CHAPTER 46 It was late evening, July 27. They were camped on what the sign, now halfdemolished by

CHAPTER 46

It was late evening, July 27. They were camped on what the sign, now halfdemolished by summer storms, proclaimed to be the Kunkle Fairgrounds. Kunkle itself, Kunkle, Ohio, was south of them. There had been some sort of fire there, and most of Kunkle was gone. Stu said it had probably been lightning. Harold had of course disputed that. These days if Stu Redman said a firetruck was red, Harold Lauder would produce facts and figures proving that most of them these days were green. She sighed and rolled over. Couldn't sleep. She was afraid of the dream. To her left the five motorcycles stood in a row, heeled over on their kickstands, moonlight twinkling along their chromed exhaust pipes and fittings. As if a band of Hell's Angels had picked this particular spot to crash for the night. Not that the Angels ever would have ridden such a pussycat bunch of bikes as these Hondas and Yamahas, she supposed. They had driven "hogs"... or was that just something she had picked up from the old American-International bike epic she'd seen on TV? The Wild Angels. The Devil's Angels. Hell's Angels on Wheels. The bike pictures had been very big at the drive-ins when she had been in high school, Wells Drive-In, Sanford Drive-In, South Portland Twin, you pays your money and you takes your choice. Now kaput, all the drive-ins were kaput, not to mention the Hell's Angels and good old American-International Pictures. Put it in your diary, Frannie, she told herself, and rolled over on her other side. Not tonight. Tonight she was going to sleep, dreams or no dreams. Twenty paces from where she was lying, she could see the others, zonked out in their sleeping bags like Hell's Angels after a big beer party, the one where everybody in the picture got laid except for Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra. Harold, Stu, Glen Bateman, Mark Braddock, Perion McCarthy. Take Sominex tonight and sleep... It wasn't Sominex they were on but half a grain of Veronal apiece. It had been Stu's idea when the dreams got really bad and they all began to get flaky and hard to live with. He had taken Harold aside before mentioning it to the rest of them because the way to flatter Harold was to soberly ask his opinion and also because Harold knew things. It was good that he did, but it was also rather spooky, as if they had a fifth-rate god traveling with them-more or less omniscient, but emotionally unstable and likely to fragment at any time. Harold had picked up a second gun in Albany, where they had met Mark and Perion, and now he wore the two pistols crisscrossed low on his hips like a latterday Johnny Ringo. She felt badly for Harold, but Harold had also begun to frighten her. She had begun to wonder if Harold might not just go crackers some night and start blazing away with his two pistols. She often found herself remembering the day she had come upon Harold in his back yard, all his emotional defenses demolished, mowing the lawn in his bathing suit and crying. She knew just how Stu would have put it to him, very quietly, almost conspiratorially: Harold, these dreams are a problem. 1've got an idea, but 1 don't know exactly how to carry it out... a mild sedative... but it would have to be just the right dose. Too much and nobody would wake up if there was trouble. What do you suggest? Harold had suggested they try a whole grain of Veronal, available at any drugstore, and if that interrupted the dreamcycle, that they cut back to three quarters of a grain, and if that worked to half. Stu had gone privately to Glen, had gotten a concurring opinion, and the experiment had been tried. At a quarter grain the dreams had begun to creep back in, so they held the dosage at a half. At least for the others. Frannie accepted her drug each night, but palmed it. She didn't know if Veronal would hurt the baby or not, but she was taking no chances. They said that even aspirin could break the chromosome chain. So she suffered the dreamssuffered, that was the right word. One of them predominated; if the others werifferent, they would sooner or later blend into this one. She was in

245 her Ogunquit house, and the dark man was chasing her. Up and down shadowy corridors, through her mother's parlor where the clock continued to tick off seasons in a dry age... she could get away from him, she knew, if she didn't have to carry the body. It was her father's body, wrapped in a bedsheet, and if she dropped it the dark man would do something to it, perform some awful desecration on it. So she ran, knowing that he was getting closer and closer, and at last his hand would fall on her shoulder, his hot and sickening hand. She would go boneless and weak, her father's shrouded corpse would slither out of her arms, she would turn, ready to say: Take him, do anything, 1 don't care, just don't chase me anymore. And there he would be, dressed in some dark stuff like a hooded monk's robe, nothing visible of his features save his huge and happy grin. And in one hand he held the bent and twisted coathanger. That was when the horror struck her like a padded fist and she struggled up from sleep, her skin clammy with sweat, her heart thudding, wanting never to sleep again. Because it wasn't the dead body of her father he wanted; it was the living child in her womb.

She rolled over again. If she didn't go to sleep soon she really would take her diary out and write in it. She had been keeping the journal since July 5. In a way she was keeping it for the baby. It was an act of faith-faith that the baby would live. She wanted it to know what it had been like. How the plague had come to a place called Ogunquit, how she and Harold had escaped, what became of them. She wanted the child to know how things had been. The moonlight was strong enough to write by, and two or three pages of diary were always enough to make her feel snoozy. Didn't say much for her literary talents, she supposed. She would give sleep one more fair chance first, though. She closed her eyes. And went on thinking of Harold. The situation might have eased with the coming of Mark and Perion if the two of them hadn't already been committed to each other. Perion was thirty-three, eleven years older than Mark, but in this world such things made little difference. They had found each other, they had been looking out for each other, and they were content to stick together. Perion had confided to Frannie that they were trying to make a baby. Thank God I was on the pill and didn't have a loop, Peri said. How in God's name would I ever have gotten it out? Frannie had almost told her about the baby she was carrying (she was over a third of the way along now) but something held her back. She was afraid it might make a bad situation even worse. So now there were six of them instead of four (Glen refused utterly to try driving a motorcycle and always rode pillion behind Stu or Harold), but the situation hadn't changed with the addition of another woman. What about you, Frannie? What do you want? If she had to exist in a world like this, she thought, with a biological clock inside her set to go off in six months, she wanted someone like Stu Redman to be her man-no, not someone like. She wanted him: There it was, stated with complete baldness. With civilization gone, all the chrome and geegaws had been—stripped from the engine of human society. Glen Bateman held forth on this theme often, and it always seemed to please Harold inordinately. Women's lib, Frannie had decided (thinking that if she was going to be bald, she might as well go totally bald), was nothing more nor less than an outgrowth of the technological society. Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man couldn't get with child, but a woman could-every four-year-old knows it. And a pregnant woman is a vulnerable human being. Civilization had provided an umbrella of sanity that both sexes could stand beneath. Liberation-that one word said it all. Before civilization, with its careful and merciful system of protections, women had been slaves. Let us not gild the lily; slaves was what we were, Fran thought. Then the evil days ended. And the Women's Credo, which should have been hung in the offices of Ms. magazine, preferably in needlepoint, was just this: Thank you, Men, for the railroads. Thank you, Men, for inventing the automobile and killing the red Indians who thought it might be nice to hold on to America for a while longer, since they were here frst. Thank you, Men, for the hospitals, the police, the schools. Now I'd like to vote, please, and have the right to set my own course and make my own destiny. Once 1 was chattel, but now that is obsolete. My days of slavery must be over; 1 need to be a slave no more than 1 need to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a tiny boat with sails. Jet planes are safer and quicker than little boats with sails and freedom makes more sense than slavery. 1 am not afraid of fying. Thank you, Men. And what was there to say? Nothing. The rednecks could grunt about burning bras, the reactionaries could play intellectual little games, but the truth only smiles.. Now all that had changed, in a matter of weeks it had changed-how much only time would tell. But lying here in the night, she knew that she needed a man. Oh God, she badly needed a man.

