The Waste Lands (Page 39)

The Cadillac floated by. Jake caught a glimpse of the fat man in the blue hat peering out through the windshield, and then it was gone. That was when it happened; that was when he split down the middle and became two boys. One lay dying in the street. The other stood here on the corner, watching in dumb, stricken amazement as DONT WALK turned to WALK again and people began to cross around him just as if nothing had happened … as, indeed, nothing had. I’m alive! half of his mind rejoiced, screaming with relief. Dead! the other half screamed back. Dead in the street! They’re all gathering around me, and the man in black who pushed me is saying, “I am a priest. Let me through.”

Waves of faintness rushed through him and turned his thoughts to billowing parachute silk. He saw the fat lady approaching, and as she passed, Jake looked into her bag. He saw the bright blue eyes of a doll peeping above the edge of a red towel, just as he had known he would. Then she was gone. The pretzel vendor was not yelling Oh my God, he’s kilt; he was continuing to set up for the day’s business while he whistled the Donna Summer tune that had been playing on the Chicano guy’s radio.

Jake turned around, looking wildly for the priest who was not a priest. He wasn’t there.

Jake moaned.

Snap out of it! What’s wrong with you?

He didn’t know. He only knew he was supposed to be lying in the street right now, getting ready to die while the fat woman screamed and the guy in the nailhead worsted suit threw up and the man in black pushed through the gathering crowd.

And in part of his mind, that did seem to be happening. The faintness began to return. Jake suddenly dropped his lunch sack to the pavement and slapped himself across the face as hard as he could. A woman on her way to work gave him a queer look. Jake ignored her. He left his lunch lying on the sidewalk and plunged into the intersection, also ignoring the red DONT WALK light, which had begun to stutter on and off again. It didn’t matter now. Death had approached . . . and then passed by without a second glance. It hadn’t been meant to happen that way, and on the deepest level of his exis-tence he knew that, but it had.

Maybe now he would live forever.

The thought made him feel like screaming all over again.

His HEAD HAD CLEARED a little by the time he got to school, and his mind had gone to work trying to convince him that nothing was wrong, really nothing at all. Maybe something a little weird had happened, some sort of psychic flash, a momentary peek into one possible future, but so what? No big deal, right? The idea was actually sort of cool—the kind of thing they were always printing in the weird supermarket newspapers Greta Shaw liked to read when she was sure Jake’s mother wasn’t around—papers like the National Enquirer and Inside View. Except, of course, in those papers the psychic flash was always a kind of tactical nuclear strike—a woman who dreamed of a plane crash and changed her reservations, or a guy who dreamed his brother was being held prisoner in a Chinese fortune cookie factory and it turned out to be true. When your psychic flash consisted of knowing that a Kiss song was going to play next on the radio, that a fat lady had a doll wrapped in a red towel in her Bloomingdale’s bag, and that a pretzel vendor was going to drink a bottle of Yoo-Hoo instead of a can, how big a deal could it be?

Forget it, he advised himself. It’s over. A great idea, except by period three he knew it wasn’t over; it was just beginning. He sat in pre-algebra, watching Mr. Knopf solving simple equations on the board, and realized with dawning horror that a whole new set of memories was surfacing in his mind. It was like watching strange objects float slowly toward the surface of a muddy lake.

I’m in a place I don’t know, he thought. I mean, I will know it—or would have known it if the Cadillac had hit me. It’s the way station—but the part of me that’s there doesn’t know that yet. That part only knows it’s in the desert someplace, and there are no people. I’ve been crying, because I’m scared. I’m scared that this might be hell.

By three o’clock, when he arrived at Mid-Town Lanes, he knew he had found the pump in the stables and had gotten a drink of water. The water was very cold and tasted strongly of minerals. Soon he would go inside and find a small supply of dried beef in a room which had once been a kitchen. He knew this as clearly and surely as he’d known the pretzel vendor would select a bottle of Yoo-Hoo, and that the doll peek-ing out of the Bloomingdale’s bag had blue eyes. It was like being able to remember forward in time. He bowled only two strings—the first a 96, the second an 87. Timmy looked at his sheet when he turned it in at the counter and shook his head. “You’re having an off-day today, champ,” he said.

“You don’t know the half of it,” Jake said. Timmy took a closer look. “You okay? You look really pale.” “I think I might be coming down with a bug.” This didn’t feel like a lie, either. He was sure as hell coming down with something. “Go home and go to bed,” Timmy advised. “Drink lots of clear liquids—gin, vodka, stuff like that.”

Jake smiled dutifully. “Maybe I will.”

He walked slowly home. All of New York was spread out around him, New York at its most seductive—a late-afternoon street serenade with a musician on every corner, all the trees in bloom, and everyone apparently in a good mood. Jake saw all this, but he also saw behind it: saw himself cowering in the shadows of the kitchen as the man in black drank like a grinning dog from the stable pump, saw himself sobbing with relief as he—or it—moved on without discovering him, saw himself falling deeply asleep as the sun went down and the stars began to come out like chips of ice in the harsh purple desert sky. He let himself into the duplex apartment with his key and walked into the kitchen to get something to eat. He wasn’t hungry, but it was, habit. He was headed for the refrigerator when his eye happened on the pantry door and he stopped. He realized suddenly that the way station— and all the rest of that strange other world where he now belonged— was behind that door. All he had to do was push through it and rejoin the Jake that already existed there. The queer doubling in his mind would end; the voices, endlessly arguing the question of whether or not he had been dead since 8:25 that morning, would fall silent. Jake pushed open the pantry door with both hands, his face already breaking into a sunny, relieved smile . . . and then froze as Mrs. Shaw, who was standing on a step-stool at the back of the pantry, screamed. The can of tomato paste she had been holding dropped out of her hand and fell to the floor. She tottered on the stool and Jake rushed forward to steady her before she could join the tomato paste.