging away suggestions by the Bereavement Counselor in the Casket Selection Parlor that “consideration and thoughtfulness for the departed” might better be served by the Monaco, a “Duraseal metal unit with Sea Mist Polished Finish, interior richly lined in 600 Aqua Supreme Cheney velvet, magnificently quilted and shirred, with matching jumbo bolster and coverlet.”
“I couldn't sleep,” she said. “I was watching television, and they had a thing about the echidna, the Australian anteater, you know...?” He made a sound that indicated he knew. “And Vic never got over the trip we took to the Flinders Range in ‘82, and he just loved the Australian animals, and I turned in the bed to see him smiling...”
She began to cry.
He could feel his throat closing. He knew. The turning to tell your best friend something you'd just seen together, to get the reinforcement, the input, the expression on his face. And there was no face. There was emptiness in that place. He knew. He'd turned to Victor three dozen times in the past two days. Turned, to confront emptiness. Oh, he knew, all right.
“Sally,” he murmured. “Sally, I know; I know.”
She pulled herself together, snuffled herself unclogged and cleared her throat. “It's okay. I'm fine. It was just a second there...”
“Try to get some sleep. We have to do stuff tomorrow.”
“Of course,” she said, sounding really quite all right. “I'll go back to bed. I'm sorry.” He told her to shut up, if you couldn't call a friend at that hour to talk about the echidna, who the hell could you call?
“Jerry Falwell,” she said. “If I have to annoy someone at three in the morning, better it should be a shit like him.” They laughed quickly and emptily, she said good night and told him he had been much loved by both of them, he said I know that, and they hung up.
Lonny McGrath lay there, the paperback still tented at his side, the Tensor still warming his flesh, the sheets still soggy from the humidity, and he stared at the far wall of the bedroom on whose surface, like the surface of his skin, there lay no evidence whatever of secret mouths filled with teeth.
*	* * *
“I can't get it out of my mind.”
Dr. Jess ran her fingers down his side, looked closer. “Well, it is red; but that's more chafing than anything out of Stephen King.”
“It's red because I keep rubbing it. I'm getting obsessive about it. And don't make fun, Jess. I can't get it out of my mind.”
She sighed and raked a hand back through her thick auburn hair. “Sorry.” She got up and walked to the window in the examination room. Then, as an afterthought, she said, “You can get dressed.” She stared out the window as McGrath hopped off the physical therapy table, nearly catching his heel on the retractable step. He partially folded the stiff paper gown that had covered his lap, and laid it on the padded seat. As he pulled up his undershorts, Dr. Jess turned and stared at him. He thought for the hundredth time that his initial fears, years before, at being examined by a female physician, had been foolish. His friend looked at him with concern, but without the look that passed between men and women. “How long has it been since Victor died?”
“Three months, almost.”
“And Emily?”
“Six months.”
“And Steve and Melanie's son?”
“Oh, Christ, Jess!”
She pursed her lips. “Look, Lonny, I'm not a psychotherapist, but even I can see that the death of all these friends is getting to you. Maybe you don't even see it, but you used the right word: obsessive. No body can sustain so much pain, over so brief a period, the loss of so many loved ones, without going into a spiral.”
“What did the X-rays show?”
“I told you.”
“But there might've been some thing. Some lesion, or inflammation; an irregularity in the dermis ... some thing!”
“Lonny. Come on. I've never lied to you. You looked at them with me, did you see anything?” He sighed deeply, shook his head. She spread her hands as if to say, well, there you are, I can't make something sick where nothing sick exists. “I can work on your soft prostate, and I can give you a shot of cortisone in the ball joint where that cop worked you over; but I can't treat something out of a penny dreadful novel that doesn't leave any trace.”
“You think I need a shrink?”
She turned back to the window. “This is your third visit, Lonny. You're my pal, kiddo, but I think you need to get counseling of a different sort.”
McGrath knotted his tie and drew it up, spreading the wings of his shirt collar with his little fingers. She didn't turn around. “I'm worried about you, Lonny. You ought to be married.”
“I was married. You're not talking wife, anyway. You're talking keeper.” She didn't turn. He pulled on his jacket, and waited. Finally, with his hand on the doorknob, he said, “Maybe you're right. I've never been a melancholy sort, but all this ... so many, in so short a time ... maybe you're right.”
He opened the door. She looked out the window. “We'll talk.” He started out, and without turning, she said, “There won't be a charge for this visit.”
He smiled thinly, not at all happily. But she didn't see it. There is always a charge, of one kind or another.
*	* * *
He called Tommy and begged off from work. Tommy went into a snit. “I'm up to my ass, Lonny,” he said, affecting his Dowager Empress tone. “This is Black goddam Friday! The Eroica! That Fahrenheit woman, Farrenstock, whatever the hell it is...”
“Fahnestock,” Lonny said, smiling for the first time in days. “I thought we'd seen the last of her when you suggested she look into the possibility of a leper sitting on her face.”
Tommy sighed. “The grotesque bitch is simply a glutton. I swear to God she must be into bondage; the worse I treat her, the more often she comes in.”
“What'd she bring this time?”
