The Land of Laughs (25 page)

“A guy wants to create a man in his dreams, but not just a little dream man — a real flesh-and-blood man. The real thing.”

“Does he do it?” She smoothed her hand across the top of the couch.

“Yes.”

There’s a point where even a sponge can’t absorb any more water but reaches a saturation point. Too much stimulus, too many things happening all at once, all of them incredible, but taken together, they made my brain play five-dimensional chess.

She patted the cushion beside her. “Come on, Thomas, come here and sit down next to me.”

“I don’t think I want to right now.”

“Thomas, I want you to know everything. I want to try to be totally honest with you. I want you to know about me, Galen, Father, everything.

“Do you know why?” She shifted completely around so that she faced me over the back of the sofa. Her damned breasts rested on that soft shelf. “A couple of years ago everything that Father had written was still happening. If someone was supposed to give birth to a boy on Friday, the ninth of January, it happened. Everything went as he had written it down in his
Galen Journals
. It was Utopian —”

“Utopian? Really? Well, then, what about dying? Aren’t people here a little afraid of dying?”

She closed her eyes and shook her head. The dumb student was asking a dumb question again. “Not at all, because death is nothingness.”

“Oh, come on, Anna. Don’t get heavy and religious with me now, all right? Just answer the question.”

“No, Thomas, you misunderstand me. Remember that when one of
them
dies, it isn’t the same thing as when a normal person dies. When we go, there is a chance that there’s a heaven or a hell. For the people in Galen, Father didn’t create an afterlife for them, so there is no question in their minds. They just disappear. Poof!” She flung her unclenched hands up as if releasing fireflies.

“An existentialist’s delight, eh?”

“Yes, and since they know that nothing comes afterward for them, they don’t worry about it. Nobody is going to judge them or throw them into a fiery pit. They live and they die. As a result, most of them spend their lives trying to be as happy as possible.”

“But doesn’t anyone rebel? Don’t at least some of them want to live longer?”

“Of course, but that isn’t possible. They have to get used to it.”

“And nobody complains? Nobody runs away?”

“Any Galener who tries to leave, dies.”

“Uh-oh, now, look —”

She laughed and fluttered a hand at me. “No, no, I don’t mean it that way. This was part of Father’s security system. As long as the people live here, everything will be fine for them. But if they try to leave and they’re gone for more than one week, then they die of heart attacks or cerebral hemorrhages, fulminating hepatitis… .” The hand fluttered again and floated, weightless, back down to the couch. “It’s silly to talk about, because no one ever tries to leave, because it hasn’t been written —”

“Written! Written! So all right, so where is this great almightly oracle of his?”

“You will see it in a little while, but I want you to know the story of it first, so that when you do see it, you will understand everything better.”

“Ha! Fat chance of that. I’m not understanding things now!”

Anna’s story was fantastic and involved, and she made a hundred detours along the way. I ended up sitting next to her on the couch, but only after I’d spent an hour perched uncomfortably on the hot radiator beneath the windowsill.

Marshall France began
The Night Races into Anna
to make his daughter feel better. One of the main characters in the book was his good friend Dorothy Lee, only he changed her name to Dorothy Little. After he accidentally “killed” her and the cats came to tell him, he realized what he was capable of doing. He stopped writing
The Night Races
and began
The Galen Journals
. For months he researched, wrote, and rewrote. Since he was a perfectionist, he would sometimes do twenty drafts of a book before he felt that it was right, so it isn’t hard to imagine how long he worked and “prepared” for Galen.

The first person he created after Dorothy Lee was a man named Karl Tremmel. An innocuous plumber from Pine Island, New York, who brought his wife and two little girls out to Galen in a silver Airstream trailer. There hadn’t been a plumber in Galen in years.

Then came a barber named Sillman, a mortician named Lucente (I tried to smile at the in joke, but I didn’t have it in me) … and the parade of Marshall France characters was on.

They lived quiet, uneventful lives except for a post-office clerk named Bernard Stackhouse, who got drunk one night and accidentally blew his head off with a shotgun.

