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  He could see her there so clearly in his mind that he almost believed he’d seen her, if only as a hallucination.

  Then another strange idea came to him of its own volition. What if it were the new girl from work? Crouching in the bushes with a knife glittering in her hand, her expressionless eyes now subtly insane behind her owlish glasses? Seeking revenge for his glaring look. Maybe this was why she had stared at him so blatantly—because she wanted to kill him.

  Who could tell what horror, what a monster, lurked behind a quiet face?

  This flash of imagination was so weird, so sudden that it struck him sober. It seemed weirder to him than his fear of the possessed girl’s face.

  Where had this crazy flash come from? He had frightened himself.

  Coming back to reality after his dreamy flashes shocked him. How could he allow himself such vulnerability? He felt sharp now, nauseous with excitement. He had to look out there now; if he didn’t, whatever it was might get away before he could try. He had the gun; what was there to be afraid of?

  Her, spider-like claw hands gripping the screen like summer bugs, her anorexic face pressed to it, the mesh indenting her flesh…her swollen tongue licking the screen…glazed eyes burning…

  Ray realized he was moving. He was looking out the window now over Kelly’s head and he had surprised himself. He had to adjust to it quickly.

  She wasn’t there. Nothing was there. Just the ferns, barely visible, the crickets calling from afar, the sinuous stirring of the night breeze.

  Kelly’s growling had died down. She remained at the screen for a few minutes more, though, snorting at the fresh air. Ray crouched there for a while also, watching…spying through the window as if still expecting to see some horrid image take form.

  29

  Chapter

  2

  This was no unusual day. It was only too usual.

  Paul grumbled irritably. His mother rested the tray on his bed practically under his nose. Canned spaghetti. “Don’t let Pinky get it,” she warned emphatically, leaving him. She closed the door, latching it with a lock on the other side because the knob didn’t function.

  He’d have to slip a birthday card he used through the door to unlatch it and let himself out. He had to keep it latched on one side or the other to keep their twenty voracious cats out. Pinky, a pathetic grungy poodle like an asthmatic lamb curled at the foot of the bed, perked up at the smell.

  Paul stared at the canned spaghetti, just his eyes showing over the blanket edge, glaringly disgusted. Those slimy soupy strands in their anemic orange juice were how he felt too often, waking up at two in the afternoon having to be at work by three-thirty. Going on five years now.

  Paul reopened his eyes. Searched out the digital clock face in the videotape machine on top of the expensive TV he’d bought for the bedroom in his parents’ house. He’d fallen back asleep. Two-thirty. “Fuckin’

  goddamn it,” he hissed. Why hadn’t his mother checked back on him? He sat up to wolf the goop that Pinky had stared at longingly in contrast but hadn’t pilfered. Paul gave up on it after four mouthfuls, just ate his buttered bread and drank his milk. He set the tray closer to Pinky and got up.

  He’d better have time to wash his hair or he’d be pissed. It was long, to his shoulders, dark blond and straight and got greasy and limp easily.

  After employing the birthday card and latching the door behind him, he scuffed in slippers to the bathroom. His mother had disappeared into her room to sit in bed and read from her mounds of books on her beloved Orient, a fantasy world she had never visited, but probably appreciated more than many people who’d gone there physically. Paul’s father was as usual shopping for them and for Paul’s grandmother across the street, his only real job since he’d been disabled for fifteen years after having half a lung removed. He had a heart condition, too, and last summer had had a tumor removed. He thought he had two more and was going for tests soon. Paul’s sister lived with her boyfriend and had a two-year-old son who had undergone surgery three times to correct a cleft palate and harelip. Paul’s younger brother was a sophomore on a scholarship at Brandeis University majoring in foreign language, and he had a hernia now he was going to have corrected in April, spring break. Harelips and the tendency for hernias ran in some families; Paul’s father had had a double hernia. Defects and abnormalities predestined by DNA configurations. Today Paul felt as if tumors churned in his guts, pulsed in his head, inherited from himself from the day before and the day before.