“Another half dozen of those tacky petit-point things. I can barely bring myself to look at them. Bleeding martyrs and scenes of culturally depressed areas in, I suppose, Iowa or Indiana. Illinois, Idaho, I don't know: one of those places that begins with an I, teeming with people who bowl.”
Lonny always wound up framing Mrs. Fahnestock's gaucheries. Tommy always took one look, then went upstairs in back of the framing shop to lie down for a while. McGrath had asked the matron once, what she did with all of them. She replied that she gave them as gifts. Tommy, when he heard, fell to his knees and prayed to a God in which he did not believe that the woman would never hold him in enough esteem to feel he deserved such a gift. But she spent, oh my, how she spent.
“Let me guess,” McGrath said. “She wants them blocked so tightly you could bounce a dime off them, with a fabric liner, a basic pearl matte, and the black lacquer frame from Chapin Molding. Right?”
“Yes, of course, right. Which is another reason your slacker behavior is particularly distressing. The truck from Chapin just dropped off a hundred feet of the oval top walnut molding. It's got to be unpacked, the footage measured, and put away. You can't take the day off.”
“Tommy, don't whip the guilt on me. I'm a goy, remember?”
“If it weren't for guilt, the goyim would have wiped us out three thousand years ago. It's more effective than a Star Wars defense system.” He puffed air through his lips for a moment, measuring how much he would actually be inconvenienced by his assistant's absence. “Monday morning? Early?”
McGrath said, “I'll be there no later than eight o'clock. I'll do the petit-points first.”
“All right. And by the way, you sound awful. D'you know the worst part about being an Atheist?”
Lonny smiled. Tommy would feel it was a closed bargain if he could pass on one of his horrendous jokes. “No, what's the worst part about being an Atheist?”
“You've got no one to talk to when you're fucking.”
Lonny roared, silently. There was no need to give him the satisfaction. But Tommy knew. He couldn't see him, but Lonny knew he was grinning broadly at the other end of the line. “So long, Tommy. See you Monday.”
He racked the receiver in the phone booth and looked across Pico Boulevard at the office building. He had lived in Los Angeles for eleven years, since he and Victor and Sally had fled New York, and he still couldn't get used to the golden patina that lay over the days here. Except when it rained, at which times the inclemency seemed so alien he had visions of giant mushrooms sprouting from the sidewalks. The office building was unimpressive, just three storeys high and brick; but a late afternoon shadow lay across its face, and it recalled for him the eighteen frontal views of the Rouen Cathedral that Monet had painted during the winter months of 1892 and 1893: the same façade, following the light from early morning till sunset. He had seen the Monet exhibition at MOMA. Then he remembered with whom he had taken in that exhibition, and he felt again the passage of chill leaving his body through that secret mouth. He stepped out of the booth and just wanted to go somewhere and cry. Stop it! he said inside. Knock it off. He swiped at the corner of his eye, and crossed the street. He passed through the shadow that cut the sidewalk.
Inside the tiny lobby he consulted the glass-paneled wall register. Mostly, the building housed dentists and philatelists, as best he could tell. But against the ribbed black panel he read the little white plastic letters that had been darted in to include THE REM GROUP 306. He walked up the stairs.
To find 306, he had to make a choice: go left or go right. There were no office location arrows on the wall. He went to the right, and was pleased. As the numbers went down, he began to hear someone speaking rather loudly. “Sleep is of several kinds. Dream sleep, or rapid eye movement sleep—what we call REM sleep, and thus the name of our group—is predominantly found in mammals who bring forth living young, rather than eggs. Some birds and reptiles, as well.”
McGrath stood outside the glass-paneled door to 306, and he listened. Viviparous mammals, he thought. He could now discern that the speaker was a woman; and her use of “living young, rather than eggs” instead of viviparous convinced him she was addressing one or more laypersons. The echidna, he thought. A familiar viviparous mammal.
“We now believe dreams originate in the brain's neocortex. Dreams have been used to attempt to foretell the future. Freud used dreams to explore the unconscious mind. Jung thought dreams formed a bridge of communication between the conscious and the unconscious.” It wasn't a dream, McGrath thought. I was awake. I know the difference.
The woman was saying, “...those who try to make dreams work for them, to create poetry, to solve problems; and it's generally thought that dreams aid in consolidating memories. How many of you believe that if you can only remember the dream when you waken, that you will understand something very important, or regain some special memory you've lost?”
How many ofyou.McGrath now understood that the dream therapy group was in session. Late on a Friday afternoon? It would have to be women in their thirties, forties.
He opened the door, to see if he was correct.
With their hands in the air, indicating they believed the capturing of a dream on awakening would bring back an old memory, all six of the women in the room, not one of them older than forty, turned to stare at McGrath as he entered. He closed the door behind him, and said, “I don't agree. I think we dream to forget. And sometimes it doesn't work.”
He was looking at the woman standing in front of the six hand-raised members of the group. She stared back at him for a long moment, and all six heads turned back to her. Their hands were frozen in the air. The woman who had been speaking settled back till she was perched on the edge of her desk.
“Mr. McGrath?”
“Yes. I'm sorry I'm late. It's been a day.”
