twice.”
But for the longest while, he could not stop, because Dorothy had gone where he couldn’t follow.
He was not merely alone now. He was reduced to half of who he had been.
8
Woody never needed more than five hours of sleep. Perhaps he’d slept more when he’d been a fat-cheeked baby, but though he had an exceptional memory, he could recall nothing of his infancy other than a mobile that hung over his crib: colorful Lucite birds—coral pink, yellow, sapphire blue—circling around and around, casting cheerful prismatic patterns on the walls. Maybe the mobile was why, all these years later, he sometimes dreamed that he could fly.
Medical authorities unanimously agreed that everyone needed eight hours of sleep every night. Less sack time supposedly led to difficulty focusing the mind, disordered thought processes. Most people who wound up as vagrants or embezzlers or serial killers had perhaps been shaped by sleep deprivation. That was a theory, anyway. In Woody’s case, however, if he languished in bed too long, that left him fuzzy-headed, with a lingering attention deficit. At 3:50 a.m., his eyelids flipped up with an almost audible click, and he became awake, with no chance whatsoever of falling back into sleep.
This embarrassed him. He was different from other people in half a gajillion ways. If only he had needed eight hours in the sheets, he would have been a little less alien.
On this Wednesday morning, Woody did what he always did on arising. He had his routines. Routines were his salvation. The world was vast and complex, part of a larger and even more complex solar system, an enormous galaxy, an infinite universe—trillions of stars!—and he didn’t want to think too much about that. There were uncountable choices that were yours to make, innumerable things that could happen to you. The options could paralyze you with indecision, and all the threats could petrify you with fear. Routines made the infinite finite and manageable. So he took his usual four-minute shower and dressed and went quietly downstairs.
He was allowed to prepare his own breakfast cereal and toast, but it was too early to eat.
Anyway, he liked to have breakfast with his mother when she got up for the day. He never spoke a word as they ate, but he enjoyed listening to her. Sometimes she didn’t say much, either, and that was okay, too, as long as she wasn’t quiet because she was sad.
He always knew when she was sad. Her sadness passed through him like windblown sleet, and he became chilled into sadness, too, which he otherwise never was.
From a kitchen drawer, he retrieved a Bell and Howell Tac Light and his trusty Attwood signal horn. The latter was a small aerosol can with a red plastic Klaxon on top, which could produce an earsplitting WAAAAAHHHHH that reliably scared off potentially dangerous animals, though he had rarely seen any of those and had only used the horn twice.
Thus equipped, he stepped to the security alarm keypad next to the back door. He entered the four numbers, and the recorded voice said, “System is disarmed.” The volume was turned low so that his mother wouldn’t be awakened by anything but the alarm itself.
The back porch offered a pair of teak chairs with thick blue cushions, a little table between them, a bench swing hanging from stainless-steel chains, and darkness all around.
Woody wasn’t afraid of the night.
The night could be magical. Cool things had happened to him in the dark morning hours while his mother still slept. Once he’d seen a fat opossum waddling across the lawn, trailed by her babies, all their tiny lantern eyes shining with curiosity when they saw him. He had seen foxes and countless rabbits and families of deer. The only thing he’d needed to scare away with a long blast of the horn had been raccoons that approached him hissing and baring their teeth.
His faithful obedience had earned him the right to sit on the porch at night as long as he was careful to leave the door unlocked to facilitate a quick retreat. He wasn’t permitted to venture into the yard alone. It was a deep yard, almost three acres, and at the farther end waited the forest.
Animals more dangerous than mean raccoons lived in the forest. Mother Nature wasn’t really motherly. Mom said nature was more like a bipolar aunt who treated you kindly most of the time but, now and then, could be a real witch, conjuring killer storms and vicious animals,