Et cetera, et cetera. A small factory outside of town that employed five hundred people caught fire mysteriously in the middle of the night, and after the insurance claims were settled, the owners decided to relocate a hundred miles closer to St. Louis.

“In a few years the only ones left here were Father and I, Richard, and ‘Father’s people.’”

“Why did he let Richard stay?”

“Oh, because we needed to have at least a couple of normal people in case some kind of emergency ever came up and one of us would have to leave here for a while. Remember, the others will die if they leave for more than a week.”

“How did he get the rest of the ‘normal’ people to go? The ones who didn’t work at the factory?”

“Father wrote it so that some of them — some of the normal Galeners — wanted to move on. One person was convinced that his house was haunted, another man’s natural-gas tank exploded when he was away on vacation and he decided to move to Illinois … Do you want me to go on?”

“And none of them suspected anything?”

“No, of course not. Father wrote it so that everything would look totally natural and acceptable. He didn’t want anyone to come around asking questions.”

“Did he ever … ?” One of my fear-yawns took over. “Did he ever use, uh, violence?”

“No. No one was hurt when the factory burned down. But it depends on what you would call violence. He did cause the fire and he did make that man’s gas tank explode. But he never hurt anyone. He didn’t need to, Thomas. He could
write
anything he wanted.”

France went on creating, but he didn’t know how long it would last. That’s why Anna had had me read that one notebook entry. In the end, he decided that the only thing he could do was to get down as much about each character as he could and then take it as far into the future as he could go. Then hope for the best to happen after he died.

“It will probably be explained in the notebooks, Anna, but just how much of people’s lives did he control? I mean, does it say things like, ‘Eight-twelve Joe Smith woke up and yawned for three seconds. Then he — ’”

She shook her head. “No, no. He found that he could leave most of their lives up to them. Later on, he decided only about the big things in their lives, the big events — who they were to marry, how many children each of them would have, when they died and how… . He wanted them to have —”

“Don’t you
dare
say free will!”

“No, no, I won’t. But in a way it was. Look at what happened to Gert and Wilma Inkler: he let them go and do what they wanted with their son. When it got to be too much, he changed them into dogs.”

“Our God is a jealous God, eh?”

“Don’t say that, Thomas.” Two nasty matches lit up in her eyes.

“Don’t say
what
, that he played with them? Look, I don’t want to piss you off, Anna, but if all this is true, then your father was the most …” I tried to think of appropriate words that would encompass what he had done, but there weren’t any. “I don’t know — he was the most amazing human being that ever lived. I’m not even talking about him as an artist either. The man put a pen to paper and actually made people come
alive?
” I realized that I was talking more to myself than to Anna, but I didn’t care. “No, it’s impossible.” All at once it flooded over me thick and heavy and impossibly gluey. What the hell kind of idiot was I, believing this crap? But then again there was Nails, who had talked to me. And Petals, who had talked to me. And what little I’d read in the notebooks that coincided with what had happened. And Anna knowing that the little boy would die after he got hit by the truck. .

“Why was it so important for people to know if the little Hayden boy was laughing, Anna? How does that all fit in?”

“Because he was supposed to be killed that day. He was supposed to be laughing and happy right up to the moment when he got hit by the truck. The problem was that the wrong person was driving the truck. That’s what Joe Jordan and all of the others were so upset about. He wasn’t laughing, and he was killed by the wrong man.”

As long as things went according to France’s plans, Anna and the Galeners had little contact with the outside world. Once in a while one of them went shopping or to a movie in a nearby town, and the Galen stores were constantly being replenished by trucks from St. Louis and Kansas City, but that was about all. For appearance’s sake, there was a real-estate office in town, but the only things for sale there were in other towns. What wasn’t privately owned belonged to the town of Galen, and nothing was ever for sale. Nothing for rent either.

“But what about Mrs. Fletcher’s? What about — ?”

“You and Saxony are the first new people to live in Galen since my father died.”