246 Nor was it all a matter of preserving herself and her baby, of looking out for number one (and, she supposed, number two). Stu attracted her, especially after Jess Rider. Stu was calm, capable, and most of all he was not what her father would have called "twenty pounds of bullshit in a ten- pound bag." He was attracted to her as well. She knew that perfectly well, had known it since that first lunch together on the Fourth of July in that deserted restaurant. For a momentjust one moment-their eyes had met and there had been that instant of heat, like a power surge when all the needles swing over to overload. She guessed Stu knew how things were, too, but he was waiting on her, letting her make her decision in her own time. She had been with Harold first, therefore she was Harold's chattel. A stinking macho idea, but she was afraid this was going to be a stinking macho world again, at least for a while. If only there was someone else, someone for Harold, but there wasn't, and she was afraid she could not wait long. She thought of the day Harold, in his clumsy way, had tried to make love to her, to make his claim of ownership irrevocable. How long ago? Two weeks? It seemed longer. All the past seemed longer now. It had pulled out like warm Bonomo's Turkish taffy. Between her worry of what to do about Harold-and her fears of what he might do if she did go to Stuart-and her fears of the dreams, she would never get to sleep. So thinking, she drifted off.

When she woke up, it was still dark. Someone was shaking her. She muttered some protest her sleep had been restful and without dreams for the first time in a week-and then came reluctantly out of it, thinking that it must be morning, and time to get going. But why would they want to get goingin the dark? As she sat up, she saw that even the moon was down. It was Harold shaking her, and Harold looked scared. "Harold? Is something wrong?" Stu was also up, she saw. And Glen Bateman. Perion was kneeling on the far side of the place where their small fire had been. "It's Mark," Harold said. "He's sick." "Sick?" she said, and then a low moan came from the other side of the campfire's ashes, where Perion was kneeling and the two men were standing. Frannie felt dread rise up inside her like a black column. Sickness was the thing they were all most afraid of. "It isn't... the flu, is it, Harold?" Because if Mark came down with a belated case of Captain Trips, that meant any of them could. Perhaps the germ was still hanging around. Perhaps it had even mutated. The better to feed on you, my dear. "No, it's not the flu. It's nothing like the flu. Fran, did you eat any of the canned oysters tonight? Or maybe when we stopped for lunch?" She tried to think, her mind still fuzzy with sleep. "Yes, I had some both times," she said. "They tasted fine. I love oysters. Is it food poisoning? Is that what it is?" "Fran, I'm just asking. None of us know what it is. There isn't a doctor in the house. How do you feel? Do you feel all right.. "Fine, just sleepy." But she wasn't. Not anymore. Another groan floated over from the other side of the camp, as if Mark were accusing her of feeling well while he did not. Harold said, "Glen thinks it might be his appendix." "What?" Harold only grinned sickly and nodded. Fran got up and walked across to where the others were gathered. Harold trailed her like an unhappy shadow. "We've got to help him," Perion said. She spoke mechanically, as if she had said it many times before. Her eyes went from one of them to the next relentlessly, eyes so full of terror and helplessness that Frannie once again felt accused. Her thoughts went selfishly to the baby she was carrying and she tried to push the thoughts away. Inappropriate or not, they wouldn't go. Get away from him, part of her screamed at the rest of her. You get away from him right now, he might be catching. She looked at Glen, who was pale and oldlooking in the steady glow of the Coleman lantern. "Harold says you think it's his appendix?" she asked. "I don't know," Glen said, sounding upset and scared. "He's got the symptoms, certainly; he's feverish, his belly is hard and swelled, painful to touch—" "We've got to help him," Perion said again, and burst into tears. Glen touched Mark's belly and Mark's eyes, which had been half-lidded and glazed, opened wide. He screamed. Glen jerked his hand away as if he had put it on a hot stove and looked from Stu to Harold and then back to Stu again with barely concealed panic. "What would you two gentlemen suggest?"

247 Harold stood with his throat working convulsively, as if something was stuck in there, and choking him. At last he blurted, "Give him some aspirin." Perion, who had been gazing down at Mark through her tears, now whirled to look at Harold. "Aspirin?" she asked. Her tone was one of furious astonishment. "Aspirin?" This time she shrieked it. "Is that the best you can do with all your big-talk smartassery? Aspirin?" Harold stuffed his hands into his pockets and looked at her miserably, accepting the rebuke. Stu said very quietly, "But Harold's right, Perion. For now, aspirin's just about the best we can do. What time is it?" "You don't know what to do!" she screamed at them. "Why don't you just admit it?" "It's quarter of three," Frannie said. "What if he dies?" Peri pushed a sheaf of dark auburn hair away from her face, which was puffed from crying. "Leave them alone, Peri," Mark said in a dull, tired voice. It startled them all. "They'll do what they can. If it goes on hurting as bad as this, I think I'd father be dead anyway. Give me some aspirin. Anything." "I'll get it," Harold said, eager to be away. "There's some in my knapsack. Extra Strength Excedrin," he added, as if hoping for their approval, and then he went for it nearly scuttling in his hurry. "We've got to help him," Perion said, returning to her old scripture. Stu drew Glen and Frannie off to one side. "Any ideas on what to do about this?" he asked them quietly. "1 don't have any, I can tell you. She was mad at Harold, but his aspirin idea was just about twice as good as any I've had." "She's upset, that's all," Fran said. Glen sighed. "Maybe it's just his bowels. Too much roughage. Maybe he'll have a good movement and it'll clear up." Frannie was shaking her head. "I don't think that's it. He wouldn't be running a fever if it was his bowels. And I don't think his belly would have swelled up that way, either." It had almost looked as if a tumor had swelled up there overnight. It made her feel ill to think about it. She could not remember when (except for when she was dreaming the dreams) she had been so badly frightened. What was it Harold had said? There's no doctor in the house. How true. it was. How horribly true. God, it was all coming at her at once, crashing down all around her. How horribly alone they were. How horribly far out on the wire they were, and somebody had forgotten the safety net. She looked from Glen's strained face to Stu's. She saw deep concern in both of them, but no answers in either of them. Behind them, Mark screamed again, and Perion echoed his cry as if she felt his pain. In a way, Frannie supposed that she did. "What are we going to do?" Frannie asked helplessly. She was thinking of the baby, and over and over again the question which dinned its way into her mind was: What if it has to be cesarean? What if it has to be cesarean? What if Behind her, Mark screamed again like some horrible prophet, and she hated him. They looked at each other in the trembling dark.

