Amy had been traumatized in late childhood by an old movie she saw on her family’s RCA console TV, in which a mad pianist’s hands were severed after death and proceeded to crawl around a drafty old house at night, strangling people. Frankenstein was tragic, and Bela Lugosi cracked her up, but for some reason the spectacle of white hands moving crabwise across a bedspread stopped her breath. She took to keeping the door of her closet firmly closed and sleeping with the bedroom door open, to catch the light from downstairs, and insisted, over her mother’s practical objections, upon dust ruffles beneath her mattress, around which dust collected in dingy clouds. She pretended to find the dust ruffles feminine and cozy, but really they were just flimsy barriers beyond which lurked the malign viscosity under her bed. Behind those pink curtains the pale hands waited, squatting, flexing, mulling their midnight itinerary.
It was the fingers that frightened her the most, not the gory, indecent stump, which in those days had yet to be rendered realistically on screen and so could not really be imagined. Fingers were intelligent. “You have smart hands,” her grandmother used to tell her, when Amy would deal the cards for Authors and Crazy 8s and Hi-Lo Jack. Hands could be smart or stupid, and the hands capering hypothetically beneath her bed were brilliant. They knew all about Amy.
Most nights young Amy slept well, but at least one night a week, sometimes two, she was terrorized by the creeping hands. She never saw them, of course, not even out of the corner of her eye, but often she heard them scampering across the floor, the bureau, and on one memorable occasion the window by her bed, a velvet tapping so subtle that it seemed composed for her ears alone, in some obscene code. At twelve she didn’t worry at their symbolism. She had enough on her plate, those long nights, without torturing herself with deeper meanings. All she knew about the hands was that they were out to get her and could be kept away only through constant, wretched vigilance.
In time, though, she came to know something worse: that they weren’t really under her bed, or behind the closet door, and that they weren’t even hands. They were something else entirely, and they lived inside her mind. This came to her one long night when she came awake from a deep sleep to a crisp, hyperreal afterimage, one severed hand perched on her night table, index and third fingers extended toward her, playing a slow trill on the night air, and when, before she had emerged so fully from sleep as to be paralyzed with fright, she sat up and switched on the table lamp, the hand remained, three-dimensional, solid, and absurd. It was just as she had always imagined it, but smaller, or more compact, and frankly stupid-looking. A ridiculous object, and she blinked it away, and there was her blond night table, lightly and evenly blanketed in dust.
Of course there were no severed hands crawling around her bedroom at midnight. She was protected by laws biological and physical. She had been terrified of nothing in this world. Amy was a self-conscious child, never more so than when she was alone, and she was given to formal observations, the most cogent of which she wrote down in her journal, which at that stage was only a three-volume set. Now she got out her pen with the multicolored refills, opened her journal, selected lavender ink, and wrote
What a goon I’ve been! I’ve been living inside a B movie all this time. Think of all those nights, all that lost sleep…But perhaps it was all worth it. I’ve just realized something truly profound. I really am “the Captain of My Fate”! Good night, sweet dreams, Onward to the Morning!!!
She slipped the journal back into its bedside drawer, switched off the light, settled in for the first carefree night in recent memory, and an hour later bolted awake screaming from the worst nightmare she had ever had in her whole life: the first of the tarantula dreams. They chased her down hallways, up spiral staircases, through all the upper rooms of unfamiliar houses, multiplying as they scampered, and always, in the end, surrounding her, nibbling at her bare feet, and they must have been albinos, because they were as pale as they were huge, and coated in luxuriant platinum fur. Her mother and father were both at her bedside, calling her name, shaking her into consciousness. They told her that she’d been screaming for ten minutes.
Amy had two more realizations that night, neither of which she wrote down. First, she literally was, as her parents often told her, her own worst enemy; and second, she missed the hands already. The hands were fictional. But there really were tarantulas in the world; and beneath their disguise lurked something else, and something worse beneath that. Onward to the Morning, indeed.
