Timbuktu Page 6

  Willy stopped talking then, and the hand that had been rubbing the top of Mr. Bones’s head for the past twenty-five minutes gradually went limp, then ceased moving altogether. For the life of him, Mr. Bones assumed that this was the end. How not to think that after the finality of the words just spoken? How not to think his master was gone when the hand that had been massaging his skull suddenly slid off him and fell lifelessly to the ground? Mr. Bones didn’t dare look up. He kept his head planted on Willy’s right thigh and waited, hoping against hope that he was wrong. For the fact was that the air was less still than it should have been. There were sounds coming from somewhere, and as he fought through the miasma of his mounting grief to listen more carefully, he understood that they were coming from his master. Was it possible? Not quite willing to believe his ears, the dog checked again, girding himself against disappointment even as his certainty grew. Yes, Willy was breathing. The air was still going in and out of his lungs, still going in and out of his mouth, still lumbering through the old dance of inhales and exhales, and though the breath was shallower than it had been just a day or two ago, no more than a faint fluttering now, a feathery sibilance confined to the throat and upper lungs, it was nevertheless breath, and where there was breath, there was life. His master wasn’t dead. He had fallen asleep.

  Not two seconds after that, as if to confirm the accuracy of Mr. Bones’s observation, Willy began to snore.

  The dog was a nervous wreck by then. His heart had jumped through a hundred hoops of dread and despair, and when he understood that a reprieve had been granted, that the hour of reckoning had been pushed back a little longer, he nearly collapsed with exhaustion. It was all too much for him. When he saw his master sit down on the ground and lean his back against the walls of Poland, he had vowed to stay awake, to keep watch over him until the bitter end. That was his duty, his fundamental responsibility as a dog. Now, as he listened to the familiar dirge of Willy’s snoring, he couldn’t resist the temptation to close his eyes. The tranquilizing effects of the sound were that powerful. Every night for seven years, Mr. Bones had drifted off to sleep on the waves of that music, and by now it was a signal that all was right with the world, that no matter how hungry or miserable you felt at that moment, the time had come to put aside your cares and float into the land of dreams. After some minor readjustments of position, that was precisely what Mr. Bones did. He laid his head on Willy’s stomach, Willy’s arm involuntarily lifted itself up into the air, then came down to rest across the dog’s back, and the dog fell asleep.

  That was when he dreamed the dream in which he saw Willy die. It began with the two of them waking up, opening their eyes and emerging from the sleep they had just fallen into—which was the sleep they were in now, the same one in which Mr. Bones was dreaming the dream. Willy’s condition was no worse than it had been before the nap. If anything, it appeared to be a tad better because of it. For the first time in several moons, he didn’t cough when he stirred, didn’t lapse into another fit, didn’t seize up in a gruesome frenzy of gasping, choking, and blood-tinged expectorations. He simply cleared his throat and started talking again, picking up almost exactly where he had left off earlier.

  He went on for what seemed to be another thirty or forty minutes, charging ahead in a delirium of half-formed sentences and broken-off thoughts. He swam up from the bottom of the sea, took a deep breath, and began to talk about his mother. He made a list of Mom-san’s virtues, countered with a list of her faults, and then begged forgiveness for any sufferings he might have caused her. Before moving on to the next thing, he recalled her talent for bungling jokes, fondly regaling Mr. Bones with examples of her unerring knack for forgetting punch lines at the last minute. Then he reeled off another list—this one of all the women he had ever slept with (physical descriptions included)—and followed that with a long-winded diatribe against the perils of consumerism. Then, suddenly, he was delivering a treatise on the moral advantages of homelessness, which ended with a heartfelt apology to Mr. Bones for dragging him down to Baltimore on what had turned out to be a wild-goose chase. “I forgot to add the letter g,” he said. “I didn’t come for Bea Swanson; I came to give my swan song,” and immediately after that he was reciting a new poem, an apostrophe to the invisible demiurge who was about to claim his soul. Apparently composed off the top of his head, its opening stanza went something like this:

