Don rubbed his face with his freezing hands. It was important not to appear confused in front of David- David had asked him to lunch. David had something to tell him.
New York?
But yes, it was New York, and there was David, looking at him amusedly, happy to see him, full of something to say. Don looked down at the sidewalk. The axe was gone. He ran between the cars and embraced his brother and smelled cigars, good shampoo, Aramis cologne. He was here and David was alive.
"How do you feel?" David asked.
"I'm not here and you're dead," came out of his mouth.
David looked embarrassed, then disguised it behind another smile. "You'd better sit down, little brother. You're not supposed to be talking like that anymore." David held his elbow and led him to a chair beneath one of the sun umbrellas. A martini on the rocks chilled a sweating glass.
"I'm not supposed… Don began. He sat heavily in the chair; Manhattan traffic went down the pleasant East Fifties street; on the other side, over the top of the traffic, he read the name of a French restaurant painted in gold on dark glass. Even his cold feet could tell that the pavement was hot.
"You bet you're not," David said. "I ordered a steak for you, all right? I didn't think you'd want anything too rich." He looked sympathetically across the table at Don. The modish glasses hid his eyes, but David's whole handsome face exuded warmth. "Is that suit okay, by the way? I found it in your closet. Now that you're out of the hospital, you'll have to shop for some new clothes. Use my account at Brooks, will you?" Don looked down at what he wore. A tan summer suit, a brown-and-green-striped tie, brown loafers. It all looked a little out of date and shabby beside David's elegance.
"Now look at me and tell me I'm dead," David said.
"You're not dead."
David sighed happily. "Okay. Good. You had me worried there, pal. Now-do you remember anything about what happened?"
"No. Hospital?"
"You had about the worst breakdown anyone's ever seen, brother. It was the next thing to a one-way ticket. Happened right after you finished that book."
"The Nightwatcher?"
"What else? You just blanked out-and when you'd say anything, it was just crazy stuff about me being dead and Alma being something awful and mysterious. You were in outer space. If you don't remember any of this, it's because of the shock treatments. Now we have to get you settled again. I talked to Professor Lieberman, and he says he'll give you another appointment in the fall-he really liked you, Don."
"Lieberman? No, he said I was…"
"That was before he knew how sick you were. Anyhow, I got you out of Mexico and put you in a private hospital in Riverdale. Paid all the bills until you got straightened out. The steak'll be here in a minute. Better get that martini down. The house red isn't bad here."
Don obediently sipped at his drink: that familiar cold potent taste. "Why am I so cold?" he asked David. "I'm frozen."
"Aftereffect of the drug therapy." David patted his hand. "They told me you'd feel like that for a day or two, cold, not too sure of yourself yet-it'll go away. I promise you."
A waitress came with their food. Don let her take away his martini glass.
"You had all these disturbed ideas," his brother was saying. "Now that you're well again, they'll shock you. You thought my wife was some kind of monster who had killed me in Amsterdam-you were convinced of it. The doctor said you couldn't face the fact that you'd lost her: that's why you never came out here to talk about it. You wound up thinking that what you wrote in your novel was real. After you mailed the book off to your agent, you just sat in a hotel room, not eating, not washing-you didn't even get up to shit. I had to go all the way down to Mexico City to bring you back."
"What was I doing an hour ago?" Don asked.
"You were getting a sedative shot. Then they put you in a cab and sent you down here. I thought you'd like to see the place again. Something familiar."
"I've been in a hospital for a year?"
"Nearly two years. For the past few months, you've been making great progress."
"Why can't I remember it?"
"Simple. Because you don't want to. As far as you're concerned, you were born five minutes ago. But it'll all come back slowly. You can recuperate in our place on the Island-lots of sun, sand, a few women. Like the sound of that?"
Don blinked and looked around. His entire body felt unreasonably cold. A tall woman was just now coming down the block toward them, pulled along by an enormous sheepdog on a leash-the woman was slender and tanned, she wore sunglasses pushed up into her hair, and for a moment she was the emblem of what was reaclass="underline" the epitome of all not hallucinated or imagined, of sanity. She was no one important, she was a stranger, but if what David was telling, him was the truth, she meant health.
"You'll see plenty of women," David said, almost laughing. "Don't burn out your eyes on the first one who crosses your path."
"You're married to Alma now," Don said.
"Of course. She's dying to see you. And you know," David said, still smiling, holding a fork with a neatly speared section of meat, "she's kind of flattered about that book of yours. She feels she contributed to literature! But I want to tell you something," and David hitched his chair closer. "Think about the consequences of it, if what you said in that book was true. If creatures like that really existed-and you thought they did, you know."
"I know," Don said. "I thought-"
"Wait. Let me finish. Can't you see how puny we'd look to them? We live-what? A miserable sixty-seventy years, maybe. They'd live for centuries-for a century of centuries. Becoming anything they want to become. Our lives are made by accident, by coincidence, by a blind combination of genes-they make themselves by will. They would detest us. And they'd be right. Next to them, we would be detestable."
"No," Don said. "That's all wrong. They're savage and cruel, they live on death…" He felt as though he were about to be sick. "You can't say those things."
"Your problem is that you're still caught up in the story you were telling yourself-even though you're out of it, that story is still hanging around in your memory somewhere. You know, your doctor told me he never saw anything like it-when you flipped, you flipped into a story. You'd be walking down the hall in the hospital, and you'd be carrying on a conversation with people who weren't there. You were all wrapped up in some sort of plot. Impressed the hell out of the doctors. You'd be talking to them, and they'd talk back, but you answered back like you were talking to some guy named Sears or another guy named Ricky…" David smiled and shook his head.
"What happened at the end of the story?" Don asked.
"Huh?"
"What happened at the end of the story?" Don set down his fork and leaned forward, staring at his brother's bland face.
"They didn't let you get there," David said. "They were afraid to-looked like you were setting yourself up to get killed. See, that was part of your problem. You invented these fantastic beautiful creatures, and then you 'wrote' yourself into the story as their enemy. But nothing like that could ever be defeated. No matter how hard you tried, they'd always win in the end."
"No, that isn't…" Don said. That wasn't correct: he could only remember the vague outlines of the "story" David was talking about, but he was sure David was wrong.
"Your doctors said it was the most interesting way for a novelist to commit suicide they ever heard of. So they couldn't let you push it to the end, do you see? They had to bring you out of it."
Don sat as if in freezing wind.
"Hello and welcome back," Sears said. "We've all had that dream, but I imagine you must be the first to have it at one of our meetings."