Bag of Bones CHAPTER THREE

My juvenilespaper didnt k at i era, my editor Debra Weinstock didnt drive in, my agent Har older Oblowski didnt k instanteradays. Frank Arlen didnt know, either, although on to a greater extent than unriv alled occasion I had been tempted to certify him. Let me be your brother. For Jos sake if non your own, he told me on the day he went tush to his printing business and mostly solitary life in the gray Maine town of Sanford. I had never sojourned to take him up on that, and didnt not in the elemental cry-for-help way of life he superpower leave out been view ab pop pop solely I phvirtuosod him both(prenominal) couple of weeks or so. Guy- converse, you know Hows it spill, Not too hard, cold as a witchs tit, Yeah, here, too, You de creationd to go knock down to Boston if I lavatory ticktack Bruins tickets, possibly near class, pretty busy secure now, Yeah, I know how that is, seeya, Mikey, Okay, Frank, keep open your wee-wee in the teepee. Guy-talk.Im pretty confident(predicate) that once or doubly he asked me if I was working on a new view as, and I signify I said Oh, fuck it thats a lie, okay? star so ingrown that now Im eventide telling it to myself. He asked, both near, and I endlessly said yeah, I was working on a new book, it was spill good, certain good. I was tempted more than than once to tell him I dealt write two paragraphs without going into total mental and forcible doglock my heartbeat doubles, and so triples, I function short of breath and hence start to pant, my look feel the the likes of theyre going to pop out of my head and hang there on my cheeks. Im like a claustrophobe in a sinking submarine. Thats how its going, thanks for asking, moreover I never did. I dont c on the whole for help. I cant call for help. I designate I told you that.From my professedly prejudiced stand purport, sure-fire invigoratedists even modestly successful unfermentedists save got the silk hat(p) gig in the creative arts. Its true that tribe buy more CDS than books, go to more movies, and watch a draw poker more TV. however the arc of productivity is languisher for novelists, perhaps because realiseers argon a graceful b pay offer than buffers of the non-written arts, and thus ease up marginally yearner memories. David Soul of Starsky and Hutch is immortal knows where, same with that peculiar white rapper Vanilla Ice, still in 1994, Herman Wouk, James Michener, and Norman Mailer were all still around talk nearly when dinosaurs walked the earth.Arthur Hailey was writing a new book (that was the rumor, anyway, and it gaminged out to be true), Thomas Harris could take seven years amidst Lecters and still garden truck best dole outers, and although not heard from in almost forty years, J. D. Salinger was still a hot topic in English classes and informal coffee-house literary groups. Readers r left(a)overer a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creativ e arts, which explains wherefore so many writers who fork up run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled onto the bestseller lists by the magic talking to AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books.What the circu later(a)er wants in re writhe, especially from an author who can be counted on to sell 500,000 or so copies of to apiece adept novel in hardcover and a million more in paper cover charge, is perfectly simple a book a year. That, the wallahs in New York contri neverthelesse determined, is the optimum. Three hundred and eighty pages bound by string or glue every cardinal months, a beginning, a middle, and an end, continuing main character like Kinsey Millh wiz or Kay Scarpetta optional but very a great deal preferred. Readers love continuing characters its like coming choke off to family.Less than a book a year and youre screwing up the publishers investment in you, hampering your business managers ability to advance floating all of your credit cards, and jeop ardizing your agents ability to pay his shrink on cadence. Also, theres always s nimblenessly fan attrition when you take too long. Cant be helped. Just as, if you publish too much, there are inferers wholl scan, Phew, Ive had enough of this kat for a era, its all starting to taste like beans.I tell you all this so youll understand how I could spend four years use my reck mavinr as the worlds most expensive Scrabble board, and no iodin ever suspected. Writers bend? What writers block? We dont got no steenkin writers block. How could any unitary work out much(prenominal) a amour when there was a new Michael Noonan suspense novel coming into court each hand proficient like clockwork, perfect for your late-summer pleasure reading, folks, and by the way, dont forget that the holidays are coming and that all your relatives would too plausibly approve the new Noonan, which can he had at Borders at a thirty percent discount, oy vay, such a deal.The secret is simple, and I am not the only popular novelist in America who knows it if the rumors are correct, Danielle Steel (to tell apart sightly i) has been using the Noonan Formula for decades. You see, although I rescue published a book a year starting with Being Two in 1984, I wrote two books in four of those ten years, publishing one and ratholing the other.I dont esteem ever talking intimately this with Jo, and since she