The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

‘Not for you, for the dog. He doesn’t deserve to suffer. It wasn’t dogs that built the bombs, after all.’

‘I think maybe he just ate a chipmunk,’ Robinson said feebly.

‘We both know that’s not it. Even if it was, the dead animals are so full of radiation it might as well have been a cobalt capsule. It’s a wonder he’s survived as long as he has. Be grateful for the time you’ve had with him. A little bit of grace. That’s what a good dog is, you know. A little bit of grace.’

Timlin studied him closely.

‘Don’t you cry on me. If you do, I will too, so man up. There’s one more six-pack of Bud in the fridge. I don’t know why I bothered to put it in there, but old habits die hard. Why don’t you bring us each one? Warm beer is better than no beer; I believe Woodrow Wilson said that. We’ll toast Gandalf. Also your new motorcycle battery. Meanwhile, I need to spend a penny. Or, who knows, this one might cost a little more.’

Robinson got the beer. When he came back Timlin was gone, and remained gone for almost five minutes. He came back slowly, holding onto things. He had removed his pants and cinched a bath sheet around his midsection. He sat down with a little cry of pain, but took the can of beer Robinson held out to him. They toasted Gandalf and drank. The Bud was warm, all right, but not that bad. It was, after all, the King of Beers.

Timlin picked up the gun. ‘Mine will be the classic Victorian suicide,’ he said, sounding pleased at the prospect. ‘Gun to temple. Free hand over the eyes. Goodbye, cruel world.’

‘I’m off to join the circus,’ Robinson said without thinking.

Timlin laughed heartily, lips peeling back to reveal his few remaining teeth. ‘It would be nice, but I doubt it. Did I ever tell you that I was hit by a truck when I was a boy? The kind our British cousins call a milk float?’

Robinson shook his head.

‘Nineteen fifty-seven, this was. I was fifteen, walking down a country road in Michigan, headed for Highway Twenty-two, where I hoped to hook a ride into Traverse City and attend a double-feature movie show. I was daydreaming about a girl in my homeroom – such long, lovely legs and such high breasts – and wandered away from the relative safety of the shoulder. The milk float came over the top of a hill – the driver was going much too fast – and hit me square on. If it had been fully loaded, I surely would have been killed, but because it was empty it was much lighter, thus allowing me to live to the age of seventy-five, and experience what it’s like to shit one’s bowels into a toilet that will no longer flush.’

There seemed to be no adequate response to this.

‘There was a flash of sun on the float’s windshield as it came over the top of the hill, and then … nothing. I believe I will experience roughly the same thing when the bullet goes into my brain and lays waste to all I’ve ever thought or experienced.’ He raised a professorly finger. ‘Only this time, nothing will not give way to something. Just a flash, like sun on the the windshield of a milk float, followed by nothing. I find the idea simultaneously awesome and terribly depressing.’

‘Maybe you ought to hold off for awhile,’ Robinson said. ‘You might …’

Timlin waited politely, eyebrows raised.

‘Fuck, I don’t know,’ Robinson said. And then, surprising himself, he shouted, ‘What did they do? What did those motherfuckers do?’

‘You know perfectly well what they did,’ Timlin said. ‘And now we live with the consequences. I know you love that dog, Peter. It’s displaced love – what the psychiatrists call hysterical conversion – but we take what we can get, and if we’ve got half a brain, we’re grateful. So don’t hesitate. Stick him in the neck, and stick him hard. Grab his collar in case he flinches.’

Robinson put his beer down. He didn’t want it anymore. ‘He was in pretty bad shape when I left. Maybe he’s dead already.’

But Gandalf wasn’t.

He looked up when Robinson came into the bedroom and thumped his tail twice on his bloody pad of blankets. Robinson sat down next to him. He stroked Gandalf’s head and thought about the dooms of love, which were really so simple when you peered directly into them. Gandalf put his head on Robinson’s knee and looked up at him. Robinson took the hypo out of his shirt pocket and removed the protective cap from the needle.

‘You’re a good guy,’ he said, and took hold of Gandalf’s collar, as Timlin had instructed.

While he was nerving himself to go through with it, he heard a gunshot. The sound was faint at this distance, but with the lake so still, there was no mistaking it for anything else. It rolled across the hot summer air, diminished, tried to echo, failed. Gandalf cocked his ears, and an idea came to Robinson, as comforting as it was absurd. Maybe Timlin was wrong about the nothing. It was possible. In a world where you could look up and see an eternal hallway of stars, he reckoned anything was. Maybe –

Maybe.