Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [93]
“What Carvel?” said Irene.
“He’s from a little town called Carvel. Near Scranton,”
“That was a Pittsburgh number I called,” said Irene. “412.”
“Just a minute,” said Irv. He got up from the table and brought down an old Rand McNally Road Atlas from the shelf under the stairs. He licked his fingertips and smoothed down his flyaway hair, looking relieved to have found a way back into the reasonable land of reference books. We searched the index three times, but there was, naturally, no listing for anyplace called Carvel.
I WAS SITTING BEHIND the wheel of Happy Blackmore’s Galaxie 500, looking up at the sky. I’d rolled myself a big fat gherkin of a joint, a cocktail weenie, a spaniel dick, and I intended to smoke it down to the skin of my lips. I was looking for the seventh star in the constellation of the Pleiades, thinking about Sara and trying not to think of Hannah. It was so quiet in the farmyard that I could hear the bones of the house creaking, and the snoring of the cattle in the barn. Every so often there was the sound of a car passing, out on the Youngstown Road, all tires and slipstream, like a sigh. The downstairs windows of the house were dark, but upstairs the lights were still on in all the rooms except James Leer’s. Emily was still not back, but she had called from a pay phone to tell her mother that we should not wait up for her. I’d passed a couple of hours in front of the television with Philly, watching Edward G. Robinson pad around Pharaonic Memphis in sandals; then let myself be drawn into a sullen game of Scrabble with Irv and Irene. Finally everyone had turned in, tired of waiting for James’s parents to show; they were already almost two hours late.
I couldn’t help wondering how Hannah would feel when she learned that James had saddened us and won our sympathies with a false autobiography; she knew him much better than I did, which I supposed meant that now she didn’t know him at all. I was still having a hard time abandoning my conception of James Leer as the working-class northeastern Pennsylvania boy damaged by grief for his dead mother. But I supposed that was only the situation of the hero of his Love Parade. How much of what he’d told me about himself would turn out to be the story of his novel’s protagonist?
I looked up at that dark window and thought of how it was said that acute insomniacs often experienced a kind of queasy blurring of the lines between dreams and wakefulness, their waking lives taking on some of the surprising tedium of a nightmare. Maybe the midnight disease was like that, too. After a while you lost the ability to distinguish between your fictional and actual worlds; you confused yourself with your characters, and the random happenings of your life with the machinations of a plot. If that was so, I thought that James Leer probably had the worst case I’d ever seen; but then I remembered another lonely fantasist, sitting slumped in his bentwood chair with his pistol in his fingers, slowly, slowly rocking back and forth. Maybe Albert Vetch had also come to think of himself as the protagonist of one of his own stories. His solitary archaeologists and small-town bibliomanes frequently chose to shoot themselves rather than be devoured by the slavering jaws of whatever betentacled terror their unreasonable thirsts set loose upon the world, devoured by those grins as unluminous and empty as cold black space itself.
The joint had gone out, and I relit it amid the coils of the dashboard lighter. I saw now that with their creatures from beyond the Void—eye sockets vacant, maws desolate and huge—August Van Zorn’s stories were all, at bottom, about the horror of emptiness: the emptiness of a matronly pair of pumps abandoned in the back of an armoire, of a blank sheet of foolscap, of a killed bottle of bourbon on a windowsill at five-thirty A.M. Perhaps Albert Vetch, like his hero Eric Waldensee confronted by the deserted rooms and corridors of “The House on Polfax Street,” put a pistol to his