Sometime during the six nights between Halloween and the following Tuesday, when she got Killjoy’s e-mail, Amy must have dozed off, but her only evidence of this was that she hadn’t gone completely insane, which was supposed to happen to you if you were critically sleep deprived. After spending Wednesday night at the IHOP she had harbored faint hopes for an exhausted sleep on Thursday, but it didn’t come, and she survived that night in bed watching television. By Friday evening she had consumed a bottle and a half of sour merlot, which knocked her out for two hours. For the rest of that night she was too sick for night terrors, but by late Saturday afternoon she had needed to turn on every light in her little house.
Flipping Carla off like that, breezily assuring her that she wasn’t worried about being let go, had somehow made things worse instead of better. She was sick about being let go. She had been disrespected by an executive assistant to an associate dean, on top of which she had lost her last direct contact with humankind.
She roamed her house and attached garage day and night, dragging Alphonse with her, attempting to believe that they were alone and safe. She tried to go out once to shop for groceries, and realized that even at high noon she didn’t have the nerve to leave the place unattended, for fear of what would slip in. By Monday she had emptied the freezer and was down to ancient cans of soup, cream of potato, tomato, corn chowder, with no crackers, and no milk either, which made the oatmeal (the only cereal left on top of her refrigerator) pretty tough to choke down. Alphonse ate well, as she always bought his kibble in bulk, but he missed his snacks, the Vienna Fingers and Cheez-Its, the giant soft pretzels, the cold cuts and havarti, not to mention dinner-plate leftovers, and he took to sitting motionless at her feet, staring at her with simple hostility. He had never pretended to love her, and now he drilled her with the basset gaze of hate. She didn’t blame him. For all he knew, she had the good stuff hidden somewhere and withheld it now out of unfathomable human spite.
Amy was a loner who hated to be alone, but before the Sniper entered her life, she had kept her nebulous fears at bay, taking them out once every month or so, walking them in the night air, letting them trash the occasional night’s rest, and then they had always tucked themselves away (like spiders) until the next time. The Sniper had let them loose, apparently for good. And Amy still didn’t know what it was she feared. It wasn’t spiders, it wasn’t hands, and if she were ever to identify it, in some blinding midnight epiphany, it would turn out not to be that either.
Finally hearing from Killjoy the Sniper allowed Amy to sleep through the night. The downside was that now she could dream again. The blond tarantulas were back, from a ten-year hiatus. Or maybe they’d never left. When she was married to “Bob,” at least during the time when they shared a bed, he would often complain about the noises she made in her sleep. Little yelps, he called them. She sounded, he claimed, like an old-time cartoon character, singing. He called her Steamboat Willie.
She’d never been able to figure out what they stood for—the tarantulas, the hands. Oddly for a writer, Amy was bored by symbols. They ruled the night, and they sprouted in her fiction, when she wrote, but she figured they were no business, really, of hers. They were the product and property of her subconscious, which she pictured as a little man in a projection booth whose matinees she preferred not to attend. The little man threw severed hands at her, and then tarantulas, because he figured she wasn’t ready to look at what they really, really meant, and that was just fine with Amy. He knew what he was doing, she was sure.
Still, except for the one nightmare, which stirred her only briefly, she slept deep and awakened early Wednesday afternoon to the officious clicks of Alphonse’s overgrown nails on the hardwood floor of her bedroom. She staggered to the back door, let him out, waited until he was finished, let him back in, filled up his dish with dry food, and lurched back to bed, passing along the way her answering machine blinking “35.” This was fifteen more than it had been at midnight, which was bad. She had planned on wiping the messages without reading them, once the number stopped growing, and the class gave up. It had to be class members calling, mostly Carla, because nobody else ever called Amy. She slept dreamlessly, deeper even than before, the kind of sleep into which time disappears, and then the doorbell rang.