“So
that’s
why she didn’t mind our not being married that first day that we rented it! She must have told us ten times that she didn’t care about that kind of thing. You set us up, didn’t you, Anna? It was all a big plan!”

She nodded. “The moment I heard that you were coming out here from David Louis, I called Goosey Fletcher and told her to move upstairs in that big house. Then I sent Nails over to live with her.”

“And I thought that she did it for the money.”

“Goosey is a very good actress.”

“Was she really in the insane asylum?”

“No.”

“Just no? Nothing more?”

“How could she he in an insane asylum, Thomas, if she was one of Father’s people? You can learn everything, Thomas, as soon as you start reading the journals.”

I was right about the biographer from Princeton when I said that he came to the wrong place at the wrong time. Because of its secret, Galen was shut up tight then and nobody was about to tell the guy nuthin’ about nuthin’. According to Anna, he stayed a few weeks and then fumed off toward California, where he said that he was going to write the definitive biography of R. Crumb.

But then it started happening. In the last two years, things started going wrong in Galen. A man who was supposed to live to be ninety and die peacefully in his sleep was electrocuted by a high-tension wire that broke and fell on him as he was passing. He was forty-seven. A child who was supposed to adore corn couldn’t look at it without throwing up. A woman who had been changed into a bull terrier suddenly bore a litter of nine puppies. None of the dogs had ever done that before: none of them were supposed to.

I put my hands under my armpits to warm them. I yawned for the umpteenth time. “So what went wrong?”

Anna held her empty cup in her hand and tinked a fingernail against it. “Father’s powers started to fade. They started to wear off. In one of the journals he wrote about the possibility. You can read it, but I’ll just tell you the essence of it now. He said that two things might happen after he died. One was that everything he had created would disappear immediately.”

“I read that part.” I still had his journal in my hand and held it up for her to see.

“Yes. The second possibility was that everything would be all right afterward because he had filled them with such …” She tightened her lips and hesitated a moment. “He had filled them with such
life
spirit that they would continue to function even after he was dead.”

“And they did. They have, haven’t they?”

“Yes, Thomas, they have until two years ago. Until then everything had gone perfectly. But suddenly things were wrong — I told you about some of them. But Father saw this as a possibility too. He wrote about it in the same notebook that you have there.”

“Just tell me about it, Anna. I’m really not in the mood to read right now.”

“All right.” She looked at the cup as if she didn’t know how it had gotten into her hands. She put it down on the coffee table and shoved it brusquely away. “He was convinced that since he had been able to create the people in Galen, then if he died, someone somewhere would be able to recreate him.”

“
What?
” Little freezing lizards ran up and down my back.

“Yes, he believed that his biographer” — she stopped and raised her eyebrows at me,
his biographer
— “if his biographer was good enough, then he could bring Father back to life if he wrote the story of Father’s life the right way.”

“Anna, Jesus Christ, you’re saying that that’s me? You’re comparing pigs to swine! I mean
pearls
to swine! Your father was … was … I don’t know,
God
. Who the hell am I?”

“Do you know why I’ve let you go this far, Thomas?”

“I don’t know if I want to know. All right, all right, how come?”

“Because you have the first quality that Father said was necessary: you are obsessed with him. All you ever do is talk about how important his books are to you. His work is almost as important to you as it is to all of us.”

“Oh, come on, Anna, it isn’t the same thing!”

“Thomas, stop.” She held her hand up like a traffic cop. “You don’t know this, but since you wrote that first chapter, everything has gone right again in Galen. Things that he wrote to happen in the journals
have
happened, just as before. Everything — Nails’s death was just the latest.”

I looked at her and opened my mouth to speak, but there wasn’t anything to say. I had just been paid the most outrageous compliment of my life. My mind was stuck in an elevator halfway between green-bile fear and total, life-hugging elation. For God’s sake, what if she was right?

We continued working, only now Saxony wouldn’t have anything to do with the biography. She carved three marionettes, and when she wasn’t doing that, she read Eddison’s
The Worm Ouroboros
.