She didn’t pause until she had reached her office. When she was inside she slammed the door behind her, dropped to her knees, crouched there trembling until she was sure that she was not going to throw up. Gradually her heart stopped pounding and her breathing returned to normal. Terrible things were happening in her thigh muscles. She glanced up at her data wall. There was a message waiting for her, it said. She called it up.Thanks for info. Our list of dreams exactly the same, detailed analysis to follow. Rumor of similar dream occurrence as far south as San Diego: am checking. More later. What in Cod’s name is going on, anyhow? It was signed Paolucci, San Francisco.
Three
1
The red-and-yellow ground-effect van was floating westward, floating westward, floating westward, on and on and on. The scratchers hadn’t wanted to stay in the San Joaquin Valley after the killings in the farmhouse by the river fork. So westward they went, on a chariot of air, drifting a little way above the dusty August roadbed. Tom felt like a king, riding like that: like Solomon going forth in majesty.
They let him sit up front next to the driver. Charley drove some of the time, and Buffalo, and sometimes the one named Nicholas, who had a smooth boyish face and hair that was entirely white, and who almost never said a thing. Occasionally Mujer drove, or Stidge. Tamale never did, nor Tom himself. Mostly the one who drove, though, was Rupe, beefy and broad-shouldered and red-faced. He just sat there, hour after hour after hour, holding the stick. When Rupe drove, the van never seemed to drift more than a whisker’s width from the straight path. But Rupe didn’t like Tom to sing when he drove. Charley did; Charley was always calling for songs during his shifts. “Get out the old finger-piano, man,” Charley would say, and Tom would rummage in his pack. He had picked up the finger-piano down San Diego way three years ago from one of the African refugees they had down there. It was just a little hollow wooden board with metal tabs fastened to it, but Tom had learned to make it sound as good as a guitar, picking out the melodies with his thumbs against the tabs. He knew the words of a lot of songs. He didn’t know tunes for all of them, but by now he had had enough practice so that he could make tunes up that fitted the words. His voice was a high clear tenor. People liked to hear it, everyone but Rupe. But that was only fair, not bothering Rupe while he was driving.
“Where do you get those songs?” Mujer asked. “I never heard no songs like that.”
“I found a book once,” Tom said. “I learned a lot of poems out of it. Then I made up the music myself.”
“No wonder I never heard none of those songs,” said Mujer. “No wonder.”
“Sing the one about the beach,” Charley said. He was sitting just to the right of Tom. Mujer was driving, and Tom between them in the front seat. “I liked that one. The sad one, the beach at moonlight.” They were getting close to San Francisco now, maybe just another four or five hours, Charley had said. There were a lot of little towns out here, and most of them still were inhabited, though about every third one had been abandoned long ago. The land was still dry and hot, the heavy hand of summer pressing down. The last time they had gotten out of the van to scratch for food, that morning around eleven, Tom had hoped to feel the first cool breeze blowing from the west, and to see wisps of fog drifting their way: San Francisco air, clean and cool. No, Charley had said, you don’t feel San Francisco air until you’re right there, and then it changes all of a sudden, you can be roasting and you come through the tunnel in the hills and it’s cool, it’s like a different kind of air altogether.
Tom was ready for that. He was getting tired of the heat of the Valley. His visions came sharper and better when the air was cool, somehow.
He played a riff on the finger-piano and sang:
“Beautiful,” Charley said.
“I don’t like this goddamn song neither,” said Mujer.
“Then don’t listen,” Charley said. “Just shut up.”
“It don’t make no sense,” said Mujer. “It ain’t about anything.”
“What about the end part?” Charley said. “That’s where it’s really beautiful. If you got any soul in you. Skip to the end, Tom. Hey, what’s that town? Modesto, you think? Modesto, coming up. Skip to the end of the song, will you, Tom?”
Skipping to the end was all right with Tom. He could sing the songs in any order at all.
He sang:
“Beautiful,” Charley said. “You just listen to that. That’s real poetry. It says it all. Take the bypass, Mujer. We don’t want to get ourselves into Modesto, I don’t think.”
“Do the rest of it,” Charley said, as Tom became silent.
“That’s it,” said Tom. “That’s where it ends. Where ignorant armies clash by night. ” He closed his eyes. He saw Eternity come rising up, that ring of blazing light stretching from one end of the universe to the other, and he wondered if a vision was coming on, but no, no, it died away as fast as it had risen. Too bad, he thought. But he knew it would return before long; he could still feel it hovering at the edge of his consciousness, getting ready to break through. Someday, he told himself, a vision of brightness will come and completely take me and carry me off to the heavens, like Elijah who was swept up by the whirlwind, like Enoch, who walked with God and God took him.