Thomas World (34 page)

The joke was to make it look like I was learning how to play by watching Fred. I wanted to surprise Gloria, impress her parents, and then sing what I came here to sing. Say what I came here to say.

My hands were shaking so badly I thought I would drop the banjo, but I didn't.

Fred looked at me and played the first chord. I played it back to him. It wasn't perfect, but that was by design.

He played another and I repeated it.

I looked up at Gloria and her smile was like magic. She threw her hands into the air.
What are you doing?
she mouthed again. Everyone was looking at me. My stomach was hot and liquid and I smiled like everything in the world was perfect.

Fred picked some individual notes and I followed along. The crowd as a whole was beginning to watch now. At first it looked like some drunk jackass had wandered by and picked up a banjo, but now we were progressing further into the song and people were becoming interested. There were a few claps and a whistles as I picked faster. I looked at Gloria's father, who was smiling broadly, and her mother, whose eyes were on her daughter. I could hardly look at Gloria herself because I was afraid I might forget how to play. But when I did glance at her, quickly, the surprise on her face couldn't have been more obvious.

As we approached the meat of the song, where the real picking would start, I wondered if my fingers might fail me. But Fred had been right. Now that I was playing, my hands seemed to have forgotten they were nervous.

We picked faster, faster, faster. At first I couldn't take my eyes off my fingers, watching to make sure I hit every note, but eventually I realized I could do it by feel. All the practice had paid off. People were clapping, keeping time with us. Gloria and her parents were clapping. I will never forget the look on her face.

The song ends with a banjo solo, and I didn't miss a note. When it was over, every single person in the bar stood up and cheered.

Fred pushed a microphone in my direction. The plan was for me to play three other songs. I'm not much of a singer, but I'd practiced staying within a comfortable range and projecting from the diaphragm. Besides, I didn't much care if I sounded like shit, as long as I got the point across.

“So I've been practicing a bit,” I said into the microphone. The crowd laughed. Gloria looked delighted. “And I appreciate The Scanners for allowing me to join them tonight. I wonder if you guys would mind if a played a couple more songs?”

More cheers from the crowd, and now my nervousness was completely gone. I could understand why musicians derived such a high from performing…it would be easy, I thought, to become addicted to the adulation of drunk people.

I wanted to play something fun next, so we chose Springsteen's “Glory Days.” The message is kind of depressing, but the music is a crowd pleaser and easy enough to play. It was also a good way to warm up to the second act of my plan.

“Two more songs,” I said after we were done with Springsteen. “But I need a little help with the next one. I'm hoping I can convince Mr. Eric Knudson to join me onstage.”

Gloria's mouth opened then, and her eyes grew wide. Up to that point she might have believed I was just having fun, or maybe trying to impress her in a general way. But now it was clear I had put some thought into this.

I watched her father think for a moment. It wouldn't ruin my plan if he declined, but it would help tremendously if he agreed. I like to think that he and I shared something there, some unspoken communication, because I've always suspected he really didn't want to play that night. But eventually he stood up and walked toward the stage. The bar erupted in cheers. They chanted his name.

“What do you have in mind, son?” Mr. Knudson asked me.

I told him and he smiled. Maybe he thought I would ask him to play something unfamiliar, but he'd played this song hundreds of times. I knew this because Gloria had told me so. And what bar crowd doesn't want to hear “Sweet Home Alabama”?

I wish you could have been there to hear him play the opening notes. The reaction of the crowd, the look on Gloria's face…these are memories that can make a man smile all the years of his life.

When the song ended, the bar erupted again. Mr. Knudson's smile was so permanent it could have been chiseled from concrete. He shook my hand as he left the stage and thanked me for asking him to play.

“You're a helluva young man,” he said. “Helluva young man.”

“Thank you, sir. And thank you for agreeing to play.”

Mr. Knudson leaned in close then and spoke directly into my ear.