It was probably a Mormon, or some poor soul hawking tamales out of the trunk of his car, or her neighbor Mrs. Franz, who was losing her mind and sometimes forgot where she lived. But the bell rang again, and then three or four minutes later, a third time, and now Alphonse clicked out into the living room and began to woof at the front door, and there was nothing for it but to open her eyes, locate her slippers and put on a bathrobe, and find out who the hell it was.
Never mind who. It was dark in Amy’s room, even with the reading lamp on, and the rest of the house was darker still. How long had she been sleeping? And why was she opening her front door to an unknown caller in what was apparently the middle of the night? Because, Amy guessed, as she tried to focus on the figure standing with its back to her on her front porch, her circadian clock was off and she had early-morning courage. Kill me now. She spoke. “Do you know what time it is?”
The figure simultaneously jumped a foot and whirled around off balance, colliding with her decrepit Christmas cactus and knocking it to the cement. “Jesus,” said Chuck Heston. “Give a guy some warning.”
Amy stared for a moment, and then said, “Seriously, do you know what time it is? Because actually I don’t.”
Chuck squatted and began to scoop dirt back into the pot. “It’s time to get a new plant.”
“Because I’ve been asleep, more or less, since Tuesday night.”
“I’ll make you a deal. I’ll tell you what time it is if you tell me what day it is.”
Rumplestiltskin. Amy remembered now making a wisecrack about the fairy-tale dwarf the night she first met Chuck, and here he was on her front porch making enigmatic bargains. Amy was suddenly aware of how she must look, which was much worse than usual; and how, even if she had wanted to, she couldn’t very well invite him into her filthy house, which hadn’t been cleaned or picked up or even aired out in a week and must reek of burned pizza, old basset, and flop sweat. “I can’t invite you in,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s Wednesday,” said Chuck, rising to his feet and brushing potting soil off his jeans. “Wednesday is class day. They sent me, by the way, because I’m the only one who lives near Escondido.”
Chuck wasn’t making any sense at all. “But didn’t you get my letter? Oh, no.” Amy had a distressing thought. “Chuck, I sent a letter to each of you. Don’t tell me you didn’t—”
“We decided to blow off your letter.”
Amy just stared. The last human being who had stood on her porch, besides the mailman and Mrs. Franz, was Carla; and before her, she couldn’t remember anyone.
“Actually, Carla decided to blow off your letter, and she browbeat the rest of us into joining her. The class must go on.”
“Chuck, that’s sweet, but we don’t have a classroom, and anyway—”
“I just came from a pretty good classroom. We all got together tonight at Carla’s place, in La Jolla. She’s got a great house with a view straight down into the water, and a living room the size of Petco Park. We can meet there next week, too.”
“When you say ‘we all,’ who are you talking about? Surely not the whole class.”
“Just about. Surtees didn’t make it, but he sent regards, and said he was in. The only one we didn’t hear back from was Dot Hieronymus. Carla’s going to call her again tomorrow.”
“Chuck.” Amy didn’t know where to start. She was gladdened, absurdly so, by the gesture. She felt valued. She could not remember feeling that way for a long time, perhaps ever. “Aren’t you all forgetting something?”
“We’ll pay you exactly what we paid the extension, which they returned already, only now you’ll get the whole amount.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean…”
“Oh! You mean…” He waggled his eyebrows three times.
“It’s not funny. You didn’t see Tiffany in that car, screaming her head off. We can’t all pretend it didn’t happen.”
“Want to know something interesting? Tiffany was your other cheerleader. She and Carla talked the rest of us into it. And if the screamer isn’t worried, what’s the problem?”
“It’s escalating. That’s the problem, Chuck. Okay, right now everybody’s excited about carrying on and meeting in a new place, and so on, and that’s cute, but sooner or later they’re going to start looking at each other, and wondering: ‘What if it’s her? How do I know it isn’t him?’ And you won’t, either, unless the Sniper stands up and confesses, and fat chance of that. It’s going to end with everybody freaking out everybody else.”
