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Harvey. It was about this sweet-tempered alcoholic who is befriended by a giant rabbit that only he can see. I watched the movie with more interest and trepidation than it warranted. It was a harmless, mildly amusing piece, but I was so caught in its spell that I jumped when Evil Ed's sponsor sat down next to me.
"Still a little jumpy!" he said. He squeezed the back of my neck and laughed.
He leaned forward and peered at the television set. "Well no wonder you're jumpy. You're watching a movie about a
pooka! That's what they call that invisible bu
A pretty young woman came up and hugged the old man; such women have the power to dominate an elder's mind, and he forgot I was there. They got up and went off, to dance, I think, and I finished watching the movie. Despite its happy ending, I felt a sense of deep disquiet.
Christmas day didn't go well. I'd bought Da
His name was Gunther, and when he walked in the door, Da
"What happened to you?" Evil Ed wanted to know.
"Christmas di
"Looks like the turkey got the stuffings knocked out of him," he said.
It took a week of stewing, of feeling ill-used and done-wrong, of wallowing in self-pity, but, finally, I picked up a drink. There was this little well-lit delicatessen with a liquor license, right next door to the print shop. It wasn't some dive filled with comatose barflies. It was clean and bright, you might even say wholesome. I drank a couple of beers there before going home one evening. It didn't seem like such a big deal.
But it's the first drink that gets you drunk, even if that first drink takes a few days to really kick in.
So I was drunk in my room in my underwear. I hadn't gone to the print shop for a week or so. After the second day, my boss had stopped leaving messages on the answering machine. My guess was I didn't have that job anymore.
The television was on, as it often was, babbling away in its news voice, a serious Iraq-Darfur voice over a blighted greyscape, muddy video-people moving around, digital zombies. I wasn't watching closely, but the voice droned on, the non-stop monologue of a demented relative. Then the voice turned hearty, and I looked up for the good-news segment, some cheery thing about toddlers helping the homeless or octogenarians climbing a mountain, human
interest as opposed to the tedium of human death.
A reporter was standing in front of the zoo in West Orange (I recognized the crenellated towers and little flags). I tapped the remote's volume control, raising the volume in time to hear her say, "… going home. That's right, these penguins, extremely rare, are on their way back to New Zealand where they will be re-introduced to their native habitat. The Fiordland Crested penguin's numbers have been reduced by… "
I stared at the full-screen close-up of this endangered penguin as it tilted its head back and forth, flashing those familiar eyebrows. I reached for the remote and punched the power button.
Where did this penguin dread come from? Penguins were not, generally, considered creatures capable of inspiring much in the way of horror and loathing. Was I losing my mind?
That was a question I rarely asked myself. I knew where my mind was. All right, in the years I'd had this mind, I hadn't always used it carefully, hadn't checked off every single 5,000-mile oil change, hadn't even done a crossword puzzle or read a challenging novel in the last ten years, but was there anything fundamentally wrong with my mind?
There
was this penguin glitch. But I could work around that. How hard was it to avoid penguins? And the zoo was sending those penguins back to New Zealand, in any event, so I could even go to the zoo with Da
I was starting to panic. My heart shivered, like some small bird in an ice storm. I heard a sudden loud, thumping sound, and I looked to the door, but the sound was behind me, coming from the kitchen. I got up from the bed; my legs felt boneless but, by an effort of will, I was able to walk.
I reached the doorway to the kitchen and leaned against the frame. The sound was coming from within the refrigerator, a muffled, booming sound. The fridge rocked from side to side, and half a dozen cockroaches skittered out from under it and shot across the dirty linoleum.
The refrigerator's door banged open releasing billowing clouds of grey mist that blew over me, soaking me, plastering my hair to my forehead. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, he was there. He was wearing a tuxedo, and his eyebrows were now complete circles around his eyes. He'd drawn a small purple patch of mustache above his purple lips. These embellishments still failed to define him. He was a sort of manic blur, a creature my mind refused to bring into focus.
"Derrick Thorn," I said.
He clapped his white-gloved hands. "Yes. I think sometimes you forget me, but then I come back because you remember me, you remember me and you keep your bargains!"
I did remember him. It wasn't like remembering, though. It was like entering a room that held stuff you'd lost, stuff you'd completely forgotten about, and now, here it was. You recognized it immediately, and that was the word, really,
recognized.
I recognized the bloodstains on his white dress shirt and on his gloves.
"What did you do?" I asked.
"We have the bargains, you remember? You say, 'Forget the bargains. I take my son of the child support and I leave, and no more bargains.'"
He shook his head ruefully, studying the floor. "That is the rule. Is up to you. No bargains? Very well, no bargains, and I go away."
"And now? Why are you here now?"
"Ha, ha! I am always around, but you ca
"You came because I started drinking?" I was talking to a supernatural creature, a