never asked, I always assumed she understood what I was doing saving up nuts. It wasnt writers block I was view of, though. Shit, I was just having fun.By February of 1995, after crashing and fire with at least two good ideas (that particular function the constantan thing has never stopped, which creates its own special version of hell), I could no longer deny the obvious I was in the worst style of issue a writer can get into, barring Alzheimers or a cataclysmic stroke. Still, I had four cardboard disseminated sclerosis packagees in the big lockbox box I keep up at Fidelity Union. They were marked Promise, Threat, Darcy, and Top. Around Valentines Day, my agent called, moderately nervous I unremarkably delivered my latest masterpiece to him by January, and here it was already half-past February. They would confine to crash production to get this years Mike Noonan out in time for the annual Christmas buying orgy. Was everything all proficient?This was my starting signal chance to say things were a country mile from all but Mr. Harold Oblowski of 225 Park avenue wasnt the sort of man you said such things to. He was a fine agent, both liked and loathed in publishing circles ( both(prenominal)times by the same throng at the same time), but he didnt adapt well to bad news from the dark and oil.treaked levels where the goods were in truth produced. He would get to freaked and been on the next plane to Derry, ready to give me creative mouth-to-mouth, adamant in his split not to leave until he had yanked me out of my fugue. No, I liked Har old right where he was, in his thirty-eighth-floor office with its kickass view of the East Side.I told him what a coincidence, Harold, you calling on the very day I ratiocinationed the new one, gosharooty, how bout that, Ill send it out FedEx, youll have it tomorrow. Harold assured me solemnly that there was no coincidence around it, that where his writers were concerned, he was telepathic. wherefore he felicitated me and hung up. Two hours posterior I received his bouquet-every bit as ful few and silky as one of his Jimmy Hollywood ascots.After coifting the f pull downs in the eat room, where I rarely went since Jo died, I went down to Fidelity Union. I use my key, the bank manager used his, and soon enough I was on my way to FedEx with the manuscript of All the Way from the Top. I took the most recent book because it was the one shutst to the depend of the box, thats all. In November it was published just in time for the Christmas rush. I dedicated it to the memory of m y late, beloved wife, Johanna. It went to good turn eleven on the Times bestseller list, and everyone went base of operations happy. take down me. Because things would get snap off, wouldnt they? No one had terminal writers block, did they (well, with the possible exception of Harper Lee)? All I had to do was relax, as the chorus girl said to the archbishop. And thank idol Id been a good squirrel and saved up my nuts.I was still affirmatory the following year when I drove down to the Federal evince office with Threatening Behavior. That one was written in the fall of 1991, and had been one of Jos favorites. Optimism had faded quite a diminutive bit by borderland of 1997, when I drove through a wet snow wedge with Darcys Admirer, although when people asked me how it was going (Writing any good books lately? is the existential way most seem to phrase the question), I still answered good, fine, yeah, writing stacks of good books lately, theyre pouring out of me like shit out of a cows ass.After Harold had read Darcy and pronounced it my best ever, a best-seller which was in any case serious, I hesitantly broached the idea of taking a year off. He responded immediately with the question I detest above all others was I all right? Sure, I told him, fine as freckles, just hypothecateing about(predicate) easing off a miniscule.thither followed one of those secure Harold Oblowski silences, which were meant to convey that you were cosmos a terrific asshole, but because Harold liked you so much, he was exhausting to think of the gentlest possible way of telling you so. This is a wonderful trick, but one I saw through about six years ago. Actually, it was Jo who saw through it. Hes only pretending compassion, she said. Actually, hes like a cop in one of those old film noir movies, keeping his mouth shut so youll blunder ahead and end up confessing to everything.This time I kept my mouth shut just switched the knell from my right ear to my left, and roc ked back a little further in my office ch airwave. When I did, my eye fell on the framed characterization over my computer Sara Laughs, our positioning on Dark Score Lake. I hadnt been there in eons, and for a moment I consciously wondered why.Then Harolds voice cautious, comforting, the voice of a sane man arduous to talk a lunatic out of what he relys leave alone be no more than a passing delusion was back in my ear. That might not be a good idea, Mike not at this stage of your career.This isnt a stage, I said. I peaked in 1991 since then, my gross revenue havent really do for(p) up or down. This is a plateau, Harold.Yes, he said, and writers whove reached that soused state really only have two choices in equipment casualty of gross revenue they can continue as they are, or they can go down.So I go down, I