that now. I was the one Charlie conned, not just once but again and again and again. Still—count your blessings, right? Conrad Morton had a lot of good stargazing years before I woke Mother. And there’s hope for him. He plays tennis, after all (although he never speaks), and as I said, he’s a volleyball monster. His doctor says he’s begun to show increased outward response (whatever that is when it’s at home), and the nurses and orderlies are less likely to come in and see him standing in the corner and striking his head lightly against the wall. Ed Braithwaite says that in time Conrad may come all the way back; that he may revive. I choose to believe he will. People say that where there’s life, there’s hope, and I have no quarrel with that, but I also believe the reverse.
There is hope, therefore I live.
Twice a week, after my talks with Ed, I sit in the living room of my brother’s suite and talk some more. Some of what I tell him is real—a kerfuffle at Harbor House that brought the police, a particularly large haul of almost-new clothes at the Goodwill, how I’ve finally gotten around to watching all five seasons of The Wire—and some of it is made up, like the woman I’m supposedly seeing who works as a waitress at the Nene Goose Bakery, and the long Skype conversations I have with Terry. Our visits are monologues rather than conversations, and that makes fiction necessary. My real life just won’t do, because these days it’s as sparsely furnished as a cheap hotel room.
I always finish by telling him he’s too thin, he has to eat more, and by telling him that I love him.
“Do you love me, Con?” I ask.
So far he hasn’t answered, but sometimes he smiles a little. That’s an answer of a kind, wouldn’t you agree?
• • •
When four o’clock comes and our visit is over, I reverse course and walk back down to the atrium, where the shadows—of the palms, the avocados, and the big, twisted banyan at the center of it all—have begun to grow long.
I count my steps, and I take little glances at the door ahead of me, but otherwise keep my gaze firmly fixed on the carpet. Unless I hear that voice whispering my name.
Sometimes when that happens, I’m able to ignore it.
Sometimes I cannot.
Sometimes I look up in spite of myself and see that the hospital wall, painted soothing pastel yellow, has been replaced with gray stones held together by ancient mortar and covered with ivy. The ivy is dead, and the branches look like grasping skeletal hands. The small door in the wall is hidden, Astrid was right about that, but it’s there. The voice comes from behind it, drifting through an ancient rusty keyhole.
I walk on resolutely. Of course I do. Horrors beyond comprehension wait on the other side of that door. Not just the land of death, but the land beyond death, a place full of insane colors, mad geometry, and bottomless chasms where the Great Ones live their endless, alien lives and think their endless, malevolent thoughts.
It’s the Null beyond that door.
I walk on, and think of the couplet in Bree’s last email: That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons, even death may die.
Jamie, an old woman’s voice whispers from the keyhole of a door only I can see. Come. Come to me and live forever.
No, I tell her, just as I told her in my vision. No.
And . . . so far, so good. But eventually something will happen. Something always does. And when it does . . .
I will come to Mother.
April 6, 2013–December 27, 2013
Author’s Note
CHUCK VERRILL is my agent. He sold the book, and provided aid and comfort along the way.
NAN GRAHAM edited the book with a sharp eye and an even sharper blue pencil.
RUSS DORR, my tireless researcher, provided information when information was needed. If I screwed something up, it was because I failed to understand. In such cases blame me, not him.
SUSAN MOLDOW took all my calls, even when I was being a pain in the ass, and urged me ever onward.
MARSHA DeFILIPPO and JULIE EUGLEY mind my real-world affairs so I can live in my imagination.
TABITHA KING, my wife and best critic, pointed out the soft places and urged me to fix them. Which I did, to the best of my ability. I love her a bunch.
Thanks to all of you, and special thanks to THE ROCK BOTTOM REMAINDERS, who taught me you’re never too old to rock and roll and have kept me high-stepping to “In the Midnight Hour” since 1992. Key of E. All that shit starts in E.
—Bangor, Maine