  The shower had been broken for months. Paul washed up the best he could weekdays and on weekends filled plastic basins with water, soaped up and stood naked in the tub and dumped water on himself. He dressed—a black T-shirt with a shiny Chinese dragon decal on the chest.

  Black corduroy pants. He liked black; artistic. He washed his hair in the kitchen sink, returned to the bathroom to blow-dry it.

  Finished. It was three. He had fifteen minutes. Paul lit up the first cigarette of his day with relish. The livingroom had little furniture—his brother’s desk and chair, another battered desk with no chair, and one kitchen chair in front of the new but broken livingroom TV and the Atari video game system Paul had played by the hour and now missed. Plenty of room to pace. They had owned a new used sofa recently but in no time the cats had clawed it up, pissed on it. Bay windows gave Paul a view of his yard, the fantasy landscape of his childhood, through green plastic blinds. Dragging on his butt, he searched the stereo numbers. He settled on Synchronity II by the Police, a favorite song. Once he had hated the group because he hated reggae music, until he had listened to the lyrics.

  He paced to the song, a caged cat, with his cigarette. Now a medallion bumped against his chest. More properly a lead, die-cast pentagram the size of a silver dollar in diameter. Paul was a self-proclaimed witch.

  “I made your lunch,” his mother called from her adjacent room.

  “Mm,” he grumbled, involved in thought. He veered from his pacing back to his room to collect his things for the night. Money for snacks.

  Cigarettes. His buck knife he knew he shouldn’t carry in his pocket but did. The room was a cluttered maze of magazines, books, records, all the stuff of Paul’s dreams. Even his brother’s top bunk bed was stacked and heaped. On the walls, along with theater posters for Taxi Driver, his favorite film, and Excalibur, were drawings, paintings by himself.

  Tangled, warped monsters of impossible configurations, eyes on elbows, lips on the ends of penises. Naked women being raped and/or tortured by other women, by monsters or by themselves, was a recurrent image in his art and many comic books, most only half finished. On his desk was a monster mask of cardboard painted over with layers of liquid latex, hardened to an alien rubber skin. Here was an over-detailed Star Wars- like space ship made from a cardboard frame and glued all over with bits snipped from dozens of model cars and aircrafts, spray-painted white. Paul made his own full-length movies with the video camera and portable unit from the video recorder he had saved so long for. His cousin Ray, also an artist, filmed the movies with him. They took turns directing and starring, and played most of the parts, disguised in monster makeup usually devised by Paul but sometimes by Ray. Planet Of The Apes- like appliances glued on the face with theatrical spirit gum. Sometimes they stooped to papier-mache. For blood-spurting gunshot effects in their usually highly violent films they would hide clear tubing inside clothing, hit a pump and gush bogus gore—later dubbing in a gunshot sound effect. Fake stabbings, phony dismemberings. Once they had even made a dummy, dressed in clothes with blood-filled sandwich bags concealed in the chest, taken it into the woods and in closeup shot it repeatedly with Paul’s real .22 rifle. The dummy doubled for one of Ray’s characters. Their most realistic violent effect to date.

  Paul left his tray on the bed, the spaghetti gone, Pinky’s face all orange, probably to remain orange for a week. He scooped Pinky up, left his room, latched it. No cats or even old feeble poodles allowed to remain in there unattended anymore
, to dirty around, knock down piles or topple the papier-mache Stonehenge-inspired trilithon on one of his desks. Three realistic stones, two upright and one across their tops. This was his altar, the trilithon on a green towel to represent grass. He left oak leaf or pumpkin offerings before the trilithon, acorns or candles. No slaughtered animals or cups of blood—he was a real witch, a Nature-worshipping paganist. Nature being the Mother Goddess, a great benevolent entity. His beloved winter, the time of Nolaig and Candlemas, was ending. His favorite season because the Mother made the humans shiver in humility and kept them off the streets. It was supposed to snow tonight, on this March night of 1984, beginning late—around midnight, when he’d be getting out. Good, he could watch it begin. He had prayed, if such was the word, to the Mother by candlelight last night for one last good snow.

  Out into the kitchen, where most of the cats congregated, perched high and nestled low, all colors and sizes and ages. They eyed him calmly like an audience of sphinxes as he dug in the refrigerator for his bagged lunch.

