Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,121

the covers, and goes back to sleep stubbornly. Sleep is a safe cave. Today is the last day of his abnormal life, today is the funeral; tomorrow he is scheduled to go back to work.

He has a vivid dream. He is alone on a large sporting field, or vacant lot, littered with small pebbles. In the sky two perfect disks, identical in size but the one a dense white and the other slightly transparent, move toward each other slowly; the pale one is directly above the dense one. At the moment they touch he feels frightened and a voice like over a loudspeaker at a track meet announces, “The cowslip swallows up the elder.” The downward gliding of the top one continues steadily until the other, though the stronger, is totally eclipsed, and just one circle is before his eyes, pale and pure. He understands: “the cowslip” is the moon, and “the elder” the sun, and that what he had witnessed is the explanation of death: lovely life eclipsed by lovely death. With great excitement he realizes he must go forth from this field and found a new religion. There is a feeling of the disks, and the echo of the voice, bending over him importunately, and he opens his eyes. Janice stands by the bed in a brown skirt and a pink sleeveless blouse. There is a drab thickness of fat under her chin he has never noticed before. He is surprised to be on his back; he almost always sleeps on his stomach. He realizes it was a dream, that he has nothing to tell the world, and the knot regathers in his chest. In getting out of bed he kisses the back of her hand, which is hanging by her side helpless and raw.

She makes him breakfast, the cereal drowned in milk, the coffee scalded in her style. With Nelson they walk over to the apartment to get clothes for the funeral. Rabbit resents her being able to walk; resents her not dying of remorse and shame. What kind of grief is it that permits them to walk? The sense of their thick bodies just going on, wrapping their hearts in numbness and small needs, angers him. They walk with their child through streets they walked as children. The gutter along Potter Avenue where the slime-rimmed ice-plant water used to run is dry. The houses, many of them no longer lived in by the people whose faces he all knew, are like the houses in a town you see from the train, their brick faces blank in posing the riddle, Why does anyone live here? Why was he set down here, why is this town, a dull suburb of a third-rate city, for him the center and index of a universe that contains immense prairies, mountains, deserts, forests, coastlines, cities, seas? This childish mystery—the mystery of “any place,” prelude to the ultimate, “Why am I me?”—starts panic in his heart. Coldness spreads through his body and he feels detached, as if at last he is, what he’s always dreaded, walking on air. The details of the street—the ragged margin where the pavement and grass struggle, the tarry scarred trunks of the telephone poles—no longer speak to him in a child’s intimate, excited voice. He is no one; it is as if he stepped outside of his body and brain a moment to watch the engine run and stepped into nothingness, for this “he” had been merely a refraction, a vibration within the engine, and now can’t get back in. He feels be is behind the windows of the houses they walk by, watching this three-cornered family walk along solidly with no sign that their universe has convulsed other than the woman’s quiet tears. Janice’s tears have come as gently as dew comes; the sight of the morning-fresh streets seems to have sprung them.

When they get inside the apartment she gives a sharp sigh and collapses against him. Perhaps she didn’t expect the place to be full of sunshine; buttresses of dust drifting in milky light slant from the middle of the floor to the tops of the windows and touch everything with innocence and newness and hopefulness. The door to his closet is near the entry door so they needn’t go very deep into the apartment at first. He opens the closet door as far as he can without bumping the television set and reaches far in and unzips a plastic zippered storage bag and takes out