She smiled quickly, totally in command, putting him at ease. “I'm Anna Picket. Tricia said you'd probably be along today. Please grab a chair.”
McGrath nodded and took a folding chair from the three remaining against the wall. He unfolded it and set it at the far left of the semicircle. The six well-tended, expensively-coifed heads remained turned toward him as, one by one, the hands came down.
He wasn't at all sure letting his ex-wife call this Anna Picket, to get him into the group, had been such a good idea. They had remained friends after the divorce, and he trusted her judgment. Though he had never availed himself of her services after they'd separated and she had gone for her degree at UCLA, he'd been assured that Tricia was as good a family counseling therapist as one could find in Southern California. He had been shocked when she'd suggested a dream group. But he'd come: he had walked through the area most of the early part of the day, trying to decide if he wanted to do this, share what he'd experienced with total strangers; walked through the area stopping in at this shop and that boutique, having some gelato and shaking his head at how this neighborhood had been “gentrified,” how it had changed so radically, how all the wonderful little tradesmen who had flourished here had been driven out by geysering rents; walked through the area growing more and more despondent at how nothing lasted, how joy was drained away shop by shop, neighborhood by neighborhood, person by...
Until one was left alone.
Standing on an empty plain. The dark wind blowing from the horizon. Cold, empty dark: with the knowledge that a pit of eternal loneliness lay just over that horizon, and that the frightening wind that blew up out of the pit would never cease. That one would stand there, all alone, on the empty plain, as one after another of the ones you loved were erased in a second.
Had walked through the area, all day, and finally had called Tommy, and finally had allowed Tricia's wisdom to lead him, and here he sat, in a folding straight-back chair, asking a total stranger to repeat what she had just said.
“I asked why you didn't agree with the group, that remembering dreams is a good thing?” She arched an eyebrow, and tilted her head.
McGrath felt uncomfortable for a moment. He blushed. It was something that had always caused him embarrassment. “Well,” he said slowly, “I don't want to seem like a smart aleck, one of those people who reads some popularized bit of science and then comes on like an authority...”
She smiled at his consternation, the flush of his cheeks. “Please, Mr. McGrath, that's quite all right. Where dreams are concerned, we're all journeyists. What did you read?”
“The Crick-Mitchison theory. The paper on ‘unlearning.’ I don't know, it just seemed, well, reasonable to me.”
One of the women asked what that was.
Anna Picket said, “Dr. Sir Francis Crick, you'll know of him because he won the Nobel Prize for his work with DNA; and Graeme Mitchison, he's a highly respected brain researcher at Cambridge. Their experiments in the early 1980s. They postulate that we dream to forget, not to remember.”
“The best way I understood it,” McGrath said, “was using the analogy of cleaning out an office building at night, after all the workers are gone. Outdated reports are trashed, computer dump sheets are shredded, old memos tossed with the refuse. Every night our brains get cleaned during the one to two hours of REM sleep. The dreams pick up after us every day, sweep out the unnecessary, untrue, or just plain silly memories that could keep us from storing the important memories, or might keep us from rational thinking when we're awake. Remembering the dreams would be counter-productive, since the brain is trying to unlearn all that crap so we function better.”
Anna Picket smiled. “You were sent from heaven, Mr. McGrath. I was going precisely to that theory when you came in. You've saved me a great deal of explanation.”
One of the six women said, “Then you don't want us to write down our dreams and bring them in for discussion? I even put a tape recorder by the bed. For instance, I had a dream just last night in which my bicycle... ”
He sat through the entire session, listening to things that infuriated him. They were so self-indulgent, making of the most minor inconveniences in their lives, mountains impossible to conquer. They were so different from the women he knew. They seemed to be antiquated creatures from some primitive time, confused by changing times and the demand on them to be utterly responsible for their existence. They seemed to want succor, to be told that there were greater forces at work in their world; powers and pressures and even conspiracies that existed solely to keep them nervous, uncomfortable, and helpless. Five of the six were divorcées, and only one of the five had a full-time job: selling real estate. The sixth
was the daughter of an organized crime figure. McGrath felt no link with them. He didn't need a group therapy session. His life was as full as he wanted it to be ... except that he was now always scared, and lost, and constantly depressed. Perhaps Dr. Jess was dead on target. Perhaps he did need a shrink.
He was certain he did not need Anna Picket and her well-tailored ladies whose greatest real anguish was making sure they got home in time to turn on the sprinklers.
When the session ended, he started toward the door without saying anything to the Picket woman. She was surrounded by the six. But she gently edged them aside and called to him, “Mr. McGrath, would you wait a moment? I'd like to speak to you.” He took his hand off the doorknob, and went back to his chair. He bit the soft flesh of his inner cheek, annoyed.
She blew them off like dandelion fluff, far more quickly than McGrath thought possible, and did it without their taking it as rejection. In less than five minutes he was alone in the office with the dream therapist.
She closed the door behind the Mafia Princess and locked it. For a deranged moment he thought ... but it passed, and the look on her face was concern, not lust. He started to rise. She laid a palm against the air, stopping him. He sank back onto the folding chair.