  “Bye!” he called off to his mother.

  “Bye, Paul,” she called from her room and her books.

  Paul left his house. House of many years—from childhood—gray and tired. He was twenty-four. His family had moved out twice but had inevitably moved back. Paul loved this house. It was an extension of himself.

  In the garage he took his new twelve speed black bike by the horns and wheeled it out into the crisp afternoon air. Everything dead brown.

  Paul swung a leg over the bike and mounted it, pumped up the driveway.

  He had his sunglasses on and a cigarette clenched. Bike, glasses, cigarette, long blond hair flapping—a familiar image in this part of town. His house faded off behind him.

  ««—»»

  Massachusetts town of his life. He had never been out of Massachusetts for more than twenty-four hours, and probably not even that. The town had shrunk since his childhood— life had shrunk. His rambling house where every cupboard had been a cavern for a G.I. Joe doll was now a claustrophobic cupboard for him, and the immense yard where plastic dinosaurs had raged was now a meager patch mostly mine-fielded by the shit of the family dogs, dinosaurs extinct. Only in his room, amidst his books, on his videos and on his paper did life still extend horizonless into the fantasy and brightness of childhood.

  Not entirely true. Since he had delved into witchcraft, Nature had attracted him to the sky, trees, stones. Woods were like stepping into his drawings, into dreams and child memories of wonder and life—awe. He loved autumn, the foliage and pumpkins, Halloween…spring and summer were beautiful but his less appreciative fellow humans emerged then to leave vodka bottles in his woods and panties hanging from branches like mock pagan offerings. He loved winter. He felt good now whipping along through cold air, the trees lining the road all starkly barren, coldly latticed.

  He felt bad that spring was nearing and he’d have to share the lonely, serene air with the night whoops of drunken teenagers, blaring rock music and the revving of car engines. Please, just one more snow.

  Paul didn’t dread another Ice Age.

  It was only a ten minute walk to the factory, so much less so on bike.

  A block away and he could already smell it. No kidding, he swore he could smell it sooner every day. Next week he’d open his door and smell it. That plastic and paint fumes stink, gray and sickish. How is it he had never smelled it the years he had walked this street on his way to Junior High? He had walked and rode and biked past the factory all his childhood, seeing only red brick and blocked windows on the outside, never knowing that someday he would know the inside so very well, and that this place would mean so much in his life history.

  Paul turned a corner and saw the building far ahead on the right, like a deserted fortress the town had sprung up around and forgotten. He had a stop to make first; a tiny delicatessen on the left. He stopped in here every other day or so to either supplement or replace the dismal lunches his mother or father made him to bring to work.

  He bounced in with his familiar energetic walk, hair swinging around his face. “Hey, Paulie,” said the owner behind the cash register; Mr. Ed, they called him. “How are ya how are ya?”

  “Fine, fine. Hello, greetings one and all.” Paul clutched his chest and dropped his jaw in mock shock. “Robin!” He staggered back a step.

  “When did you get back?”

  Behind the counter a woman had appeared from a back room. “Hi Paulie…I got back Monday.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Good. How come you didn’t come visit me or draw me a get well card or anything? Jeesh.”

  “Sorry, sorry, I beg your forgiveness, I throw myself at your mercy, trample me with high heels—I love humiliation.”

  “I left my high heels at home today—sorry,” Robin chuckled. They all loved Paulie in here.

  “Hm hm hm, let’s see…what’ll it be today…” Nose to glass.

  Soft-spoken, wry Mr. Ed had noticed how their new girl Irene had been noticing their exchanges with Paul. Mr. Ed said, “Paul, this is our new friend Irene—why don’t you break her in with a song?”

  Robin laughed. Paul straightened up enthusiastically, grinning. Irene smiled nervously. Paul hopped to the counter and snatched a Slim Jim beef jerky stick and held it to his mouth like a microphone, warbling in his loudest and most obnoxious nightclub singer’s voice, “Goodnight, Irene, scooby-doo…oh yeah…hey, where’ya from—okay!”

