Sound Mind - Tricia Sullivan

[marianne]

Sound Mind by Tricia Sullivan

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Orbit (18 Jan 2007)
• Language English
• ISBN-10: 1841494054
• ISBN-13: 978-1841494050
• Product Dimensions: 19.3 x 12.7 x 3.3 cm

Synopsis:

When Cassidy Walker stumbles into the middle of the highway, bloodied and bruised, Bard college in flames behind her, and manages to flag down a ride, she thinks the worst is over. Arriving in the nearby town of Red Hook, Cassidy tries to call her parents but the phone lines are down - no radio or television signals are being received either. The town, it seems, is cut off from the rest of the world. But that's not the strangest thing. Not by a long shot. Nobody in Red Hook has even heard of Bard College. Furthermore, they claim that Cassidy is not a music student, but a hand at the local stable. And she has lived in a house she can't remember, with people she barely knows, for over a year. The world is fracturing. Cassidy just knows it - just as she knows that she is responsible. As Cassidy undertakes the ultimate road trip, through bubbles of reality, she will find that everything she thinks she knows about herself is wrong. Is she losing her mind or is the world a far more complex place than she thought?

Quote: 'Sleek, smart and working in a genre where "feminist" isn't yet a dirty word, Sullivan writes intelligent, zesty and freewheeling novels that are so entertaining they're almost embarrassing. Seriously, when was the last time you read a really smart book that was also fun?'--Patrick Ness, The Guardian

[marianne]

What Happens After

I made it to 199 and stuck out my thumb.
Normally I wouldn't hitchhike but I couldn’t have walked much further on that leg. I had already come four miles. I’d ditched all my books, so all I had in my backpack were a couple of sticks of gum, my Pro Walkman with some recent recordings, a notebook and the bra I’d taken off while Craig and I were messing around in his room. For some reason, when IT happened I had the presence of mind to put on my sweater and stuff the bra in my backpack before climbing out the window. Saving your bra isn’t a very practical use of a precious five seconds; but then, climbing out the window wasn’t too bright, either.
Craig lived in one of the Ravine Houses, which are these wooden dorms built on stilts out over the wooded ravine. They look like treehouses, and they sway like treehouses, so when the place first started shaking we weren’t didn’t think anything much about it. We were sitting on the floor and Craig was sharing his Captain Beefheart LP collection with me. This was maybe less kinky than it sounds, and I complained that I was bored.
"OK, Cassidy-the-Real-Musician," said Craig, and reached into my backpack. "Let's find out how your stuff compares, then."
He pulled out a white plastic bag with Staples Office Supplies printed on it. He took a cassette out and held it up over my head.
“That’s not mine!” I cried. It wasn’t; I’d found it near the dead guy the night before. I tried to get it off Craig but he wrestled me away and stuck it in the deck. I tackled him, things got kind of horny, and I wasn't really paying attention to the music.
I didn't yet know that I was hearing the first approach of IT, right there in Craig’s tape deck. Still, I tried to get him to turn the music off, because I didn't like it, but he wouldn't let me near the tape deck. That was how the bra came off.
I was laughing so hard that at first I didn't hear the screaming; but we both heard the first explosion, so Craig told me to stay put and went to check things out.
I took the tape out of the deck and put it in my backpack. A minute later there was more screaming and a lot of demolition-site noises, and I smelled smoke. I opened the door and the hallway was on fire. So I grabbed my sneakers and went out the window.
Got banged up pretty bad when the building went down. I was still clinging to a strut and ended up jumping clear just in time. I scraped one leg on a protruding nail and twisted the other ankle when I landed. I also bit my lip so hard I was sure it would be detached, but it only swelled.
I clapped my hands over my ears. The sound of IT was all around: in the air, in the ground, in the trembling branches with their ragged autumn leaves. I started running. Away from IT, into IT, through IT.