idea of saying . . . but didnt. I didnt want Harold to know exactly how deep this went, or how wonky the ground under me was. I didnt want him to know that I was now having heart palpitations-yes, I mean this literally almost every time I opened the book of account Six trend of instruction on my computer and looked at the blank screen and flashing cursor.Yeah, I said. Okay. Message received.Youre sure youre all right?Does the book read like Im wrong, Harold?Hell, no its a helluva yarn. Your personal best, I told you. A great read but also fucking serious shit. If Saul Bellow wrote romantic suspense fiction, this is what hed write. precisely . . . youre not having any trouble with the next one, are you? I know youre still missing Jo, hell, we all are No, I said. No trouble at all. Another of those long silences ensued. I endured it. At locomote Harold said, Grisham could spend to take a year off. Clancy could. Thomas Harris, the long silences are a part of his mystique. But where you are, life is even tougher than at the very top, Mike. on that point are five writers for every one of those spots down on the list, and you know who they are hell, theyre your neighbors cardinal months a year. Some are going up, the way Patricia Cornwell went up with her last two books, some are going down, and some are staying steady, like you. If Tom Clancy were to go on suspension for five years and then bring Jack Ryan back, hed scrape up back strong, no argument. If you go on hiatus for five years, maybe you dont come back at all. My advice is Make hay while the sun shines.Took the words right out of my mouth.We talked a little more, then said our goodbyes. I leaned back further in my office chair not all the way to the tip over point but close and looked at the photo of our western Maine retreat. Sara Laughs, sort of like the title of that hoary old Hall and Oates ballad. Jo had loved it more, true enough, but only by a little, so why had I been staying away? pecker Dean, the caretaker, took down the storm shutters every spring and put them back up every fall, idle the pipes in the fall and made sure the pump was racetrack in the spring, checked the generator and took care to see that all the maintenance tags were current, anchored the fluent float fifty yards or so off our little jabbing of beach after each Memorial Day.Bill had the chimney cleaned in the early summer of 96, although there hadnt been a fire in the open fireplace for two years or more. I paid him quarterly, as is the impost with caretakers in that part of the world Bill Dean, old Yankee from a long line of them, cashed my checks and didnt ask why I never used my place anymore. Id only been down two or three times since Jo died, and not a iodine overnight. Good thing Bill didnt ask, because I dont know what answer I would have given him. I hadnt even really belief about Sara Laughs until my conversation with Harold.Thinking of Harold, I looked away from the photo and back at the phone. Imagined saying to him, So I go down, so what? The world comes to an end? Please. It isnt as if I had a wife and family to support the wife died in a d carpetingstore park lot, if you please (or even if you dont please), and the kid we valued so badly and tested for so long went with her, I dont crave the fame, either if writers who fill the lower slots on the Times bestseller list can be said to be famous and I dont fall asleep ambitioning of book ordination sales. So why? Why does it even bother me?But that last one I could answer. Because it entangle like giving up. Because without my wife and my work, I was a superfluous man living alone in a big house that was all paid for, doing nil but the composition crossword over lunch.I pushed on with what passed for my life. I forgot about Sara Laughs (or some part of me that didnt want to go there buried the idea) and spent another(prenominal) sweltering, miser able-bodied summer in Derry. I put a cruciverbalist program on my Powerbook and began making my own crossword puzzles. I took an interim particular date on the local YMCAs board of directors and judged the Summer Arts Competition in Waterville. I did a series of TV ads for the local homeless shelter, which was keel toward bankruptcy, then served on that board for awhile. (At one public meeting of this latter(prenominal) board a woman called me a friend of degenerates, to which I replied, thank I needed that. This resulted in a loud outburst of applause which I still dont understand.) I tried some one-on-one focussing and gave it up after five appointments, deciding that the counsellors problems were removed worse than mine. I sponsored an Asian child and bowled with a league.Sometimes I tried to write, and every time I did, I locked up. Once, when I tried to force a sentence or two (any sentence or two, just as long as they came fresh-baked out of my own head), I had to grab the waste basket and vomit into it. I vomited until I thought it was going to kill me . . . and I did have to literally crawl away from the desk and the computer, pulling myself crosswise the deep-pile rug on my hands and knees. By the time I got to the other array of the room, it was better. I could even look back over my shoulder at the VDT screen. I just couldnt get near it. Later that day, I approached it with my eyes shut and rancid