Bag of Bones CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I caught the rubeola when I was octette, and I was very ill. I survey you were dismission to die, my yield t grey-headed me at virtuoso time, and he was not a man given up to exaggeration. He t grizzly me nigh how he and my mother had dunked me in a tub of c old piddle peerless iniquity, both of them at least half-convinced the shock of it would stop my midriff, entirely both of them completely convinced that Id burn up in the lead their eye if they didnt do fewthing. I had begun to speak in a loud, monotonously discursive joint ab start the b right hand figures I dictum in the mood angels scrape to bear me away, my terrified mother was sure and the subsist judgment of conviction my father took my temperature before the cold plunge, he said that the mercury on the old Johnson & Johnson rectal thermometer had stood at a hundred and six degrees. after(prenominal) that, he said, he didnt dare take it nigh(prenominal) more.I dont remember any bright figures, unless I remember a strange blockage of time that was worry being in a funhouse cor unlooseor whither several contrasting movies were showing at once. The field grew elastic, bulging in places where it had never bulged before, wavering in places where it had always been solid. People near of them dep halting impossibly t entirelydarted in and come on of my agency on scissoring, cartoonish legs. Their words altogether came discover booming, with glaring echoes. Some unrivaled shook a pair of treat-shoes in my face. I externalisem to remember my brother, Siddy, sustaining his mess into his shirt and making repeated arm- farthert noises. tenacity broke low. Everything came in segments, eldritch wieners on a poison string.In the years between and so and the summer I re glum to Sara Laughs, I had the vernacular sicknesses, infections, and insults to the be, but never anything corresponding that feverish interlude when I was eight. I never expected to believing , I suppose, that such experiences are unique to children, sight with malaria, or possibly those suffering catastrophic mental break use ups. But on the night of July s change surfaceth and the morning of July eighth, I lived by means of a percentage point of time re trailably homogeneous that childhood delirium. Dreaming, waking, moving they were all unrivalled. Ill split up you as best I can, but nothing I verbalize can convey the strangeness of that experience. It was as if I had found a secret passage hidden just beyond the wall of the world and went crawling along it.First in that respect was music. Not Dixieland, because in that respect were no horns, but like Dixieland. A primitive, reeling kind of bebop. Three or iv acoustic guitars, a harmonica, a stand-up bass (or maybe a pair). Behind all of this was a grueling, happy drumming that didnt sound as if it was orgasm from a real drum it sounded as if someone with a lot of percussive talent was whopping on a mic kle of boxes. consequently a womans voice joined in a countertenor voice, not quite mannish, roughing everywhere the high notes. It was laughing and urgent and minatory all at the equivalent time, and I knew at once that I was auditory sense Sara Tidwell, who had never cut a record in her life. I was hearing Sara Laughs, and man, she was rocking.You love were going stern to MANderley,Were gonna dance on the SANderley,Im gonna peach with the BANderley,We gonna ball all we CANderley Ball me, baby, yeahThe basses yes, there were two broke out(p) in a barnyard shuffle like the break in Elviss version of Baby Lets Play House, and thence there was a guitar aviate Son Tidwell playing that chickenscratch thing.Lights gleamed in the dark, and I perspective of a melodic phrase from the fifties Claudine Clark singing Party Lights. And here they were, Nipponese lanterns hung from the trees above the elbow room of railroad-tie steps leading from the house to the water. Party l ights casting mystic circles of refulgenceing in the dark red blue and green.Behind me, Sara was singing the bridge deck to her Manderley song mama likes it nasty, mama likes it strong, mama likes to ruiny all night long but it was fading. Sara and the Red-Top Boys had set up their bandstand in the thoroughfare by the sound, about where George Footman had parked when he came to serve me with Max Devores subpoena. I was descending toward the lake through circles of radiance, past party lights surrounded by soft-winged moths. mavin had found its way inside a lamp and it cast a monstrous, batlike dwarf against the rib arse paper. The flower-boxes Jo had give beside the steps were full of night-blooming roses. In the light of the Japanese lanterns they give eared blue.Now the band was provided a faint murmur I could hear Sara shouting out the lyric, laughing her way through it as though it were the funniest thing shed ever heard, all that Manderley-sanderley-canderley halt , but I could no eight-day make out the individual words. Much clearer was the lap of the lake against the rocks at the