From Fran Goldsmith's Diary

July 6, 1990

After some persuasion Mr. Bateman has agreed to come along with us. He sez that after all his articles ("I write them in big words so no one will really know how simpleminded they are," he sez) and boring twenty years of students to death in SY-1 and SY-2, not to mention the Sociology of Deviant Behavior and Rural Sociology, he has decided he can't afford to turn down this opportunity. Stu wanted to know what opportunity he meant. "I should think that would be clear," sez Harold in that INSUFFERABLY SNOTTY way of his (sometimes Harold can be a dear but he can also be a real boogersnot and tonight he was being the latter). "Mr. Bateman—" "Please call me Glen," sez he, very quietly, but the way Harold glared at him, you would have thought he had accused Harold of having some social disease. "Glen, as a sociologist, sees the opportunity to study the formation of a society first-hand, I believe. He wants to see how fact compares with theory." Well, to make a long story short, Glen (which I will call him from now on, since that's what he likes) agreed that was mostly it but added: "I also have certain theories which I've written down and hope to prove or disprove. I don't believe that man arising from the ashes of the superflu is going to be anything like man arising from the cradle of the Nile with a bone in his nose and a woman by the hair. That's one of the theories."

248 Stu said, in that quiet way he has, "Because everything is lying around, waiting to be picked up again." He looked so grim when he said it that I was surprised, and even Harold looked at him sort of funny. But Glen just nodded and said, "That's right. The technological society has walked off the court, so to speak, but they've left all the basketballs behind. Someone will come along who remembers the game and teach it to the rest again. That's rather neat, isn't it? I ought to write it down later." (But I've written it down myself, just in case he forgets. Who knows? The Shadow do, hee-hee.) So then Harold sez, "You sound as if you believe the whole thing will start up again-the arms race, the pollution, and so on. Is that another of your theories? Or a corollary to the first one?" "Not exactly," Glen started to say, but before he could go any further, Harold burst in with his own chicken-bone to pick. I can't put it down word for word, because when he gets excited Harold talks fast, but what he said amounted to how, even though he had a pretty low opinion of people in general, he didn't think they could be that stupid. He said he thought that this time around, certain laws would be made. One would be no fiddling around with badass stuff like nuclear fission and fleurocarbon (probably spelled that one wrong, oh well) sprays and stuff like that. I do remember one thing he said, because it was a very vivid image. "Just because the Gordian knot has been cut for us is no reason for us to go to work and tie it back up." I could see he was just spoiling for an argument-one of the things that makes Harold hard to like is how eager he is to show off how much he knows (and he sure does know a lot, I can't take that away from him, Harold is superbright)—but all Glen said was, "Time will tell, won't it?" That all finished up about an hour ago, and now I am in an upstairs bedroom with Kojak lying on the floor beside me. Good dog! It is all rawther cozy, reminds me of home, but I am trying not to think about home too much because it makes me weepy. I know this must sound awful but I really wish I had someone to help me warm this bed. I even have a candidate in mind. Put it out of your mind, Frannie! So tomorrow we're off for Stovington and I know Stu doesn't like the idea much. He's scared of that place. I like Stu very much, only wish Harold liked him more. Harold is making everything very hard, but I suppose he can't help his nature. Glen has decided to leave Kojak behind. He is sorry to have to do that, even though Kojak will have no trouble finding forage. Still there is nothing else for it unless we could find a motorcycle with a sidecar, and even then poor Kojak might get scared and jump out. Hurt or kill himself. Anyway tomorrow we'll be going. Things to Remember: The Texas Rangers (baseball team) had a pitcher named Nolan Ryan who pitched all kinds of no-hitters and things with his famous fastball, and a no-hitter is very good. There were TV comedies with laughtracks, and a laugh-track was people on tape laughing at the funny parts, and they were supposed to make you have a better time watching. You used to be able to get frozen cakes and pies at the supermarket and just thaw them out and eat them. Sara Lee strawberry cheesecake was my personal favorite.

July 7, 1990

Can't write long. Cycled all day. My fanny feels like hamburger & my back feels like there's a rock in it. I had that bad dream again last night. Harold has also been dreaming about that?man? and it upsets the hell out of him because he can't explain how both of us can be having what is essentially the same dream. Stu sez he is still having that dream about Nebraska and the old black woman there. She keeps saying he should come and see her anytime. Stu thinks she lives in a town called Holland Home or Hometown or something like that. Sez he thinks he could find it. Harold sneered at him and went into a long spiel about how dreams were psycho-Freudian manifestations of things we didn't dare think about when we were awake. Stu was angry, I think, but kept his temper. I'm so afraid that the bad feeling between them may break out into the open, I WISH IT DIDN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY! Anyway, Stu said, "So how come you and Frannie are having the same dream?" Harold muttered something about coincidence and just stalked off. Stu told Glen and I that he would like us to go to Nebraska after Stovington. Glen shrugged and said, "Why not? We have to go somewhere." Harold, of course, will object on general principles. Damn you, Harold, grow up! Things to Remember: There were gasoline shortages in the early 80s because everybody in America was driving something and we had used up most of our oil supplies and the Arabs had us by the short hairs. The Arabs had so much money they literally couldn't spend it. There was a rock and roll group called The Who that sometimes used to finish their live performances by smashing their guitars and amplifiers. This was known as "conspicuous consumption."

