NOS4A2

by Joe Hill

So much for romance. She was, in truth, about as romantic as a box full of spark plugs.

“But . . . if you remember, then you know what happened. Aren’t remembering and knowing the same thing?” “Not if you remember it two different ways. In my head there are two stories about what happened to me, and they both seem true. Do you want to hear them?”

I could tell any story I wanted about Charlie Manx, because I knew that stuff he had really done was worse than any lie I could make up. Remember: In this version of my life, he’s not a dirty old kidnapper, he’s a fucking vampire.”

“So to recap: There’s one version of your life where Charlie Manx, a dirty ol’ fuckin’ child murderer, kidnapped you from a train station. And you only barely got away from him. That’s the official memory. But then there’s this other version where you crossed an imaginary bridge on a psychically powered bicycle and tracked him down in Colorado all on your own. And that’s the unofficial memory. The VH1 Behind the Music story.”

I was thinking how every man loves a hot girl with a history of making mistakes. Because it’s always possible she’ll make one with you.” She smiled, reached across the space between them, put her hand on his. “I have a long history of making mistakes, Louis Carmody, but you weren’t one of them.

all those trips through the Shorter Way Bridge messed me up somehow. Because it was an unsafe structure to begin with, and every time I went across it, it took a little more wear. Because it’s a bridge, but it’s also the inside of my own head.

“These memories just come to me, all at once, perfect little chapters in this crazy story I wrote in my imagination. But of course there’s nothing true about them. They’re invented on the spot. My imagination provides them, and some part of me decides to accept them as fact the instant they come to me.

“The pills I take are a paperweight. All they do is pin the fantasies down. But they’re still there, and any strong wind that comes along, I can feel them rattling around, trying to slip free.”

The sky was the color of a migraine. Thunder sounded once. It was a boom-and-bang, like a heavy truck going over an iron bridge. Wayne waited for rain.

The bike rushed her away from thought. She had known that it would, had known the first moment she saw it in the carriage house that it was fast enough and powerful enough to race her away from the worst part of herself, the part that tried to make sense of things.

The fog thickened against her, blowing into her face. It was pearly, evanescent, the sunlight striking through from somewhere up and to the left, causing the whole world to glow around her as if irradiated. Vic felt that a person could not hope for more beauty in this world.

Who knew what dogs saw? What the shapes in the mist meant to them? What odd, superstitious notions they might hold? Wayne was certain dogs were as superstitious as humans. More, maybe.

Wayne understood that if he climbed into the backseat, he would never climb out again. It would be like climbing into his own grave. Hooper, though, had tried to show him what to do. Hooper had tried to show him that even when you seemed completely overpowered, you could still show your teeth.

She had walked away from the other bike once, the Raleigh, and had left the best of herself behind with it. When you had a set of wheels that could take you anywhere, you didn’t walk away from it.

The Wraith slid out of the mist, a black sleigh tearing through a cloud and dragging tails of December frost behind it. December frost in July. The roiling white smoke boiled away from the license plate, old, dented, rust-shot: NOS4A2.

VIC SWAM. She was underwater, she was in the lake. She had plunged almost all the way to the bottom, where the world was dark and slow. Vic felt no need for air, was not conscious of holding her breath. She had always liked going deep, into the still, silent, shadowed provinces of fish. Vic could’ve stayed under forever, was ready to be a trout,

Her father’s voice, her lover’s jacket. For a moment she was aware of both the men in her life looking after her. She had thought they were both better off without her and that she was better off without them, but now here, in the dirt, it came to her that she had never really gone anywhere without them.

Everyone you lost was still there with you, and so maybe no one was ever lost at all.

In Maine, around the Lewiston/Auburn/Derry area, there was a place called PENNYWISE CIRCUS.

It was the time of day of naps, stillness, dogs sleeping under porches.

There was no such thing as arguing with delight. Like seeing a pretty girl with the sunlight in her hair, like pancakes and hot chocolate in front of a crackling fire. Delight was one of the fundamental forces of being, like gravity.

A wind rushed in the tops of the pines with a gentle roar, like a river in flood.

If she’d been able to show him this, these woods, with their sprawling carpet of rusty pine needles, beneath the sky lit up with the first best light of July, she thought it would’ve been a memory for both of them to hold on to for the rest of their lives. What a thing it would be, to ride through the scented shadows with Wayne clutching her tight, to follow a dirt path until they found a peaceful place to stop, to share out a homemade lunch and some bottles of soda, to doze off together by the bike, in this ancient house of sleep, with its floor of mossy earth and its high ceiling of crisscrossing boughs.

On our first date, Cassie and I went to see a silent movie! It was that long ago!” “What movie?” “It was a horror picture from Germany, although the title cards were in English. During the scary parts, Cassie would hide her face against me.

“Later, you know, my wife accused me of being a vampire, just like you,” Manx said. “She said I was like the fiend in that first movie we saw together, the German picture.

Have a peek at my license plate sometime. I took my wife’s horrid ideas about me and made a joke out of them.

The difference between childhood and adulthood, Vic had come to believe, was the difference between imagination and resignation. You traded one for the other and lost your way.

“‘I am a leaf on the wind,’” Lou said, and the man-nurse said, “Dude, don’t say that. I don’t want to start crying on the job.”

It seemed to her sometimes that this was the only fight that mattered: the struggle to take the world’s chaos and make it mean something, to put it to words.

Sometimes she thought she was a ghost, that she had really died in the flood, died with the library and just hadn’t realized it yet.

She wanted to believe that information brought clarity. Not for the first time in her life, however, she had the disconcerting notion that it was often the opposite. Information was a jar of flies, and when you unscrewed the lid, they went everywhere and good luck to you trying to round them all up again.

people made the imaginary real all the time: taking the music they heard in their head and recording it, seeing a house in their imagination and building it. Fantasy was always only a reality waiting to be switched on.

A snowflake caught in one of her eyelashes. The sight of it struck him as almost heartbreaking in its beauty. He doubted he would ever see anything so beautiful again in his life. To be fair, he was not anticipating living beyond the evening.

“You’re a good man, Lou Carmody. I may be one crazy bitch, but I love you. I’m sorry about a lot of things I put you through, and I wish like hell you’d met someone better than me. But I am not sorry we had a kid together. He’s got my looks and your heart. I know which one is worth more.”

“Lou,” Tabitha said again, standing at the top of the embankment. “Why are you doing this?” “Because one of these is his,” Lou said, and nodded at Wayne. “Vic brought most of him back, but I want the rest.”

“No one has to apologize for tears, dude.” “I feel sick.” “Yeah. Yeah, I know. ’S okay. I think you’re suffering from the human condition.” “Can you die from that?” Wayne said. “Yes,” Lou said. “It’s pretty much fatal in every case.” Wayne nodded. “Okay. Well. I guess that’s good.”