against the counter.
“It’s not my fault.”
Wade shrugged. “Sorry.”
“So stop it,” she said. “Just goddamn stop.”
Kathy spun around on her stool, got up, went over to the magazine rack, and stood with her back to him. Dusk was settling in fast. A cold lake breeze slapped up against the Mini-Mart’s screen door, startling the plump young waitress, causing a spill as she refilled their cups.
It was 5:24.
After a time Kathy sat down again and studied the frosted mirror behind the counter, the ads for Pabst and Hamm’s and Bromo-Seltzer. She avoided eye contact, sliding down inside herself, and for an instant, watching her in the mirror, John Wade was assaulted by the ferocity of his own love. A beautiful woman. Her face was tired, with the lax darkening that accompanies age, but still he found much to admire. The green eyes and brown summer skin and slim legs and shapely little fingers. Other things, too—subtle things. The way her hand fit precisely into his. How the sun had turned her hair almost white at the temples. Back in college, he remembered, she used to lie in bed and grasp her own feet like a baby and tell funny stories and giggle and roll around and be happy. All these things and a million more.
Presently, Wade sighed and slipped a dollar bill under his saucer.
“Kath, I am sorry,” he said. “I mean it.”
“Fine, you’re sorry.”
“All right?”
“Sorry, sorry. Never ends.” Kathy waited for the young waitress to scoop up their cups. “Stop blaming me. We lost. That’s the truth—we lost.”
“It was more than that.”
“John, we can’t keep doing this.”
Wade looked at the revolving clock. “Mr. Monster.”
They had a light supper, played backgammon for dimes, sat listening to records in the living room. Around eight o’clock they went out for a short walk. There was a moon and some stars, and the night was windy and cool. The fog had not yet rolled in off the lake. In the coming days John Wade would remember how he reached out to take her hand, the easy lacing of their fingers. But he would also remember how Kathy pulled away after a few steps. She folded her arms across her chest and walked up to the yellow cottage and went inside without waiting for him.
They did not take their blankets to the porch that night. They did not make love. For the rest of the evening they concentrated on backgammon, pushing dimes back and forth across the kitchen table.
At one point he looked up at her and said, “Kath, that stuff in the newspapers—”
Kathy passed him the dice.
“Your move,” she said.
As near as he could remember, they went to bed around eleven. Kathy snapped off the lamp. She turned onto her side and said, “Dream time,” almost cheerfully, as if it did not matter at all that she was now going away.
The purest mystery, of course, but maybe she had a secret lover. Marriages come unraveled. Pressures accumulate. There was precedent in their lives.
In the kitchen that morning, when her eyes traveled away, maybe Kathy Wade was imagining a hotel room in Minneapolis, or in Seattle or Milwaukee, a large clean room with air-conditioning and fresh flowers and no politics and no defeat. Maybe she saw someone waiting for her. Or someone driving north toward Lake of the Woods, moving fast, coming to her rescue. An honest, quiet man. A man without guile or hidden history. Maybe she had grown tired of tricks and trapdoors, a husband she had never known, and later that night, when she said “Dream time,” maybe it was this she meant—an escape dream, a dream she would now enter.
Among the missing, as among the dead, there is only the flux of possibility.
Maybe a heaven, maybe not.
Maybe she couldn’t bear to tell him. Maybe she staged it. Not likely, but not implausible either. The motives were plentiful—fed up, afraid, exhausted by unhappiness. Maybe she woke early the next morning and slipped out of bed and got dressed and moved out to the porch and quietly closed the door behind her and walked up the narrow dirt road to where a car was waiting.
We called him Sorcerer. It was a nickname.
—Richard Thinbill
Exhibit Seven: Photograph of John Wade, age 12
Smiling
Husky, not fat
Holding a magician’s wand over four white mice
He used to practice down in the basement, just stand in front of that old mirror of his and do tricks for hours and hours. His father didn’t think it was healthy. Always alone, always shut up by himself. A very secretive boy, I think I mentioned that.
—Eleanor K. Wade
Exhibit Eight: John Wade’s Box of Tricks, Partial List
Miser’s Dream
Horn of Plenty
Spirit of the Dark
The Egg Bag
Guillotine of Death
Silks
Pulls
Wands
Wires
Duplicates (6) of father’s necktie
My sister seemed almost scared of him sometimes. I remember this one time when Kathy … Look, I don’t think it’s something we should talk about.
—Patricia S. Hood
What did she so desire escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all.
Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its line of force, she may fall back on superstition or take up a useless hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?12
—Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49)
To study psychological trauma is to come face to face both with human vulnerability in the natural world and with the capacity for evil in human nature.13
—Judith Herman (Trauma and Recovery)
There is no such thing as “getting used to combat” … Each moment of combat imposes a strain so great that men will break down in direct relation to the intensity and duration of their exposure. Thus psychiatric casualties are as inevitable as gunshot and shrapnel wounds in warfare.