NOS4A2

by Joe Hill

Ellen could have her theories about what was healthy for boys and what wasn’t. That didn’t mean Santa had to share them.

The salesman had strongly encouraged her to look at other bikes, felt that the Tuff Burner was too big for her, even with the seat dropped to its lowest position. She didn’t know what the guy was talking about. It was like witchcraft; she could’ve been riding a broom, slicing effortlessly through Halloween darkness, a thousand feet off the ground. Her father had pretended to agree with the shopkeeper, though, and told Vic she could have something like it when she was older. Three weeks later it was in the driveway, with a big silver bow stuck on the handlebars. “You’re older now, ain’tcha?” her father said, and winked.

Vic’s father was badass. Other dads built things. Hers blew shit up and rode away on a Harley, smoking the cigarette he used to light the fuse. Top that.

It had made Vic’s breath quicken, to walk out into the long, shadowed tunnel that bridged not just a river but death itself.

“It’s only an antique if it’s worth something. If it’s not worth anything, it’s just an old thingamajig.”

She knew even before she opened her eyes that she was home—or not home, but in her woods at least. She knew they were her woods by the smell of pines and the quality of the air, a scrubbed, cool, clean sensation that she associated with the Merrimack River. She could hear the river, distantly, a gentle, soothing rush of sound

She had never, in all her life, so needed to be home, in her room, in her bed, in the crisp folds of her sheets.

You could look at birds all your life without ever knowing what was a sparrow and what was a blackbird, but we all know a swan when we see it. So it was with cars. Maybe you could not tell a Firebird from a Fiero, but when you saw a Rolls-Royce, you knew it.

“The road to Christmasland is paved in dreams. This old car can slip right out of the everyday world and onto the secret roads of thought. Sleep is just the exit ramp. When a passenger dozes off, my Wraith leaves whatever road it was on and slides onto the St. Nick Parkway. We are sharing this dream together. It is your dream, Bing. But it is still my ride.

It was one thing to fantasize trips across a long-gone covered bridge when she was eight or nine and another when she was thirteen. At nine it was a daydream. At thirteen it was a delusion.

Mr. Eugley—poor old broken Mr. Eugley—was proof that the Shorter Way was real. She didn’t want proof. She wanted not to know about it. Failing that, she wished there were someone she could talk to who would tell her she was all right, that she was not a lunatic. She wanted to find someone who could explain, make sense of a bridge that only existed when she needed it and always took her where she needed to go.

“Here, Iowa. That’s the name of the town. You’re right down the road from beautiful Cedar Rapids, at the Here Public Library. And I know all about why you came. You’re confused about your bridge, and you’re trying to figure things out. Boy, is this your lucky day!” She clapped her hands. “You found yourself a librarian! I can help with the figuring-out thing and point you toward some good poetry while I’m at it. It’s what I do.”

I have a bed down in Romantic Poetry.

People make out like it’s a terrible thing to be pitied, but I say, Hey! I get to sleep in a library and read books all night! Without pity, where would I be?

She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse,

It was, Vic thought, an office for a private investigator in a black-and-white movie, not a librarian with a punk haircut. It had the five essential props for any PI’s home base: a gunmetal gray desk, an out-of-date pinup-girl calendar, a coatrack, a sink with rust stains in it—and a snub-nosed .38 in the center of the desk, holding down some papers.

Maggie grinned, and the dimples reappeared. She was, in her chubby-cheeked, bright-eyed way, more or less adorable. Like a punk-rock Keebler elf.

“Well. That’s helpful. We’ll put an APB out on the Gingerbread Man. I’m not hopeful it’ll do us much good, though. Word on the street is you can’t catch him.”

She ran into the early-October afternoon. The light came at a low slant through the oaks across the street, gold and green, and how she loved that light. There was no light in the world like you saw in New England in early fall.

Vic had a whole framework of fantasies that involved riding the Tuff Burner across an imaginary bridge to faraway places and fantastic lands. She had ridden it to a terrorist hideout and rescued her mother’s missing bracelet and had taken it on a ride to a book-filled crypt where she’d met an elf who made her tea and warned her about a vampire. Vic moved a finger across the handlebars, collected a thick gray pad of dust on her fingertip. All this time it had been down here gathering dust because her parents hadn’t wanted her to have it. Vic had loved the bike, and it had given her a thousand stories, and so naturally her parents took it away.

She didn’t know where to go, just that she was in the mood to find some trouble. She was sure that if she rode around long enough, she would come across some.

She was seventeen and unafraid and liked the sound of the wind rustling the ivy around the entrance of the bridge.

Christmas was almost three months in the rearview mirror, and there was something awful about Christmas music when it was nearly summer. It was like a clown in the rain, with his makeup running.