Then Anna Picket came to him and said, “For McGrath hath murdered sleep.” He stared up at her as she put her left hand behind his head, cupping the nape with fingers extending up under his hair along the curve of the skull. “Don't be nervous, this'll be all right,” she said, laying her right hand with the palm against his left cheek, the spread thumb and index finger bracketing an eye he tried mightily not to blink. Her thumb lay alongside his nose, the tip curving onto the bridge. The forefinger lay across the bony eyeridge.
She pursed her lips, then sighed deeply. In a moment her body twitched with an involuntary rictus, and she gasped, as if she had had the wind knocked out of her. McGrath couldn't move. He could feel the strength of her hands cradling his head, and the tremors of—he wanted to say—passionslamming through her. Not the passion of strong amorous feeling, but passion in the sense of being acted upon by something external, something alien to one's nature.
The trembling in her grew more pronounced, and McGrath had the sense that power was being drained out of him, pouring into her, that it had reached saturation level and was leaking back along the system into him, but changed, more dangerous. But why dangerous? She was spasming now, her eyes closed, her head thrown back and to the side, her thick mass of hair swaying and bobbing as she jerked, a human double-circuit high-voltage tower about to overload.
She moaned softly, in pain, without the slightest trace of subliminal pleasure, and he could see she was biting her lower lip so fercely that blood was beginning to coat her mouth. When the pain he saw in her face became more than he could bear, he reached up quickly and took her hands away with difficulty; breaking the circuit.
Anna Picket's legs went out and she keeled toward him. He tried to brace himself, but she hit him with full dead weight, and they went crashing to the floor entangled in the metal folding chair.
Frightened, thinking insanely what if someone comes in and sees us like this, they'd think I was molesting her, and in the next instant thinking with relief she locked the door, and in the next instant his fear was transmogrified into concern for her. He rolled out from under her trembling body, taking the chair with him, wrapped around one ankle. He shook off the chair, and got to his knees. Her eyes were
half-closed, the lids flickering so rapidly she might have been in the line of strobe lights.
He hauled her around, settling her semi-upright with her head in his lap. He brushed the hair from her face, and shook her ever so lightly, because he had no water, and had no moist washcloth. Her breathing slowed, her chest heaved not quite so spastically, and her hand, flung away from her body, began to flex the fingers.
“Ms. Picket,” he whispered, “can you talk? Are you all right? Is there some medicine you need ... in your desk?”
She opened her eyes, then, and looked up at him. She tasted the blood on her lips and continued breathing raggedly, as though she had run a great distance. And finally she said, “I could feel it in you when you walked in.”
He tried to ask what it was she had felt, what it was in him that had so unhinged her, but she reached in with the flexing hand and touched his forearm.
“You'll have to come with me.”
“Where?”
“To meet the real REM Group.”
And she began to cry. He knew immediately that she was weeping for him, and he murmured that he would come with her. She tried to smile reassurance, but there was still too much pain in her. They stayed that way for a time, and then they left the office building together.
*	* * *
They were impaired, every one of them in the sprawling ranch-style house in Hidden Hills. One was blind, another had only one hand. A third looked as if she had been in a terrible fire and had lost half her face, and another propelled herself through the house on a small wheeled platform with restraining bars to keep her from falling off.
They had taken the San Diego Freeway to the Ventura, and had driven west on 101 to the Calabasas exit. Climbing, then dropping behind the hills, they had turned up a side road that became a dirt road that became a horse path, Lonny driving Anna Picket's ‘85 Le Sabre.
The house lay within a bowl, completely concealed, even from the dirt road below. The horse trail passed behind low hills covered with mesquite and coast live oak, and abruptly became a perfectly surfaced blacktop. Like the roads Hearst had had cut in the hills leading up to San Simeon, concealing access to the Castle from the Coast Highway above Cambria, the blacktop had been poured on spiral rising cuts laid on a reverse bias.
Unless sought from the air, the enormous ranch house and its outbuildings and grounds would be unknown even to the most adventurous picnicker. “How much of this acreage do you own?” McGrath asked, circling down the inside of the bowl.
“All this,” she said, waving an arm across the empty hills, “almost to the edge of Ventura County.”
She had recovered completely, but had said very little during the hour and a half trip, even during the heaviest weekend traffic on the 101 Freeway crawling like a million-wheeled worm through the San
Fernando Valley out of Los Angeles. “Not a lot of casual drop-ins I should imagine,” he replied. She looked at him across the front seat, fully for the first time since leaving Santa Monica. “I hope you'll have faith in me, trust me just a while longer,” she said.
He paid strict attention to the driving.
He had been cramped within the Buick by a kind of dull fear that strangely reminded him of how he had always felt on Christmas Eve, as a child, lying in bed, afraid of, yet anxious for, the sleep that permitted Santa Claus to come.
In that house below lay something that knew of secret mouths and ancient winds from within. Had he not trusted her, he would have slammed the brake pedal and leaped from the car and not stopped running till he had reached the freeway.
And once inside the house, seeing all of them, so ruined and tragic, he was helpless to do anything but allow her to lead him to a large sitting-room, where a circle of comfortable overstuffed chairs formed a pattern that made the fear more overwhelming.