foot of the steps, the hollow clunk of the cannisters down the stairs the move float, and the cry of a loon drifting out of the darkness. Someone was standing on The pass to my right, at the edge of the lake. I couldnt mold his face, but I could see the brown sportcoat and the tee-shirt he was clothing on a lower floor it. The lapels cut off some of the letters of the message, so it looked like thisORMAEROUNI knew what it said leastways in dreams you almost always k straightway, dont you? NORMAL SPERM COUNT, a closure Cafe yuck-it-up special if ever there was one.I was in the northward bedroom dreaming all this, and here I woke up sufficient to hunch over I was dreaming . . . except it was like waking into some other dream, because Bunters bell was ringing madly and there was someone standing in the hall. Mr. Normal Sperm Count? No, not him. The trace- shape falling on the doorway wasnt quite human. It was slumped, the arms indistinct. I sit up into the silver thrill of the bell, clutching a loose puddle of sheet against my naked waist, sure it was the shroud-thing out there the shroud-thing had come out of its grave to pay me.Please dont, I said in a dry and trembling voice. Please dont, please.The shadow on the door raised its arms. It aint nuthin but a barn-dance sugar Sara Tidwells laughing, uncivilised voice sang. It aint nuthin but a round-and-roundI lay back down and pulled the sheet over my face in a childish sub chopine of denial . . . and there I stood on our atomic lick of beach, eating away just my down the stairsshorts. My feet were ankle-deep in the water. It was warm the way the lake gets by midsummer. My dull shadow was cast two ways, in one direction by the scantling moon which rode low above the water, in another by the Japanese lantern with the moth caught inside it. The man whod been standing on the pat h was asleep(p) but he had left a plastic owl to mark his place. It stared at me with frozen, gold-ringed eyeball.Hey IrishI looked out at the swimming float. Jo stood there. She moldiness have just climbed out of the water, because she was still dripping and her hair was tight against her cheeks. She was erosion the two- rig swim instance from the photo Id found, gray with red piping.Its been a long time, Irish what do you say?Say about what? I called back, although I knew.About this She put her reach over her breasts and squeezed. Water ran out between her fingers and trickled across her knuckles.Come on, Irish, she said from beside and above me, come on, you bastard, lets go. I felt her strip down the sheet, pulling it easily out of my sleep-numbed fingers. I shut my eyes, but she took my hand and placed it between her legs. As I found that velvety seam and began to stroke it open, she began to rub the back of my jazz with her fingers.Youre not Jo, I said. Who are you?But no one was there to answer. I was in the woods. It was dark, and on the lake the loons were crying. I was walking the path to Jos studio. It wasnt a dream I could feel the cool air against my skin and the occasional(a) bite of a rock into my bare sole or heel. A mosquito buzzed round my ear and I waved it away. I was wearing Jockey shorts, and at every step they pulled against a huge and quiverbing erection.What the hell is this? I asked as Jos subatomic barnboard studio loomed in the dark. I looked behind me and truism Sara on her hill, not the woman but the house, a long suit jutting toward the nightbound lake. Whats happening to me?Everythings all right, Mike, Jo said. She was standing on the float, watching as I swam toward her. She put her hands behind her neck like a calendar model, lifting her breasts more fully into the disclose halter. As in the photo, I could see her nipples poking out the cloth. I was swimming in my downstairspants, and with the same huge erection. Everythings all right, Mike, Mattie said in the north bedroom, and I open(a) my eyes. She was sitting beside me on the bed, smooth and naked in the weak glow of the nightlight. Her hair was down, hanging to her shoulders. Her breasts were tiny, the size of teacups, but the nipples were large and distended. Between her legs, where my hand still lingered, was a powderpuff of blonde hair, smooth as down. Her body was wrapped in shadows like moth-wings, like rose-petals. in that location was something desperately cute about her as she sat there she was like the prize you know youll never win at the carny shooting gallery or the county reliable ringtoss. The one they keep on the top shelf. She reached under the sheet and folded her fingers over the stretched material of my undershorts.Everythings all right, it aint nuthin but a round-and-round, said the UFO voice as I climbed the steps to my wifes studio. I stooped, fished for the key from beneath the mat, and took it out.I climbed the endure to the float, wet and dripping, preceded by my engorged sex is there anything, I wonder, so unintentionally comic as a sexually unrestrained man? Jo stood on the boards in her wet bathing suit. I pulled Mattie into bed with me. I opened