  O Lord of the ten thousand blast furnaces and dungeons,

  Of the pulverizing hammer and chain-mail gaze,

  Dark Lord of the salt mines and pyramids,

  Maestro of the sand dunes and flying fish,

  Listen to the prattle of your poor servant,

  Dying on the shores of Baltimore

  And headed for the Great Beyond…

  After the poem dribbled away, it was replaced by more laments and fugues, more unpredictable sputterings on any number of themes: the Symphony of Smells and why the experiment failed, Happy Felton and the Knothole Gang (who the hell was he?), and the fact that the Japanese ate more rice grown in America than in Japan. From there he drifted into the ups and downs of his literary career, wallowing for several minutes in a bog of pent-up grievances and morbid self-pity, then roused his spirits for a while to talk about his college roommate (the same one who had taken him to the hospital in 1968)—a guy named Anster, Omster, something like that— who had gone on to write a number of so-so books and had once promised Willy to find a publisher for his poems, but of course Willy had never sent him the manuscript and that was that, but it proved that he could have been published if he’d wanted to be—he just didn’t want to, that’s all, and who the fuck cared about that vainglorious bullshit anyway? The doing was what mattered, not what you did with it after it was done, and as far as he was concerned now, not even the notebooks in the Greyhound locker were worth more than a fart and a used-up can of beans. Let them burn, for all he cared, let them be thrown out with the trash, let them be tossed into the men’s room for weary travelers to wipe their asses with. He never should have lugged them down to Baltimore in the first place. A moment of weakness, that’s what it was, a last-gasp move in the vile game of Ego—which was the one game that everyone loses, that no one can ever win. He paused for a few moments after that, marveling at the depth of his own bitterness, and then let out a long wheezy laugh, bravely mocking himself and the world he loved so much. From there he returned to Omster, launching into a story his friend had told him many years before about meeting an English setter in Italy who could write out sentences on a typewriter that had been custom-built for dogs. Inexplicably, Willy broke down in sobs after that, and then he began to berate himself for never having taught Mr. Bones how to read. How could he have neglected to take care of such an essential matter? Now that the dog was about to be cast out on his own, he would need every advantage he could get, and Willy had let him down, had done nothing to provide him with a new situation, was leaving him with no money, no food, no means to cope with the dangers that lay ahead. The bard’s tongue was going a mile a minute by then, but Mr. Bones didn’t miss a trick, and he could hear Willy’s words as distinctly as he had ever heard them in life. That was what was so strange about the dream. There was no distortion, no wavy interference, no sudden switching of channels. It was just like life, and even though he was asleep, even though he was hearing the words in a dream, he was awake in the dream, and therefore the longer he went on sleeping, the more awake he felt.

  Midway through Willy’s speculations on canine reading skills, a police car pulled up in front of Poe’s house, and two large men in uniforms climbed out. One was white and the other was black, and they were both sweating in the August heat, a pair of wide-hipped cops out on Sunday patrol, carrying the instruments of the law around their waists: revolvers and handcuffs, billy clubs and holsters, flashlights and bullets. There was no time to make a full inventory, for no sooner did the men get out of the car than one of them started talking to Willy (“Can’t stay there, pal. You going to move o
n or what?”), and at that moment Willy turned, looked straight into his friend’s eyes, and said, “Beat it, Bonesy. Don’t let them catch you,” and because Mr. Bones knew that this was it, that the dreaded moment was suddenly upon them, he licked Willy’s face, whimpered a brief farewell as his master patted his head for the last time, and then took off, charging down North Amity Street as fast as his legs could take him.

  He heard the alarmed voice of one of the cops shouting behind him (“Frank, get the dog! Get the fucking dog, Frank!”), but he didn’t stop until he reached the corner, a good eighty or ninety feet from the house. By then, Frank had already given up the idea of chasing after him. As Mr. Bones turned around to see what was happening to Willy, he saw the white cop waddling back toward the house. A moment later, urged on by the other one, who was kneeling over Willy and gesturing wildly with his hand, he broke into a slow trot and went to join his partner. No one was worried about the dog anymore. There was a dying man to attend to, and as long as Mr. Bones kept himself at a safe distance, nothing was going to happen to him.