A pickup whizzed by me and my thumb on the 199. I blinked away grit, feeling embarrassed. I had never hitched before. I wasn't prepared for the feeling of rejection.
There were some pieces of concrete on the highway, and a fallen tree blocked Annandale road on the other side. The traffic light was out. I could hear, but not see, a helicopter somewhere over the river. When a green Pathfinder stopped at the fallen tree, I limped over and banged on the window.
There was a blond woman inside. She was wearing a Mets cap and sunglasses, and she had put her head and arms on the steering wheel like she was asleep or crying. When I banged, she jumped and then shrank back away from me, reaching for the glove compartment with her right hand using jerky, panicked movements.
“What do you want? Get back!” she yelled. Behind her back, her hand closed on a king-sized Milky Way and I saw the knuckles go white as she gripped it, bringing the candy bar forward with a defensive jerk; then she seemed to realize what it was and chucked it into the back seat. She groped some more in the glove compartment.
I wanted to laugh, but by this time I was pretty tired because I’d come about three miles from campus on the bad leg, and the initial burn of adrenaline was gone, leaving me sort of in a daze. My whole body was starting to ache and feel heavy. I guess I didn’t look too good, either.
“Whoa,” I said slowly. “Chill out. I was only going to ask for a ride.”
A Volkswagon hurtled past us, spraying me with gravel. I had to lean against the side of the Pathfinder. The woman had finally grabbed what she was looking for: a sharpened screwdriver. But once she had it, she just kind of looked at it, then at me.
“You’re hurt,” she observed. She sounded suspicious. I shrugged. I could hear a helicopter approaching from the direction of Rhinebeck, fast. She frowned at the screwdriver.
“I don’t know what...” she said. “I’m a little...look, it’s shaking in my hand. Look at my hand shake!”
I wasn’t so sure I wanted to get in the car with her after all. If she was this nervous, she might crash. But now she glued me with a blue gaze and said, “Come on. Get in.”
As I climbed up into the passenger seat I had, like, a muscle insurrection. As in, none of them would work. I had to lean out to pull the door shut, and the helicopter dove at us and swooped past as I fought with the door and the wind. It was a military plane and I could see a guy with some kind of big gun leaning out the side. He didn’t point it at me. He didn’t have to—I freaked out anyway.
“Jesus!” I screamed, and the woman threw the Pathfinder into reverse then first gear, weaving it around the fallen tree with a roar and a squeal. I grabbed the door with both hands and threw my whole body weight backward into the car. The air pressure shifted and I was thrown against the driver as the door slammed. She kept accelerating; by the time we hit 50 I was back in my own seat, apologizing and cursing at the same time.
The helicopter picked itself up and went haring off towards Bard. I leaned on the dashboard, wide-eyed, and watched the road hurtling toward us. We were lucky that nobody seemed to be coming the other way, because this woman was kind of all over the place, side-of-the-road-wise.
“It’s OK.” I kept saying it over and over, hoping she would slow down but she didn’t. “It’s OK, we’ll be OK.”
She glanced at me, braking and looking left and right as she got ready to take the Red Hook turn.
“You got blood on your face. Were you at the bridge?”
I checked out my face in the vanity mirror and wished I hadn’t.
“Bridge? No. What happened at the bridge?”
She glanced at me again, then stepped hard on the gas. She gave a little laugh. “You don’t want to know. I’m Michelle, by the way.”
“I’m Cassidy. Nice to meet you.”
I felt like a jerk when I said that, but she didn’t even seem to listen. She swerved around an 18-wheeler coming the other way, even though she had plenty of room and didn’t have to. As a result she clipped the edge of Kurt’s Truck Stop parking lot and the Pathfinder rocked from side to side like a boat. An electronic chime sounded to warn her we were about to tip over.
“Oops,” she said. “Sorry about that. Should you be going to the hospital? Because I’m going to Red Hook and that isn’t really the right way if you're going to the hospital now that I think about it.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “I don’t care. I’ll go anywhere as long as it isn’t Bard.”
“Bard?”
“Yeah, Bard College, you know? That’s where I just was, when...well, if you don't want to talk about it...”
I stopped talking. I didn't want to provoke her. She was awfully antsy. Her face twitched.
"Was it really Soviet? I talked to a guy who saw it take out the bridge. He said something big hit the water half a mile south." She shook her head like she was arguing with herself. "They set up a roadblock and they got boats out there looking for survivors. Cars got swept off the bridge and everything. I wanted to stay and help the divers--they could've used the back of my car, and I got ropes and stuff, I got a first aid kit. But the police made me go back. One army chopper, is that the best they can do after two hours?"
I steadied myself on the dash again as we hurtled around a bend. The bridge was down. What the hell.
“So were you on the bridge?”
“No, I was at Bard.”
"Who's Bart?"
The suspicious look came back again. My right leg was throbbing and my left ankle was so swollen I doubted I'd be able to walk on it at all.
"Bard," I said. "Where I go to college."
She took her eyes off the road a little too long and the Pathfinder drifted right, brushing against some overhanging bushes. She corrected just in time.
I saw her shake her head to herself. People can be funny about Bard students. The locals seem to hate us.
"Where is this college?”
“Oh, it’s just a couple miles from where you picked me up. I’m surprised you didn’t see the sign.”
“Never heard of it,” she said in a clipped tone. “And I lived in Red Hook all my life. The Moonies live up by there, though.”
I didn’t say anything for a minute. There was indeed a Moonie complex in Barrytown, just down the road from Bard. Did she seriously think I was a Moonie? There had to be something wrong with this woman.
“I really appreciate the ride,” I said finally. “If you could drop me anywhere in town, that’d be great.”

