A Dark Matter (36 page)

In a room as brightly colored as a preschool classroom, Howard Bly was seated on the edge of his neatly made-up bed, dressed in a red polo shirt slightly too small for him, striped bib overalls laundered so often the denim folded on itself like cashmere, and shiny yellow Timberland work boots. He looked splendid. His sparse hair had been combed back and flattened against his scalp with water, and his ordinarily placid blue eyes glowed with plea sure and excitement.

“You’re wearing your birthday shoes,” Greengrass said, smiling, and turned to us. “We gave them to Howard last year. He saves them for special occasions.”

“Yes, I do,” Howard said. “I love my Timbs.”

“Today, you could go back into our garden, sit at the picnic table. That’s a good place to talk.”

“I’m going to talk today,” Howard said, glowing at Don and me. “I’m going to
tell
you things. It won’t be like that other time.”

“You’re feeling better now,” Greengrass said.

The three of us stood there, lined up at the side of Hootie’s bed like doctors doing rounds.

Hootie nodded. “Dill and Illslie are back again, and safe.”

“Dill and
who?”

A wide smile from Howard Bly.

“Howard, what did you call Mr. Harwell?”

The smile extended ever farther. “Illslie. Because that’s what he is. He used to be Twin, but now he’s Illslie.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yes. I get it. I’m Eel’s Lee.”

“Of course that’s who you are,” Hootie said. “And I feel better because you and Dill are back in Madison. But now I would like to go outside with my friends, please.”

“Are you concealing something from me, Howard?”

Howard blinked, then smiled. “No more than a dark shimmer in the air.”

“What’s that a quote from?”

“Mrs. Pembroke’s Wager
, by Lamar Van Gunden. Permanent Press, New York, New York, 1957. I found it behind a sofa in the Game Room, but the next time I looked, it wasn’t there.”

“I think you gentlemen should take your friend into the back gardens,” said Dr. Greengrass. “When he starts making books up, he’s had enough of me.”

“He thinks I made it up, but
Mrs. Pembroke’s Wager
was real,” Howard said. “I never make books up. To make books up, you have to be an author.” They were moving, at a deliberate pace, through soft, mild sunlight toward the picnic table just inside the canopy of shade cast by a huge oak with a wide crown.

“Were you worried about us?” Don asked.

“Of course I was worried. You almost could have died.” Howard slipped into the shade, moved to the back of the table, and sat where he could look out at the whole of the Lamont’s back gardens.

Don moved around beside him. Together, they looked like a farmer and a cowboy momentarily occupying the same picnic bench: a sly, humorous farmer; a leathery, sun-baked old cowboy with something on his mind.

“Almost could have
died?” he asked.

“Yeah, what does that mean?” I asked, sliding into the opposite bench and planting my elbows on the table.

“It means you almost could have, but you didn’t, because you couldn’t. It’s not the same as ‘could almost have,’ though. Right, right?”

“I think I see your point,” I said, “but how did you know? A little bird told you?”

“The dark shimmer in the air,” Howard said. “Once I found it in back of the Game Room sofa, but after I took it away, it wasn’t there.”

“All right,” I said. “No more ‘almost could’ as distinct from ‘could almost,’ and no more about whatever was behind the Game Room sofa. All right?”

“It is, with me,” Howard said. This time, I could almost
taste
the quotation: a ghostly book seemed to form itself around the words, humming with language of a remembered flavor that flowed out through details of every kind, and through these specificities into the characters. The whole experience was like a warm taste in my mouth.

I turned away from the men on the other side of the table and gazed out over the hospital’s gardens.

Before me, long descending terraces unrolled like a flawless green carpet. On these wide, serene terraces, men and women in wheelchairs rolled along smooth, black asphalt paths beside tidy four-foot hedges. Through the middle of every terrace ran a long, brilliant bed of flowers bracketed at either end by smaller, circular beds. Just enough oaks and maples cast just enough shade. Fountains played, and beads of water scattered in a slight wind. It would be a nice place to end up, I reflected. Inside, of course, the hospital was less comfortable. Given their context, the gardens were a surprising fact—it came to me that they had been added later on, by someone who had understood that extensive gardens like these would aid the healing of the patients at the Lamont.