“How do you know,” asked Chuck, “that it isn’t me?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You don’t know, do you?”
“Chuck, that’s seriously not funny.”
“I’m not trying to be funny. I’m just pointing something out. Do you or do you not know if it’s me?”
“I don’t know. Obviously. Look, this is really annoying.”
“Exactly! I’m annoying you, and sorry about that, but look what I’m not doing. I’m not freaking you out. Am I?”
Amy was startled to realize this was true.
“It’s weird, isn’t it?” Chuck grinned. “We all noticed it tonight. The absence of freak. There we were, relaxing together in this, by the way, amazing retro conversation pit, the kind where you sink into these huge couches and chairs and can’t get back out without flailing around, and we were about an hour into it when Frank mentioned that, actuarially speaking, the Sniper was one of us. There was this real brief pause, and then somebody asked him to pass the nachos. Then Pete Purvis asked if we should maybe talk about it. And there was another pause, and then Harry B. said, ‘What’s the point? Whoever it is, they’re not going to admit it.’ And then he asked if anybody was worried. And nobody said anything, and then they went back to planning the schedule. We’re going to meet in different people’s houses. Carla nominated your house for the last class.”
Amy sagged against the doorframe. “I don’t get it,” she said.
“You don’t have to,” said Chuck. “Look, you got everybody worked up. Face it, you’re a good teacher. They don’t want to quit, and they want to go on working with you. And if you want to know the truth,” he said, backing down the steps, “I think they’re kind of enjoying the whole Sniper thing. It’s exciting, in a dirty sort of way.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” said Amy. She had no idea if this was true.
Chuck opened his car door. “So. Next week at Carla’s. We’re doing Tiffany’s thing, and Ricky Buzza’s, and Syl’s bringing in something to pass around for the week after. And somebody else is too. I don’t remember who.”
“You never asked me,” Amy called after him, “whether I’d do it.”
“Seven o’clock sharp,” Chuck called through his window as he backed down the drive. “See ya, Teach!”
Amy slowly closed the door and shuffled back to her bedroom. She lay on her back, trying to figure out if she was worried or angry or even happy, and eventually decided that it was a three-way tie. Only then did she remember that she hadn’t locked the front door. Then a tiny miracle happened: the absence of freak. She just walked calmly to the door and locked it.
There was, tonight, nothing to be afraid of. And she was still of value. Amy closed her eyes and slept, without spiders.
Go Away
Funny-Looking Words
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2007
buckaroo
hartebeest
flummox
Kibbitzers
Selma B. wrote:
How about “chard”?
Marian Haste wrote:
“Gallup” is pretty funny.
Novel Hybrids
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2007
Little Women Who Run With the Wolves
…try valiantly but can’t keep up, which is probably just as well.
The Scarsdale Diet of Worms
Drastic weight loss through unrecanted heresy.
Suddenly Last Summa Theologica
The prolonged agony and hideous death of an effete young man at the hands of ravenous street urchins brilliantly sums up all that can be understood of Christian theology.
Beast in the Jungle Book
On his deathbed, Mowgli is horrified to realize that he has wasted his entire life in the damn jungle.
National Blue Velvet
Dennis Hopper does something unspeakable with Elizabeth Taylor’s ear.
Jurassic Mansfield Park
Fanny and Edmund avert their eyes while Mary and Henry Crawford are slaughtered by velociraptors.
20,000 Bottles of Beer Under the Sea
Al Gore attempts to befriend a giant squid. A struggle ensues.
Kibbitzers:
John Q. Public wrote:
A Christmas Carol Channing, featuring “Hello, Jesus.”
Song of the South Beach Diet: “Mr. Bluebird’s On My Shoulder, which must be why the scale says 239 pounds.”
Hardy Harharr wrote:
Northwest Passage to India. Mrs. Moore narrowly misses getting butchered by Abenaki Indians and gets really creeped out.
Your Number One Fan wrote:
r u supposed to be funny?