There were no police in Red Hook ("diverted to Poughkeepsie, big surprise," snorted Michelle) but there were enough guys with CBs and megaphones to cover each of the four roads. Everybody and his lesbian aunt were trying to fill up at the crossroads Shell station where Michelle dropped me. I was uneasy about the proximity of all that gasoline, especially after what had happened at Bard. I started to cross the street with some vague intention of getting a ride to the hospital from there when I noticed the crowd lined up at the payphones on the brick wall between the Shell and Tivoli Gardens restaurant.
I stopped. It was crazy to go to the hospital if the emergency room was going to be overrun. It was a long line for the phone, but I decided to call my mom and try to get home. I stood in line trying to ignore the weird looks people were giving me. Instead, I pictured my mom in my mind. It would be lunchtime; she’d be in the staff room having coffee with Ethel or reading a magazine and eating a tuna sandwich. If I was lucky, I could just catch her before her afternoon sculpture class started. She’d go into a panic when she heard my news. Maybe she already knew, if it was on TV. Anyway, she'd panic. Then she'd tell me not to panic. Then she’d call Dad and he'd drive up and pick me up at the hospital. Maybe he was even on his way already. Yeah, that would be good.
The sun shone on my face, making me want to close my eyes. I was really tired. I took a half-melted Nestle crunch out of my backpack and ate it slowly, taking deep breaths of gasoline-smelling air. My tongue felt exhausted when I ran it over my gums to clean up the chocolate. Of all the muscles in my body my tongue had been the least-used, and it still went on strike. My eyelids drooped and I shut my eyes for a little while. I swayed on my feet.
At the nearest pump, a whole pickupload of construction workers had the radio tuned to an emergency broadcast, but the announcer kept getting blotted out by the sound of IT. I shuddered, wanting to hear the news but cringing every time the sound of IT overpowered the radio. ….route 9 closed south of Poughkeepsie, route 84 closed at the New Paltz bridge…IT….governer's office issued…IT….Mike in our helicopter over…IT….not to stockpile…..IT…emergency generators…IT IT IT IT—
I put my hands over my ears and glared at the men. They listened with focused intent. How could they do that? How could they stand the sound of IT? Were they hearing something I wasn’t? Or was it the other way around?
I had a bad feeling. Maybe I was the one hearing things.
So maybe I was just paranoid, but stuff can happen to your head when you see things other people don’t see. Or when invisible people put staples in you while you're inside the piano. Not that I wanted to think about that.

