"It's not so difficult. In some ways it's easier. She upstairs?"
Pop nods. "She's rarely down anymore."
"I thought this new stuff was working."
"It does in a way, but she's so depressed she lacks the will. Nine-tenths of life is will, my father used to say it, and the longer I live the more I see how right he was."
The disinfected scent of the house is still oppressive, but Harry goes up the stairs two at a time; Jill's disappearance has left him vigorous with anger. He bursts into the sickroom, saying, "Mom, tell me your dreams."
She has lost weight. The bones have shed all but the minimum connective tissue; her face is strained over the bones with an expression of far-seeing, expectant sweetness. Her voice emerges from this apparition more strongly than before, with less hesitation between words.
"I'm tormented something cruel at night, Harry. Did Earl tell you?"
"He mentioned bad dreams."
"Yes, bad, but not so bad as not being able to sleep at all. I know this room so well now, every object. At night even that innocent old bureau and that -poor shapeless armchair they."
They what?" He sits on the bed to take her hand, and fears the swaying under his weight will jostle and break her bones.
She says, "They want. To suffocate me."
"Those things do?"
"All things – do. They crowd in, in the queerest way, these simple homely bits of furniture I've. Lived with all my life. Dad's asleep in the next room, I can hear him snore. No cars go by. It's just me and the streetlamp. It's like being -under water. I count the seconds I have breath left for. I figure I can go forty, thirty, then it gets down to ten."
"I didn't know breathing was affected by this."
"It isn't. It's all my mind. The things I have in my mind, Hassy, it reminds me of when they clean out a drain. All that hair and sludge mixed up with a rubber comb somebody went and dropped down years ago. Sixty years ago in my case."
"You don't feel that about your life, do you? I think you did a good job."
"A good job at what? You don't even know what you're trying to do, is the humor of it."
"Have a few laughs," he offers. "Have a few babies."
She takes him up on that. "I keep dreaming about you and Mim. Always together. When you haven't been together since you got out of school."
"What do Mim and I do, in these dreams?"
"You look up at me. Sometimes you want to be fed and I can't find the food. Once I remember looking into the icebox and. A man was in it frozen. A man I never knew, just one. Of those total strangers dreams have. Or else the stove won't light. Or I can't locate where Earl put the food when he came home from shopping, I know he. Put it somewhere. Silly things. But they become so important. I wake up screaming at Earl."
"Do Mim and I say anything?"
"No, you just look up like children do. Slightly frightened but sure I'll save. The situation. This is how you look. Even when I can see you're dead."
"Dead?"
"Yes. All powdered and set out in coffins. Only still standing up, still waiting for something from me. You've died because I couldn't get the food on the table. A strange thing about these dreams, come to think of it. Though you look up at me from a child's height. You look the way you do now. Mim all full of lipstick, with one of those shiny miniskirts and boots zippered up to her knee."
"Is that how she looks now?"
"Yes, she sent us a publicity picture."
"Publicity for what?"
"Oh, you know. For herself. You know how they do things now. I didn't understand it myself. It's on the bureau."
The picture, eight by ten, very glossy, with a diagonal crease where the mailman bent it, shows Mim in a halter and bracelets and sultan pants, her head thrown back, one long bare foot – she had big feet as a child, Mom had to make the shoe salesmen go deep into the stockroom – up on a hassock. Her eyes from the way they've reshaped them do not look like Mim at all. Only something about the nose makes it Mim. The kind of lump on the end, and the nostrils: the way as a baby they would tuck in when she started to cry is the way they tuck in now when they tell her to look sexy. He feels in this picture less Mim than the men posing her. Underneath, the message pale in ballpoint pen, she had written, Miss you all Hope to come East soon Love Mim. A slanting cramped hand that hadn't gone past high school. Jill's message had been written in splashy upright private-school semi-printing, confident as a poster. Mim never had that.
Rabbit asks, "How old is Mim now?"
Mom says, "You don't want to hear about my dreams."
"Sure I do." He figures it: born when he was six, Mim would be thirty now: she wasn't going anywhere, not even in harem costume. What you haven't done by thirty you're not likely to do. What you have done you'll do lots more. He says to his mother: "Tell me the worst one."
"The house next door has been sold. To some people who want to put up an apartment building. The Scranton pair have gone into partnership with them and then. These two walls go up, so the house doesn't get any light at all, and I'm in a hole looking up. And dirt starts to come down on me, cola cans and cereal boxes, and then. I wake up and know I can't breathe."
He tells her, "Mt. Judge isn't zoned for high-rise."
She doesn't laugh. Her eyes are wide now, fastened on that other half of her life, the night half, the nightmare half that now is rising like water in a bad cellar and is going to engulf her, proving that it was the real half all along, that daylight was an illusion, a cheat. "No," she says, "that's not the worst. The worst is Earl and I go to the hospital for tests. All around us are tables the size of our kitchen table. Only instead of set for meals each has a kind of puddle on it, a red puddle mixed up with crumpled bedsheets so they're shaped like. Children's sandcastles. And connected with tubes to machines with like television patterns on them. And then it dawns on me these are each people. And Earl keeps saying, so proud and pleased he's brainless, `The government is paying for it all. The government is paying for it.' And he shows me the paper you and Mim signed to make me one of-you know, them. Those puddles."
"That's not a dream," her son says. "That's how it is."
And she sits up straighter on the pillows, stiff, scolding. Her mouth gets that unforgiving downward sag he used to fear more than anything – more than vampires, more than polio, more than thunder or God or being late for school. "I'm ashamed of you," she says. "I never thought I'd hear a son of mine so bitter."
"It was a joke, Mom."
"Who has so much to be grateful for," she goes on implacably.
"For what? For exactly what?"
"For Janice's leaving you, for one thing. She was always. A damp washrag."
"And what about Nelson, huh? What happens to him now?" This is her falsity, that she forgets what time creates, she still sees the world with its original four corners, her and Pop and him and Mim sitting at the kitchen table. Her tyrant love would freeze the world.
Mom says, "Nelson isn't my child, you're my child."
"Well, he exists anyway, and I have to worry about him. You just can't dismiss Janice like that."
"She's dismissed you."
"Not really. She calls me up at work all the time. Stavros wants her to come back."
"Don't you let her. She'll. Smother you, Harry."
"What choices do I have?"