The Land Of Laughs

A

"Yes, this is the one." She looked at it once more and then handed it to me. "The pages are numbered. Start reading at about page forty."

I did, and there it was again – the fu

An individual description would sometimes go on for ten or twelve pages. The line of a man's eyebrow, the color of the faint mustache shadowing a woman's lip.

I skimmed through and saw that the whole book was like that. France had done an inventory of a whole town, if that was possible. Suspiciously, I turned to the last page of the book. At the very bottom it said, "Book Two." I looked up to find A

"How many of these books are there?"

"Forty-three."

"All like this one? Lists and things?"

"Yes, in the First Series there are only lists and details."

"What do you mean, the First Series?"

"The Galen First Series. That's what he called them. He knew that the only way he could even attempt the Second Series was to begin by making up a kind of Galen encyclopedia. The town and everything in it as he perceived it. It took him over two years to finish."

I put the notebook down in my lap. The room was colder than before, so I got my shirt from under the pillow and put it on.

"But what's the Second Series, then?"

She spoke as if she hadn't heard a word I'd said. "He stopped writing The Night Races into A

"Wait a minute, A

"Have you read The Night Races? The version that the people here in Galen have?"

"Yes, it's longer."

"Eighty-three pages. Do you remember what happens on the last pages of our edition?"

Embarrassed, I said no.

"The old woman, Mrs. Little, dies. But before she does, she tells her three eats to go and stay with her best friend after she's gone."

I began to remember. "That's right. And then when she does die, the cats leave her house and walk across town to her friend's house. They understand everything that's happened."

Rain was pattering on the roof. A streetlight blinked on outside, and I could see the rain slicing down through it.

"Father wrote that scene the day that Dorothy Lee died." She stopped and looked at me. "In the book, he changed Dorothy's last name to Mrs. Little. Dorothy Little." She stopped again. I waited for more, but only the rain filled the silence.

"He wrote that scene the day she died? Christ, that's a hell of a coincidence."

"No, Thomas. My father wrote her death."

My hands were freezing. The rain came across the streetlight in diagonals.

"He wrote her death, and then an hour later Dorothy's cats came over to tell us, just as he had written. That's how he discovered it. I heard them and opened the door. They stood on the bottom step of the porch and their eyes caught the hall light so that they looked like molten gold. I knew that Father hated cats, so I tried to shoo them away, but they wouldn't go. Then they started to cry and whine, and he finally came down from his workroom to find out where all of the noise was coming from. He saw them down there, crying and eyes glowing, and he understood everything in an instant. He sat down on one of the steps and started to cry, because he knew that he had killed her. He sat there, and the cats climbed up into his lap."

I sat on the edge of the chair and rubbed my arms. A wind blew around outside, whipping the trees and the rain. It died as suddenly as it came. I didn't want to understand, but I did. Marshall France had discovered that when he wrote something, it happened: it was: it came into being. Just like that.

I didn't wait for her to say anything. "That's ridiculous, A

She sat down on the windowsill and put her hands underneath her sweatshirt to warm them. A picture of her bare breasts skipped blithely, incongruously across my mind. She started bumping her knees together. She continued to do it while she spoke.

"Father knew that something had changed in him after he finished The Land of Laughs. My mother told me that he was very close to having a nervous breakdown because he was so wrought up. He didn't write anything for almost two years after he finished that book. Then she died, and that almost drove him crazy. When the book was published, it became so famous that he could easily have become a big celebrity, but he didn't want that. Instead, he worked down at the supermarket for the previous owner and took his little trips to St. Louis and Lake of the Ozarks."

I wanted to tell her to cut the shit and answer my questions, but I realized that she would, sooner or later.

"I was in college by then. I wanted to be a concert pianist. I don't know if I was good enough, but I had the drive and dedication. That was right after Mother died, and sometimes I felt guilty about his being here alone in Galen, but whenever I brought the subject up with him, he would laugh and tell me not to be silly."

She pushed off from the sill and turned around to look out at the rainy night. I was trying to stop my teeth from chattering. When she spoke again, her voice, reflected off the windowpanes, sounded slightly different.

"I was seeing a boy named Peter Mexico at the time. Isn't that a fu

"We were totally gone on each other. We had these grand visions of living in an atelier somewhere with skylights and twin Bцsendorfer pianos in the living room." She turned from the window and came over to my chair. She sat on the wooden arm and put her hand on my shoulder. She spoke to the darkness.

"We had this terrible little apartment that we could barely afford. We both had rooms in the dormitory, but this was our secret sanctuary. We would go there after classes or at night, whenever we weren't practicing. We would sign out for the weekend and fly over there as fast as we could. And the place was so absolutely barren. We had bought two army-surplus cots and had tied the legs together to make it into a sort of double bed.

"One morning I woke up and Peter was dead."

Do you know the tone of voice of the a