the door to Jos studio. All of these things happened at the same time, twist in and out of each other like strands of some exotic rope or belt. The thing with Jo felt the most like a dream, the thing in the studio, me crossing the floor and feeling down at my old green IBM, the least. Mattie in the north bedroom was somewhere in between.On the float Jo said, Do what you fate. In the north bedroom Mattie said, Do what you want. In the studio, no one had to tell me anything. In there I knew exactly what I wanted.On the float I bent my flip and put my give tongue to on one of Jos breasts and sucked the cloth-covered nipple into my mouth. I tasted damp fabric and dank lake. She reached for me where I stuck out and I slapped her hand a way. If she touched(p) me I would come at once. I sucked, drinking back trickles of cotton-water, seek with my own hands, first caressing her ass and then yanking down the piece of ass half of her suit. I got it off her and she dropped to her knees. I did too, finally getting rid of my wet, clinging underpants and tossing them on top of her bikini panty. We face each other that way, me naked, her almost.Who was the make fun at the game? I panted. Who was he, Jo?No one in particular, Irish. vertical another bag of bones.She laughed, then leaned back on her haunches and stared at me. Her umbilicus was a tiny black cup. thither was something queerly, attractively snakelike in her posture. Everything down there is death, she said, and pressed her cold palms and white, pruney fingers to my cheeks. She turned my head and then bent it so I was looking into the lake. Under the water I saw decomposing bodies slipping by, pulled by some deep current. Their wet eyes stared. Their fish- nibbled noses gaped. Their tongues lolled between white lips like tendrils of waterweed. Some of the dead trailed pallid balloons of man-of-war guts some were little more than bone. Yet not even out the sight of this floating charnel parade could divert me from what I wanted. I shrugged my head free of her hands, pushed her down on the boards, and finally cooled what was so hard and contentious, sinking it deep. Her moon-silvered eyes stared up at me, through me, and I saw that one pupil was larger than the other. That was how her eyes had looked on the TV reminder when I had identified her in the Derry County Morgue. She was dead. My wife was dead and I was bang her corpse. Nor could even that realization stop me. Who was he? I cried at her, covert her cold flesh as it lay on the wet boards. Who was he, Jo, for Christs interestingness tell me who he wasIn the north bedroom I pulled Mattie on top of me, relishing the feel of those small breasts against my chest and the length of her entwining legs. Then I involute her over on the far side of the bed. I felt her hand reaching for me, and slapped it away if she touched me where she meant to touch me, I would come in an instant. Spread your legs, hurry, I said, and she did. I unappealing my eyes, shutdown out all other sensory input in raise of this. I pressed forward, then stop. I made one little adjustment, pushing at my engorged penis with the side of my hand, then rolled my hips and slipped into her like a finger in a silk-lined glove. She looked up at me, wide-eyed, then put a hand on my cheek and turned my head. Everything out there is death, she said, as if only explaining the obvious. In the window I saw Fifth Avenue between Fiftieth and Sixtieth all those trendy shops, Bijan and Bally, Tiffany and Bergdorfs and Steuben Glass. And here came Harold Oblowski, northbound and swinging his pigskin briefcase (the one Jo and I had given him for Christmas the year before she died). Beside him, carrying a Barnes and Noble bag by the handles, was the bountiful, pretty Nola, his secretary. Except her bounty was gone. This was a grinning, yellow-jawed skeleton in a Donna Karan suit and alligator pumps scrawny, beringed bones instead of fingers gripped the bag-handles. Harolds teeth jutted in his usual agents grin, now extended to the point of obscenity. His favorite suit, the doublebreasted charcoal-gray from Paul Stuart, flapped on him like a sail in a fresh breeze. All around them, on both sides of the street, walked the living dead mommy mummies leading baby corpses by the hands or wheeling them in expensive prams, living dead doormen, reanimated skateboarders. Here a tall black man with a last few strips of flesh hanging from his face like corned deer-hide walked his skeletal Alsatian. The cab-drivers were rotting to raga music. The faces looking down from the passing buses were skulls, each wearing its own version of Harolds grin Hey, how are ya, hows the wife, hows the kid s, writing any unattackable books lately? The peanut vendors were putrefying. Yet none of it could quench me. I was on fire. I slipped my hands under her buttocks, lifting her, sulphurous at the sheet (the pattern, I saw with no surprise, was blue roses) until I pulled it free of the mattress to keep from biting her on the neck, the shoulder, the breasts, anywhere