it off.More and more often during those late-summer days I thought of Dennison Carville, the creative-writing teacher whod helped me connect with Harold and who had damned Being Two with such faint praise. Camille once said something I never forgot, attributing it to Thomas venturesome, the Victorian novelist and poet. Perhaps Hardy did say it, but Ive never found it repeated, not in Bartletts, not in the Hardy biography I read between the publications of All the Way from the Top and Threatening Behavior. I have an idea Carville may have made it up himself and then attributed it to Hardy in order to give it more weight. Its a ploy I have used myself from time to time, Im ashamed to say.In any case, I thought about this quote more and more as I st ruggled with the panic in my bole and the frozen feeling in my head, that direful locked-up feeling. It seemed to sum up my despair and my exploitation certainty that I would never be able to write again (what a tragedy, V. C. Andrews with a rotating shaft felled by writers block). It was this quote that suggested any effort I made to better my situation might be meaningless even if it succeeded.According to muddy old Dennison Carville, the aspiring novelist should understand from the outset that fictions goals were forever beyond his reach, that the communication channel was an exercise in futility. Compared to the dullest human macrocosm actually walk about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there, Hardy supposedly said, the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones. I understood because that was what I felt like in those interminable, dissembling days a bag of bones. farthest night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.If there is any mor e dishy and haunting first line in English fiction, Ive never read it. And it was a line I had cause to think of a lot during the fall of 1997 and the winter of 1998. I didnt dream of Manderley, of course, but of Sara Laughs, which Jo sometimes called the hideout. A fair enough description, I guess, for a place so far up in the western Maine woodland that its not really even in a town at all, but in an unincorporated area designated on state maps as RR-90.The last of these dreams was a nightmare, but until that one they had a kind of surreal simplicity. They were dreams Id awake from wanting to turn on the sleeping room light-colored so I could reconfirm my place in reality beforehand going back to sleep. You know how the air feels before a thunderstorm, how everything gets still and colors seem to stand out with the brilliance of things seen during a high fever? My winter dreams of Sara Laughs were like that, each leaving me with a feeling that was not quite sickness. Ive dream t again of Manderley, I would think sometimes, and sometimes I would lie in bed with the light on, listening to the wind outside, looking into the bedrooms shadowy corners, and thinking that Rebecca de Winter hadnt drowned in a bay but in Dark Score Lake. That she had gone down, gurgling and flailing, her strange black eyes full of water, while the loons cried out indifferently in the twilight. Sometimes I would get up and drink a glass of water. Sometimes I just turned off the light after I was once more sure of where I was, roll over on my side again, and went back to sleep.In the daytime I rarely thought of Sara Laughs at all, and it was only much later that I realized something is badly out of whack when there is such a dichotomy between a persons waking and sleeping lives. I think that Harold Oblowskis call in October of 1997 was what kicked off the dreams. Harolds ostensible reason for calling was to congratulate me on the impending release of Darcys Admirer, which was estee ming as hell and which also contained some extremely thought-provoking shit. I suspected he had at least one other item on his agenda Harold usually does and I was right. Hed had lunch with Debra Weinstock, my editor, the day before, and they had gotten talking about the fall of 1998.Looks ganged, he said, meaning the fall lists, meaning specifically the fiction half of the fall lists. And there are some surprise additions. Dean Koontz I thought he usually published in January, I said.He does, but Debra hears this one may be delayed. He wants to add a section, or something. Also theres a Harold Robbins, The Predators Big deal.Robbins still has his fans, Mike, still has his fans. As you yourself have pointed out on more than one occasion, fiction writers have a long arc.Uh-huh. I switched the telephone to the other ear and leaned back in my chair. I caught a glimpse of the framed Sara Laughs photo over my desk when I did. I would be visiting it at greater length and propinquity t hat night in my dreams, although I didnt know that then all I knew then was that I beseeched like almighty fuck that Harold Oblowski would hurry up and get to the point.I sense impatience, Michael my boy, Harold said. Did I catch you at your desk? are you writing? Just finished for the day, I said. I am thinking about lunch, however.Ill be quick, he promised, but hang with me, this is important. in that location may be as many as five other writers that we didnt expect publishing next fall Ken Follett . . . its supposed to be his best since Eye of the Needle . . . Belva Plain . . . John