The Sun Dog (18 page)

Victor-Graff gramophone (which had actually turned out to be a much more common 1919 model), Pop had lost three hundred dollars' worth of sleep over it, sometimes plotting various forms of revenge (each more wild-eyed and ridiculous than the last), sometimes just damning himself for a fool, telling himself he must really be slipping if a city man like that Donahue could skin Pop Merrill. And sometimes he imagined the fucker telling his pokerbuddies about how easy it had been, hell, they were all just a bunch of rubes up there, he believed that if you tried to sell the Brooklyn Bridge to a fellow like that country mouse Merrill in Castle Rock, the damned fool would ask 'How much?' Then him and his cronies rocking back in their chairs around that poker-table (why he always saw them around such a table in this morbid daydream Pop didn't know, but he did), smoking dollar cigars and roaring with laughter like a bunch of trolls.

file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20...ing%20-%20A%20note%20On%20The%20sun%20Dog.HTM (81 of 119)7/28/2005 9:22:39 PM

The Sun Dog

The business of the Polaroid was eating into him like acid, but he still wasn't ready to let go of the thing yet. Not quite yet.

You're crazy!
a voice shouted at him.
You're crazy to go on with it!

'Damned if I'll eat it,' he muttered sulkily to that voice and to his empty shadowed store, which ticked softly to itself like a bomb in a suitcase.
'Damned
if I will.'

But that didn't mean he had to go haring off on any more stupid goddam trips trying to sell the sonofawhore, and he
certainly
didn't mean to take any more pictures with it. He judged there were at least three more 'safe' ones left in it, and there were
probably
as many as seven, but he wasn't going to be the one to find out. Not at all. Still, something might come up. You never knew. And it could hardly do him or anyone else any harm locked up in a drawer, could it?

'Nope,' Pop agreed briskly to himself. He dropped the camera inside, locked the drawer, repocketed his keys, and then went to the door and turned CLOSED over to OPEN with the air of a man who has finally put some nagging problem behind him for good.

Pop woke up at three the next morning, bathed with sweat and peering fearfully into the dark. The clocks had just begun another weary run at the hour.

It was not this sound which awakened him, although it could have done, since he was not upstairs in his bed but down below, in the shop itself. The Emporium Galorium was a cave of darkness crowded with hulking shadows created by the streetlamps outside, which managed to send just enough light through the dirty plate-glass windows to create the unpleasant feeling of things hiding beyond the borders of vision. It wasn't the
clocks
that woke him; it was the
flash.

He was horrified to find himself standing in his pyjamas beside his worktable with the Polaroid Sun 660 in his hands. The 'special' drawer was open. He was aware that, although he had taken only a single picture, his finger had been pushing the button which triggered the shutter again and again and again. He would have taken a great many more than the one that protruded from the slot at the bottom of the camera but for simple good luck. There had only been a single picture left in the film pack currently in the camera. Pop started to lower his arms - he had been holding the camera pointed toward the front of the shop, the viewfinder with its minute hairline crack held up to one open, sleeping eye - and when he got them down as far as his ribcage, they began to tremble and the muscles holding the hinges of his elbows just seemed to give way. His arms fell, his fingers opened, and the camera tumbled back into the 'special' drawer with a clatter. The picture he had taken slipped from the slot and fluttered. It struck one edge of the open drawer, teetered first one way as if file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20...ing%20-%20A%20note%20On%20The%20sun%20Dog.HTM (82 of 119)7/28/2005 9:22:39 PM

The Sun Dog

it would follow the camera in, and then the other. It fell on the floor.
Heart attack, Pop
thought incoherently.
I'm gonna have a goddam Christing heart attack.
He tried to raise his right arm, wanting to massage the left side of his chest with the hand on the end of it, but the arm wouldn't come. The hand on the end of it dangled as limp as a dead man at the end of a hangrope. The world wavered in and out of focus. The sound of the clocks (the tardy ones were just finishing up) faded away to distant echoes. Then the pain in his chest diminished, the light seemed to come back a little, and he realized all he was doing was trying to faint.