249 July 8, 1990

It's late and I'm tired again but I should try to get as much down as I possibly can before my eyelids just SLAM SHUT. Harold finished his sign about an hour ago (with much bad grace I must say) and put it on the front lawn of the Stovington installation. Stu helped him put it up and held his peace in spite of all Harold's mean little jibes. I had tried to prepare myself for the disappointment. I never believed Stu was lying, and I really don't think Harold believed he was, either. So I was sure everybody was dead, but still it was an upsetting experience and I cried. I couldn't help myself. But I wasn't the only one who was upset. When Stu saw the place he turned almost dead white. He had on a shortsleeved shirt, and I could see he had goosebumps all up and down his arms. His eyes are normally blue but they had gone a slaty color, like the ocean on a gray day. He pointed up to the third floor and said, "That was my room." Harold turned toward him, and I could see him getting ready with one of his patented Harold Lauder Smartass Comments, but then he saw Stu's face and shut up. I think that was very wise of him, actually. So after a little while Harold sez, "Well, let's go in and look around." "What would you want to do that for?" Stu answers, and he sounded almost hysterical, but keeping it under a tight rein. It scared me, more so because he is usually as cool as icewater. Witness what little success Harold has had getting under his skin. "Stuart—" Glen starts, but Stu interrupts with, "What for? Can't you see it's a dead place? No brass bands, no soldiers, no nothing. Believe it," he says, "if they were here they'd be all over us by now. We'd be up in those white rooms like a bunch of fucking guinea pigs." Then he looks at me and says, "Sorry, Fran—I didn't mean to talk that way. I guess I'm upset." "Well, I'm going in," Harold sez, "who's coming with me?" But I could see that even though Harold was trying to be BIG & BOLD, he was really scared himself. Glen said he would, and Stu said: "You go in, too, Fran. Have a look. Satisfy yourself." I wanted to say I'd stay outside with him, because he looked so uptight (and because I really didn't want to go in, either, you know), but that would have made more trouble with Harold, so I said okay. If we-Glen and I-had really had any doubts about Stu's story, we could have dropped them as soon as we opened the door. It was the smell. You can smell the same thing in any of the fair-sized towns we've traveled thru, it's a smell like decayed tomatoes, and oh God I'm crying again, but is it right for people not just to die but then to stink like Wait (later) There, I've had my second GOOD CRY of the day, whatever can be happening to L'il Fran Goldsmith, Our Gal Sal, who used to be able to chew up nails and spit out carpet tacks, ha-ha, as the old saying goes. Well, no more tears tonite, and that's a promise. We went inside anyway, morbid curiosity, I guess. I don't know about the others, but I kind of wanted to see the room where Stu was held prisoner. Anyway, it wasn't just the smell, you know, but how cool the place was after the outside. A lot of granite and marble and probably really fantastic insulation. It was warmer on the top 2 floors, but down below was that smell... and the cool... it was like a tomb. YUCK. It was also spooky, like a haunted house-the three of us were all huddled together like sheep, and I was glad I had my rifle, even if it is only a . 22. Our footsteps kept echoing back to us as if there was someone creeping along, following us, you know, and I started thinking about that dream again, the one starring the man in the black robe. No wonder Stu didn't want to come with us. We wandered around to the elevators at last and went up to the 2nd floor. Nothing there but offices... and several bodies. The 3rd floor was made up like a hospital, but all the rooms had airlock doors (both Harold and Glen said that's what they were) and special viewing windows. There were lots of bodies up there, in the rooms and in the hallways, too. Very few women. Did they try to evacuate them at the end, I wonder? There's so much we'll never know. But then, why would we want to? Anyway, at the end of the hall leading down from the main corridor where the elevator core was, we found a room with its airlock door open. There was a dead man in there, but he wasn't a patient (they were all wearing white hospital johnnies) and he sure didn't die of the flu. He was lying in a big pool of dried blood, and he looked like he'd been trying to crawl out of the room when he died. There was a broken chair, and things were all messed up, as if there'd been a fight. Glen looked around for a long time and then said, "I don't think we'd better say anything about this room to Stu. I believe he came very close to dying in here." I looked at that sprawled body and felt creepier than ever.

250 "What do you mean?" Harold asked, and even he sounded hushed. It was one of the few times I ever heard Harold talk as if what he was saying wasn't going out on a public address system. "I believe that gentleman came in here to kill Stuart," Glen said, "and that Stu somehow got the better of him." "But why?" I asked. "Why would they want to kill Stu if he was immune? It doesn't make any sense!" He looked at me, and his eyes were scary. His eyes looked almost dead, like a mackerel's eyes. "That doesn't matter, Fran," he said. "Sense didn't have much to do with this place, from the way it looks. There is a certain mentality that believes in covering up. They believe in it with the sincerity and fanaticism that members of some religious groups believe in the divinity of Jesus. Because, for some people, the necessity to continue covering up even after the damage is done is all-important. It makes me wonder how many immunes they killed in Atlanta and San Francisco and the Topeka Viral Center before the plague finally killed them and made an end to their butchery. This asshole? I'm glad he's dead. I'm only sorry for Stu, who'll probably spend the rest of his life having nightmares about him." And do you know what Glen Bateman did then? That nice man who paints the horrible pictures? He went over and kicked that dead man in the face. Harold made a muffled sort of grunt, as if he was the one who had been kicked. Then Glen drew his foot back again. "No!" Harold yells, but Glen kicked the dead man again just the same. Then he turned around and he was wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, but at least his eyes had lost that awful dead-fish look. "Come on," he sez, "let's get out of here. Stu was right. It's a dead place." So we went out, and Stu was sitting with his back to the iron gate in the high wall that ran around the place, and I wanted to... oh go ahead, Frannie, if you can't tell your diary, who can you tell? I wanted to run to him and kiss him and tell him I was 'ashamed for all of us not believing him. And ashamed of how all of us had gone on about what a hard time we'd had when the plague was on, and him hardly saying anything when all the time that man had almost killed him. Oh dear, I'm falling in love with him, I think I've got the world's most crushable crush, if only it wasn't for Harold I'd take my damn chances! Anyway (there's always an anyway, even tho by now my fingers are so numb they are just about falling off), that was when Stu told us for the first time that he wanted to go to Nebraska, that he wanted to check out his dream. He had a stubborn, sort of embarrassed look on his face, as if he knew he was going to have to take some more patronizing shit from Harold, but Harold was too unnerved from our "tour" of the Stovington facility to offer more than token resistance. And even that stopped when Glen said, in a very reticent way, that he had also dreamed of the old woman the night before. "Of course, it might only be because Stu told us about his dream," he said, kind of red in the face, "but it was remarkably similar." Harold said that of course that was it, but Stu said, "Wait a minute, HaroldI've got an idea." His idea was that we all take a sheet of paper and write down everything we could remember of our dreams over the last week, then compare notes. This was just scientific enough so that Harold couldn't grumble too much. Well, the only dream I've had is the one I've already written down, and I won't repeat it. I'll just say I wrote it down, leaving in the part about my father but leaving out the part about the baby and the coathanger he always has. The results when we compared our papers were rather amazing. Harold, Stu, and I had all dreamed about "the dark man," as I call him. Both Stu & I visualized him as a man in a monk's robe with no visible features-his face is always in a shadow. Harold's paper said that he was always standing in a dark doorway, beckoning to him "like a pimp." Sometimes he could just see his feet and the shine of his eyes"like weasel's eyes" is how he put it. Stu and Glen's dreams of the old woman are very similar. The points of similarity are almost too many to go into (which is my "literary" way of saying my fingers are going numb). Anyway, they both agree she is in Polk County, Nebraska, altho they couldn't get together on the actual name of the town-Stu says Hollingford Home, Glen says Hemingway Home. Close either way. They both seemed to feel they could find it. (Note Well, diary: My guess is "Hemingford Home.") Glen said, "This is really remarkable. We all seem to be sharing an authentic psychic experience." Harold pooh-poohed, of course, but he looked like he'd been given lots of food for thought. He would only agree to go on the basis of "we have to go somewhere." We leave in the morning. I'm scared, excited, and mostly happy to be leaving Stovington, which is a death-place. And I'll take that old woman over the dark man anytime. Things to Remember: "Hang loose" meant don't get upset. "Rad" and "gnarly" were ways of saying a thing was good. "No sweat" meant you weren't worried. To "boogie down" was to have a good time, and lots of people wore T-shirts which said SHIT HAPPENS, which it certainly did... and