  Everyone laughed. Paulie was a good kid, a wild sense of humor. The didn’t see him at home pacing his furniture-less livingroom, staring out a window. He purchased an antipasto salad with a bisected hard-boiled egg on top, some wheat crackers and a can of Sprite, then was gone, calling back, “Farewell, humans!”

  Back on his bike, he had only a little further to go before crossing the street to the factory.

  It was three stories, and so many of the many arched windows had been blocked or bricked over that the building seemed to have no windows. It did, but nothing you could really look out of—light couldn’t even get through because they were tiny and covered with translucent plastic insulation. Only the offices in the office area, which was largely a modern addition, had real windows. Paul didn’t head for the front door into the reception area and offices, but down the length of the building for the side door the workers used. Battered cars were parked all along this narrow side street, some with engines running, husbands or boyfriends waiting for their women to get out. Paul hefted open the metal door; it rattled. A flood of workers was approaching—he had to hurry. Paul lifted his bike and carried it down a few steps into the building. Immediately to his left was another metal door with a small window in it.

  In here, an echoy stairwell built from concrete blocks led upstairs. As usual Paul left his bike unchained under the staircase, then returned to the dark and chaotic molding room to punch in. He walked against the outgoing tide. Most of the smirky, punky-looking young guys looked twice as tall and heavy as Paul, who was pretty short, and they wore leather biker jackets and army coats. A lot of grease-stained men. Paul made it to the clock, avoiding meeting eyes, jouncing with bogus nonchalance, and waited for bodies to clear sufficiently for him to pluck his manilla time card. He left it in the same spot every night upon leaving so he wouldn’t have to search in the day while impatient punks waited. Paul inserted his card. Zzzt-stamp.

  He inserted his card in the IN rack now. He turned from the clock to head upstairs to the second floor and his department.

  Down here were “molding,” primarily, “deflashing” and “post-ops.”

  A confusion of machinery and hoses and noise and dirt. Spattered sprays of molten plastic had hardened on walls like solidified moss. Complex mold half-dangled from the ceiling, partially supported by thick chains.

  The yellow, unpainted plastic parts were heaped in boxes waiting to be deflashed; that is, filed of their rough edges. In post-ops holes were drilled in them, screws inserted. Paul walked back through th
e clamor, the shouts of workers to each other, the blasting of multiple radios on multiple stations, the screech of drills. It was a loud, filthy, dark hell down here. With all the chains and strange machinery, it seemed like some Industrial Age torture dungeon.

  The metal door clanging shut behind him was a welcome barrier.

  Carrying his bagged salad, wearing an army-colored winter jacket and under that a navy blue zippered sweatshirt with a less than Druidic hood hanging down his back, punched in for another day, Paul mounted the concrete steps to the second floor.

  ««—»»

  Familiar smells permeating all, leading the way. Whatever varied smells and colors, words and thoughts were brought in here, the factory smells were ever-present/ever-permeating in an invisible effort to unite all in a wholeness, like one organism. Paul followed them up the stairs and got off at the second floor: metal door, little window. He opened it.

  Lesser noise and chaos was better lighted in this, the shipping department. A less loud single radio played top forty, right now featuring some Michael Jackson hit. And it was mostly women in this room, standing or sitting at a collection of long tables—the “refinishing” crew. They were preparing to leave at three-forty, as various crews left at various times to avoid traffic jams. Paul’s “masking” team would replace them in the same work area.

  They looked at Paul askance, most of them, as he bounced toward the shipping office. Weird, crazy, long-haired kid. Probably a druggie. And they looked at him askance because they sensed that under the humor and apparent nonchalance he didn’t think too highly of them either.

  The shipping office was just a partially partitioned hollow under a staircase which led to the third floor painting department. Two desks, bul-letin boards and a coffee pot. Paul waited for his boss, the shipping supervisor Ted, to get off the phone. Ted would pass his orders down to Paul, who was the masking team’s group leader, thus considered a boss. Paul was paid five-fifty an hour for this honor, fifty cents more an hour than his team members and fifty less than the sanding team largely composed of Vietnam refugees upstairs.