for the Sylvia Plath worshippers. It's just that creative people have creative breakdowns. If you don't believe it, I repeat: look at this shit.
Over there was the water heater, a white, cylindrical bulk to the right of the root-cellar door. It looked the same, but ...
Gardener went over, wanting to see how Bobbi had souped it up so radically.
She's gone on a mad home-improvement kick. And the nuttiest thing is that she doesn't seem to have differentiated between things like fixing the water heater and customizing doorbells. New banister. Fresh dirt brought in and raked over the floor of the root cellar. Christ knows what else. No wonder she's exhausted. And just by the bye, Gard, exactly where did Bobbi come by the know-how to do all this stuff? If it was a correspondence course from Popular Mechanix, she must have really crammed.
His first dazed surprise at coming on this nutty workshop in Bobbi's basement was becoming deepening unease. It wasn't just the evidences of obsessive behavior that he saw along that table - heaps of equipment too neatly organized, all four corners of the instruction sheets tacked down - that bothered him. Nor was it the evidence of mania in Bobbi's apparent failure to discriminate between worthwhile renovations and nonsensical (apparently nonsensical, Gardener amended) ones.
What gave Gardener the creeps was thinking about - trying to think about - the huge, the profligate amounts of energy that had been expended here. To have done just those things he had seen so far, Bobbi must have blazed like a torch. There were projects like the fluorescent lights which had already been completed. There were the ones still pending. There were the trips to Augusta she must have needed to make to get all the equipment, hardware, and batteries. Plus getting sweet dirt to replace the sour. Don't forget that.
What could have driven her to it?
Gardener didn't know, he didn't like to imagine Bobbi here, racing back and forth, working on two different do-it-yourself projects at once, or five, or ten. The image was too clear. Bobbi with the sleeves of her shirt rolled up and the top three buttons undone, beads of sweat trickling down between her breasts, her hair pulled back in a rough horsetail, eyes burning, face pale except for two hectic red patches, one in each cheek. Bobbi looking like Ms Wizard gone insane, growing more haggard as she screwed screws, bolted bolts, soldered wires, trucked in dirt, and stood on her stepladder, bent backwards like a ballet dancer, sweat running down her face, cords standing out in her neck as she hung up the new lights. Oh, and while you're at it, don't forget Bobbi putting in the new wiring and fixing the hot-water tank.
Gardener touched the tank's enamel side and pulled his hand back fast. It looked the same, but it wasn't. It was hot as hell. He squatted and opened the hatch at the bottom of the tank.
That was when Gardener really sailed off the edge of the world.
6
Before, the water heater had run on LP gas. The small-bore copper tubes which fed gas to the tank's burner ran from tanks in a hook-up behind the house. The delivery truck from Dead River Gas in Derry came once a month and replaced the tanks if they needed replacing - usually they did, because the tank was wasteful as well as inefficient ... two things that went together more often than not, now that Gard thought about it. The first thing Gardener noticed was that the copper tubes were no longer hooked into the tank. They hung free behind it, their ends stuffed with cloth.
Holy shit, how's she heating her water? he thought, and then he did look into the hatch, and then for a little while he froze completely.
His mind seemed clear enough, yes, but that disconnected, floating sensation had come back - that feeling of separation. Ole Gard was going up again, up like a child's silver Puffer balloon. He knew he felt afraid, but this knowledge was dim, hardly important, compared to that dismal feeling of coming untethered from himself. No, Gard, Jesus! a mournful voice cried from deep inside him.
He remembered going to the Fryeburg Fair when he was a little kid, no more than ten. He went into the Mirror Maze with his mother, and the two of them had gotten separated. That was the first time he had felt this odd sensation of separation from self, of drifting away, or