Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [101]
The outline of the intruder once he came downstairs by the patio door: he was large, Sheppard’s size and build, and his hair seemed to stand straight up, a bushy crew cut. He could tell the blacked-out form had turned to see his own blacked-out form, then run from the house.
Often, Sheppard dreamed what he thought were memories of that night—for instance, racing toward the beach after the intruder, but in the dream he was practically flying, taking four or five steps at a leap like an astronaut on the moon, catching tremendous air with every stride, hitting the figure as hard as a falcon its prey. In one dream he managed to pin the intruder down, gripping the man’s neck in his hands, but this clearly hadn’t happened because the face and the neck he was strangling were his own. “Do I look like that?” he thought. He couldn’t kill himself, of course, but he remembered thinking, mid-dream, “My God, this is a dream, and I’m wrestling myself because I killed Marilyn.” In any case, his double used the moment of surprise to wrestle him off, throw him back into the water, and once again raise his fist to ready a punch. Then everything went black.
He wondered occasionally if he’d killed his wife in some kind of psychotic episode and blocked it out, though no evidence supported this. In a room as flecked with blood as a Pollock painting, he had some only on his knee and on his watch, on the crystal itself, fogged with water after he lay half-submerged in the lake. True, sleepwalkers were capable of remarkably precise and coordinated actions; his father once told him that his mother had watched as he sleepwalked to the refrigerator, took out a ham, and cut the meat into fine slices. Also true, we occasionally respond physically to mere dreams; once, while he was supposedly locked in battle with his father, Marilyn heard him groan, tried to wake him up, and took an elbow to the nose for her trouble. But he’d searched his soul and could find no blood rage, even in his darkest moments, toward his wife.
Still, there was one thing he remembered with utter certainty.
It was after he woke up on the beach, half-naked and waterlogged, his shirt missing, his pockets filled with sand. He raised himself to look at his house, at their bedroom window, realizing that Marilyn was gone, and what he recalled was his first thought: there had been a time, wretched and seemingly interminable, when he’d wanted this very thing.
As Hoversten drove toward Kent, he couldn’t help reviewing his exchange with Marilyn in his mind—except in this version, after Marilyn said, “You’re a failure,” he didn’t repeat all the shit she already knew, since that kept things on a woman’s “strictly emotional” level, but instead nodded twice in consideration, pretended for a moment to take it all in, and then, in response, took his putter in both his hands and cracked the goddamn cunt’s head wide open with it.
“Or better,” he yelled from his open convertible, “I knock out some of your fucking teeth.” That would be the ticket: a hard thrust with the sole of the club right above the lip. He imagined her stunned by the blow—there were probably as many nerve endings around your mouth as on a man’s dick—before falling back. “And then what would be nice,” he screamed, looking at himself in the rearview mirror, “what would be delectable, would be to step around your head, put the clubface to your ear, take a nice backswing, and tee the fuck off.” The bitch’s feet and hands would be twitching, her cheeks and nose rendered as soft as sirloin. Once he’d shattered through her brain plate and bone started knifing through the gray matter, her whole nervous system would