It's a thousand pages give or take a few . . .4番

Now Thomas—please try to keep T.D.M. in mind. He is, after all, one of the central elements of this story, if not, as some would have it, life itself. As I was saying, Thomas was under the weather, and on this particular day it was not weather he particularly wanted to be under. It was one of those marrow freezing, soul draining early spring rains you get in the Mid-West who's only redeeming feature is that it makes the first line of "The Wasteland" seem like an understatement. When the local PBS station broadcast a work by Mahler that afternoon the suicide hotline had to bring in extra help. The world was cold, wet and gray, and not only was Thomas being rained on, he felt like hell.


His umbrella seemed especially designed to direct the maximum amount of water down the back of his neck, and as he walked along the reflection that kept pace with him in the shop windows was a lot pudgier than he remembered it being. He had remarked to a friend just the other day that he was sure shopkeepers were using a new type of magnifying glass in their windows that made him look like a fat, old man.

“You’re a twit,” had been her thoughtful reply. “You’ll be wearing tinfoil in your hats next.”

Thomas’s umbrella chose that particular moment in his reverie to dump about a quart of water it had been saving down the back of his neck. His breath came out all in a rush, “Whoa!” and he kind of danced/skipped a couple of steps. “Bloody designer probably graduated from here,” he muttered. A woman walking toward him wondered when the state would start providing decent care for those unfortunate people and decided to cross the street.

“The problem,” he muttered, “is life. It’s a concept that needs a bit more thinking through before being shoved off on someone with no training.”

The way people were edging away from him reminded him that he was muttering again and he clamped his teeth firmly shut. Unfortunately, his left cheek was not paying attention and he bit into it, which caused him to exclaim, “Shit!” with enough force to cause people to edge even further away from him. This irritated him because he was, by all accounts, a fairly nice guy—he was just under some particularly ugly weather at the moment—and he glared at them for edging away. Which, of course, made them edge even further away.

“At least the sidewalk’s not crowded,” he muttered.

It was at this precise moment that a very large, and seemingly perfect stranger managed to run into him knocking Thomas off the sidewalk into the gutter. The man had just jumped out of the blue, or perhaps a hat shop—Thomas was a bit confused by the blow—and the passersby who had looked out from under their umbrellas, there are always one or two, could never agree if the stranger had come out of the blue, a hat shop or a Starbucks. (The individual who had voted for Starbucks later confessed he had only done so because he hadn't passed a Starbucks for at least the last thirty feet and figured there had to be one nearby.) When Thomas had recovered his breath he stammered a quiet, and totally insincere, “Pardon me,” while in his mind he screamed questions that, if taken literally, would have gotten him arrested—or an Emmy winning series on HBO—or both.

“What!” the stranger demanded, “Are you doing here?”

By this time Thomas had collected himself sufficiently to observe that while the man was, thankfully, a total stranger and not missing any obvious parts, he was not quite a perfect stranger. For one thing he seemed prone to knocking people into rain-swollen gutters. He made a stab at a couple of answers, missed, and tried a couple more, one of which he wounded; but they had trouble convincing him let alone strangers out of the blue—or a hat shop.

"I'm not sure."

"You're not sure?" The stranger's voice was dripping with scorn; or, since he didn't have an umbrella, it could have just been the rain.

"No." Desperately Thomas groped for the wounded answer, but it escaped by hiding under some dirty linen in one of the darker corners of his mind. "Should I be?"

"Christ. You're even dumber than a wildebeest," and the stranger jumped back into the blue, knocking two Stetsons off a shelf in the process.

Now this exchange hurt Thomas very much. Partly because he had twisted his ankle when he fell off the curb, and partly because his ego wasn't quite up to unfair comparisons to wildebeests at the moment.