  So he stood on the corner and watched, panting heavily after his short run, the wind all but knocked out of him. He felt sorely tempted to open his mouth and howl, to let go with one of his dark, bloodcurdling moon wails, but he suppressed the urge, knowing full well that this was no time to vent his sorrows. In the distance, he saw the black cop standing by the car, talking into the two-way radio. A muffled, static-charged response filled the empty street. The cop talked again, and gusts of incomprehensible words followed, another onslaught of noise and gibberish. A door opened across the street, and someone came out to see what was going on. A woman in a yellow house frock and a head full of pink curlers. Two children emerged from another house. A boy of about nine and a girl of about six, both of them wearing shorts and no shoes. Meanwhile, Willy was invisible, still lying where Mr. Bones had left him, blocked off from view by the white cop’s broad, hulking body. A minute or two went by, then another minute or two, and then, faintly in the distance, Mr. Bones heard the sound of an approaching siren. By the time the white ambulance turned down North Amity Street and stopped in front of the house, a crowd of a dozen people had gathered, standing around with their hands in their pockets or their arms folded across their chests. Two paramedics jumped out of the back of the ambulance, wheeled a stretcher toward the house, and returned a moment later with Willy onboard. It was hard to see much of anything, hard to know whether his master was alive or not. Mr. Bones considered rushing back for a last look, but he hesitated to take such a risk, and by the time he’d made up his mind to do it, the paramedics had already slid Willy into the ambulance and were slamming the doors shut.

  Until then, the dream had been no different from reality. Word for word, gesture for gesture, every event had been an exact and faithful rendering of events as they happened in the world. Now, as the ambulance drove off and the people slowly returned to their houses, Mr. Bones felt himself divide in two. Half of him remained on the corner, a dog contemplating his bleak and uncertain future, and the other half of him turned into a fly. Given the nature of dreams, perhaps there was nothing unusual about that. We all change into other things while we sleep, and Mr. Bones was no exception. At one time or another, he had entered the skin of a horse, a cow, and a pig, not to speak of several different dogs, but until he had the dream that day, he had never been two things at once.

  There was urgent business to attend to, and only the fly part of him could do it. So, while the dog part of him waited on the corner, the fly rose into the air and flew down the block, chasing after the ambulance as swiftly as his wings could carry him. Because it was a dream, and because the fly could fly faster than any flesh-and-blood fly, it didn’t take him long to reach his goal. By the time the ambulance turned the corner onto the next street, he had already attached himself to the back door handle, and it was in this way that he rode with Willy to the hospital, all six of his feet clamped onto the slightly rusty surface of the handle’s leeward side, praying that the wind wouldn’t blow him off. It turned out to be a wild jaunt, what with the pothole bumps and the swerves and the sudden stops and starts and the air streaming in on him from all directions, but he managed to hold on, and when the ambulance pulled up to the hospital emergency entrance eight or nine minutes later, his wits were still intact. He hopped off the handle just as one of the paramedics was about to grab hold of it, and then, as the doors were opened and Willy was wheeled out, he hovered a yard or so above the scene, an unobtrusive speck looking down at his master’s face. At first, he couldn’t tell if Willy was alive or dead, but once the gurney was all the way out and its wheels were on the ground, Mrs. Gurevitch’s son opened his eyes. Not much, perhaps, just a crack to let some light in and see what was happening, but even that squint was enough to make the fly’s heart skip a beat. “Bea Swanson,” Willy mumbled. “Three-sixteen Calvert. Gotta call her. Pronto. Gotta give her the key. Bea’s key. Life and death. A matter of.”

  “Don’t worry,” one of the paramedics said. “We’ll take care of it. But don’t talk now. Save your strength, Willy.”