Back at Bard I can remember jamming my feet into my sneakers and running across the dirt track that passed for a road-cum-parking lot in front of the Ravine Houses, squeezing between the bumpers of cars that were piling up in the rush to get out. One of the dorm proctors was trying to get his jeep across the big field between the Ravine Houses and Tewksbury and bypass the road entirely, but the field was soaking wet and he’d gotten stuck. Some guy called Shawn who lived in Bleucher House went jogging over in his Doc Martens and ripped jeans and Butthole Surfers t-shirt, dragging his girlfriend Pru who was wearing only panties and a leather jacket. They started trying to move the car.
I made it out into the field; then I first heard IT. The sound was coming at me from all directions. I was awestruck. The sound opened up rooms in my mind that I never knew existed. I seemed to remember places and ideas that I knew hadn’t happened to me. I wondered if it was like tripping—which I’ve never done but you hear enough about it at Bard to feel like you have.
For a few seconds—and I’m guessing on how long it was, but I’d say it was really only a few seconds even though they were stretched-out, long, intense ones—I was in balance with the sound and it filled me and I felt empty at the same time. I felt like a guitar string that’s been tuned to its neighbors, tightrope-taut and in perfect resonance. But then IT kept going. ITs sound kept mounting and increasing and taking strange turns, and in a flash, I lost it. Lost my scrambled eggs and OJ, lost my composure, lost myself for a little while at least.
When I got up off my knees and wiped the puke off my chin, Shawn and Co. had managed to push the jeep back on to the road. I saw Craig then, standing in front of the burning Hirsch House with his t-shirt pulled up over his face because of the smoke, looking from side to side. I thought maybe he was looking for me. Where Craig's dorm had been there was now just a ragged chunk of the front porch, framed by bright light and trees, beyond. Craig’s blond hair was gray with ash. I wanted to go to him. But the sound made that impossible. IT was getting more and more intense. I had the horrible feeling that the sound was actually drilling its way outwards from inside my body.
Then a shadow passed over everything. At the same time, the fire jumped from Hirsch to the line of cars, and I threw my arms over my head and eyes and flattened myself to the ground like a rabbit in a wind. I looked up and saw Craig get in a VW Bug.
"No, stupid!" I cried, but I couldn't hear myself. I was panting and I could smell my armpits and my groin in the sheltered air between my clothes and my body. Something big was passing overhead. It wasn’t a bird and it wasn’t a plane and it wasn’t superman. My first thought was UFO, but the way the air was moving I could swear I heard the beating of wings so big I wouldn’t want to see them. I was totally cowed. I squeezed my eyes shut and waited. I don’t even know what I thought I was waiting for. I wasn’t thinking. I was just reacting.
The shadow moved off me. I got to my feet, but I didn’t look up at the sky. I didn’t want to see IT. ITs sound continued at the same intensity, but the volume abated so that now IT was all mixed up with people yelling and the explosions of gas tanks as cars caught fire. I saw flames running along the hood of the VW. I must have seen the explosion, too, but I don’t remember that part. I know pointed my butt at whatever happened and ran from it, slipping on the wet grass. I felt gangling and useless and the leg wasn’t cooperating, but I dragged myself forward anyway.
Ahead loomed the white bulk of Tewksbury, the ugliest building on campus and the only dorm that looks and feels like a dorm. Everything about it screams Institution. Under normal circumstances I would never go there, and even under these circumstances, it seemed a stupid place to be. Everybody else was running outof the building and I had to stand aside in the stairwell to let hysterical freshman get loose.
I went in. I had to get away from the sound.
Tewks has a laundry room in the basement, and piano practice rooms with soundproof walls. I went into a practice room and sat under a battered old spinet, but I could still hear IT. I tried another room; same thing. Finally I went into the laundry room, where somebody’s jeans were slushing in one of the machines and somebody’s colors were spinning in the dryer, and all that white noise took away the thing I didn’t want to hear. I crouched next to the warm dryer and tried not to see the Volkswagon containing my boyfriend going boom on my mental projection screen, over and over and over.

Somebody was tapping me on the shoulder. I was in Red Hook and it was almost my turn to use the phone.
I turned around and took my hands off my ears. The pickup truck was gone and I couldn't hear IT on the radio anymore. A round, bearded face with glasses confronted me.
“Jeremy!” I heard myself exclaim. I sounded overjoyed, like some popular chick fakely greeting a guy she doesn’t really like at a party. “Hey, what’s up? Are you OK?”
It was hard to read his expression through his beard and glasses, which I was sure he used to cultivate his overall air of faintly superior detachment. Jeremy is the kind of person who knows everything about everything and always wants to tell you. If he sees you drinking an Anchor Steam he’ll lecture you about the politics of independent breweries. He has a thick voice, the kind that always sounds like he’s got some mucous or something way down in his throat, or like he’s talking through a mouthful of peanut butter.
He said, “Yeah. I’m OK. You look like shit.”
I was kind of surprised he even remembered who I was. He was my friend Anitra's former boyfriend, and I'd seen him around the music department—he even took a computer music class last year. I sat in on it but it was too dry for me. So was he. The last time I’d run into him, I’d asked him the standard, “How was your summer?” question and he said, “I spent it calculating pi as far as I could. Got about 17 pages.”
Now I snorted. “I guess you weren’t there, then. I look goodcompared to...”
I halted. The first few people that you see on fire, running, and then falling down and not getting up, you don’t really take in the information. By the time your brain has gotten around to figuring out what it is you’re seeing, you’re practically inured to it—or something has happened, anyway, to make you numb and unfeeling. Or just sick-headed—because I had this tremendous urge to make flip remarks about human torches. I realized I was probably skating on the edge of sounding nuts.
‘I wasn’t where?’ said Jeremy.
I shook my head. I didn’t want to start crying; not in front of him.
I tried not saying anything for a minute. It was my turn for the phone. I dialled my mom’s work number but I got one of those annoying beeps and an uptight female recording telling me to check the number and dial again. I did, and it was the same thing. I tried calling home; I could leave a message on the machine, anyway. The exact same thing happened.
“That’s weird,” I said to Jeremy. “The phone’s not going through.”
“Let me try,” he said. “Maybe it’s this phone.”
I stood back and he dialled, had a brief conversation, and hung up. He shrugged.
“I just called the house. Got the machine. Seems OK.”
I tried again, with him watching me; it still didn’t work.
“Shit,” I said. “How am I supposed to get home? I can’t take a bus all the way to New Jersey.”
I tried calling Ben's office, but that phone didn’t work either. I called his home number. Machine, of course. I stammered some kind of message and hung up.