my teeth could reach. name me who he was I yelled at her. You know, I know you do My voice was so dumb by my mouthful of bed-linen that I doubted if anyone but me could have understood it. Tell me, you kvetch On the path between Jos studio and the house I stood in the dark with the typewriter in my arms and that dream-spanning erection quivering at a lower place its metal bulk all that ready and nothing willing. Except maybe for the night breeze. Then I became aware I was no longer alone. The shroud-thing was behind me, called like the moths to the party lights. It laughed-a brazen, smoke-broken laugh that could bel ong to only one woman. I didnt see the hand that reached around my hip to grip me the typewriter was in the way but I didnt need to see it to know its show was brown. It squeezed, slowly tightening, the fingers wriggling.What do you want to know, sugar? she asked from behind me. quench laughing. Still teasing. Do you really want to know at all? Do you want to know or do you want to feel?Oh, youre cleanup spot me I cried. The typewriter thirty or so pounds of IBM Selectric was shaking back and aside in my arms. I could feel my muscles twanging like guitar strings.Do you want to know who he was, sugar? That nasty man?Just do me, you bitch I screamed. She laughed again that harsh laughter that was almost like a cough and squeezed me where the squeezing was best.You hold still, now, she said. You hold still, pretty boy, less you want me to take fright and yank this thing of yours right out by the . . . I lost the rest as the whole world change integrity in an orgasm so deep and strong that I musical theme it would simply tear me apart. I snapped my head back like a man being hung and ejaculated looking up at the stars. I screamed I had to and on the lake, two loons screamed back.At the same time I was on the float. Jo was gone, but I could faintly hear the sound of the band -Sara and cuss and the Red-Top Boys tearing through Black Mountain Rag. I sat up, daze and spent, fucked hollow. I couldnt see the path leading up to the house, but I could discern its switchback course by the Japanese lanterns. My underpants lay beside me in a little wet heap. I picked them up and started to put them on, only because I didnt want to swim back to shore with them in my hand. I halt with them stretched between my knees, looking at my fingers. They were slimed with decaying flesh. Puffing out from beneath several of the nails were clumps of torn-out hair. Corpsehair.Oh Jesus, I moaned. The strength went out of me. I flopped into wetness. I was in the north-wing bedroom. What I had landed in was hot, and at first I thought it was come. The dim glow of the nightlight showed darker stuff, however. Mattie was gone and the bed was full of furrow. Lying in the middle of that soaking pool was something I at first glance took to be a clump of flesh or a piece of organ. I looked more closely and saw it was a stuffed fauna, a black-furred quarry matted red with blood. I lay on my side looking at it, wanting to bolt out of the bed and flee from the room but unable to do it. My muscles were in a dead swoon. Who had I really been having sex with in this bed? And what had I done to her? In Gods name, what?I dont believe these lies, I heard myself say, and as though it were an incantation, I was slapped back together. That isnt exactly what happened, bur its the only way of saying that seems to come close to whatever did. There were three of me one on the float, one in the north bedroom, one on the path and each one felt that hard slap, as if the w ind had grown a fist. There was rushing blackness, and in it the steady silver shaking of Bunters bell. Then it faded, and I faded with it. For a little while I was nowhere at all.I came back to the casual chatter of birds on summer holiday and to that peculiar red darkness that means the sun is shining through your closed eyelids. My neck was stiff, my head was canted at a weird angle, my legs were folded awkwardly beneath me, and I was hot.I lifted my head with a wince, knowing even as I opened my eyes that I was no longer in bed, no longer on the swimming float, no longer on the path between the house and the studio. It was floorboards under me, hard and uncompromising.The light was dazzling. I squinched my eyes closed again and groaned like a man with a hangover. I eased them back open behind my cupped hands, gave them time to adjust, then cautiously uncovered them, sat all the way up, and looked around. I was in the upstairs hall, lying under the broken air conditioner. Mrs. M eserves note still hung from it. Sitting outside my stead door was the green IBM with a piece of paper rolled into it. I looked down at my feet and saw that they were dirty. Pine needles were stuck to my soles, and one toe was scratched. I got up, staggered a little (my right leg had gone to sleep), then buttressed a hand against the wall and stood steady. I looked down at myself. I was wearing the Jockeys Id gone to bed in, and I didnt look as if Id had an fortuity in them. I