Demon Box

I tried awhile to ring Information for the number at the clinic, but I couldn’t decipher the complicated switchboard. I finally gave up and walked to the couches. I took a seat in the one at the front of the rank, right at the windows. New louvered sun shades waited along the baseboard. They would replace the old blinds. Now the sun boomed in dead level, like cannon fire.

I got up and went around to the couch at the rear. It was still in the sun but I managed to pull it over into the bar of shade from one of the window frames. I sat down in the narrow shadow and closed my eyes.

Joe was gone a long time. The sun angled along. I had to keep scooting on the plastic to stay behind that shadow. I slumped back and folded my arms, hoping I might appear calm and relaxed should a guard happen past. I just about had the flutter in my breath under control when a thumping crash right at my feet made me jump a mile. My shoulder bag on the couch had been spilled by my fidgeting—the thump was the I Ching hitting the floor; the crash was the martini glass I’d swiped from Szaabo.

I tried to make fun of myself: Whadja think, one of the guys in white gotcha with his butterfly net? I was leaning to gather up the spilled stuff when I saw something that got me worse than any net ever could. It was on the front cover of the book, one of the pictures taken years before-of a little boy in pajamas looking over the rail of a crib at the back of a cluttered bus. God Almighty had that been all there was to it? Nothing but a spell of déjà vu! a commonplace phenomenon triggered by that glimpse of Caleb standing on the porch in his nightclothes? It seemed to be that simply: the image on the porch had resonated with the photograph of that other time I traipsed off to see this mysterious Wolf Doctor. Always one of my favorite of Hassler’s bus pictures. That’s why it’s front page center in my collage. A ringing moment from the past, and it happened to find a corresponding note in the present. This could account for all these shadows that have been haunting me. Reverberations. The nuthouse reverberations. Woofner repeated. Separate splashes in the same pond, the ripples intersecting. Resonating waves, that’s what it is, clear and simple—

yet…

there must be something more to it than surface waves to get you so good. It stirs too far down, rolls from too far away. To roll that far, wouldn’t the two moments have to share something deeper as well? some primal heading? some upwelling force from a mutual spring that drives the pair of times to join forces and become one many times more lasting than either original time alone, a double-sided moment that can roll powerfully across years and at the same time remain fixed, permanently laminated in a timeproof vault of the memory, where the little boy stands longing yet, in unfading Kodachrome, in flannel pajamas and Grateful Deadshirt both, on the porch at the farm and holding to the crib rail at the back of the bus, eyes shining forever brave down that dim and disorderly tube—

and yet…

it isn’t the longing. Or the bravery. It’s the trust. If Dad leaves a speed demon to babysit, the very act must signify it’s aw-right, right? If he says a visit to Disney World is a Big People’s business trip, then that’s that. Trust doesn’t fume off in a pout, like big brother Quiston, or wheedle like May or Sherree; but it does expect to have something brought back. It does expect to reel in something if it casts far and often and deep enough, like those faces on the ward. It does expect to slide in someday to more than a plate of dirt if it rounds bases enough. It expects these things because these things have been signified. That’s what gets you.

Especially if you’re one of those that’s been doing the signifying.

So the discovery that I was having déjà vus did not bring me any ease. It only clarified the fearful murk that had been nagging me into something far more haunting: guilt. And when I closed my eyes to shut out the little face looking up from the book on my lap, I found my head crammed full of other faces waiting their turn. What was my mother going to say? Why hadn’t I phoned? Why wouldn’t I lend poor Joe a little support a while ago after all of it he’s afforded me the last two days? Why can’t I face those faces upstairs? I know now that it isn’t my fear that chains me back. It’s the bleak and bottomless rock of failure, jutting remote from the black waters. Onto this hard rock I am chained. The water pounds like blame itself. The air is thick with broken promises coming home to roost, flapping and clacking their beaks and circling down to give me the same as Prometheus got… worse! Because I sailed up to those forbidden heights more times than he had—as many times as I could manage the means—but instead of a flagon of fire the only thing I brought back was an empty cocktail glass… and I broke that.