He made to sit down in the wheeled chair behind the worktable, and the business of lowering himself into the seat, like the business of lowering the camera, began all right, but before he had gotten even halfway down,
those
hinges, the ones that strapped his thighs and calves together by way of his knees, also gave way and he didn't so much sit in the chair as cave into it. It rolled a foot backward, struck a crate filled with old
Life
and
Look
magazines, and stopped.

Pop put his head down, the way you were supposed to do when you felt lightheaded, and time passed. He had no idea at all, then or later, how much. He might even have gone back to sleep for a little while. But when he raised his head, he was more or less all right again. There was a steady dull throbbing at his temples and behind his forehead, probably because he had stuffed his goddam noodle with blood, hanging it over so long that way, but he found he could stand up and he knew what he had to do. When the thing had gotten hold of him so badly it could make him walk in his sleep, then make him (his mind tried to revolt at that verb, that
make,
but he wouldn't let it) take pictures with it, that was enough. He had no idea what the goddam thing was, but one thing was clear: you couldn't compromise with it.

Time to do what you should have let the boy do in the first place.

Yes. But not tonight. He was exhausted, drenched with sweat, and shivering. He thought he would have his work cut out for him just climbing the stairs to his apartment again, let alone swinging that sledge. He supposed he could do the job in here, simply pick it out of the drawer and dash it against the floor again and again, but there was a deeper truth, and he'd better own up to it: he couldn't have any more truck with that camera tonight. The morning would be time enough
...
and the camera couldn't do any damage between now and then, could it? There was no film in it.

Pop shut the drawer and locked it. Then he got up slowly, looking more like a man pushing eighty than seventy, and tottered slowly to the stairs. He climbed them one at a time, resting on each, clinging to the bannister (which was none too solid itself) with one hand while he held his heavy bunch of keys on their steel ring in the other. At last he made the top. With the door shut behind him, he seemed to feel a little stronger. He went back into his bedroom and got into bed, unaware as always of the strong yellow smell of sweat and old man that puffed up when he lay down - he changed the sheets on the first of every month and called it good.
I won't sleep now,
he thought, and then:
Yes you will. You will because you can, and you can because tomorrow
morning you're going to take the sledge and pound that fucking thing to pieces and there's an end to it.
This thought and sleep came simultaneously, and Pop slept without dreaming, almost without moving, all the rest file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20...ing%20-%20A%20note%20On%20The%20sun%20Dog.HTM (83 of 119)7/28/2005 9:22:39 PM

The Sun Dog

of that night. When he woke he was astonished to hear the clocks downstairs seeming to chime an extra stroke, all of them: eight instead of seven. It wasn't until he looked at the light falling across the floor and wall in a slightly slanted oblong that he realized it really
was
eight; he had overslept for the first time in ten years. Then he remembered the night before. Now, in daylight, the whole episode seemed less weird; had he nearly
fainted?
Or was that maybe just a natural sort of weakness that came to a sleepwalker when he was unexpectedly wakened?

But of course, that was it, wasn't it? A little bright morning sunshine wasn't going to change that central fact: he
had
walked in his sleep, he
had
taken at least one picture and would have taken a whole slew of them if there had been more film in the pack.

He got up, got dressed, and went downstairs, meaning to see the thing in pieces before he even had his morning's coffee.