251 still does. "I got grease" was a pretty current expression (I first heard it just this year) that meant everything was going well. "Digs," an old British expression, was just replacing "pad" or "crashpad" as an expression for the place you were living in before the superflu hit. It was very cool to say "I dig your digs." Stupid, huh? But that was life.

It was just after twelve noon. Perion had fallen into an exhausted sleep beside Mark, who they had moved carefully into the shade two hours earlier. He was in and out of consciousness, and it was easier on all of them when he was out. He had held against the pain for the remainder of the night, but after daybreak he had finally given in to it and when he was conscious, his screams curdled their blood. They stood looking at each other, helpless. No one had wanted any lunch. "It's his appendix," Glen said. "I don't think there's any doubt about it." "Maybe we ought to try... well, operating on him," Harold said. He was looking at Glen. "I don't suppose you..." "We'd kill him," Glen said flatly. "You know that, Harold. If we could open him up without having him bleed to death, which we couldn't, we wouldn't know his appendix from his pancreas. The stuff in there isn't labeled, you know." "We'll kill him if we don't," Harold said. "Do you want to try?" Glen asked waspishly. "Sometimes I wonder about you, Harold." "I don't see that you're being much help in our current situation, either," Harold said, flushing. "No, stop, come on," Stu said. "What good are either of you doing? Unless one of you plans to saw him open with a jackknife, it's out of the question, anyway." "Stu!" Frannie almost gasped. "Well?" he asked, and shrugged. "The nearest hospital would be back in Maumee. We could never get him there. I don't even think we could get him back to the turnpike." "You're right, of course," Glen muttered, and ran a hand over his sandpapery cheek. "Harold, I apologize. I'm very upset. I knew this sort of thing could happen-pardon me, would happen-but I guess I only knew it in an academic way. This is a lot different than sitting in the old study, blue- skying things." Harold muttered an ungrateful acknowledgment and walked off with his hands stuffed deep into his pockets. He looked like a sulky, overgrown ten-year-old. "Why can't we move him?" Fran asked desperately, looking from Stu to Glen. "Because of how much his appendix must have swelled by now," Glen said. "If it bursts, it's going to dump enough poison into his system to kill ten men." Stu nodded. "Peritonitis." Frannie's head whirled. Appendicitis? That was nothing these days. Nothing. Why sometimes, if you were in the hospital for gallstones or something, they would just lift out your appendix on general principles while they still had you open. She remembered that one of her grammar school friends, a boy named Charley Biggers whom everyone had called Biggy, had had his appendix out during the summer between fifth and sixth grades. He was only in the hospital for two or three days. Having your appendix out was just nothing, medically speaking. Just like having a baby was nothing, medically speaking. "But if you leave him alone," she asked, "won't it burst anyway?" Stu and Glen looked at each other uncomfortably and said nothing. "Then you're just as bad as Harold says!" she burst out wildly. "You've got to do something, even if it is with a jackknife! You've got to!" "Why us?" Glen asked angrily. "Why not you? We don't even have a medical book, for Christ's sweet sake!" "But you... he... it can't happen this way! Having your appendix out is supposed to be nothing!" "Well, maybe not in the old days, but it's sure something now," Glen said, but by then she had blundered off, crying.

She came back around three o'clock, ashamed of herself and ready to apologize. But neither Glen nor Stu was in camp. Harold was sitting dejectedly on the trunk of a fallen tree. Perion was sitting crosslegged by Mark, sponging his face with a cloth. She looked pale but composed. "Frannie!" Harold said, looking up and brightening visibly. "Hi, Harold." She went on to Peri. "How is he?" "Sleeping," Perion said, but he wasn't sleeping; even Fran could see that. He was unconscious. "Where have the others gone, Peri? Do you know?" It was Harold who answered her. He had come up behind her, and Fran could feel him wanting to touch her hair or put a hand on her shoulder. She didn't want him to. Harold had begun to make her acutely uncomfortable almost all of the time.