Without looking back at the other two, I said, “Hootie, was it like this when you first came here?”

“Back then, it was really ugly out here, Sarge.”

“Sarge?”

“Never mind,” said Hootie. “Never mind, never mind anything at all. I don’t.”

“Is everything you say still a quote from a book?”

“Everything I say,” Hootie started off, then for a moment like the flicker of a bird’s wing, seemed to search his remarkable memory, “is made up of a variety of quotations. As if in a … blender. Get it, Jake? Sentences that have never met become joined at the hip! My doctor does not want this to be true, but it is true, and that’s that. He would prefer me to have access to entirely original language, whereas I would prefer not to. Nobody’s language is really original. The way I talk is infinitely free, anyhow.”

“It’s wonderful that you let yourself move on from Hawthorne, though I suppose he’s still in there, somewhere.”

“‘In the way of literary talk, it is true,’” Hootie said, grinning with pleasure.

“What let you do it?” Don asked. “I mean, I know this sounds egotistical, but was it us?”

“I remembered my old English classes.” He closed his eyes and pulled his brows together. “I mean to say, I remembered that I remembered them. And all those amazing books we read. Do you remember? Do you?”

“I remember most of them, probably,” I said.

“I only read half of them,” said Don. “Being a more typical high-school student than you guys.”

“The Catcher in the Rye,”
Hootie said.
“To Kill a Mockingbird. The Lord of the Flies. Tom Sawyer. Huckleberry Finn. The Last of the Mohicans. The Red Badge of Courage. My Ántonia. Hamlet. Julius Caesar. Twelfth Night. Great Expectations. A Tale of Two Cities. Dombey and Son. A Christmas Carol. The Red Pony. The Grapes of Wrath. Of Mice and Men. The Sun Also Rises. A Farewell to Arms. A Separate Peace
. ‘The Bear,’ ‘A Rose for Emily,’ ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner,’ ‘The Celestial Omnibus,’ ‘Up in Michigan,’ ‘The Big Two-Hearted River,’ and about fifty other short stories.
Black Boy. Death of a Salesman. Pygmalion. Man and Superman. Rebecca. Fahrenheit 451. The Call of the Wild. 1984. Animal Farm. Where Angels Fear to Tread. Pride and Prejudice. Ethan Frome. Emma. Vanity Fair. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Jude the Obscure. The Great Gatsby
. The beginning of
The Canterbury Tales
. A lot of poetry—Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Tennyson, Whitman. There’s a lot more, too. Just for pleasure, I read five James Bond novels, and I remember every word of every one. And
Harrison High
, by John Farris. Our whole gang read that.”

“All those books are inside you.” I felt something like reverence.

“All that and more. L. Shelby Austin. Mary Stewart. J. R. R. Tolkien. John Norman. E. Phillips Oppenheim. Rex Stout. Louis L’Amour and Max Brand.”

“I forgot how much stuff we read in high school,” Olson said.

“To state the obvious, I did not.” Hootie was grinning again.

“Just out of curiosity, what was that from?”

“The Moondreamers,”
Hootie said. “A great novel. Honestly. But you asked me a question, and I’d like to answer it. Yes, I think it was you. The two of you. After you came to me, and I cried, and we talked, I remembered what I knew. I remembered what I had known all along, all during every minute of those long years, those dear, foolish years, those long, vanished years.”

“Don’t quote from that one anymore,” I said. “Writing like that drives me up the wall.”

“Sorry,” Hootie said. “I thought you’d enjoy that. Anyhow, you were asking about the gardens. The good doctor and his fair wife are responsible for all that you see before you. They planted a lot of it themselves, but they hired gardeners, too.”

“Where did ‘gardeners’ come from?”