What a blessed if painful thing, this business of being alive.

Later, when Vic thought about what she liked best in women, she always thought of the soldier’s wife, of her certainty and her quiet decency. She thought of mothering, which was really another word for being present and caring what happened to someone. She wished for that certainty herself, that grounded awareness, that she saw in the soldier’s wife, and thought she would like to be a woman such as this: a mother, with the steady, sure, feminine awareness of what to do in a crisis.

she liked Lou better than most guys; he smelled good and he moved slow and he was roughly as difficult to anger as a character from the Hundred Acre Wood. Soft as a character from the Hundred Acre Wood, too.

She could not quite work out how she had found her way here. She used to be so good at finding the place she wanted to go.

She’d thought love had something to do with happiness, but it turned out they were not even vaguely related. Love was closer to a need, no different from the need to eat, to breathe.

“we’re all getting hungry. There hasn’t been anything to eat forever, and what’s the point of having all these teeth if you can’t use them on something?”

“You been, like, sitting out here for a while,” he said. “Do you want me to bring you a blanket or a dead tauntaun or something?” “What’s a tauntaun?” “Something like a camel. Or maybe a big goat. I don’t think it matters.”

“You’re a good dad.” “It ain’t rocket science.” No, Vic thought. It was harder.

“You sure you’re all right? You aren’t out here pondering dark female thoughts are you?”

That silver lady should’ve been magical and pretty, but the smile on her face ruined it. She had the demented grin of a madwoman who has just pushed a loved one off a ledge and is about to follow him into eternity.

“Like a vampire lady.” “The bloofer lady,” her father said, remembering something he had read once.

It was impossible to have a conversation in a room with a phone. It was like having a conversation in a room with a bat hanging from the ceiling. Even if the bat was asleep, how were you supposed to think about anything else or look at anything else?

The engine was a big 4,257-cc straight-six, and sitting on his worktable it looked like some vast mechanical heart—which was what it was, he supposed.

A cold season of banged knuckles and oil under his fingernails and rust flakes falling in his eyes: sacred time, important to him in the way transcribing a holy text was important to a monk in a monastery. He had cared to get it right and it showed. The ebony body gleamed like a torpedo, like a polished slab of volcanic glass. The rear side door, which had been rusty and mismatched, had been replaced by an original, sent to him by a collector in one of the former Soviet republics. He had reupholstered the interior in kidskin leather, replaced the foldout trays and drawers in the rear of the limo with new walnut components, handmade by a carpenter in Nova Scotia. It was all original, even the vacuum-tube radio, although he had toyed with the idea of installing a CD player, bolting a Bose subwoofer into the trunk. In the end he had decided against it. When you had a Mona Lisa, you didn’t spray-paint a baseball cap on her.

Back in the days when the Wraith had been assembled, things were built like tanks, built to last. This car, he felt sure, would outlive him.

Sooner or later a black car came for everyone. It came and took you away from your loved ones, and you never got to go back.

Her sanity was a fragile thing, a butterfly cupped in her hands, that she carried with her everywhere, afraid of what would happen if she let it go—or got careless and crushed it.

She just knew that even when you had nothing, you still had love.

He’s like the tiger shark in Jaws. The one Dreyfuss cuts open in the fisherman’s basement. That’s why we named him Hooper.

“Did you like flying?” she asked. “I liked it so much I fell asleep when we took off and missed the whole thing. Ten minutes ago I was in Colorado, and now I’m here. Isn’t that insane? Going so far just all of a sudden like that?”

You had to know when it made sense to try to untangle something and when to just cut the motherfucker loose.

She couldn’t afford to ignore a single good idea. Could anyone?

He listened to the Berlin Orchestra performing the Frobisher sextet, Cloud Atlas

She was a cartoonist, not an engineer; reality could get stuffed.

he had not anticipated that this arrangement would prevent his son from knowing the single best thing about his own father. That his father had once reached past his fear for a moment of real Captain America heroism. He had pulled a beautiful girl onto the back of his motorcycle and raced her away from a monster. And when the monster caught up to them and set a man on fire, Lou had been the one to put out the flames—admittedly too late to save a life, but his heart had been in the right place and he had acted without any thought to the risk he was taking. Lou hated to think what his son knew about him instead: that he was a walking fat joke, that he made a mediocre living towing people out of snowbanks and repairing transmissions, that he had not been able to hold on to Vic.

Was there any human urge more pitiful—or more intense—than wanting another chance at something?

They were sitting under a low tree, and there were pink blossoms in it. A few petals dropped, caught in Vic’s hair. Lou ached with happiness, and never mind what they were talking about. It was July, and he was with Vic, and there were blossoms in her hair. It was romantic, like a song by Journey, one of the good ones.