The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams Read Online Free Page A

suddenly
fades away and you’re passing through sheer, breathless
quiet.
    Wooly took me on a trial
heading due east. There were thousands of footpaths in these woods,
he said, and some of them—maybe this one—had been here for hundreds
of years. They’d been laid down by the Algonquins, the Indians
who’d given Long Island its first name, Paumanok. It was easy to
imagine we were walking an Algonquin trail, seeing the same things
they saw—the oaks and pines and cedars and tupelos that had been
left behind thousands of years ago by a pair of glaciers. You walk
these woods, you’re going way back in time.
    It took a few wordless
minutes before he loosened up and started talking. He told me what
his life was like a few years ago, what a brain-blasted muddle it
had been. Like most egomaniacs, he believed deep down that he was a
worthless shit. He thought of himself as a genetic fumble—his life
was just a useless growth, a wart on the face of the universe. At
one point, he said, he tried to fix the problem with booze, then
with coke, then with cough medicine—robotripping on DXM.
    “I was bad. I was in a
very bad way. Delusions, hallucinations, paranoia. I started
hearing voices—you know, in my head. I’d hear voices saying, Are
you hearing voices in your head? Drove me nuts. Then they’d up the
volume. Start shouting at me, You’re guilty! You’re guilty! You’re
motherfucking guilty! I’d say, Of what? They wouldn’t say. Just
you’re guilty, guilty, guilty. I’m starting to think, shit, I must
be guilty of something .
    “One day I go down to
village hall, the police station, I tell Alex Tarkashian I want to
turn myself in. I want to confess that I’d killed the Pope. I was
sure that somewhere along the line I’d killed the Pope. Alex says,
‘Well, I’ll arrest you if you want, only thing is, the Pope isn’t
dead.’ He’s been a little leery of me ever since.”
    We took a series of trails
that led us around a gigantic mess of swamp. All you could see on
one side were acres of reeds and tannin-saturated water the color
of weak tea. This, said Wooly, is how the town got its name. This
was the Hidden Lake. This particular swamp was the hidden lake in
the woods, fed—like the rest of the Paumanok—by trillions of
gallons of water from a vast underground river system that ran 50
feet below the surface.
    “One night,” he said, “I
just decided I’d had it. I couldn’t do this anymore. I kept a gun
in the house, an old Beretta. Made sure it was loaded, said fuck it
all and shoved the barrel in my mouth. Now maybe if I’d just rested
the thing on my lips, things would’ve been different. But me, I’ve
gotta do things all the way, you know? I shove the barrel all the
way inside. Turns out the tooth I had back here, the molar? It was
a bad tooth. I hit the thing with the gun and the pain shoots
through every square inch of my skull. The pain was so bad—I’m
screaming like I’ve never screamed before—I forgot all about
killing myself.”
    “I guess that’s some kind
of miracle.”
    “Yeah? Wait—I call my
dentist. It’s like one in the morning. He says can it wait? I say
get your ass down to your office and I’ll meet you there. I get in
the car, start driving. I’m taking a road along the edge of the
woods, I’m out maybe two minutes, the car dies. Middle of nowhere,
I’m doing 30, 40 miles per, the car just drops dead on me. The
engine cuts out, the headlights go off. I’m sitting there, the
headlights go on again, then off, then on and off again, maybe
three or four times all by themselves. Mind you, the next day, when
I found the car again, I had it checked out. Nothing wrong with it.
Engine, electrical system—not a thing wrong.”
    “Okay.”
    “So I get out, try to look
under the hood, only it’s pitch fucking black I can’t see a thing.
Just then I hear a woman crying. She’s like coming from the woods.
I hear her crying, then she’s calling my name. She’s calling