They came, then, in twos and threes, the legless woman on the rolling cart propelling herself into the center of the ring. He sat there and watched them come, and his heart seemed to press against his chest. McGrath, as a young man, had gone to a Judy Garland film festival at the Thalia in New York. One of the revived movies had been A Child Is Waiting , a nonsinging role for Judy, a film about retarded children. Sally had had to help him out of the theater only halfway through. He could not see through his tears. His capacity for bearing the anguish of the crippled, particularly children, was less than that of most people. He brought himself up short: why had he thought of that afternoon at the Thalia now? These weren't children. They were adults. All of them. Every woman in the house was at least as old as he, surely older. Why had he been thinking of them as children?
Anna Picket took the chair beside him, and looked around the circle. One chair was empty.
“Catherine?” she asked.
The blind woman said, “She died on Sunday.”
Anna closed her eyes and sank back into the chair. “God be with her, and her pain ended.”
They sat quietly for a time, until the woman on the cart looked up at McGrath, smiled a very kind smile, and said, “What is your name, young man?”
“Lonny,” McGrath said. He watched as she rolled herself to his feet and put a hand on his knee. He felt warmth flow through him, and his fear melted. But it only lasted for a moment, as she trembled and moaned softly, as Anna Picket had done in the office. Anna quickly rose and drew her away from McGrath. There were tears in the cart-woman's eyes.
A woman with gray hair and involuntary head tremors, indicative of Parkinson's, leaned forward and said, “Lonny, tell us.”
He started to say tell you what? but she held up a finger and said the same thing again.
So he told them. As best he could. Putting words to feelings that always sounded melodramatic; words that were wholly inadequate for the tidal wave of sorrow that held him down in darkness. “I miss them, oh God how I miss them,” he said, twisting his hands. “I've never been like this. My mother died, and I
was lost, I was miserable, yes there was a feeling my heart would break, because I loved her. But I could handle it. I could comfort my father and my sister, I had it in me to do that. But these last two years ... one after another ... so many who were close to me ... pieces of my past, my life ... friends I'd shared times with, and now those times are gone, they slip away as I try to think of them. I, I just don't know what to do."
And he spoke of the mouth. The teeth. The closing of that mouth. The wind that had escaped from inside him.
“Did you ever sleepwalk, as a child?” a woman with a clubfoot asked. He said: yes, but only once. Tell us, they said.
“It was nothing. I was a little boy, maybe ten or eleven. My father found me standing in the hallway outside my bedroom, at the head of the stairs. I was asleep, and I was looking at the wall. I said, ‘I don't see it here anywhere.’ My father told me I'd said that; the next morning he told me. He took me back to bed. That was the only time, as best I know.”
The women murmured around the circle to each other. Then the woman with Parkinson's said, “No, I don't think that's anything.” Then she stood up, and came to him. She laid a hand on his forehead and said, “Go to sleep, Lonny.”
And he blinked once, and suddenly sat bolt upright. But it wasn't an instant, it had been much longer. He had been asleep. For a long while. He knew it was so instantly, because it was now dark outside the house, and the women looked as if they had been savaged by living jungles. The blind woman was bleeding from her eyes and ears; the woman on the cart had fallen over, lay unconscious at his feet; in the chair where the fire victim had sat, there was now only a charred outline of a human being, still faintly smoking.
McGrath leaped to his feet. He looked about wildly. He didn't know what to do to help them. Beside him, Anna Picket lay slumped across the bolster arm of the chair, her body twisted and blood once again speckling her lips.
Then he realized: the woman who had touched him, the woman with Parkinson's, was gone.
They began to whimper, and several of them moved, their hands idly touching the air. A woman who had no nose tried to rise, slipped and fell. He rushed to her, helped her back into the chair, and he realized she was missing fingers on both hands. Leprosy ... no ! Hansen's disease, that's what it's called. She was coming to, and she whispered to him, “There ... Teresa ... help her...” and he looked where she was pointing, at a woman as pale as crystal, her hair a glowing white, her eyes colorless. “She ... has ... lupus...” the woman without a nose whispered.
McGrath went to Teresa. She looked up at him with fear and was barely able to say, “Can you ... please ... take me to a dark place...?”
He lifted her in his arms. She weighed nothing. He let her direct him up the stairs to the second floor, to the third bedroom off the main corridor. He opened the door; inside it was musty and unlit. He could barely make out the shape of a bed. He carried her over and placed her gently on the puffy down comforter. She reached up and touched his hand. “Thank you.” She spoke haltingly, having trouble breathing. “We, we didn't expect anything ... like that...”
McGrath was frantic. He didn't know what had happened, didn't know what he had done to them. He felt awful, felt responsible, but he didn't know what he had done!
“Go back to them,” she whispered. “Help them.”
“Where is the woman who touched me...?”
He heard her sobbing. “She's gone. Lurene is gone. It wasn't your fault. We didn't expect anything ... like ... that.”
He rushed back downstairs.
They were helping one another. Anna Picket had brought water, and bottles of medicine, and wet cloths. They were helping one another. The healthier ones limping and crawling to the ones still unconscious or groaning in pain. And he smelled the fried metal scent of ozone in the air. There was a charred patch on the ceiling above the chair where the burned woman had been sitting.