[marianne]

Ben would know what to do, wouldn't he? I mean, he hadn't known what to make of the stapling thing but maybe he would know what IT was all about. Music-wise.
I followed Jeremy into the gas station office. There were a few racks of groceries and some magazines, and a lot of people talking semi-hysterically. The tv was showing wrack and ruin in Poughkeepsie, but I couldn't hear the reporter's voice over the din of the real people. I thought I heard a faint hum of IT starting to come through, like fire starts to penetrate paper by a spreading black stain before bursting into flame. I tried to ignore it.
"I don't think you're going to get to Jersey," Jeremy said. "The highways are all blocked. I'm supposed to be in Albany. I had to turn around and come back."
He opened his wallet and took out an Amex gold card. A lot of Bard students had them. Mom and Dad paid the bill. I started working my way through the crowd that was jammed into the tiny station, looking for something to eat.
Then this girl Leona from my dorm walked in. I dodged behind the Hostess rack for a minute to try to compose myself. Leona always made me nervous. She reminded me of the younger sister of this guy Paul I really really liked in high school. The younger sister, Diane, was a gymnast but not built like a typical anorexic gymnast, no: she was compact and muscular, and, as my friend Janie once cattily remarked, “She has the same legs as Justin,” who had really solid legs from skiing but of course that kind of bulk looks nice on a guy but not on a girl. Especially a short girl. Anyway, due to this resemblance I’d always found myself staring at Leona and feeling a weird mixture of being intimidated by her and jealous of her and attracted to her. But we'd never been friends. When I talked to her on the first night of freshman orientation our conversation went something like this.
Me: “Where you from?”
Her: “New York.”
Me: “Yeah, what part?”
Her: “Manhattan.” I.e., the real New York, stupid.
Her: “Where are you from?”
Me: “Um…Jersey.”
Silence.
Still, I found myself drawn to her and I'd even wondered if it meant I was a lesbian or bisexual or something and I ended up avoiding her for this reason and also, as I said before, because I suspected she was stupid and worse yet, that she thought I was stupid.
Hence, me hiding behind the Hostess rack. But she must have spotted me because she came around the corner and said, “Hey. What’s up?”
I blurted, “How’d you get here?”
She looked at me pityingly and I could tell it was going to be another one of those conversations.
“I got a ride?” she said, raising the pitch of her voice at the end like she was asking a question: her way of letting me know she did indeed believe I was an idiot.
I grabbed her shoulders and shook her.
“Where from? From the city?”
She pulled away, aghast. “No. From work. What’s the matter with you? You didn't even show up this morning. I heard Dominic just disappeared and Hannah locked herself in the house. Sally can’t pay anybody.”
I stopped shaking her and tried to pull myself together. She was talking about my job. How did she know about my job?
“You work at Moonshadow.” I said it like a statement, but of course it wasn't true.
“Duh. Cassidy, what’s with you? Come on, you can’t let this disaster stuff get you down. Everything’s going to be OK.”
She had never worked at Moonshadow that I could remember. It was hard to picture her shovelling shit. I wondered if she rode the racehorses or something and that was why I hadn't known about it.
“I came to buy chocolate,” I said irrelevantly. “I don't know where to go or what to do. I can't go back to Bard."
“Who?”
Oh, here we go again.
“Never mind,” I said.
It must have been then that I started to adopt the shut-up-and-wait-for-the-authorities-to-arrive game plan. Not that it was a real strategy, more like a default response to terror. And it does seem to be something people do. Pass the buck, I mean. I know why I did it. When you grow up in the suburbs you don’t tend to think of yourself as responsible for the world as such. You don’t even consider yourself as living in the world; you occupy this semi-abstract realm of tv and shopping and school, waiting for your life to start. You get a fuck-this attitude by the time you’re fourteen. Well, I did anyway. When I got to Bard and everything was chilled and there were no cliques and being different was better than being in fashion and everybody hung out getting stoned with everybody else and the professors expected you to actually think and credited you with some intelligence and you were allowed to try new things—well, I admit I did suddenly turn sincere; or, at least, the edge of my cynicism about the world got blunted a little.
But that change must have been only superficial, because as soon as IT swooped down on campus and drove me out of Annandale and into redneck Red Hook, I reverted to save. I became suburban again. I wanted somebody else to fix it. I wanted to call the monster exterminators and charge the whole thing on my mom's credit card. I didn’t want to deal at all.
"We're going to get out of here," Leona said. "We got space in the back. You could come."
She said it reluctantly, like she half thought better of it.
"Jeremy said the roads were blocked."
"Preston has a four wheel drive. We can go over the fields."
"Where?"
"The city. Preston's paying for the diesel right now. He's got a credit card. Do you have any money?"
I shrugged. "Like, ten bucks," I said.
Now I could hear Preston arguing with the girl behind the counter and I guess she didn’t want to honor the card on account of the phone lines being down. I don't know where Jeremy disappeared to, but he was gone and so was his Infiniti. There was a line of about fifty cars backed up on the 199 waiting for gas, and the shelves of the minimart were looking pretty bare with everybody stocking up.