Jakes . . . None of those guys plays lawn tennis on my court, I said, although I knew that was not exactly Harolds point Harolds point was that there are only fifteen slots on the Times list.How about blue jean Auel, finally publishing the next of her sex-among-the-cave-people epics? I sat up.Jean Auel? Really?Well . . . not a hundred percent, but it looks good. hold out but not least is a new bloody shame Higgins Clark. I know what tennis court she plays on, and so do you. If Id gotten that sort of news six or seven years earlier, when Id felt I had a great deal more to protect, I would have been frothing Mary Higgins Clark did play on the same court, shared exactly the same audience, and so far our publishing schedules had been arranged to keep us out of each others way . . . which was to my benefit rather than hers, let me assure you. Going wander to nose, she would cream me. As the late Jim Croce so wisely observed, you dont tug on Supermans cape, you dont spit into the wind, you dont pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger, and you dont push-down storage around with Mary Higgins Clark. Not if youre Michael Noonan, anyway.How did this happen? I asked. I dont think my tone was particularly ominous, but Harold replied in the nervous, stumbling-all-over-his-own-words fashion of a man who suspects he may be fired or even behead for bearing evil tidings.I dont know. She just happened to get an extra idea this year, I guess. That does happen, Ive been told.As a fellow who had taken his share of double-dips I knew it did, so I simply asked Harold what he wanted. It seemed the quickest and easiest way to get him to relinquish the phone. The answer was no surprise what he and Debra both wanted not to mention all the rest of my Putnam pals was a book they could publish in late summer of 98, thus getting in front of Ms. Clark and the rest of the competition by a couple of months. Then, in November, the Putnam sales reps would give the novel a healthy second push, with the Christmas season in mind.So they say, I replied. Like most novelists (and in this regard the successful are no different from the unsuccessful, indicating there might be some merit to the idea as well as the usual free-floating paranoia), I never trusted publishers promises.I think you can believe them on this, Mike Darcys Admirer was the last book of your old contract, remember. Harold sounded almost quick at the thought of forthcoming contract negotiations with Debra Weinstock and Phyllis Grann at Putnam. The big thing is they still like you. Theyd like you even more, I think, if they saw pages with your design on them before Thanksgiving.They want me to give them the next book in November? Next month? I injected what I hoped was the right note of scepticism into my voice, just as if I hadnt had Helens Promise in a safe-deposit box for almost eleven years. It had been the first nut I had stored it was now the only nut I had left.No, no, you could have until January fifteenth, at least, he said, trying to sound magnanimous. I found myself wondering where he and Debra had gotten their lunch. Some aerify place, I would have bet my life on that. Maybe quadruplet Seasons. Johanna always used to call that place Valli and the Four Seasons. It means theyd have to crash production, seriously crash it, but theyre willing to do that. The real question is whethe r or not you could crash production.I think I could, but itll cost em, I said. Tell them to think of it as being like same-day service on your dry-cleaning.Oh what a rotten shame for them Harold sounded as if he were maybe jacking off and had reached the point where Old Faithful splurts and everybody snaps their Instamatics.How much do you think A douse tacked on to the advance is probably the way to go, he said. Theyll get pouty of course, claim that the move is in your interest, too. in the first place in your interest, even. But based on the extra-work argument . . . the midnight oil youll have to burn . . . The mental agony of creation . . . the pangs of premature birth . . . right hand . . . right . . . I think a ten percent surcharge sounds about right. He spoke judiciously, like a man trying to be just as damned fair as he possibly could. Myself, I was wondering how many women would induce birth a month or so early if they got paid two or three hundred grand extra for doi ng so. Probably some questions are best left unanswered.And in my case, what difference did it make? The goddam thing was written, wasnt it?Well, see if you can make the deal, I said. Yes, but I dont think we want to be talking about just a single book here, okay? I think Harold, what I want right now is to eat some lunch.You sound a little tense, Michael. Is everything Everything is fine. reproof to them about just one book, with a sweetener for speeding up production at my end. Okay?Okay, he said after one of his most significant pauses. But I hope this doesnt mean that you wont entertain a three- or four-book contract later on. Make hay while the sun shines, remember. Its the guide word Of champions.Cross each bridge when you come to it is the motto of champions, I said, and that night I dreamt I went to Sara Laughs again.In that dream in all the dreams I had that fall and winter I am walking up the lane to the confront. The lane is a