  Willy. That meant he’d said enough for them to know his name, and if he’d been talking in the ambulance, maybe that meant he wasn’t as bad off as he seemed, which in turn meant that maybe with the right medicines and the proper care, he’d pull through after all. Or so mused the fly in Mr. Bones’s dream, who was in fact Mr. Bones himself, and because he was a biased witness to the proceedings, we should not begrudge him the consolation of last-minute hopes, even if all traces of hope were gone. But what do flies know? And what do dogs know? And what, for that matter, do men know? It was in God’s hands now, and the truth was that there was no turning back.

  Nevertheless, in the seventeen hours that remained, a number of extraordinary things happened. The fly saw each one of them, looking down from the ceiling above Bed 34 in the indigents’ ward of Our Lady of Sorrows Hospital, and if he hadn’t been there on that August day in 1993 to see them with his own eyes, he might not have believed that such things were possible. First of all, Mrs. Swanson was found. Within three hours of Willy’s admittance to the hospital, his old teacher came striding down the aisle of the ward, was shown to a chair by Sister Mary Theresa, the staff supervisor of the four-P.M.-to-midnight shift, and from that moment until Willy left this world, she never once strayed from her student’s side. Second of all, after several hours of intravenous feeding and nonstop megadoses of antibiotics and adrenaline, Willy’s head seemed to clear somewhat, and he spent the last morning of his life in a state as lucid and serene as any Mr. Bones could remember. Third of all, he died without pain. No convulsions, no upheavals, no cataclysmic fires in his chest. He slipped away slowly, withdrawing from this world by small, imperceptible degrees, and in the end it was as if he were a drop of water evaporating in the sun, shrinking and shrinking until at last he wasn’t there anymore.

  The fly never actually saw the key change hands. It might have happened at a moment when his attention was briefly diverted, but then again, Willy might have forgotten to mention it. At the time, it hardly seemed important. Once Bea Swanson entered the room, there were so many other things to think about, so many words to follow and feelings to digest, that he could scarcely remember his own name, let alone Willy’s half-cocked scheme for salvaging his literary archive.

  Her hair had turned white, and she had put on thirty pounds, but the moment he saw her the fly knew who it was. Physically speaking, there was nothing to set her apart from a million other women her age. Dressed in blue-and-yellow madras shorts, a billowing white blouse, and a pair of leather sandals, she seemed to have stopped thinking about her appearance a long time ago. The plumpness of her arms and legs had grown even more pronounced over the years, and with the dimples in her pudgy knees and the varicose veins bulging from her calves and the flesh sagging from her upper arms, you could easily have mistaken her for a retirement-community golf lady, someone with nothing better to do than roam the b
ack nine in an electric cart and worry about whether she was going to putt out in time for the early-bird special. But this woman’s skin was white, not tanned, and instead of sunglasses she had on a pair of no-nonsense wire-rimmed specs. Furthermore, once you looked through the lenses of those drugstore glasses, you discovered eyes of the most remarkable shade of blue. Look into those eyes, and you were trapped. They held you with their warmth and vivacity, their intelligence and watchfulness, the depth of their Scandinavian silences. These were the eyes that Willy had fallen in love with as a boy, and now the fly understood what all the fuss had been about. Forget the short-cropped hair and the chubby legs and the humdrum clothes. Mrs. Swanson was no dowager schoolmarm. She was the goddess of wisdom, and once you fell in love with her, you loved her until the day you died.

  Nor was she quite the pushover that Mr. Bones had expected her to be. After listening to Willy go on about Mrs. Swanson’s kindness and generosity all the way down to Baltimore, he had imagined her as a softhearted sentimentalist, one of those flighty women prone to vast and sudden enthusiasms, who broke down and cried at the smallest provocation and bustled about straightening up after people the moment they stood up from their chairs. The real Mrs. Swanson was anything but. That is to say, the Mrs. Swanson in his dream was anything but. When she approached Willy’s bed and looked into the face of her former student for the first time in almost thirty years, the fly was startled by the toughness and clarity of her reaction. “Jesus Christ, William,” she said. “You’ve sure made a mess of things, haven’t you?”