We went outside to wait, me with a Diet 7-Up which was all I could get hold of in the crush, Leona with a pack of Winstons and a bag of M&Ms. With my paint-stained Dr. Scholls I scuffed at oil spots on the pavement in time to “Fear of a Black Planet” on Preston’s car stereo. Preston was a cornfed Iowa boy with blond hair who said “yup” and “nope” and "maybay," but he took his Public Enemy seriously. “I’m studying their angle on syncopation and spacetime architecture,” he said earnestly when he brought a tape into Ben's class once. Preston's room-mate Cliff called them Pubic Enema. Relentlessly.
It was all very thin and bland; just life. Just pavement and cloudy late summer sky and the taste of M&Ms because that was the kind of thing we bought when we were hungry, like kids let out of mom’s sight, just because we could. I was bored, and underneath that, anxious.
All these people lining up to get out of town, they were just responding to what they heard on the CB, or word of mouth, or maybe to the TV reports that had cropped up fast and thick on local news. Evidently we were cut off from the rest of the state. How, exactly, nobody could or would say; but you couldn't cross the Kingston Bridge to get to the Thruway, you couldn't get to the Taconic, you couldn't take a train. The only media stations that worked were the local ones. No one knew what was going on. Was it nuclear war? A seismic event? Invasion by aliens?
'An unexplained atmospheric disturbance,' the news people were saying. The correspondents had a glassy, vague look. I probably looked like that, too. I don't think anyone else in Red Hook had seen IT, because they were all acting pretty normal and none of them were the walking wounded like me. Nobody else from Bard seemed to have made it out yet. The only Bard students I could see had been off-campus at the time of the attack. None of them wanted to hear the word 'Bard' and they looked at me like I was deranged when I referred to it.
But I was scared, and I wanted to get out of here in case this thing wasn't over.
I bit my lip. “What’s taking so lo—“
Over Leona’s shoulder I saw the first crack. It wasn’t obvious; just a displaced cornice on the old building catty-corner to the gas station on 199 and 9G. The building had been painted dark red at ground level and white from the first floor to the roof. On the corner at the point where the white paint started, there was a raised molding in a scalloped design. A section of this was black. Not black like black paint, and not black like there were missing bricks and you could see a hole, because there was no discernible edge. It was black as in void—just not there.
I stared at it, mouth still half-open with my unfinished complaint. There was a florist shop in the store below, and the staff must have planted some decorative flowers along the edge of the molding, because there was a lilac-colored lace of blooms to either side of the black space. The missing area was C-shaped, a crescent moon. I thought that the proximity of the flowers, their petals stirring in the breeze off the road, made the black spot all the more menacing. And it was beginning to grow, like the wall was a piece of paper and there were flames on the other side beginning to stain it, beginning to break through...
No one else had noticed it. I thought: Fuck, what do I do?
Preston had succeeded in paying; he came out of the shop waving his credit card and smiling. The card flashed in the sun. On the clean new pavement of the forecourt there was a web of cracks, some of them sprouting grass. I could see tendrils of black there, too, and they shook like a dance floor. IT was coming faster this time. They didn’t know, but IT was almost upon us.
I made an inarticulate noise. I wanted to warn them but I couldn’t find the words. I turned to Leona, leaning on the hood. There was a black spot on the hood.
“The car!” I said, pointing idiotically. “See? Shit, we better get going now.”
Leona wasn’t reading me at all. Half a smile started up the side of her face. Then the wind knocked her flat against the diesel pump as IT came on.
I threw myself downwind, rolled, ran, fell, crawled.
The sound went through my body like a fat, blunt spike. Again.
I took it personally. How could I not? As sound, it was a transliteration of terror. It was the sound I'd been looking for all semester, the sound I'd made a fool of myself for, and now that I was hearing it for real I wished I could crawl back in the womb and start everything over.
I’d been working on this collage of found sounds, I called it ‘Nuclear Day Dream’ and it was about nuclear war. I find it really hard to believe there won’t be one. Ever since I was a kid and I found out the whole planet could get wiped out I find it hard to make, like, plans of any kind. I guess it’s just a realization of death, but the nuclear shit makes it all seem so absolute. Some people would say what does it matter if the whole world blows up because if you get killed, you get killed and you’re not there to appreciate what’s left anyway. But I’d like to think of there still being trees and stuff; the idea that everything would be wasted is pretty hard to take.
Anyway, I played a tape of my piece in Ben's class and he didn’t think the total-noise part was anything much. Which is kind of embarrassing because I went all-out hell-for-leather on chaos and I was hoping to get some kind of rise that I was daring enough to trash the world in this way.
Ben said, “I think the thing that would be really interesting is what happens after the big explosion.”
“After?” I said incredulously. “There isn’t anything after. That’s the whole point.”
“OK, so there isn’t anything after, but it would be interesting to hear what there would be if there was something after.”
I didn’t say anything. I was disappointed. He didn’t get it.