252 "They've gone to Kunkle. To look for a doctor's office." "They thought they could get some books," Peri said. "And some... some instruments." She swallowed and her throat made an audible click. She went on cooling Mark's face, occasionally dipping her cloth into one of the canteens and wringing it out. "We're really sorry," Harold said uncomfortably. "I guess that doesn't sound like jack shit, but we really are." Peri looked up and offered Harold a strained, sweet smile. "I know that," she said. "Thank you. This is no one's fault. Unless there's a God, of course. If there's a God, then it's His fault. And when I see Him, I intend to kick Him in the balls." She had a horsey sort of face and a thick peasant's body. Fran, who saw everyone's best features long before she saw the less fortunate ones (Harold, for instance, had a lovely pair of hands for a boy), noticed that Peri's hair, a soft auburn shade, was almost gorgeous, and that her dark indigo eyes were fine and intelligent. She had taught anthropology at NYU, she had told them, and she had also been active in a number of political causes, including women's rights and equal treatment under the law for AIDS victims. She had never been married. Mark, she told Frannie once, had been better to her than she had ever expected a man to be. The others she had known had either ignored her or lumped her in with other girls as a "pig" or a "scag." She admitted Mark might have been in the group which had always just ignored her if conditions had been normal, but they hadn't been. They had met each other in Albany, where Perion had been summering with her parents, on the last day of June, and after some talk they had decided to get out of the city before all the germs incubating in all the decomposing bodies could do to them what the superflu hadn't been able to do. So they had left, and the next night they had become lovers, more out of desperate loneliness than any real attraction (this was girl-talk, and Frannie hadn't even written it down in her diary). He was good to her, Peri had told Fran in the soft and slightly amazed way of all plain women who have discovered a nice man in a hard world. She began to love him, a little more each day she had begun to love him. And now this. "It's funny," she said. "Everybody here but Stu and Harold are college graduates, and you certainly would have been if things had gone on in their normal course, Harold." "Yes, I guess that's true," Harold said. Peri turned back to Mark and began to sponge his forehead again, gently, with love. Frannie was reminded of a color plate in their family Bible, a picture that showed three women making the body of Jesus ready for burial-they were anointing him with oils and spices. "Frannie was studying English, Glen was a teacher of sociology, Mark was getting his doctorate in American history, Harold, you'd be in English, too, wanting to be a writer. We could sit around and have some wonderful bull sessions. We did, as a matter of fact, didn't we?" "Yes," Harold agreed. His voice, normally penetrating, was almost too low to hear. "A liberal arts education teaches you how to think-I read that somewhere. The hard facts you learn are secondary to that. The big thing you take away from school with you is how to induct and deduct in a constructive way." "That's good," Harold said. "I like that." Now his hand did drop on Fran's shoulder. She didn't shrug it away, but she was unhappily conscious of its presence. "But it isn't good," Peri said fiercely, and in his surprise, Harold took his hand off Fran's shoulder. She felt lighter immediately. "No?" he asked, rather timidly. "He's dying!" Peri said, not loudly but in an angry, helpless way. "He's dying because we've all been spending our time learning how to bullshit each other in dorms and the living rooms of cheap apartments in college towns. Oh, I could tell you about the Midi Indians of New Guinea, and Harold could explain the literary technique of the later English poets, but what good does any of that do my Mark?" "If we had somebody from med school—" Fran began tentatively. "Yes, if we did. But we don't. We don't even have a car mechanic with us, or someone who went to ag college and might have at least watched once when a vet was working on a cow or a horse." She looked at them, her indigo eyes growing even darker. "Much as I like you all, I think at this point I'd trade the whole bunch of you for Mr. Goodwrench. You're all so afraid to touch him, even though you know what's going to happen if you don't. And I'm the same way-I'm not excluding myself." "At least the two..." Fran stopped. She had been about to say At least the two men went, then decided that might be unfortunate phrasing, with Harold still here. "At least Stu and Glen went. That's something, isn't it?"

253 Peri sighed. "Yes-that's something. But it was Stu's decision to go, wasn't it? The only one of us who finally decided it would be better to try anything than to just stand around wringing our hands." She looked at Frannie. "Did he tell you what he did for a living before?" "He worked in a factory," Fran said promptly. She did not notice that Harold's brow clouded at how quickly she was able to come up with this information. "He put circuits in electronic calculators. I guess you could say he was a computer technician." "Ha!" Harold said, and smiled sourly. "He's the only one of us who understands taking things apart," Peri said. "What he and Mr. Bateman do will kill Mark, I'm almost sure it will, but it's better that he be killed while somebody is trying to make him well than it would be for him to die while we just stand around watching... as if he were a dog that had been run over in the street." Neither Harold nor Fran could find a reply to that. They only stood behind her and watched Mark's pale, still face. After a while Harold put his sweaty hand on Fran's shoulder again. It made her feel like screaming.

Stu and Glen got back at quarter to four. They had taken one of the cycles. Tied behind it was a doctor's black bag of instruments and several large black books. "We'll try," was all Stu said. Peri looked up. Her face was white and strained, her voice calm. "Would you? Please. We both want you to," she said.

It was ten minutes past four. Stu was kneeling on a rubber sheet that had been spread under the tree. Sweat was pouring from his face in rivers. His eyes looked bright and haunted and frantic. Frannie was holding a book open in front of him, switching back and forth between two colored plates whenever Stu raised his eyes and nodded at her. Beside him, horribly white, Glen Bateman held a spool of fine white thread. Between them was an open case of stainless steel instruments. The case was now splashed with blood. "It's here!" Stu cried. His voice was suddenly high and hard and exultant. His eyes had narrowed to two points. "Here's the little bastard! Here! Right here!" "Fran, show me that other plate again! Quick! Quick!" "Can you take it out?" Glen asked. "Jesus, East Texas, do you really think you can?" Harold was gone. He had left the party early, holding one hand cupped over his mouth. He had been standing in a small grove of trees to the east, his back to them, for the last fifteen minutes. Now he turned back, his large round face hopeful. "I don't know," Stu said, "but I might. I just might." He stared at the color plate Fran was showing him. He was wearing blood up to his elbows, like scarlet evening gloves. "It's self-containing above and below," Stu whispered. His eyes glittered fantastically. "The appendix. It's its own little unit. It... wipe my forehead, Frannie, Jesus, I'm sweating like a fucking pig... thanks... God, I don't want to cut his doins any worse than I have to... that's his everfucking intestines... but Christ, I gotta. I gotta." "Give me the scissors, Glen. No-not those. The small pair." "Stu." He looked at her at last. "You don't need to." Her voice was calm, soft. "He's dead." Stu looked at her, his narrowed eyes slowly widening. She nodded. "Almost two minutes ago. But thank you. Thank you for trying." Stu looked at her for a long time. "You're sure?" he whispered at last. She nodded again. Tears were spilling silently down her face. Stu turned away from them, dropping the small scalpel he had been holding, and put his hands over his eyes in a gesture of utter despair. Glen had already gotten up and walked off, not looking back, his shoulders hunched, as if from a blow. Frannie put her arms around Stu and hugged him. "That's that," he said. He said it over and over again, speaking in a slow and toneless way that frightened her. "That's that. All over. That's that. That's that." "You did the best you could," she said, and hugged him even tighter, as if he might fly away. "That's that," he said again, with dull finality. Frannie hugged him. Despite all her thoughts of the last three and a half weeks, despite her "crushable crush," she had not made a single overt move. She had been almost painfully careful not

254 to show the way she felt. The situation with Harold was just too much on a hair trigger. And she was not showing the true way she felt about Stu even now, not really. It was not a lover's hug she was bestowing on him. It was simply one survivor clinging to another. Stu seemed to understand this. His hands came up to her shoulders and pressed them firmly, leaving bloody handprints on her khaki shirt, marking her in a way which seemed to make them partners in some unhappy crime. Somewhere a jay cawed harshly, and closer at hand Perion began to weep. Harold Lauder, who did not know the difference between the hugs survivors and lovers may bestow on each other, gazed at Frannie and Stu with dawning suspicion and fear. After a long moment he crashed furiously off into the brush and didn't come back until long after supper.