“I feel bad for Jack. He's a good kid. But a man who would go to this trouble for my daughter is a keeper in my book. You go get her, son.”

And I thought surely, when you've won over a girl's father, her own heart can't be far behind.

THIRTY-NINE

A
fter Gloria's father shook my hand and returned to the table, I—

I—

What the hell? Where am I?

Shit. I'm lying in bed. I was dreaming. I look over at the alarm clock, still confused, expecting it to say 8:00 or 9:00 at the very latest. Surely it's only been a few minutes. I couldn't have been asleep that long, could I?

The alarm clock reads 3:14.

Wasn't it just seven-thirty in the morning? Did I just sleep for almost eight hours?

Eight hours?

I start to climb out of bed and then remember I'm not supposed to make any noise. Instead I lie there for a minute and collect myself. My arms and shoulders and legs burn with thirst that surpasses anything I've endured in my entire life. Ever. My throat is a patch of desert suffering from a thousand-year drought, craving water in a way I would not have thought possible. My first and only instinct is to get up and run to the bathroom and suck water out of the faucet until there is nothing left, anywhere, until I have consumed every drop of fresh water on Earth.

But I can't drink any water out of the faucet because I don't know where Runciter is or if he might hear the pipes…you know the sound I'm talking about, when you open a faucet.

I roll out of bed slowly and stand up, shaky on my feet. The room sways as I find my balance, but my thirst doesn't go away. It's a live thing, this thirst, and all I can think about is the luxurious feeling of water gushing into my throat, reawakening cells that right now might as well be dead. Finally I can't take it anymore. I walk quietly into the master bath, where I get down on my knees and scoop water out of the toilet, swallowing it greedily.

Regardless of its source, the water does wonders for my confidence. My mind feels more alert almost immediately. I wonder what Runciter has been up to for eight hours. Surely he must have checked on me several times by now. Once he realized I wasn't going anywhere, what did he do? Take a nap? Call in reinforcements? Play checkers? He could have done none of those things or all of them. I still don't understand what his plans are for the long run, any of these people, because they can't honestly believe living in my house and following me around everywhere is going to work for even a few days, let alone the rest of our lives.

They aren't telling me something, and the reason they aren't telling me is because I'm not going to like it.

I have to get out of here. And you know what I'm going to do?

I'm going to find Gloria.

I don't know what the hell I've been thinking. Maybe the world is a game and maybe it's not, but either way she's the most important part of it. I have to find her. I want to apologize for everything I've said and done to her, not just in the past few days but in all the years where I have taken our relationship for granted. When I met Gloria, everything else in life became secondary, because I felt like together we could do anything. Where before I had imagined life as a sequence of hurdles to be cleared, with Gloria I realized it could be a long, satisfying journey whose destination was unimportant. For some reason I haven't lived that way in a very long time. I don't remember how or when it happened, falling into such a careless and predictable routine, but I won't do it again. If I can get that life back, I will make it up to her. I will love her madly all over again.

Maybe the right thing is to leave her alone. To not tell her the truth about the world. But I can't know that for sure. What I do know is I love her, that I always have, and there is no point to anything if she isn't a part of my life.

I'm going out the window. There's no reason to look for Runciter first. If he catches me, he catches me.

So I put my shoes back on and walk to one of the windows, which unlocks and opens easily enough. Removing the screen proves a lot more difficult. There's nothing really to hold onto except a thin metal tab at the bottom. Every time I lift up on it I'm afraid the screen is going to buckle and fall out of the frame and make a lot of noise, but finally I manage to bend it outward with only the tiniest scraping sound. Surely Runciter couldn't have heard that, even if he is sitting outside the door.

Now I bend down and push my right leg out the window. I squat until my crotch is against the frame and search for the ground outside. The dirt is a little soft and muddy against the house, and I struggle for firm footing. Then, carefully, I shift my weight and bring my other leg through the window. My right knee creaks in protest but holds. My shoe tries to slip. Finally I get my other foot on the ground and now I'm standing in my backyard.