All of this is my way of not talking about exactly what happened next. I'd rather not spell it out. I'm not even sure I could.
All I really know is that when the second attack ended, I found that I'd fetched up against the lattice covering the crawl space under the front porch of a Victorian house, where the foundation would otherwise have been exposed. Smoke was coming from the direction of the Shell station a few blocks away. I didn't know how I'd gotten from there to here. I felt giddy and after IT faded, a silent lacuna lay in my head where IT had been. In the silence there seemed to be no time. I couldn't hear my own heartbeat or anything.
I drew a couple of breaths. Cars were stopping or had stopped; people were getting out and walking, or running, in various directions.

At Bard, when I had finally crept out of Tewks laundry room it had been a little like this. The sky had been blotted out by clouds of smoke. Kline Commons seemed to have imploded, or been crushed. The library was burning, but it didn’t generate enough smoke to explain the color of the sky, which was a luminous sepia dragging to black at the horizons. I stood outside Tewksbury looking across the wet soccer field wondering if I could flag down a car on the road to North Campus. There was a spicy smell in the air. I started walking towards the chapel, and that’s when I saw the footprint.
It was a star-shaped depression in the low part of the field between Tewsbury and the Proctor art center, and it had collected muddy water. I guess the main part of it was about the size of a small car, with long claw marks protruding for several feet in five directions. It looked more like a hand than a foot.
From the surface of the water came the sound of IT, only softer. The identity of the sound was the same; but this version was almost tolerable—like the fingerprint of a psychopath, it was only scary because I knew what it implied.
I whipped out my Pro Walkman and pressed Rec. I had to get this on tape.
IT sounded like a zillion different radio stations all playing really loud and the sound was like packed, it was like multilevel, it was so thick like at once really loud and outside and also really tiny and close inside your ears.
I recorded it for a few minutes. I was unable to hear much of anything else, actually. I could see cars and people and the flashing lights that meant there must be sirens, but I couldn't hear anything but IT. I thought maybe the blast of sound had done something to my ears, you know how like after going to see a band you hear the jungle in your ears for the whole next day, and people sound like they're coming to you underwater.
I held the Walkman in position until I saw something move in the air above me—a helicopter, a cloud, a wing, I don't know—and this seemed to set my legs in motion whether I wanted to go or not. I started running south on Annandale Road, and then walking, and then limping.
And as I got farther and farther from IT, my head got emptier and emptier. This draining sensation was almost pleasant. Then, for a few seconds, I found myself walking in dead silence. This happened near the crossroads leading to Barrytown. I took four or five steps, and there was no sound. Anywhere. Not even inside me. Not even my heart. And I had the sense of some visual presence just on the borders of my peripheral vision; when I tried to look, there was nothing there. Faint impression of something architectural. Maybe white stone; maybe a distant skyline. Maybe creeping numbers like insects. But only maybe. Nothing definite.
When the sound came back I realized I was whimpering a little with each breath. They were small rodent noises, frightened, self-pitying noises, and all the way along Annandale Road I didn’t stop making them until the Pathfinder pulled up.