He tried to help Anna Picket, but when she realized it was McGrath, she slapped his hand away. Then she gasped, and her hand flew to her mouth, and she began to cry again, and reached out to apologize. “Oh, my God, I'm so sorry ! It wasn't your fault. You couldn't know ... not even Lurene knew.” She swabbed at her eyes, and laid a hand on his chest. “Go outside. Please. I'll be there in a moment.”
A wide streak of dove-gray now bolted through her tangled hair. It had not been there before the instant of his sleep.
He went outside and stood under the stars. It was night, but it had not been night before Lurene had touched him. He stared up at the cold points of light, and the sense of irreparable loss overwhelmed him. He wanted to sink to his knees, letting his life ebb into the ground, freeing him from this misery that would not let him breathe. He thought of Victor, and the casket being cranked down into the earth, as Sally clung to him, murmuring words he could not understand, and hitting him again and again on the chest; not hard, but without measure, without meaning, with nothing but simple human misery. He thought of Alan, dying in a Hollywood apartment from AIDS, tended by his mother and sister who were, themselves, hysterical and constantly praying, asking Jesus to help them; dying in that apartment with the two roommates who had been sharing the rent, keeping to themselves, eating off paper plates for fear of contracting the plague, trying to figure out if they could get a lawyer to force Alan's removal; dying in that miserable apartment because the Kaiser Hospital had found a way around his coverage, and had forced him into “home care.” He thought of Emily, lying dead beside her bed, having just dressed for dinner with her daughter, being struck by the grand mal seizure and her heart exploding, lying there for a day, dressed for a dinner she would never eat, with a daughter she would never again see. He thought of Mike, trying to smile from the hospital bed, and forgetting from moment to moment who Lonny was, as the tumor consumed his brain. He thought of Ted seeking shamans and homeopathists, running full tilt till he was cut down. He thought of Roy, all alone now that DeeDee was gone: half a unit, a severed dream, an incomplete conversation. He stood there with his head in his hands, rocking back and forth, trying to ease the pain.
When Anna Picket touched him, he started violently, a small cry of desolation razoring into the darkness.
“What happened in there?” he demanded. “Who are you people? What did I do to you? Please, oh please I'm asking you, tell me what's going on !”
“We absorb.” “I don't know what—”
“We take illness. We've always been with you. As far back as we can know. We have always had that capacity, to assume the illness. There aren't many of us, but we're everywhere. We absorb. We try to help. As Jesus wrapped himself in the leper's garments, as he touched the lame and the blind, and they were healed. I don't know where it comes from, some sort of intense empathy. But ... we do it ... we absorb.”
“And with me ... what was that in there...?”
“We didn't know. We thought it was just the heartache. We've encountered it before. That was why Tricia suggested you come to the Group.”
“My wife ... is Tricia one of you? Can she ... take on the ... does she absorb? I lived with her, I never—”
Anna was shaking her head. “No, Tricia has no idea what we are. She's never been here. Very few people have been so needing that I've brought them here. But she's a fine therapist, and we've helped a few of her patients. She thought you...” She paused. “She still cares for you. She felt your pain, and thought the Group might be able to help. She doesn't even know of the real REM Group.”
He grabbed her by the shoulders, intense now.
"What happened in there?"
She bit her lip and closed her eyes tightly against the memory. “It was as you said. The mouth. We'd never seen that before. It, it opened. And then ... and then...”
He shook her. "What!?!"
She wailed against the memory. The sound slammed against him and against the hills and against the cold points of the stars. “Mouths. In each of us! Opened. And the wind, it, it just, it just hissed out of us, each of us. And the pain we held, no, that they held—I'm just their contact for the world, they can't go anywhere, so I go and shop and bring and do—the pain they absorbed, it, it took some of them. Lurene and Margid ... Teresa won't live ... I know...”
McGrath was raving now. His head was about to burst. He shook her as she cried and moaned, demanding, “What's happening to us, how could I do such an awfulness to you, why is this being done to me, to us , why now , what's going wrong, please, you've got to tell me, you've got to help me, we've got to do something—”
And they hugged each other, clinging tightly to the only thing that promised support: each other. The sky wheeled above them, and the ground seemed to fall away. But they kept their balance, and finally she pushed him to arm's length and looked closely at his face and said, “I don't know. I do not know. This isn't like anything we've experienced before. Not even Alvarez or Aries know about this. A wind, a terrible wind, something alive, leaving the body.”
"Help me!"
“I can't help you! No one can help you, I don't think anyone can help you. Not even Le Braz...”
He clutched at the name. “Le Braz! Who's Le Braz?”
“No, you don't want to see Le Braz. Please, listen to me, try to go off where it's quiet, and lonely, and try to handle it yourself, that's the only way!”
“Tell me who Le Braz is!”
She slapped him. “You're not hearing me. If we can't do for you, then no one can. Le Braz is beyond anything we know, he can't be trusted, he does things that are outside, that are awful, I think. I don't really know. I went to him once, years ago, it's not something you want to—”
“I don't care,” he said. “I don't care about any of it now. I have to rid myself of this. It's too terrible to live with. I see their faces. They're calling and I can't answer them. They plead with me to say something to them. I don't know what to say. I can't sleep. And when I sleep I dream of them. I can't live like this, because this isn't living. So tell me how to find Le Braz. I don't care, to Hell with the whole thing, I just don't give a damn, so tell me !”
