The Big Dark Sky (3)

3


Sunrise in Santa Fe, New Mexico, sometimes offered a peacock sky that opened the heart to wonder, even if the day included an appointment for a root canal procedure or, in Joanna’s case, the prospect of a car mechanic issuing a diagnosis almost as unsettling as bad news from an oncologist. At dawn Tuesday, she stood in the small walled courtyard of her house, drinking coffee as she watched the new day spread its colorful plumage across the eastern sky.

At eight o’clock, she left the Continental at the Lincoln dealership and was provided with a loaner. Her morning was filled with errands, but she returned home at eleven thirty.

She took lunch—a turkey sandwich—at her desk in the study, while she worked on her current novel. The story centered on a heinous crime, and she was determined, as always, not to glamorize or to any extent romanticize criminals, which was in her estimation a problem with many contemporary novels and films. The stories by Varlam Shalamov, which she’d been reading, often featured gangsters who ran the Soviet gulags, portraying them with anger and bitterness that had the sting of truth, and his work helped to keep her honest.

Wednesday morning, the repair-shop manager at the dealership called to report that they were unable to find anything wrong with her Continental. She returned the loaner to them and collected her sedan. During the short drive home, the navigation system didn’t offer any unsolicited directions.

That night, if the car started spontaneously in her garage, Joanna was unaware of it, for even without wine, she was lost in deep sleep. Sometime, as Wednesday melted into Thursday, the strange dreams began. Maybe she opened her eyes and saw the pale-gray light on the TV screen, or maybe that was part of the dream. Just part of the dream. Yes, relax, Jojo, it’s just part of the dream.





4


Harley Spondollar would have died violently if he hadn’t gone outside at 1:10 Thursday morning to climb over the picket fence and urinate on his neighbor’s prize roses. He had been favoring the roses with his bladder water every night for five weeks. All that uric acid had at last begun to have a satisfying effect: the leaves grew spotted, the number of roses declined, and the flowers dropped their petals even as they struggled to open from buds to blooms.

Spondollar had nothing against roses. His hatred was reserved for Viola Redfern, who lived next door. She was seventy years old, maybe ninety—who the hell knew?—and Spondollar was convinced the old bitch would never die. She was indefatigable, giving her neighbors homemade cookies and cakes, roses from her garden, and sweaters she knitted. When Spondollar was sick, she provided him with pots of homemade soups. She never complained when he played music at high volume or sat on his front porch and loudly cursed everything from squirrels to passing children. She had legions of grandkids and great-grandkids who were always visiting her; they were so polite and quiet and well behaved that they made Spondollar want to puke.

Wednesday evening and early Thursday morning, Spondollar had made a special effort to consume such quantities of beer that he would be able to pay a deathblow to his neighbor’s precious roses. Burdened by all her wrinkles and wattles, Viola reliably went to bed promptly at nine o’clock every night and fell asleep reading books, as boring a biddy as any ever born. On this occasion, however, she was staying overnight with a granddaughter to celebrate a great-granddaughter’s tenth birthday.

One of Harley Spondollar’s greatest joys in life was annoying the hell out of people and then playing psychological games with them until they regretted their impatience and indignation to such an extent that they found themselves apologizing for objecting to his boorishness. Viola refused to be annoyed, seemed impervious to insults, and had an inexhaustible supply of patience. Living next door to the likes of her was no fun.

So there he was in the second hour of Thursday, standing in her garden, facing his property, favoring her roses with a powerful stream of his finest in the mild summer night of the Oregon coast, when suddenly the air was filled with an electronic hum like the feedback from an enormous amplifier. At first the sound was the only phenomenon, with no detectable source. A crackling noise arose, as if a hundred yards of cellophane were being crumpled into a ball, which became louder than the hum. The lights went out. Then his house imploded. The front porch and walls and roof collapsed inward as if built of wet sand on a beach, imploded with such force that there might have been a black hole at the center of the structure, sucking it away into another universe. The crackling stopped first and then the humming. Perhaps fifteen seconds after the event began, it ended. Where his house had been there was now a mound of debris, its shape if not its size reminiscent of a giant anthill.

Harley Spondollar’s response to every setback in life—as well as to any positive development—was to curse it exhaustively, but in this case, obscenities and blasphemies failed him. Dumbstruck, he stopped raining on the roses and tucked himself away and, without any awareness of having taken a single step, found himself wading into the ruins of his residence.

Initially, disbelief repressed fear. He dropped to his knees and scooped up a handful of what was left of the house. Beads. Beads of various sizes—some as small as air-rifle pellets, others as big as peas, a few the size of grapes, mostly smooth. In the light of the moon, he couldn’t see them well. Some felt like wood, and others crumbled like plaster, and still others were as hard as metal. He realized there was no heat in the ruins, as might be expected, nor any dust. Mesmerized by the strangeness of the situation, he dug into the immense mound with both hands, searching for a nail or a screw or maybe a door hinge, anything that he would recognize as having been part of the house. He dug faster, more urgently, seeking an object, any object, that the house had once contained: a dish, a spoon, one of the DVDs from his porn collection.