I sneak slowly around the back of the house until I'm at the last corner, where brick gives way to a stone column. Slowly I peer around the column and look toward the driveway. I see my car. I see Runciter's. My hand feels the outside of my jeans to make sure the key fob is in my pocket.

I creep slowly toward my car, wondering if any neighbors might be looking out their windows, watching me. I'm sure I look silly doing this, but it can't be helped.

Any minute now I expect Runciter to rush out of the house, running straight for the car. I open the driver's side door and sit down behind the steering wheel, pulling the door closed as slowly as I can. Still no Runciter. I push the ignition button and the engine roars to life, which should be a clue this whole thing isn't a film. If it were, my car wouldn't start. And anyway he had to have heard that. I put the transmission in reverse and begin to back out of the driveway, and that's when I see the door in the garage swing open. Runciter is standing there. There is a button in my car that lowers the garage door and I push it as I back quickly down my driveway. That's not going to stop him but maybe it'll slow him down just enough. When I hit the street my car makes a terrible scraping sound against the asphalt. One of my tires bounces roughly over the curb. I look up to see Runciter squeezing under the garage door as it stops and begins to trundle back upwards. He is yelling something. He runs down the driveway as I put the transmission into drive and floor the accelerator. I feel ridiculous speeding down my own residential street, but I'm also relieved as I watch Runciter recede in the rearview mirror.

I watch for unfamiliar cars or people as I speed toward the end of my street. The only person I see is a thin, old woman dressed in an oversized sweater walking her dog, what I think is a Shih Tzu. The woman's sweater is red and blue and there is an American eagle stretched across the back of it. She yells at me as I drive by, obviously upset that I'm driving so fast. When I look in my rearview mirror, I see her flipping me the bird.

There are no surveillance cars waiting at the end of the block nor do I see anything unusual when I reach Yale. Just a normal amount of traffic for a Wednesday (?) afternoon, and a low droning sound coming from nowhere. I keep watching my mirrors for Runciter, but so far he's not back there. I drive north to 71st Street and then turn right. The sun is out, and the billboards are all leering, and the flags are all dead at the top of their poles.

The light is green at 71st. The mall is two miles east. The violins begin after I've driven just a few blocks, and a man in my ear warns about the end of the world.

If Runciter hasn't found me now he's probably not going to, since I could have made any number of traffic maneuvers by now. But why isn't anyone else following me?

In a few minutes I reach the mall. It's the middle of the afternoon on a Wednesday and the parking lot is packed, so densely that I'm forced to leave my car in a lot intended for customers of the Cheesecake Factory. As I'm parking I happen to notice something stuck to the back of the car in front of me, next to the brake light. It's the shape of a fish. The Jesus fish, as some call it. There is one on Gloria's car as well. I wonder if this is a sign of some kind, but I suppose that's naïve to think when
everything
seems like a sign.

I keep hearing violins even after I enter the mall. They are playing over the P.A. system. Young people are everywhere, I can never tell their ages anymore, if they are thirteen or twenty, but they all seem to be swaying in time with the music, dancing almost, even though the song is not danceable. At the base of an escalator I see a couple of Coke machines and a group of four black massage chairs, and beyond that a bank of six pay phones. The phones are built into the wall and have digital readouts and accept credit cards. I get out my wallet and find my Bank of America card. I look down at my hand and find Gloria's number.

555-2374.

2-3-74. February 3, 1974. The day Philip K. Dick went crazy. Or perhaps the day he learned the real truth.

Is there a difference?

The phone rings once, twice. The third is interrupted by silence and then a tentative query.

“Hello?”

“Junior.”

“Oh, my God. Thomas. Oh, my God, you're okay. Thank God, you're okay. Oh, my God.”

“I'm okay, but—”

“Where on earth have you been? Why didn't you call me? Thomas, I've been worried sick.”

“I lost my phone. I—”