him numb.
His friends tried to be loyal. They took turns talking to him, trying to calm him, trying to get him to lay off the drink, but it was no good. Stacy even read to him because he couldn’t read himself. He was wearing everybody down and he knew it.
The fact was, his brain was teeming. He was trying to figure things out. If he couldn’t remember, he could understand about all this, this earthshaking thing, this awful thing. But he knew he was rambling on and on about “life and death,” about what had happened “out there,” about the way the barriers betweenlife and death were crumbling in our popular art and in our serious art. Hadn’t anybody noticed? Movies and novels always told you what was going on. You just had to study them to see it. Why, he’d seen it before this even happened.
Take Bergman’s film
Fanny and Alexander.
Why, the dead just come walking in and talk to the living. And the same thing happened in
Ironweed.
In
Cries and Whispers
didn’t the dead just get up and talk? And there was some comedy out now, and when you considered the lighter movies, it was happening with even greater frequency. Take
The Woman in White
, with the little dead girl appearing in the bedroom of the little boy, and there was
Julia
with Mia Farrow being haunted by that dead child in London.
“Michael, you’re bashed.”
“It isn’t only horror movies, don’t you see? It’s happening in all our art. Take the book
The White Hotel
, any of you read that? Well, it goes on right past the heroine’s death into the afterlife. I tell you, something is about to happen. The barrier is breaking down, I myself talked to the dead and I came back, and on some subconscious level we all know the barrier is breaking.”
“Michael, you have to calm down. This thing with the hands … ”
“I don’t want to talk about that.” But he was bashed, that he had to admit, and he intended to stay bashed. He liked being bashed. He picked up the phone to order another case of beer. No need for Aunt Viv to go out for anything. And then there was all that Glenlivet Scotch he’d stashed away. And more Jack Daniel’s. Oh, he could stay drunk till he died. No problem.
By phone he finally shut down the company. When he’d tried to work, his men had told him pointedly to go home. They couldn’t get anything done with his constant talking. He was hopping from subject to subject. And then there was the reporter standing there asking him to demonstrate the power for the woman from Sonoma County. And something else was plaguing him, too, which he could not confide to anyone: he was receiving vague emotional impressions from people whether he touched them or not.
A certain free-floating telepathy it seemed; and there were no gloves to shut it off. It wasn’t information he received; it was merely strong impressions of like, dislike, truth or falsehood. Sometimes he was so caught up in this, he only saw people’s lips moving. He didn’t hear their words at all.
This highly charged intimacy, if that was the proper thing to call it, alienated him to the core.
He let the contracts go, transferring everything in the space ofan afternoon, making sure all his men got work, and then closing his small shop on Castro which sold vintage Victorian fixtures.
It was OK to go indoors, to lie down, to pull the curtains, and drink. Aunt Viv sang in the kitchen as she cooked for him meals he didn’t want to eat. Now and then he tried to read a little of
David Copperfield
, in order to escape from his own mind. At all the worst moments of his life, he had always retired to some remote corner of the world and read
David Copperfield.
It was easier and lighter than
Great Expectations
, his true favorite. But the only reason he could follow the book now was that he knew it practically by heart.
Therese went to visit her brother in Southern California. A lie, he knew, though he had not touched the phone, merely heard the voice through the
His friends tried to be loyal. They took turns talking to him, trying to calm him, trying to get him to lay off the drink, but it was no good. Stacy even read to him because he couldn’t read himself. He was wearing everybody down and he knew it.
The fact was, his brain was teeming. He was trying to figure things out. If he couldn’t remember, he could understand about all this, this earthshaking thing, this awful thing. But he knew he was rambling on and on about “life and death,” about what had happened “out there,” about the way the barriers betweenlife and death were crumbling in our popular art and in our serious art. Hadn’t anybody noticed? Movies and novels always told you what was going on. You just had to study them to see it. Why, he’d seen it before this even happened.
Take Bergman’s film
Fanny and Alexander.
Why, the dead just come walking in and talk to the living. And the same thing happened in
Ironweed.
In
Cries and Whispers
didn’t the dead just get up and talk? And there was some comedy out now, and when you considered the lighter movies, it was happening with even greater frequency. Take
The Woman in White
, with the little dead girl appearing in the bedroom of the little boy, and there was
Julia
with Mia Farrow being haunted by that dead child in London.
“Michael, you’re bashed.”
“It isn’t only horror movies, don’t you see? It’s happening in all our art. Take the book
The White Hotel
, any of you read that? Well, it goes on right past the heroine’s death into the afterlife. I tell you, something is about to happen. The barrier is breaking down, I myself talked to the dead and I came back, and on some subconscious level we all know the barrier is breaking.”
“Michael, you have to calm down. This thing with the hands … ”
“I don’t want to talk about that.” But he was bashed, that he had to admit, and he intended to stay bashed. He liked being bashed. He picked up the phone to order another case of beer. No need for Aunt Viv to go out for anything. And then there was all that Glenlivet Scotch he’d stashed away. And more Jack Daniel’s. Oh, he could stay drunk till he died. No problem.
By phone he finally shut down the company. When he’d tried to work, his men had told him pointedly to go home. They couldn’t get anything done with his constant talking. He was hopping from subject to subject. And then there was the reporter standing there asking him to demonstrate the power for the woman from Sonoma County. And something else was plaguing him, too, which he could not confide to anyone: he was receiving vague emotional impressions from people whether he touched them or not.
A certain free-floating telepathy it seemed; and there were no gloves to shut it off. It wasn’t information he received; it was merely strong impressions of like, dislike, truth or falsehood. Sometimes he was so caught up in this, he only saw people’s lips moving. He didn’t hear their words at all.
This highly charged intimacy, if that was the proper thing to call it, alienated him to the core.
He let the contracts go, transferring everything in the space ofan afternoon, making sure all his men got work, and then closing his small shop on Castro which sold vintage Victorian fixtures.
It was OK to go indoors, to lie down, to pull the curtains, and drink. Aunt Viv sang in the kitchen as she cooked for him meals he didn’t want to eat. Now and then he tried to read a little of
David Copperfield
, in order to escape from his own mind. At all the worst moments of his life, he had always retired to some remote corner of the world and read
David Copperfield.
It was easier and lighter than
Great Expectations
, his true favorite. But the only reason he could follow the book now was that he knew it practically by heart.
Therese went to visit her brother in Southern California. A lie, he knew, though he had not touched the phone, merely heard the voice through the
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