Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books) by Suzy McKee Charnas Read Free Book Online Page B

the night, as instructed.
    When he shut the door after them, his solitude struck him with sledge-hammer force. He stood clutching the counter-edge in the kitchen, unable to let go. His consciousness spun in a heavy black vortex of fear. He whimpered and clung there, bent over his clenched, white-knuckled hands, trying desperately to take deep breaths and pull out of it. But every breath made it worse, as if he breathed in the panic with the air.
    I can’t stand this, he thought, not again. I’ve been through this. Why again; isn’t it ever done with? How much worse can it get, how long can it last, what is it?
    Mad, he thought, sweating; I’m going mad. Dorothea will come back and find me raving.
    Eventually, undramatically, the dark, pulsing dread simply withdrew, leaving him wracked and gasping, while the electric clock on the wall clucked faintly to itself as the second hand jerked another fraction forward.
    He dragged in the deepest breath he dared to, wary of triggering the damned cough, and shuffled out onto the back patio, where he whispered his curses at the moon; croaked his curses, finally shouted them with all the meager power of his diseased lungs; and cried. And then felt not better but simply too exhausted to feel worse.
    Call her up, she left the number of the hotel, ask her to come back, tell her you’re leaving, something —
    Next to the phone in the kitchen, on the pink pad, she had left him a message. It was an invitation to walk down the arroyo behind the house and find something — she didn’t say what. A little map was added, firmly and clearly drawn.
    Well. He never could resist a map. He took his medicine and went to bed.
    In the morning he walked down the arroyo.
    And she dared to question whether she were an artist or not! Ricky, confronted with the mosaic wall, was outraged. What was the matter with the woman? Just look at this bloody thing! How could anyone doubt?
    He moved toward it and away from it, muttering and swearing and groaning to himself under a sky so rich with cloud that only vagrant gleams of sunlight reached the coruscated surface of the work. A woman’s work, he thought — a myriad of tiny details adding up to one stupendous gesture. Oh, she would bridle to hear him say that!
    He chuckled and wiped his forehead on his cuff, stepping back and back so that he wouldn’t have to crane his neck to see it all.
    Lord, what hubris! What a gigantic action to take in the midst of this sweep of dry land and mutinously fulminant sky!
    A god’s work, a myriad of tiny details adding up…
    No wonder she kept it a secret. Wait until the environmentalists saw what she’d done to a grand, handsome chunk of rock!
    Not his style, of course. He was a lover of Dutch painting, all domestic clarity and northern light. No matter. He couldn’t stop looking at this, trudging forward to caress the river of chipped and sand-blasted glass marbles she had made, the hot chaos of a bed of bright copper scraps not yet verdigrised over.
    By God, I could write something wonderful about this, he thought. It makes me want to sit down and drive my pen across the paper, but what words could I possibly find to convey the impact of this? He coughed, drank from his water bottle, and wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist. Better than the great Egyptian sphinx, he thought. The sort of thing one always hoped to stumble on in some trackless barrens, relic of a lost civilization no one had ever heard of before, marker of some hitherto undreamed of stage of humanity’s development. Why, he might be on Mars at this moment, stumbling upon some arrogant testament to the existence — once — of the builders of the canals (which were a figment, of course, but what the wall did was mine the imagination so that one could not look at it without visions bursting before the mind’s eye).
    His chukka boots had sand in them. He sat down on a rock in the shade of a withered tree. As he worked at the knots in his laces, the