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| Mo clouds will pick candle light a bit, not far from the door suddenly heard footsteps, MO clouds quickly stood up, opened the door to see come, made a cut-off sound gestures. Lilac strange clouds gestures Mo, Mo clouds are also silent, but will be shut out, cloves, and handed the hands of Ao Zai Mo clouds Today the street to buy clothes, saw fit on Shun Bianmai a piece for you. One39s feeling of concern, but with great solicitude, MO clouds is not well refuse, they receive hands, smiled. Cloves inside North Korea explore the probe, said He39s asleep so early? Which he, referring to Li Shen Xi. Mo clouds thought to explain too much, then light-en a cry, and cloves then whispered I have heard of this hidden weapon contest more than a lot of people away from all walks of life, there are many rivers and lakes do celebrities, competition outside the court but also in the palace hold it. Mo clouds heart a move, said Outer court? Let so many people into the arena to the outer court, for the Emperor is concerned, seems to be wrong, right? VII fog lock big Xia 85th chapter concerns Lilac shook his head I do not know, but the master said that the Lord has invited a number of Tangjiashan home Gao Ren came to assume chanel bags personal command outside world, so the emperor would have held no fear. Mo clouds moved the hearts of another move, asked What are the Gao Ren? Lilac shook his head The master did not say, I did not ask, but people should know Tangjiashan it. Mo clouds microfold the next eyebrow, but also the Tang family, he is not from their mouths what to cover, and if it has been behind the chanel poisoning incident, political relations, matters became more complicated, think of where he wanted immediately Mo floating clouds Locate Li Shen Xi. Mo clouds thought here, asked Do you know this door in Chongqing House Fenduo in what place? | ||
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| Queen Mother said Well you have to say. Emperor Tathagata asked me, I do chloe not know a thing. Small | ||
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| Beautiful mother, dior handbag 32 christian dior christian dior purse | ||
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| 22 - Dawenkou Culture before 4300 - before 2500 - Shandong Longshan Culture, Longshan Culture, also known as a typical prior to 2500 - before 2000 - Yueshi culture before 1900 - before 1500. Yueshi culture to fill the Longshan Culture in Shandong and the gap between culture. It must be stressed that the two regions from the early Neolithic culture began to infiltrate each other on the existence of the phenomenon, but is a system of two cultures. Yangshao culture is generally believed that the past and the Longshan Culture is relative, in fact, in the middle reaches of the Yellow River lower reaches of the Yellow River Yangshao culture and things relative, parallel development is the Dawenkou culture. Two areas on the relationship between culture and other cultures with the general trend of the district, archaeologists Professor Su Bingqi bag fendi clearly states based on its pre-clearance in the core areas in western Henan Jinnan the Yangshao culture to expand its influence around the main the latter is based on its south-east from the original focus on the impact of culture on the Central Plains region, mainly Yangshao culture. 23 is worthy of more research, some before and after 3000 BC, that is, about 5,000 years ago, Yangshao culture sudden decline of the middle reaches of the Yellow River, the Yellow River lower reaches of the Neolithic culture of the middle reaches of Yellow River to a uniform trend, as well as in the Yellow River Following the development of the middle reaches of the Yangshao culture in Henan, Shaanxi, Shanxi, with the characteristics of the Longshan Culture. Its influence continued to broadcast and the Yangtze River, Pearl River basin, the upper reaches of the Yellow River and the Great Wall. Although all over the Shandong Longshan Culture typical Longshan Culture can be divided into each other and parallel development of regional culture, but the overall trend is that both the basic characteristics of the Longshan Culture. This very typical phenomenon of convergence and integration, the creation of these cultures reflects the various clan between tribal groups, and integration of the struggle. Yangtze River Chinese Neolithic origin of the other most important area, there are also things the two cultural areas relative. Although it is not as accurate as the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River into the sequence, but its general outline is still clear. The lower reaches of the Yangtze River to Taihu Lake plain as the center, south of Hangzhou Bay area, north to Nanjing as the center, including areas bordering Jiangsu and Anhui. Its sequence is generally Hemudu early culture before 5000 - before 