pulled out the waistband and peeked inside. My cock looked as it commonly did small and soft, curled up and asleep in its thatch of hair. If Noonans indulging had been adventuring in the night, there was no sign of it now.It sure felt like an adventure, I croaked. I armed sweat off my forehead. It was stifling up here. Not the kind I ever read about in The Hardy Boys, though.Then I remembered the blood-soaked sheet in the north bedroom, and the stuffed animal lying on its side in the middle of it. There wa s no sense of relief attached to the memory, that thank-God-it-was-only-a-dream feeling you get after a particularly nasty nightmare. It felt as real as any of the things Id experienced in my measles fever-delirium . . . and all those things had been real, just distorted by my overheated brain.I staggered to the stairs and limped down them, holding tight to the handrail in case my tingling leg should buckle. At the foot I looked dazedly around the living room, as if seeing it for the first time, and then limped down the north-wing corridor.The bedroom door was ajar and for a moment I couldnt bring myself to push it all the way open and go in. I was very badly scared, and my mind kept trying to replay an old episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the one about the man who strangles his wife during an strong blackout. He spends the whole half hour looking for her, and finally finds her in the pantry, bloated and open-eyed. Kyra Devore was the only kid of stuffed-animal age Id met rec ently, but she had been sleeping peacefully under her cabbage-rose coverlet when I left her mother and headed home. It was stupid to think I had drive all the way back to Wasp Hill Road, in all probability wearing nothing but my Jockeys, that I had What? Raped the woman? Brought the child here? In my sleep?I got the typewriter, in my sleep, didnt I? Its sitting right upstairs in the goddam hallway.Big difference between going thirty yards through the woods and five miles down the road to I wasnt going to stand out here listening to those quarrelling voices in my head. If I wasnt crazy and I didnt think I was listening to those contentious assholes would probably send me there, and by the express. I reached out and pushed the bedroom door open.For a moment I actually saw a spreading octopus-pattern of blood soaking into the sheet, thats how real and focused my terror was. Then I closed my eyes tight, opened them, and looked again. The sheets were rumpled, the bottom one mostly pu lled free. I could see the quilted satin hide of the mattress. One pillow lay on the far edge of the bed. The other was scrunched down at the foot. The throw rug a piece of Jos work was askew, and my water-glass lay overturned on the nighttable. The bedroom looked as if it tycoon have been the site of a brawl or an orgy, but not a murder. There was no blood and no little stuffed animal with black fur.I dropped to my knees and looked under the bed. Nothing there not even dust-kitties, thanks to Brenda Meserve. I looked at the ground-sheet again, first passing a hand over its rumpled topography, then pulling it back down and resecuring the elasticized corners. Great invention, those sheets if women gave out the Medal of Freedom instead of a bunch of white politicians who never made a bed or washed a load of clothes in their lives, the guy who thought up fitted sheets would undoubtedly have gotten a piece of that tin by now. In a Rose Garden ceremony.With the sheet pulled taut, I l ooked again. No blood, not a single drop. There was no stiffening reconcile of semen, either. The former I hadnt really expected (or so I was already telling myself), but what about the latter? At the very least, Id had the worlds most creative wet-dream a triptych in which I had screwed two women and gotten a handjob from a third, all at the same time. I thought I had that morning-after feeling, too, the one you get when the previous nights sex has been of the headbusting variety. But if there had been fireworks, where was the burnt powder?In Jos studio, most likely, I told the empty, sunny room. Or on the path between here and there. Just be glad you didnt leave it in Mattie Devore, bucko. An battle with a post-adolescent widow you dont need.A part of me disagreed a part of me thought Mattie Devore was exactly what I did need. But I hadnt had sex with her last night, any more than I had had sex with my dead wife out on the swimming float or gotten a handjob from Sara Tidwell. Now that I saw I hadnt killed a nice little kid either, my thoughts turned back to the typewriter. Why had I gotten it? Why bother?Oh man. What a slaphappy question. My wife might have been keeping secrets from me, maybe even having an affair there might be ghosts in the house there might be a rich old man half a mile south who wanted to put a sharp stick into me and then break it off there might be a few toys in my own humble attic, for that publication. But as I stood there in a bright shaft of sunlight, looking at my shadow on the far wall, only one thought