'Very little,' Rich said, and then paused. 'Enough, I suppose.'
'Will you come?'
'I'll come,' Rich said, and hung up.
He sat in his study for a moment, leaning back in the chair behind his desk, looking out at the Pacific Ocean. A couple of kids were down on the left, horsing around on their surfboards, not really riding them. There wasn't much surf to ride.
The clock on the desk — an expensive LED quartz that had been a gift from a record company rep — said that it was 5:09 P .M . on May 28th, 1985. It would, of course, be three hours later where Mike was calling from. Dark already. He felt a prickle of gooseflesh at that and he began to move, to do things. First, of course, he put on a record — not hunting, just grabbing blindly among the thousands racked on the shelves. Rock and roll was almost as much a part of his life as the Voices, and it was hard for him to do anything without music playing — and the louder the better. The record he grabbed turned out to be a Motown retrospective. Marvin Gaye, one of the newer members of what Rich sometimes called The All-Dead Band, came on singing 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine.'
'Oooh-hoo, I bet your wond'rin how I knew . . . '
'Not bad,' Rich said. He even smiled a little. This was bad, and it had admittedly knocked him for a loop, but he felt that he was going to be able to handle it. No sweat.
He began getting ready to go back home. And at some point during the next hour it occurred to him that it was as if he had died and had yet been allowed to make all of his own final business dispositions . . . not to mention his own funeral arrangements. And he felt as if he was doing pretty good. He tried the travel agent he used, thinking she would probably be on the freeway and headed home by now but taking a shot on the off-chance. For a wonder, he caught he r in. He told her what he needed and she asked him for fifteen minutes.
'I owe you one, Carol,' he said. They had progressed from Mr Tozier and Ms Feeny to Rich and Carol over the last three years — pretty chummy, considering they had never met face to face.
'All right, pay off,' she said. 'Can you do Kinky Briefcase for me?'
Without even pausing — if you had to pause to find your Voice, there was usually no Voice there to be found — Rich said: 'Kinky Briefcase, Sexual Accountant, here — I had a fellow come in the other day who wanted to know what the worst thing was about getting AIDS.' His voice had dropped slightly; at the same time its rhythm had speeded up and become jaunty — it was clearly an American voice and yet it somehow conjured up images of a wealthy British colonial chappie who was as charming, in his muddled way, as he was addled. Rich hadn't the slightest idea who Kinky Briefcase really was, but he was sure he always wore white suits, read Esquire, and drank things which came in tall glasses and smelled like coconut– scented shampoo. 'I told him right away — trying to explain to your mother how you picked it up from a Haitian girl. Until next time, this is Kinky Briefcase, Sexual Accountant, saying "You need my card if you can't get hard."'
Carol Feeny screamed with laughter. 'That's perfect! Perfect. My boyfriend says he doesn't believe you can just do those voices, he says it's got to be a voice-filter gadget or something
— '
'Just talent, my dear,' Rich said. Kinky Briefcase was gone. W. C. Fields, top hat, red nose,
golf-bags and all, was here. 'I'm so stuffed with talent I have to plug up all my bodily orifices to keep it from just running out like . . . well, just running out.'
She went off into another screamy gale of laughter, and Rich closed his eyes. He could feel the beginnings of a headache.
'Be a dear and see what you can do, would you?' he asked, still being W. C. Fields, and hung up on her laughter.
Now he had to go back to being himself, and that was hard — it got harder to do that every year. It was easier to be brave when you were someone else.
He was trying to pick out a pair of good loafers and had about decided to stick with sneakers when the phone rang again. It was Carol Feeny, back in record time. He felt an instant urge to fall into the Buford Kissdrivel Voice and fought it off. She had been able to get him a first-class seat on the American Airlines red-eye nonstop from LAX to Boston. He would leave LA at 9:03 P.M. and arrive at Logan about five o'clock tomorrow morning. Delta would fly him out of Boston at 7:30 A.M. and into Bangor, Maine, at 8:20. She had gotten him a full –sized sedan from Avis, and it was only twenty –six miles from the Avis counter at Bangor International Airport to the Derry town line.
Only twenty-six miles? Rich thought. Is that all, Carol? Well, maybe it is — in miles, anyway. But you don't have the slightest idea how far it really is to Derry, and I don't, either. But oh God, oh dear God, I am going to find out.
'I didn't try for a room because you didn't tell me how long you'd be there,' she said. 'Do you — '
'No — let me take care of that,' Rich said, and then Buford Kissdrivel took over. 'You've been a peach, my deah. A Jawja peach, a cawse.'
He hung up gently on her — always leave em laughing — and then dialed 207-555-1212 for State of Maine Directory Assistance. He wanted a number for the Derry Town House. God, there was a name from the past. He hadn't thought of the Derry Town House in — what? — te n years? twenty? twenty-five years, even? Crazy as it seemed, he guessed it had been at least twenty-five years, and if Mike hadn't called, he supposed he might never have thought of it again in his life. And yet there had been a time in his life when he had walked past that great red brick pile every day — and on more than one occasion he had run past it, with Henry Bowers and Belch Huggins and that other big boy, Victor Somebody-or-Other, in hot pursuit, all of them yelling little pleasantries like We're gonna getcha, fuckface! Gonnagetcha, you little smartass! Gonna getcha, you foureyed faggot! Had they ever gotten him?
Before Rich could remember, an operator was asking him what city, please.
'In Derry, operator — '
Derry! God! Even the word felt strange and forgotten in his mouth; saying it was like kissing an antique.
' — do you have a number for the Derry Town House?'
'One moment, sir.'
No way. It'll be gone. Razed in an urban-renewal program. Changed into an Elks' Hall or a Bowl-a-Drome or an Electric Dreamscape Video Arcade. Or maybe burned down one night when the odds finally ran out on some drunk shoe salesman smoking in bed. All gone, Richie
— just like the glasses Henry Bowers always used to rag you about. What's that Springsteen
song say? Glory days . . . gone in the wink of a young girl's eye. What young girl? Why, Bev,
of course. Bev . . .
Changed the Town House might be, but gone it apparently was not, because a blank, robotic voice now came on the line and said: 'The . . . number . . . is . . . 9 . . . 4 . . . 1 . . . 8 . . . 2 . . . 8 . . . 2. Repeat: . . . the . . . number . . . is . . . '
But Rich had gotten it the first time. It was a pleasure to hang up on that droning voice — it was too easy to imagine some great globular Directory Assistance monster buried somewhere in the earth, sweating rivets and holding thousands of telephones in thousands of jointed chromium tentacles — the Ma Bell version of Spidey's nemesis, Dr Octopus. Each year the world Rich lived in felt more and more like a huge electronic haunted house in which digital ghosts and frightened human beings lived in uneasy coexistence.
Still standing. To paraphrase Paul Simon, still standing after all these years.