She slapped him again. Much harder. And again. And he took it. And finally she told him.
*	* * *
He had been an abortionist. In the days before it was legal, he had been the last hope for hundreds of women. Once, long before, he had been a surgeon. But they had taken that away from him. So he did what he could do. In the days when women went to small rooms with long tables, or to coat hangers, he had helped. He had charged two hundred dollars, just to keep up with supplies. In those days of secret thousands in brown paper bags stored in clothes closets, two hundred dollars was as if he had done the work for free. And they had put him in prison. But when he came out, he went back at it.
Anna Picket told McGrath that there had been other...
...work. Other experiments. She had said the word experiments , with a tone in her voice that made McGrath shudder. And she had said again, “For McGrath hath murdered sleep,” and he asked her if he could take her car, and she said yes, and he had driven back to the 101 Freeway and headed north toward Santa Barbara, where Anna Picket said Le Braz now lived, and had lived for years, in total seclusion.
It was difficult locating his estate. The only gas station open in Santa Barbara at that hour did not carry maps. It had been years since free maps had been a courtesy of gas stations. Like so many other small courtesies in McGrath's world that had been spirited away before he could lodge a complaint. But there was no complaint department, in any case.
So he went to the Hotel Miramar, and the night clerk was a woman in her sixties who knew every street in Santa Barbara and knew very well the location of the Le Braz “place.” She looked at McGrath as if he had asked her the location of the local abattoir. But she gave him explicit directions, and he thanked her, and she didn't say you're welcome, and he left. It was just lightening in the east as dawn approached.
By the time he found the private drive that climbed through heavy woods to the high-fenced estate, it was fully light. Sun poured across the channel and made the foliage seem Rain Forest lush. He looked back over his shoulder as he stepped out of the Le Sabre, and the Santa Monica Channel was silver and rippled and utterly oblivious to shadows left behind from the night.
He walked to the gate, and pressed the button on the intercom system. He waited, and pressed it again.
Then a voice—he could not tell if it was male or female, young or old—cracked, “Who is it?”
“I've come from Anna Picket and the REM Group.” He paused a moment, and when the silence persisted, he added, “The real REM Group. Women in a house in Hidden Hills.”
The voice said, “Who are you? What's your name?”
“It doesn't matter. You don't know me. McGrath, my name is McGrath. I came a long way to see Le Braz”
“About what?”
“Open the gate and you'll know.”
“We don't have visitors.”
“I saw ... there was a ... I woke up suddenly, there was a, a kind of mouth in my body ... a wind passed... ”
There was a whirring sound, and the iron gate began to withdraw into the brick wall. McGrath rushed back to the car and started the engine. As the gate opened completely, he decked the accelerator and leaped through, even as the gate began without hesitation to close.
He drove up the winding drive through the Rain Forest, and when he came out at the top, the large, fieldstone mansion sat there, hidden from all sides by tall stands of trees and thick foliage. He pulled up on the crushed rock drive, and sat for a moment staring at the leaded windows that looked down emptily. It was cool here, and dusky, even though it was burgeoning day. He got out and went to the carved oak door. He was reaching for the knocker when the door was opened. By a ruined thing.
McGrath couldn't help himself. He gasped and fell back, his hands coming up in front of him as if to ward off any approach by the barely human being that stood in the entranceway.
It was horribly pink where it was not burned. At first McGrath thought it was a woman, that was his quick impression; but then he could not discern its sex, it might have been male. It had certainly been tortured in flames. The head was without hair, almost without skin that was not charred black. There seemed to be too many bends and joints in the arms. The sense that it was female came from the floor-length wide skirt it wore. He was spared the sight of the lower body, but he could tell there was considerable bulk there, a bulk that seemed to move gelatinously, as if neither human torso nor human legs lay within the circle of fabric.
And the creature stared at him from one milky eye, and one eye so pure and blue that his heart ached with the beauty of it. As features between the eyes and the chin that became part of the chest, without discernible neck, there were only charred knobs and bumps, and a lipless mouth blacker than the surrounding flesh. “Come inside,” the doorkeeper said.
McGrath hesitated.
“Or go away,” it said.
Lonny McGrath drew a deep breath and passed through. The doorkeeper moved aside only a trifle. They touched: blackened hip, back of a normal hand.
Closed and double-bolted, the passage out was now denied McGrath. He followed the asexual creature through a long, high-ceilinged foyer to a closed, heavily-paneled door to the right of a spiral staircase that led to the floor above. The thing, either man or woman, indicated he should enter. Then it shambled away, toward the rear of the mansion.
McGrath stood a moment, then turned the ornate L-shaped door handle, and entered. The heavy drapes were drawn against the morning light, but in the outlaw beams that latticed the room here and there, he saw an old man sitting in a high-backed chair, a lap robe concealing his legs. He stepped inside the library, for library it had to be: floor to ceiling bookcases, spilling their contents in teetering stacks all around the floor. Music swirled through the room. Classical music; McGrath didn't recognize it.