She woke up early the next morning. Someone was shaking her. I'll open my eyes and it'll be Glen or Harold, she thought sleepily. We're going to go through it again, and we'll keep going through it until we get it right. Those who do not learn from history But it was Stu. And it was already daylight of a sort; creeping dawn, muffled in early mist like fresh gold wrapped in thin cotton. The others were sleeping humps. "What is it?" she asked, sitting up. "Is something wrong?" "I was dreaming again," he said. "Not the old woman, the... the other one. The dark man. I was scared, so I..." "Stop it," she said, frightened by the look on his face. "Say what you mean, please." "It's Perion. The Veronal. She got the Veronal out of Glen's pack." She hissed in breath. "Oh boy," Stu said brokenly. "She's dead, Frannie. Oh Lord, ain't this some mess." She tried to speak and found she could not. "I guess I've got to wake the other two up," Stu said in an absent sort of way. He rubbed at his cheek, which was sandpapery with beard. Fran could still remember how it had felt against her own cheek yesterday, when she had hugged him. He turned back to her, bewildered. "When does it end?" She said softly: "I don't think it ever will." Their eyes locked in the early dawn.

From Fran Goldsmith's Diary

July 12, 1990

We're camped just west of Guilderland (NY) tonight, have finally made it onto the Big Highway, Route 80/90. The excitement of meeting Mark and Perion (don't you think that's a pretty name? I do) yesterday afternoon has more or less abated. They have agreed to throw in with us... in fact, they made the suggestion before any of us could. Not that I'm sure Harold would have offered. You know how he is. And he was a little put off (I think Glen was, too) by all the hardware they were carrying, including semiautomatic rifles (two). But mostly Harold just had to have his little song and dance... he has to register his presence, you know. I guess I have filled up pages and pages with THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HAROLD, and if you don't know him by now, you never will. Underneath his swagger and all those pompous pronouncements, there is a very insecure little boy. He can't really believe that things have changed. Part of him-quite a large part, I think-has to go on believing that all his high school tormentors are going to rise out of their graves one fine day and start shooting spitballs at him again or maybe calling him Whack-Off Lauder, as Amy said they used to do. Sometimes I think it would have been better for him (and maybe me too) if we hadn't hooked up back in Ogunquit. I'm part of his old life, I was best friends with his sister once upon a time, and so on and so on. What sums up my weird relationship with Harold is this: strange as it may seem, knowing what I know now, I would probably pick Harold to be friends with instead of Amy, who was mostly dizzy about boys with nice cars and clothes from Sweetie's, and who was (God forgive me for saying Cruddy Things about the Dead but it's true) a real Ogunquit Snob, the way only a year-round townie can be one. Harold is, in his own weird way, sort of cool. When he's not concentrating all his mental energies on being an asshole, that is. But, you see, Harold could never believe that anyone could think he was cool. Part of him has such a huge investment in being square. He is determined to carry all of his problems right along with him into this not-so-brave new world. He might as well have them packed right inside his knapsack along with those chocolate Payday candybars he likes to eat. Oh Harold, jeez, I just don't know. Things to Remember: The Gillette parrot. "Please don't squeeze the Charmin." The walking Kool- Aid pitcher that used to say, "Oh... YEAAAAHHH!" "O. B. Tampons .. created by a woman

255 gynecologist." Converse All-Stars. Night of the Living Dead. Brrrr! That last one hits too close to home. I quit.

July 14, 1990

We had a very long and very sober talk about these dreams today at lunch, stopping much longer than we should have, probably. We're just north of Batavia, New York, by the way. Yesterday, Harold very diffidently (for him) suggested we start stocking up on Veronal and hitting ourselves with very light doses to see if we couldn't "disrupt the dream-cycle," as he put it. I went along with the idea so no one would start to wonder if something might be wrong with me, but I plan to palm my dose because I don't know what it might do to the Lone Ranger (I hope he's Lone; I'm not sure I could face twins). With the Veronal proposal adopted, Mark had a comment. "You know," he sez, "things like this really don't bear too much thinking about. The next thing you know, we'll all be thinking we're Moses or Joseph, getting telephone calls from God." "That dark man isn't calling from heaven," Stu sez. "If it's a toll-call, I think it's comin from someplace a lot lower down." "Which is Stu's way of saying Old Scratch is after us," Frannie pipes up. "And that's as good an explanation as any other," Glen sez. We all looked at him. "Well," he went on, a little on the defensive, I think, "if you look at it from a theological point of view, it does rather seem as if we're the knot in a tug-o-war rope between heaven and hell, doesn't it? If there are any Jesuit survivors of the superflu, they must be going absolutely bananas." That made Mark laugh his head off. I didn't really get it, but kept my mouth shut. "Well, I think the whole thing is ridiculous," Harold put in. "You'll be getting around to Edgar Cayce and the transmigration of souls before we know it." He pronounced Cayce Case, and when I corrected him (you say it like the initials for Kansas City), he gave me a really HORRID HAROLD-FROWN. He isn't the type of guy who swamps you with gratitude when you point out his little flaws, diary! "Whenever something overtly paranormal occurs," Glen said, "the only explanation that really fits well and holds its interior logic is the theological one. That's why psychics and religion have always gone hand in hand, right up to your modern-day faith-healers." Harold was grumbling, but Glen went on anyway. "My own gut feeling is that everyone's psychic... and it's so ingrained a part of us that we very rarely notice it. The talent may be largely preventative, and that keeps it from being noticed, too." "Why?" I asked. "Because it's a negative factor, Fran. Have any of you ever read James D. L. Staunton's 1958 study of train and airplane crashes? It was originally published in a sociology journal, but the tabloid newspapers rake it up every now and again." We all shook our heads. "You ought to," he said. "James Staunton was what my students of twenty years ago would have called `a real good head'-a mild-mannered clinical sociologist who studied the occult as a kind of hobby. He wrote any number of articles on the combined subjects before going over to the other side to do some first-hand research." Harold snorted, but Stu and Mark were grinning. I fear I was, too. "So tell us about the planes and trains," Peri sez. "Well, Staunton got the stats on over fifty plane crashes since 1925 and over two hundred train crashes since 1900. He fed all the data into a computer. Basically, he was correlating three factors: those present on any such conveyance that met with disaster, those killed, and the capacity of the vehicle." "Don't see what he was trying to prove," Stu said. "To see that, you have to understand that he fed a second series of figures into the computer-this time an equal number of planes and trains which didn't meet with disaster." Mark nodded. "A control group and an experimental group. That seems solid enough." "What he found was simple enough, but staggering in its implications. It's a shame one has to stagger through sixteen tables to get at the underlying statistical fact." "What fact?" I asked. "Full planes and trains rarely crash," Glen said. "Oh fucking BULLSHIT!" Harold just about screams. "Not at all," Glen sez calmly. "That was Staunton's theory, and the computer bore him out. In cases where planes or trains crash, the vehicles are running at 61 % capacity, as regards passenger loads. In cases where they don't, the vehicles are running at 76% capacity. That's a difference of 15% over a large computer run, and that sort of across-the-board deviation is significant. Staunton points out that, statistically speaking, a 3% deviation would be food for thought, and he's right. It's