“Right off the bat, at least five or six books. If you go on asking me about that, you’ll drive yourself around the bend.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said. “I’m with Greengrass. Sometimes, yeah, you’re quoting, but more than half the time you’re talking the same way as everyone else.”

“Split the Lark and you’ll find the music, bulb after bulb in silver rolled. The sun rose upon a tranquil world, and beamed down upon the tranquil world like a benediction.”

“Emily Dickinson, meet
Tom Sawyer,”
I said. “I know you can do that. You don’t have to prove it to me.”

“I don’t care if he quotes from books or not,” Don said. “The important thing is, it’s not all in
code
anymore! He sounds like a normal person, most of the time anyway.”

He turned to Howard and placed a hand on his shoulder. Hootie looked over at him with an expectant smile, as if he already knew what Olson was going to say. Howard Bly had become capable of meeting the unknown with perfect composure.

“Hootie, before you start telling us about the meadow, Lee and I wanted to ask you about something.”

“The answer is yes,” Hootie said, nodding.

“Hold on, wait until you hear what I have in mind.”

“If you like, but the answer is still going to be yes.” He caught me with a darting glance. “That one was all mine. So was that one. And ditto.”

“God bless you,” I said.

“This is the deal, Hootie. We were talking about you with Dr. Greengrass. The three of us wondered if you might be feeling as though pretty soon you’d be prepared to move to some new environment.”

“I told you. Yes. I think I could … Where you are? Where’s that?” He looked back across the table, an impish flame in his eyes. “And where do you live? What are you?”

“Come on, you’re quoting again,” I said. “I live in Chicago. So what was that?”

“Tess of the d’Urbervilles
. If I go to Chicago, could I see the Eel? Could I see you together?”

I nodded.

“And Dilly? Where do you live? What are you?”

“I live on the road, basically, but I might settle down in Chicago,” Don said. “I think I really might. Hell of a good town.”

Hootie nodded. “I have heard of Chicago.”

“A man can’t be a teenager forever.”

“Or a little child, neither.”

After speaking this lovely phrase, which may or may not have been a quotation, Hootie turned his head once again to me and uttered another astonishment. The pale, peaceful blue I remembered from forty years back still hung in his eyes. “The Eel is blind, isn’t she?”

I regarded him for a long time. Howard Bly did not blink.

“How do you happen to know that, Hootie?”

“It was the shiny lady with the stick. I saw it all. You don’t know what I saw.
I
don’t, even.”

“But you’re going to try to tell us.”

“That’s why we’re here.” Another dancing gleam at me. “That’s why the little
Nuhiva’s
bumping along astern there.”

“Joseph Conrad.”

Hootie giggled and pressed a hand to his mouth. I was a real comedian. “Jack London. Are you ready?”

“If you’re willing.”

Hootie closed his eyes and tilted his head back. In time, and at Hootie speed, his story emerged.

| Hootie’s Cale |

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was intensely dark and radiantly bright. What you knew was only what you thought you knew, nothing more. It was about Oneness. It was about Allness. When Spencer stood before them, when Spencer opened his golden mouth and
spoke
, Hootie Bly heard angelic choirs. But with Keith Hayward, who was actually there on the actual first day Meredith Bright had in their presence gloriously enhanced the Tick-Tock Diner by the simple act of walking in, who had come in minutes after Hootie’s radiant goddess had departed … with Keith everything got yanked upside down to display the wriggling bugs and writhing snakes. Keith had something to do with that terrible god-and-demon show at the end, Hootie knew that much, that Cornelius Agrippa business Mallon loved so much.

Not everyone you meet in the nuthouse is nuts, you know. And if you’re in a place like Madison, even the nuts in the nuthouse can have some interesting things to say. You don’t have to be a professor to read a book. Those shiny mercury-people weren’t total mysteries to the kind of person who went nosing around the same library stacks that Spencer Mallon used to haunt, that is, whenever he wasn’t seducing girls of college age and even younger.

Hootie
always
knew.