4000 - Ma Jia Bang Matsuzawa culture before 4300 - before 3300 24 - Liangzhu culture before 3300 - before 2200. Liangzhu Culture and Longshan Culture in Shandong39s quite, but there are a number of cultural characteristics in common, in the past been regarded as the Longshan Culture southward spread of a variant. On the other hand many of the contents of the Liangzhu culture is a source of culture. Jianghan Plain in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River as the center and south of Dongting Lake plain package, do the Three Gorges West Sichuan, the north of Henan province. Its sequence is still controversial, tentatively summed up as follows Project lower culture Carbon-14 Determination of 6920 200, about 5000 when the BC - Daxi culture before 4000 - before 3300 - Qujialing culture before 3000 - before 2600. 25 - Hubei Longshan Culture about 2400 BC, when the future. Qujialing culture in which cultural inheritance Daxi relatively clear,significantly affected by the Yangshao culture, in the south of Henan Province and Hubei quite staggered distribution Yangshao culture. Rao is also quite interested in are the Yangtze River basin relative two things cultural areas, respectively, the middle and lower reaches of fendi the Yellow River by the east-west relative impact of two cultural areas. However, south of the Huaihe River is represented by paddy rice farming culture, the north is represented by dryland grain farming culture, although there is infiltration of each other, but the region is relatively clear. This is two different things the existence of the agricultural culture of their two regions corresponding with the Chinese culture and the Chinese nation is the most important areas of origin. The other centered on the Great Wall Yanshanian Yanliao cultural areas north and south, the Yellow River upper reaches of the Gansu Cultural District to Lake - as the central axis of the Pearl River Delta in South China and northern culture hunting and fishing and hunting culture of the district, currently under way more in-depth studies and summarized. Yanliao cultural areas in which, as the Hongshan Culture altar and Temple of the discovery the upper reaches of the Yellow River due to the decline of painted pottery in the middle reaches of the Yellow River after it has been the development of the upper reaches of the Yellow River pottery in southern China due to the existence of agriculture in the clear before, and during the roughly 9500-10000 years ago, significantly earlier than the Neolithic culture of the Central Plains and other factors, have led archaeologists and historians a very deep concern and research interest. The North, Southwest and Northwest, as well as the Neolithic Culture of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is also found to increase with the kind of research has generated increasing attention. Few decades ago, the new West , primarily based on pottery and other cultural factors that determine China39s Neolithic culture is from Mesopotamia and Central Asia, such as the introduction, the New Stone Age archaeological expertsa detailed analysis of Professor the Neolithic in China39s western cultural content concluded that The archaeological data indicate that they are indigenous here, with the eastern part of China39s Neolithic culture are inextricably linked, especially with the early culture of the Yellow River basin is closely related to . This doomed the 39Chinese culture, the West is39 the complete bankruptcy. 26 Chinese Neolithic culture, many cultural regions and systems are based on indigenous culture, in culture and its adjacent areas in the formation of fendi bags mutual penetration. The middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River region in which two of the New Stone Age culture, the Chinese Neolithic culture, the backbone, and since from 5000 to 4000 in this millennium, the formation of the culture is becoming a consistent trend. Chinese Neolithic culture also showed that the vast land of China is the world39s major agricultural centers of origin. On the other hand, shows the history of the development of the Chinese nation, such as a former agriculture and animal husbandry have been described in the distribution of the three development zones, in the Neolithic Age, and its embryonic development has been the basic pattern. That is, the Qinling Mountains - the Huaihe River as the border, the North is represented by millet millet dryland agricultural areas, livestock are pigs, dogs, chickens, cattle, goats, sheep, horse the South is represented by rice paddy agricultural areas, livestock are pigs , dogs, chickens, water buffalo. To the late Neolithic, pigs, dogs, chickens, cattle, sheep, horses have six domestic animals have been basic. Of course, this is not completely insurmountable limits of each other at the same time the existence of the phenomenon of infiltration. Millet in the Magnetic