256 an anomaly the size of Texas. Staunton's deduction was that people know which planes and trains are going to crash... that they are unconsciously predicting the future. "Your Aunt Sally gets a bad stomachache just before Flight 61 takes off from Chicago bound for San Diego: And when the plane crashes in the Nevada desert, everyone says, `Oh Aunt Sally, that bellyache was really the grace of God. ' But until James Staunton came along, no one had realized that there were really thirty people with bellyaches... or headaches... or just that funny feeling you get in your legs when your body is trying to tell your head that something is getting ready to go way off-course." "I just can't believe that," Harold sez, shaking his head rather woefully. "Well, you know," Glen said, "about a week after I finished the Staunton article for the first time, a Majestic Airlines jet crashed at Logan Airport. It killed everyone on board. Well, I called the Majestic office at Logan after things had settled down a bit. I told them I was a reporter from the Manchester Union-Leader-a small lie in a good cause. I said we were getting a sidebar on airline crashes together and asked if they could tell me how many no-shows there were on that flight. The man sounded kind of surprised, because he said the airline personnel had been talking about that. The number was sixteen. Sixteen no-shows. I asked him what the average was on 747 flights from Denver to Boston, and he said it was three." "Three," Perion sez in a marveling kind of way. "Right. But the guy went further. He said they'd also had fifteen cancellations, and the average number is eight. So, although the headlines after the fact screamed LOGAN AIR CRASH KILLS 94, it could just as well have read 31 AVOID DEATH IN LOGAN AIRPORT DISASTER. Well... there was a lot more talk about psychic stuff, but it wandered pretty far afield from the subject of our dreams and whether or not they come from the Big Righteous in the sky. One thing that did come up (this was after Harold had wandered away in utter disgust) was Stu asking Glen, "If we're all so psychic, then how come we don't know when a loved one has just died or that our house just blew away in a tornado, or something?" "There are cases of exactly that sort of thing," Glen said, "but I will admit they are nowhere near as common... or as easy to prove with the aid of a computer. It's an interesting point. I have a theory—" (Doesn't he always, diary?) "—that has to do with evolution. You know, once men—or their progenitors— had tails and hair all over their bodies, and much sharper senses than they do now. Why don't we have them anymore? Quick, Stu! This is your chance to go to the head of the class, mortarboard and all." "Why, for the same reason people don't wear goggles and dusters when they drive anymore, I guess. Sometimes you outgrow a thing. It gets to a point where you don't need it anymore." "Exactly. And what is the point of having a psychic sense that's useless in any practical way? What earthly good would it do you to be working in your office and suddenly know that your wife had been killed in a car-smash coming back from the market? Someone is going to call you on, the telephone and tell you, right? That sense may have atrophied long ago, if we ever had it. It may have gone the way, of our tails and our pelts. "What interests me about these dreams," he went on, "is that they seem to presage some future struggle. We seem to be getting cloudy pictures of a protagonist... and an antagonist. An adversary, if you like. If that's so, it may be like looking at a plane on which we're scheduled to fly... and getting a bellyache. We're being given the means to help shape our own futures, perhaps. A kind of fourth-dimensional free will: the chance to choose in advance of events." "But we don't know what the dreams mean," I said. "No, we don't. But we may. I don't know if a little tickle of psychic ability means we are divine; there are plenty of people who can accept the miracle of eyesight without believing that eyesight proves the existence of God, and I am one of them; but I do believe these dreams are a constructive force in spite of their ability to frighten us. I'm having second thoughts about the Veronal as a result. Taking it is very much like swallowing some Pepto-Bismol to quiet the bellyache, and then getting on the pane anyway." Things to Remember: Recessions, shortages, the prototype Ford Growler that could go sixty miles of highway on a single gallon of gas. Quite the wonder car. That's all; I quit. If I don't shorten my entries, this diary will be as long as Gone with the Wind even before the Lone Ranger arrives (although please not on a white horse named Silver). Oh yes, one other Thing to Remember. Edgar Cayce. Can't forget him. He supposedly saw the future m his dreams.

July 16, 1990

Only two notes, both of them relating to the dreams (see entry two days ago). First, Glen Bateman has been very pale and silent these last two days, and tonight I saw him take an extra- large dose of Veronal. My suspicion is that he skipped his last two doses and the result was some

257 VERY bad dreams. That worries me. I wish I knew a way to approach him about it, but can think of nothing. Second, my own dreams. Nothing night before last (the night after our discussion); slept like a baby and can't remember a thing. Last night I dreamed of the old woman for the first time. Have nothing to add beyond what has already been said except to say she seems to exude an aura of NICENESS, of KINDNESS. I think I can understand why Stu was so set on going to Nebraska even in the face of Harold's sarcasm. I woke up this morning completely refreshed, thinking that if we could just get to that old woman, Mother Abigail, everything would be AOK. I hope she's really there. (By the way, I'm quite sure that the name of the town is Hemingford Home.) Things to Remember: Mother Abigail!