“Dr. Le Braz?” he said. The old man did not move. His head lay sunk on his chest. His eyes were closed. McGrath moved closer. The music swelled toward a crescendo, something symphonic. Now he was only three steps from the old man, and he called the name Le Braz again.
The eyes opened, and the leonine head rose. He stared at McGrath unblinkingly. The music came to an end. Silence filled the library.
The old man smiled sadly. And all ominousness left the space between them. It was a sweet smile. He inclined his head toward a stool beside the wingback. McGrath tried to give back a small smile, and took the seat offered.
“It is my hope that you are not here to solicit my endorsement for some new pharmacological product,” the old man said.
“Are you Dr. Le Braz?”
“It is I who was, once, known by that name, yes.”
“You have to help me.”
Le Braz looked at him. There had been such a depth of ocean in the words McGrath had spoken, such a descent into stony caverns that all casualness was instantly denied. “Help you?”
“Yes. Please. I can't bear what I'm feeling. I've been through so much, seen so much these last months,
I... ”
“Help you?” the old man said again, whispering the phrase as if it had been rendered in a lost language.
“I cannot even help myself ... how can I possibly help you, young man?”
McGrath told him. Everything.
At some point the blackened creature entered the room, but McGrath was unaware of its presence till he had completed his story. Then, from behind him, he heard it say, “You are a remarkable person. Not one living person in a million has ever seen the Thanatos mouth. Not one in a hundred million has felt the passage of the soul. Not one in the memory of the human race has been so tormented that he thought it was real, and not a dream.”
McGrath stared at the creature. It came lumbering across the room and stood just behind the old man's chair, not touching him. The old man sighed, and closed his eyes.
The creature said, “This was Josef Le Braz, who lived and worked and cared for his fellow man, and woman. He saved lives, and he married out of love, and he pledged himself to leave the world slightly better for his passage. And his wife died, and he fell into a well of melancholy such as no man had ever suffered. And one night he woke, feeling a chill, but he did not see the Thanatos mouth. All he knew was that he missed his wife so terribly that he wanted to end his life.”
McGrath sat silently. He had no idea what this meant, this history of the desolate figure under the lap robe. But he waited, because if no help lay here in this house, of all houses secret and open in the world, then he knew that the next step for him was to buy a gun and to disperse the gray mist under which he lived.
Le Braz looked up. He drew in a deep breath and turned his eyes to McGrath. “I went to the machine,” he said. “I sought the aid of the circuit and the chip. I was cold, and could never stop crying. I missed her so, it was unbearable.”
The creature came around the wingback and stood over McGrath. “He brought her back from the Other Side.”
McGrath's eyes widened. He understood.
The room was silent, building to a crescendo. He tried to get off the low stool, but he couldn't move.
The creature stared down at him with its one gorgeous blue eye and its one unseeing milky marble. “He deprived her of peace. Now she must live on, in this half-life.
“This is Josef Le Braz, and he cannot support his guilt.”
The old man was crying now. McGrath thought if one more tear was shed in the world he would say to hell with it and go for the gun. “Do you understand?” the old man said softly.
“Do you take the point?” the creature said.
McGrath's hands came up, open and empty. “The mouth ... the wind...”
“The function of dream sleep,” the creature said, “is to permit us to live. To clense the mind of that which dismays us. Otherwise, how could we bear the sorrow? The memories are their legacy, the parts of themselves left with us when they depart. But they are not whole, they are joys crying to be reunited with the one to whom they belong. You have seen the Thanatos mouth, you have felt a loved one departing. It should have freed you.”
McGrath shook his head slowly, slowly. No, it didn't free me, it enslaved me, it torments me. No, slowly, no. I cannot bear it.
“Then you do not yet take the point, do you?”
The creature touched the old man's sunken cheek with a charred twig that had been a hand. The old man tried to look up with affection, but his head would not come around. “You must let it go, all of it,” Le Braz said. “There is no other answer. Let it go ... let them go. Give them back the parts they need to be whole on the Other Side, and let them in the name of kindness have the peace to which they are entitled.”
“Let the mouth open,” the creature said. “We cannot abide here. Let the wind of the soul pass through,
and take the emptiness as release.” And she said, “Let me tell you what it's like on the Other Side. Perhaps it will help.”
McGrath laid a hand on his side. It hurt terribly, as of legions battering for release on a locked door.
*	* * *
He retraced his steps. He went back through previous days as if he were sleepwalking. I don't see it here anywhere.
He stayed at the ranch-style house in Hidden Hills, and helped Anna Picket as best he could. She drove him back to the city, and he picked up his car from the street in front of the office building on Pico. He put the three parking tickets in the glove compartment. That was work for the living. He went back to his apartment, and he took off his clothes, and he bathed. He lay naked on the bed where it had all started, and he tried to sleep. There were dreams. Dreams of smiling faces, and dreams of children he had known. Dreams of kindness, and dreams of hands that had held him.
And sometime during the long night a breeze blew.
But he never felt it.
And when he awoke, it was cooler in the world than it had been for a very long time; and when he cried for them, he was, at last, able to say goodbye.
A man is what he does with his attention.
John Ciardi