two-mile loop through the woods with e nds opening onto Route 68. It has a number at either end (Lane Forty-two, if it matters) in case you have to call in a fire, but no name. Nor did Jo and I ever give it one, not even between ourselves. It is narrow, really just a double rut with timothy and witch grass growing on the crown. When you drive in, you can hear that grass mouth like low voices against the undercarriage of your car or truck.I dont drive in the dream, though. I never drive. In these dreams I walk.The trees huddle in close on either side of the lane. The darkening sky overhead is little more than a slot. Soon I will be able to see the first peeping stars. Sunset is past. Crickets chirr. Loons cry on the lake. Small things chipmunks, probably, or the occasional squirrel rustle in the woods.Now I come to a dirt driveway sloping down the hill on my right. It is our driveway, marked with a little wooden sign which reads SARA LAUGHS. I stand at the head of it, but I dont go down. Below is the lodge. Its all lo gs and added-on wings, with a deck jutting out behind. Fourteen rooms in all, a ridiculous number of rooms. It should look ugly and awkward, but someway it does not. thither is a brave-dowager quality to Sara, the look of a lady pressing resolutely on toward her hundredth year, still taking pretty good strides in spite of her arthritic hips and gimpy old knees.The central section is the oldest, dating back to 1900 or so. Other sections were added in the thirties, forties, and sixties. Once it was a hunting lodge for a brief period in the early seventies it was home to a small commune of transcendental hippies. These were lease or lease deals the owners from the late forties until 1984 were the Hingermans, Darren and Marie . . . then Marie alone when Darren died in 1971. The only visible addition from our period of ownership is the tiny DSS dish mounted on the central roofpeak. That was Johannas idea, and she never really got a chance to enjoy it.beyond the house, the lake glimme rs in the afterglow of sunset. The driveway, I see, is carpeted with eyebrown pine needles and littered with travel branches. The bushes which grow on either side of it have run wild, arrive at out to one another like lovers across the narrowed feast which separates them. If you brought a car down here, the branches would scrape and unpleasantly against its sides. Below, I see, theres moss growing logs of the main house, and three large sunflowers with faces like have grown up through the boards of the little driveway-side. The overall feeling is not neglect, exactly, but forgottenness.There is a breath of breeze, and its coldness on my skin makes me that I have been sweating. I can smell pine a smell which is become and clean at the same time and the faint but somehow smell of the lake. Dark Score is one of the cleanest, deepest in Maine. It was bigger until the late thirties, Marie Hingerman us that was when Western Maine Electric, working hand in hand the mill about and p aper operations around Rumford, had gotten state to dam the Gessa River. Marie also showed us some ch sleeveing photographs of white-frocked ladies and vested gentlemen in canoes snaps were from the time of the First World War, she said, and to one of the young women, frozen forever on the rim of the with a drip paddle upraised. Thats my mother, she said, the man shes threatening with the paddle is my father.Loons crying, their voices like loss. Now I can see Venus in the dark-sky. Star light, star bright, wish I may, wish I might . . . in these I always wish for Johanna.With my wish made, I try to walk down the driveway. Of course I do. Its my house, isnt it? Where else would I go but my house, now that dark and now that the stealthy rustling in the woods seems closer and somehow more purposeful? Where else can I go? Its dark, and it will be excite to go into that dark place alone (suppose been left so long alone? suppose shes angry?), but I must. If the electricitys off, Ill li ght one of the hurricane lamps we keep in a kitchen cabinet.I cant go down. My legs wont move. Its as if my body knows something about the house down there that my brain does not. The breeze rises again, deject gooseflesh out onto my skin, and I wonder what I have done to get myself all sweaty like this. Have I been running? And if so, what have I been running toward? Or from?My hair is sweaty, too it lies on my brow in an unpleasantly heavy clump. I raise my hand to meeting it away and see there is a shallow cut, fairly recent, running across the back, just beyond the knuckles. Sometimes this cut is on my right hand, sometimes its on the left. I think, If this is a dream, the details are good. continuously that same thought If this is a dream, the details are good. Its the absolute truth. They are a novelists details . . . but in dreams, perhaps everyone is a novelist. How is one to know?Now Sara Laughs is only a dark hulk down below, and I realize I dont want to go down there, anyway. I am a man who has trained his mind to misbehave, and I can imagine too many things waiting for me inside. A rabid racoon crouched in a corner of the kitchen. Bats in the bath-room if disturbed theyll crowd the air around my cringing face, squeaking and fluttering against my cheeks with their dusty wings. Even one of William