He had hurt himself this way before, but never this badly—what had he done to Thumper? The paper hadn’t said, but this ache in his jaws—and in his teeth, it was in his teeth, too—suggested that it had been plenty.
I’m in trouble if they catch me, he told himself. They’ll have photographs of the marks I left on him. They’ll have samples of my saliva and ... well ... any other fluids I might have left. They have a whole array of exotic tests these days, they test everything, and I don’t even know if I’m a secretor.
Yes, true, but they weren’t going to catch him. He was registered at the Whitestone as Alvin Dodd from New Haven, and if he was pressed, he could even produce a driver’s license—a photo driver’s license—that would back that up. If the cops here called the cops back home, they would be told that Norman Daniels was a thousand miles from the midwest, camping in Utah’s Zion National Park and taking a well-deserved vacation. They might even tell the cops here not to be stupid, that Norman Daniels was a bona fide golden boy. Surely they wouldn’t pass on the story of Wendy Yarrow . . . would they?
No, probably they wouldn’t. But sooner or later—
The thing was, he no longer cared about later. These days he only cared about sooner. About finding Rose and having a serious discussion with her. About giving her a present. His bank card, in fact. And it would never be recovered from another trash barrel or from some greasy little fag’s wallet, either. He was going to make sure she never lost it or threw it away again. He was going to put it in a safe place. And if he could see only darkness beyond the . . . the insertion of that final gift ... well, maybe that was a blessing.
Now that his mind had returned to the bank card it dwelled there, as it almost always did these days, in his sleep as well as when he was awake. It was as if that piece of plastic had become a weird green river (the Merchant’s instead of the Mississippi) and the run of his thoughts was a stream which flowed into it. All thoughts ran downhill now, eventually losing their identity as they merged into the green current of his obsession. The enormous, unanswerable question surfaced again: How could she have dared? How could she have possibly dared to take it? That she should have left, run away from him, that he supposed he could understand, even if he could not condone it, and even if he knew that she would have to die just for fooling him so completely, for hiding the treachery in her stinking woman’s heart so well. But that she should have dared to take his bank card, to take what was his, like the kid who had snuck up the beanstalk and stolen the sleeping giant’s golden hen . . .
Without realizing what he was doing, Norman put the first finger of his left hand into his mouth and began to bite down on it. There was pain—quite a lot of it—but this time he didn’t feel it; he was deep in his own thoughts. There was a thick pad of callus high up on the first fingers of both hands, because this biting in moments of stress was an old, old habit of his, one that went back to childhood. At first the callus held, but as he continued to think about the bank card, as its green began to deepen in his mind until it had become the near-black of a fir-tree seen at dusk (a color quite unlike the card’s actual lime color), it gave way and blood began to flow down his hand and over his lips. He dug his teeth into his finger, relishing the pain, grinding at the flesh, tasting his blood, so salty and so thick, like the taste of Thumper’s blood when he had bitten through the cord at the base of his—
“Mommy? Why’s that man doing that to his hand?”
“Never mind, come on. ”
That brought him around. He looked sluggishly over his shoulder, like a man waking from a nap which has been short but deep, and saw a young woman and a little boy of perhaps three walking away from him—she was moving the kid along so fast he was almost running, and when the woman took her own