I muttered with a tired croak in my voice, “Probably right.” I tapped Kodie on her hot head. “You,” I whispered to her, “pill time. Get that fever down.” She got herself up, looked at each of us through eye slits, and waggled her arm goodnight, flopping her hand like it wasn’t properly connected.
As she shuffled away, she turned her head to the jack-o’-lantern and started to say something to it, but demurred.
Bass seemed animated despite the hour and the day we’d had. He hopped back to the chair and lifted the book up again. His brow furrowed, eyes skirting along the lines. “I’m going to stay up. We need someone to stand watch. I’ll start. I’ll wake one of you guys up in a few hours. I’m into this book now. We were supposed to read this in, like, ninth grade? but I don’t really remember it.”
When he moved his elbow off the armrest, I noticed the pistol on the chair. He saw me looking at it and smiled. “Goodnight.” Looked back at the book. “Progress today, eh?”
“Mmmm,” I answered, too tired to care whether we had made progress or not and too tired to appreciate the need to stand watch. Such was the way of this new world. “Yeah. You got the conch tonight. Thanks.”
He lifted an eyebrow at that, but kept reading.
Kodie’s wheeze was there, but muted, the war buglers of her sickness trailing off and though I was falling into the tumult of dreams, I clung to my belief that I was right about her, that her illness was just that: an old-world one that ignited, flared its orange spikes but now was snuffed.
This offered some comfort through the night in which I dreamt I was a chrysalis in a diaphanous sac through which you see my knees and elbows rolling and twisting in gestation’s dull agony.
The chrysalis dreamed within the dream and it was this: Johnny standing in an open field wearing Man U’s red home kit, shin guards, cinched cleats. His arms are outstretched and his chin is lifted with pride and his eyes are closed in basking. The children pool around him, hug him and jostle him, but he maintains his messianic stance.
I’m seeing this scene as a flying thing, hovering just above, then I swerve off through brightness and come upon maroon raw meat centered on a white plate on a pine table in the house with the winter cowboys. The meat starts to shudder and jump and maggots burst from the middle and spill out like white lava from the puckered flesh. In the background I hear frantic Spanish being spoken but I can’t make it out. It’s as though the disembodied Spanish speaker is calling a tight soccer match yet I know he’s describing to an audience what I’m seeing.
I watch the maggots flow out, too many and too much for one piece of meat to hold. A magic clown car of maggots.
Again, I’m flying and now I’m whipping through the air high above Lake Austin. I’m darting down for the waving bald man. In the corners of my many eyes I see that wave coming. I skim the water. It’s coming on my left and just when it gets to me, I lift myself over it and it moves past. I’m still looking at him, feeling it roll under me. But it’s not just water. It entrains an unfathomable power with it. I feel heat come off it as it passes under me. The bald man is waving like a sugared-up kid. His smile is profane. I zoom to him and hover.
His face loses its smile. His waving hand falls to his side. His torso goes slack. His mouth drops open on a rusted hinge, and his eyes droop and I see red crescents under the corneas. Dark, viscous blood falls from his slackjawed mouth.
He produces a glock just like Martin’s, the one I now have with me at all times, and puts it to his head and he fires and buckles to the ground. The lake water forced ashore by the wave comes up to his body and surrounds him once before receding, pulling a thin current of the man’s blood away.
It is then I find myself standing in the man’s yard. I turn to watch the wave seethe and hiss north.
I turn my head downriver and I feel profound doom and destiny.
There’s an echo within the river canyon. The frantic Spanish—now I understand it to be coming from Bass’s ham radio—has slowed to something the speaker wants me to understand. I shake my head, unable to. Then the voice says in heavily inflected English—they cannot do it alone. The voice lets me consider this. In my thoughts, I assent: I can help. No, they need more than that, señor.
That’s the chrysalis dream.
Now, Johnny stands over me and Kodie while we sleep. Dreaming? Unsure. Johnny says, “We do need you. I’m sorry I had to leave. You were learning to dream the dream of sleep and I couldn’t disturb that. Because you’ll need that, probably more than anything, the dream of sleep.” In his pause he became more himself, my little brother. His shoulders relaxed, his tone his again. “There’s no point in worrying, Kev. Okay? Trust me. No point. We’ll see each other soon.” And Johnny strikes that pose again, arms outstretched, palms up. His eyes and mouth become orbs of white light. My eye draws to his clenching right hand. He breaks from the pose, drops his arms, and immediately goes into a throwing motion, kicks out his leg and—
Shattering glass, together with whalescreams.
I see dawn and piles of stones on a beach.
I startled awake at that, soon tumbling in wet echoes.
I heard my name shouted. I heard pounding. I shook my skull side to side trying to rid it of the words, the screams, the dawn beach.
I sat up and there in my room I saw a head on a stick, the eyes Buddha-lidded, flies crawling and buzzing. I can’t make out the face it’s so covered. The buzzing pierces.
Truly awake, in my room. Kodie’s deep asleep. I get up slowly so as not to rouse her. I check to see if Johnny is in his room, what I’d do every morning, but it’s just Wayne on the wall doing his Christ pose in the gloom.
The world came back, the one I lived in now. It’s dawn. Spanish comes over the ham radio in the living room.
Ciudad de Mexico—
Eeef anyone ees dere, pleeese—
I made my way to the front of the house expecting to see Bass hunched over the ham. Light from the front door windows filled the hall.
A late bloomer’s voice: Hello, hello, estamos aquí, is anyone there? Weee are de Ciudad de Mexico—
I flick on the hall light switch. It does not come on. My footfalls quicken down the wooden floor of the short hall.
Los niños aquí, dios mio—
“Don’t.” Bass’s sonorous voice, aggrieved and wracked, from the front room before I even get there. “Don’t, Kevin.”
I step through the doorway. Before I turn to him, I see Mom’s car through the front door. It’s riddled with dings, the glass starred in constellations.
There’s a boy standing in the neighbor’s yard beyond the back of the car looking straight at me, still as a rabbit, a sentinel spy. His hair is blond. It moves in the breeze. He’s bigger, older, yet a boy.
Bass is naked. He holds the pistol. His face is red, his eyes are swollen from crying. He shivers blue-lipped, yet he’s starting to smile. His face forces this smile upon itself. A mucosal laugh barks from his throat when his eyes shift to look at me, then he says as if answering, “I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.” He shakes his head each time he says this and each time the smile seems to spread.
“Bass,” I said. I didn’t move. “C’mon, man.”
“Don’t.”
“I won’t, okay?” I stepped forward, my foot gingerly finding the floor as if it might contain a landmine.
“Don’t!” Bass shoved the barrel under his chin, gouging his skin. He breathed quickly, his nostrils flaring.