would never do. He would never travel as free as a flowing river, would never be crossing it in style someday. He would never be “off to see the world,” because the world in its immensity and complexity was too much for him. Although the lovely melody encircled Woody as surely as did the fence of his autism, he didn’t find it to be a sad song. Quite the contrary. The song endorsed the value of dreaming of doing things when actually doing them wasn’t possible, and for all of his limitations, Woody was a dreamer of the highest order.
He crossed the room and opened the door and stepped into the upstairs hall, where the music called him back to a world he knew and with which he could cope most of time, to the house in the pines and the mother whose graceful hands made beauty from all that she touched.
39
Although Shacket does not intend to sleep in Megan’s bed, the sensorial treasure that she imparted to the sheets merely by lying between them overwhelms his increasingly acute senses, an intensely fragrant erotic sachet that inspires vivid visions of the bitch’s naked form that are arousing and yet strangely soporific. Though at first awake, he is floating in a sea of lascivious images, like a pubescent boy swept into a dream that will end in a night emission—the swell of full young breasts, smooth thrusting buttocks, silken limbs encircling him—a thrilling suffocation of flesh. He can smell the particles of skin she’s shed in sleep, the moistness that her labia imparted to the cotton during her dreams of gratification, the faint traces of colostrum that, though she is not pregnant, have for some reason leaked from her nipples, as if she has anticipated him and is readying herself to feed him as her own. He can smell the place on her pillow where, in sleep, a thread of drool has unraveled from a corner of her ripe lips, and he works the luxurious fabric with his tongue to lick up the taste of her mouth. In his fantasies, her elegant hands caress her curvaceous body, offering its pleasures to him. He wants to suck her fingers, lick the delicate webs between them, and bite the thenar eminence, the plump ball of the thumb. His senses are sodden with lust, so he cannot think, and this sensory overload, this incogitant drowning in sensation, is a kind of sedation that sends him sinking into sleep as whiskey might a dizzied drunkard.
His dreams are unlike any he has had before. A wildness informs them, an almost frantic sense that anything is possible, that just ahead lies some revelation that will satisfy his every need and put an end forever to all his fears. Urgently he races through a gothic forest and then across a moonlit meadow, in a body other than his own, four-legged and quicker than a man, his breath steaming from him in a night coldness that he can’t feel because he is hot-blooded and burning with exertion. He is with others of his kind, lean and long-limbed and sharp-toothed beasts, and when they glimpse the lame and hobbling deer, there is a howling that is a celebration to them but horrifying to the gentle object of their passion. At this peak of excitement, the dream morphs, he morphs, and no longer understands what he is or knows what he wants, only that he must feed. He is something that crawls and scuttles in a blinding dark, consuming filth, something that is driven by a mindless agitation, to which the slightest draft is a threat, and sudden light sends him into frenetic flight, into crevice and hole and descending rot. And he finds himself now something else altogether, drowned and yet alive, creeping across the floor of an ocean, under tremendous pressure that would kill a man, far below the reach of the warm sun, where phosphorescent plants weave tentacles of eerie light. Through the fathoms comes a familiar music that draws him toward wakefulness. As he ascends, he understands that these dreams were shaped not out of the ordinary experiences of life, but perhaps issued from genetic memories installed by whatever DNA billions of archaea have carried with them when he inhaled them in Springville, Utah.
He wakes.
From below issues “Moon River,” which irritates Shacket in the same way that the painting in Megan’s studio irritated him. Both her art and this song are too soft, too richly