Now I was in Red Hook. I had to keep reminding myself about this. I was losing my moorings, and I kept flashing back to Bard. My brain must have believed I was about to relive what I had just been through. I had the feeling it was prodding me into action, coaching me to do something differently next time—but I didn’t know what. And I didn’t want to think about the possibility that there could be a next time.
I did what they tell you to do under stress: focused on breathing slowly and deeply. I could still feel the residue of IT echoing in my head. I could hear it coming out of the CBs of tractor trailers. I could hear it, faintly, coming from the diner across Route 9. In fact, IT seemed to be my personal soundtrack.
"Well, Cass," I said to myself, getting painfully to my feet. "You got your sound." And I patted the Walkman in my bag with what I hoped was ironic satisfaction, but I wanted to cry. I started walking again, slowly. I didn't know where I was going. Away from the exploded gas station, that was all I knew.
I was thinking about my so called ‘piece’ Nuclear Day Dream and how butt-ass stupid it was, after all. And here I thought it was so important, so revolutionary, so fuck-you. It was only ever lame, and now that I’d seen the real thing—heard the real thing—I knew I'd gotten it wrong.
I stopped.
"You're walking north, stupid," I informed myself. "The hospital is south."
“Cassidy? Are you OK?”
I turned around and there was Nina on a decrepit old three-speed, just catching up with me. She wobbled as she slowed down and had to put a foot out to the curb to stop herself.
“Hey, Nina,” I said wearily.
“Are you OK?” she repeated. Her forehead was furrowed, drawing her thick black eyebrows together. Nina is big and solid; she has the most gorgeous dark green eyes and skin the color of whole wheat toast. I met her in a figure drawing class I took last semester: she was the model for several of the sessions. Her body is like a piece of ripe fruit. She doesn’t shave her legs, either. This gives her an ancient, primal quality as a model.
She was shaking her head at me and looking really worried.
“Jeremy said you looked all beat up, but he didn’t mention the blood. You better come back to the house and get cleaned up.”
“OK,” I said.
“Can you walk?”
“I was walking. I’ve been walking. I walked.” I recited the phrases successively and then gave a small smile, because I reminded myself of eighth grade Latin classes. Nina was checking me out like she was pretty sure I wasn’t all there.
“You’ve just been standing here,” she said gently. “I could see you from back at the diner. I was having a Reuben and I saw you standing under this tree, doing nothing. Then I ran into Jeremy and he told me he saw you at the gas station this afternoon.”
This afternoon? “Yeah, a couple minutes ago,” I said. Then I took in the fact that the neighborhood was looking pretty gray and dim, and there were yellow lights in the windows of the nearest houses, and the streetlights had come on over by the diner.
Anitrapulled the bike off the road and propped it against my sycamore. She took my elbow like I was an old lady she was going to help across the street.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I can walk.”
But when I tried to move my leg, it felt like a piece of dead wood.
“I was afraid of something like this,” she said. “When you didn’t come home last night, and then when all this...stuff...started happening, I was afraid you were mixed up in it.”
“What do you mean I didn't come home last night?” I said, hobbling along beside her. "You're not my roommate."
I could feel her tense slightly when I said that, and I had the feeling she was going to disagree, but instead she said, “OK, OK, let’s just get you back to the house.”
“What about your bike?”
“I’ll come back for it.”
"Does all that smoke back there mean Preston and Leona are dead?"
Anitra looked like she'd been punched in the mouth. She gripped my arm and said, "Shh…."