Kevin wished his
first
visit to the two-dimensional town of Polaroidsville had also been his
last
visit there, but that was not the case. During the thirteen nights since the first one, he'd had the dream more and more often. If the dumb dream happened to take the night off - little
vacation, Kev, but seeya soon, okay?
-he was apt to have it twice the next night. Now he always
knew
it was a dream, and as soon as it started he would tell himself that all he had to do was wake himself up,
dammit, just wake yourself up!
Sometimes he
did
wake up, and sometimes the dream just faded back into deeper sleep, but he never succeeded in waking himself up. It was always Polaroidsville now - never Oatley or Hildasville, those first two efforts of his fumbling mind to identify the place. And like the photograph, each dream took the action just a little bit further. First the man with the shopping-cart, which was never empty now even to start with but filled with a jumble of objects ... mostly clocks, but all from the Emporium Galorium, and all with the eerie look not of real things but rather
of
photographs
of real things which had been cut out of magazines and then somehow, impossibly, paradoxically, stuffed into a shopping-cart, which, since it was as two-dimensional as the objects themselves, had no breadth in which to store them. Yet there they were, and the old man hunched protectively over them and told Kevin to get out, that he was a fushing feef ... only now he also told Kevin that if he
didn't
get out, 'I'll sic Pop's dawg on you!

Fee if I don't!'

The fat woman who couldn't be fat since she was perfectly flat but who was fat anyway came next. She appeared pushing her own shopping-cart filled with Polaroid Sun cameras. She also spoke to him before he passed her. 'Be careful, boy,' she'd say in the loud but toneless voice of one who is utterly deaf, 'Pop's dog broke his leash and he's a mean un. He tore up three or four people at the Trenton Farm in Camberville before he came here. It's hard to take his pitcher, but you can't do it at all, 'less you have a cam'ra.'

She would bend to get one, would sometimes get as far as holding it out, and he would reach for the camera, not knowing why the woman would think he should take the dog's picture or why he'd want to ... or maybe he was just trying to be polite?

Either way, it made no difference. They both moved with the stately slowness of underwater swimmers, as dreampeople so often do, and they always just missed making connections; when Kevin thought of this part of the dream, he often thought of the famous picture of God and Adam which Michelangelo had painted on the ceiling file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20...ing%20-%20A%20note%20On%20The%20sun%20Dog.HTM (84 of 119)7/28/2005 9:22:39 PM

The Sun Dog

of the Sistine Chapel: each of them with an arm outstretched, and each with the hand at the end of the arm also outstretched, and the forefingers almost - not quite, but
almost
-touching. Then she would disappear for a moment because she had no width, and when she reappeared again she was out of reach.
Well just go back to her, then,
Kevin would think each time the dream reached this point, but he couldn't. His feet carried him heedlessly and serenely onward to the peeling white picket fence and Pop and the dog ... only the dog was no longer a dog but some horrible mixed thing that gave off heat and smoke like a dragon and had the teeth and twisted, scarred snout of a wild pig. Pop and the Sun dog would turn toward him at the same time, and Pop would have the camera
-his
camera, Kevin knew, because there was a piece chipped out of the side - up to his right eye. His left eye was squinted shut. His rimless spectacles glinted on top of his head in hazy sunlight. Pop and the Sun dog had all three dimensions. They were the only things in this seedy, creepy little dreamtown that did.

'He's the one!' Pop cried in a shrill, fearful voice. 'He's the thief! Sic em, boy! Pull
his fuckin guts out is what I
mean to say!'

And as he screamed out this last, heatless lightning flashed in the day as Pop triggered the shutter and the flash, and Kevin turned to run. The dream had stopped here the second time he had had it. Now, on each subsequent occasion, things went a little further. Again he was moving with the aquatic slowness of a performer in an underwater ballet. He felt that, if he had been outside himself, he would even have
looked
like a dancer, his arms turning like the blades of a propeller just starting up, his shirt twisting with his body, pulling taut across his chest and his belly at the same time he heard the shirt's tail pulling free of his pants at the small of his back with a magnified rasp like sandpaper.

Then he was running back the way he came, each foot rising slowly and then floating dreamily (of
course
dreamily, what else, you fool? he would think at this point every time) back down until it hit the cracked and listless cement of the sidewalk, the soles of his tennis shoes flattening as they took his weight and spanking up small clouds of grit moving so slowly that he could see the individual particles revolving like atoms. He ran slowly, yes, of course, and the Sun dog, nameless stray Grendel of a thing that came from nowhere and signified nothing and had all the sense of a cyclone but existed nevertheless, chased him slowly . . . but not
quite
as slowly.