In the dream, a crack accommodated a slivered view. He can sense Gunner, a focal point.
Jeremy, his body becomes more present in the waiting. Spying is looking at mostly nothing changing except time. How long. Long. That is how it feels, but wait long enough and the revenge of the languid comes. Brendan, Clarence, Padraig—ordinary frames busy with grudges—and, squatting on a dolly in the corner, Gunner.
Brendan is pacing the garage, springing puffy hands. Brendan takes two steps, stops. “It was Chinky Bratty who did it, not a doubt,” he says. “Chinky Bratty who we should’ve gotten in November when we had the chance.”
“He wasn’t home,” Gunner says. “I don’t suppose the point was kill a bit of air in the kitchen.”
The clock is broken. Jeremy can’t keep time straight. The hands on the face say it is night, or afternoon, or all-time in never. Dream time.
Jeremy smells shrimp. He smells burnt bread. Something bright and cold accumulates in Jeremy’s stomach. Someone raises two hands on a grip, fires, infringes on idyll. Clumped in the carpet: the slop of meat thrown by a bullet, the body kneels like praying, falls. Life gone before the tax of cordite clears.
Brendan stands, slow and loose-limbed. Something is happening in him, a revelation real as a woman. Jeremy closes his eyes. He opens them.
“Alexandra?” Jeremy says.
An orange cat crosses the floor. “Your bake.” She laughs. “Your bake.”
And then he was awake, and there was a toy horse staring at him from the bedside table, a light pricking from his phone. Wright. He turned to the flapped-open blanket on her side, empty of Alexandra.