Denbroughs famous Creatures from Beyond the Universe, now hiding under the porch and watch me approach with glittering, pus-rimmed eyes.Well, I cant stay up here, I say, but my legs wont move, and it seems I will be staying up here, where the driveway meets the lane that I will be staying up here, like it or not. Now the rustling in the woods behind me sounds not like small animals (most of them would by then be nested or burrowed for the night, anyway) but approaching footsteps. I try to turn and see, but I cant even do that . . .. . . and that was where I usually woke up. The first thing I always did was to turn over, establishing my return to realit y by demonstrating to myself that my body would once more obey my mind. Sometimes most times, actually I would find myself thinking Manderley, I have dreamt again of Manderley. There was something creepy about this (theres something creepy about any repeating dream, I think, about knowing your subconscious is digging obsessively at some object that wont be dislodged), but I would be lying if I didnt add that some part of me enjoyed the breathless summer calm in which the dream always wrapped me, and that part also enjoyed the sadness and predict I felt when I awoke. There was an exotic strangeness to the dream that was missing from my waking life, now that the road leading out of my whim was so effectively blocked.The only time I remember being really frightened (and I must tell I dont solely trust any of these memories, because for so long they didnt seem to exist at all) was when I awoke one night speaking clearly into the dark of my bedroom Somethings behind me, dont let it get me, something in the woods, please dont let it get me. wasnt the words themselves that frightened me so much as the tone in which they were spoken. It was the voice of a man on the raw edge of panic, and scarce seemed like my own voice at all.Two days before Christmas of 1997, I once more drove down to Fidelity where once more the bank manager escorted me to my safe-box in the fluorescent-lit catacombs. As we walked down the stairs he assured me (for the dozenth time, at least) that his wife was a huge fan of my work, shed read all my books, couldnt get enough. For the dozenth time (at least) I replied that now I must get him in my clutches. He responded with his usual chuckle. I thought of this oft-repeated exchange as Bankers Communion.Mr. Quinlan inserted his key in expansion slot A and turned it. Then, as discreetly as a pimp who has conveyed a customer to a whores crib, he left. I inserted my own key in Slot B, turned it, and opened the drawer. It very vast now. The one remaining manuscript box seemed almost to quail in the far corner, like an cast out puppy who somehow knows his sibs have been taken off and gassed. Promise was scrawled across the top in fat black letters. I could barely remember what the goddam story was about.I snatched that time-traveller from the eighties and slammed the box shut. Nothing left in there now but dust. Give me that, Jo had hissed in my dream it was the first time Id thought of that one in years. Give me that, its my dust-catcher.Mr Quinlan, Im finished, I called. My voice sounded rough and unsteady to my own ears, but Quinlan seemed to sense nothing wrong . . . or perhaps he was just being discreet. I cant have been the only customer after all, who found his or her visits to this pecuniary version of Forest Lawn emotionally distressful.Im really going to read one of your books, he said, dropping an involuntary little glance at the box I was holding (I suppose I could have brought a briefcase to put it in, but o n those expeditions I never did). In fact, I think Ill put it on my list of New Years resolutions.You do that, I said. You just do that, Mr. Quinlan.Mark, he said. Please. Hed said this before, too.I had stilld two letters, which I slipped into the manuscript box before setting out for Federal Express. twain had been written on my computer, which my body would let me use as long as I chose the Note Pad function. It was only opening Word Six that caused the storms to start. I never tried to compose a novel using the Note Pad function, understanding that if I did, Id likely lose that option, too . . . not to mention my ability to play Scrabble and do crosswords on the machine. I had tried a couple of times to compose longhand, with spectacular lack of success. The problem wasnt what I had once heard expound as screen shyness I had proved that to myself.One of the notes was to Harold, the other to Debra Weinstock, and both said pretty much the same thing heres the new book, Helens P romise, hope you like it as much as I do, if it seems a little rough its because I had to work a lot of extra hours to finish it this soon, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Erin Go Bragh, trick or treat, hope person gives you a fucking pony.I stood for almost an hour in a line of shuffling, bitter-eyed late mailers (Christmas is such a carefree, low-pressure time thats one of the things I love about it), with Helens Promise under my left arm and a paperback copy of Nelson DeMilles The Charm School in my right hand.I read almost fifty pages before entrusting my final unpublished novel to a harried-looking clerk. When I wished her a Merry Christmas she shuddered and said nothing.