seemed to matter I had gone out to my wifes studio and gotten my old typewriter, and there was only one reason to do something like that.I went into the bathroom, wanting to get rid of the sweat on my body and the dirt on my feet before doing anything else. I reached for the shower-handle, then stopped. The tub was full of water. Either I had for some reason filled it during my sleepwalk . . . or something else had. I reached for the drain-lever, then stopped again, remembering that moment on the shoulder of Route 68 when my mouth had filled up with the taste of cold water. I realized I was waiting for it to happen again. When it didnt, I opened the bathtub drain to let out the standing water and started the shower.I could have brought the Selectric downstairs, perhaps even lugged it out onto the deck where there was a little breeze coming over the surface of the lake, but I didnt. I had brought it all the way to the door of my office, and my office was where Id work . . . if I could work. Id work in there even if the temperature beneath the roofpeak built to a hundred and twenty degrees . . . which, by three in the afternoon, it just might.The paper rolled into the machine was an old pink-carbon receipt from Click, the photo shop in Castle shiver where Jo had bought her supplies when we were down here. Id put it in so that the blank side faced the Courier type-ball. On it I had typed the names of my l ittle harem, as if I had tried in some struggling way to report on my three-faceted dream even while it was going onJo Sara Mattie Jo Sara Mattie Mattie Mattie Sara Sara Jo Johanna Sara Jo MattieSaraJo.Below this, in lower case normal sperm count sperm norm alls rosyI opened the office door, carried the typewriter in, and put it in its old place beneath the poster of Richard Nixon. I pulled the pink slip out of the roller, balled it up, and tossed it into the wastebasket. Then I picked up the Selectrics plug and stuck it in the baseboard socket. My heart was beating hard and fast, the way it had when I was thirteen and climbing the ladder to the high board at the Y-pool. I had climbed that ladder three clock when I was twelve and then slunk back down it again once I turned thirteen, there could be no chickening out I really had to do it.I thought Id seen a fan screen in the far corner of the closet, behind the box marked GADGETS. I started in that direction, then turned around ag ain with a frustrate little laugh. Id had moments of confidence before, hadnt I? Yes. And then the iron bands had clamped around my chest. It would be stupid to get out the fan and then discover I had no business in this room after all.Take it aristocratic, I said, take it easy. But I couldnt, no more than that narrow-chested boy in the ridiculous purple bathing suit had been able to take it easy when he walked to the end of the diving board, the pool so green beneath him, the upraised faces of the boys and girls in it so small, so small.I bent to one of the drawers on the right side of the desk and pulled so hard it came all the way out. I got my bare foot out of its landing order just in time and barked a gust of loud, humorless laughter. There was half a ream of paper in the drawer. The edges had that faintly crispy look paper gets when its been sitting for a long time. I no more than saw it before remembering I had brought my own supply stuff a good deal fresher than this. I left it where it was and put the drawer back in its hole. It took several tries to get it on its tracks my hands were shaking.At last I sat down in my desk chair, hearing the same old creaks as it took my weight and the same old gnarl of the casters as I rolled it forward, snugging my legs into the kneehole. Then I sat cladding the keyboard, sweating hard, still remembering the high board at the Y, how full of life it had been under my bare feet as I walked its length, remembering the echoing bore of the voices below me, remembering the smell of chlorine and the steady low throb of the air-exchangers fwung-fwung-fwung-fwung, as if the water had its own secret heartbeat. I had stood at the end of the board wondering (and not for the first time) if you could be paralyze if you hit the water wrong. Probably not, but you could die of fear. There were record cases of that in Ripleys Believe It or Not, which served me as science between the ages of eight and fourteen.Go on Jos voi ce cried. My version of her voice was usually tranquillize and collected this time it was shrill. Stop dithering and go onI reached for the IBMs rocker-switch, now remembering the day I had dropped my Word Six program into the Powerbooks trash. Goodbye, old pal, I had thought.Please let this work, I said. Please.I take down my hand and flicked the switch. The machine came on. The Courier ball did a preliminary twirl, like a ballet dancer standing in the wings, waiting to go on. I picked up a piece of paper, saw my sweaty fingers were leaving marks, and didnt care. I rolled it into the machine, centered it, then wroteChapter Oneand waited for the storm to break.