Hill, Pei Li Kong has been the site remains, dating back to about 8000 rice in Hemudu site also has found that since about 7000. These are currently known to the world39s crop varieties planted after the first specimen. Qin Great Wall in the north west of the New Stone Age is hunting and fishing and hunting areas, subsequently the majority of the development of the hunting tribes are nomadic tribal hunting and fishing is after a long-term development, national hunting and fishing or agriculture. That the origin of the Chinese nation in its infancy stage with three North-South farmers and regional and national economic development, all development and the formation of the Chinese nation have taken place had a profound impact. Countries of the Chinese nation as early as summer, are all in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River. But Gansu Dadiwan Qin39an Yangshao culture hall-style buildings, the 27 Liaoxi Hongshan Culture altar and Temple 28 included in the construction mode and Heaven Hall, cemetery, etc. are related to the Shang and Zhou and beyond origin of ancient Chinese system of relations. The Hongshan culture of the Shang Dynasty jade jade base with the same group of subjects, the relationship between sources of style Liangzhu jade culture and the Hongshan Culture Jade Kwan significant group of two systems, but the same Liangzhu jade culture has been inherited in the Shang and Zhou and development. Shang and Zhou bronze Oracle character and culture are based on both the middle and lower reaches fendi leather of the Yellow River area of New Stone Age culture as the main source of culture, but also many other Neolithic to the crystallization of cast together, show that the Chinese Neolithic culture, such as multi-regional development little spark and flow together in the Central Plains, into a raging bonfire together, so that the ancient Chinese culture, a brilliant shine brightly, making China the world39s oldest one of the ancient civilization. This is the Chinese Neolithic culture, revealed the true objective. Photo | ||
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| The shape of coins, is one weeks of the metal round hole square cake. This cylindrical shape inside the square in the world currency is a typical representative of the East, it reflects the ancient Chinese world viewsymbolizesDragon, the idea of imperial supremacy. The coins and the universe, comparable to the world that China39s currency to the money stage of development, money in people39s minds has been an extremely important position. It was to the number of individual coins from chanel vintage watches that it is omnipotent, that life and death without life, rich in money, The money which will enable the security risk, enable the living dead. Of the money to your will enable the low, the Health and can kill. 32 coins of the shapes is the embodiment of thinking of money fetishism. Engrave coins were cast there are inscriptions, coins and the West there are figures, animals and so on an entirely different pattern, which is the east a major feature of the currency. The text on the early coins are generally marked with the weight of later dynasties usually reign title, but also marked the location casting, casting agencies, as well as other marker symbols. The production of coins of the material referred to as wood currency, primarily copper, usually copper, tin and lead alloy, so called coins. Material as a result of currency is a value in itself, so the weight of coins is a sign of its value. History of money the Government has re-defined, but often lose money devaluation. Coins of passage, marking the metal coinage system in our country has developed to a mature stage. With 2000 years of the evolution of dynasties, and its distribution system and circulation system has a significant stage, with the metallurgical production process technology, as well as the region, the embodiment of national characteristics, the names of coins, such as the flow of shapes and have the development of different changes. Therefore, the types of coins are very many different style. To sum up, the whole can be divided into two semi-money, five-baht money Tongbao money, the money system in four major categories. First, the two semi-money Qin Qin Emperor Wen in the late Warring States period, the unification of the national territory on the currency, the implementation of two semi-Qin, won the money. After the emperor unified the country in 210 BC, the currency reform was enacted in order to the world of Qin law with the law, Qin coins to the coin with the world , 33 in the implementation of a unified national currency. At that time, the provisions of the gold coin, payment and reward for large, semi-coins for the next two coins for circulation of the daily market. For the past six-nation currency of the clutter, are prohibited. The original currency can be used as beads, jade, turtles, shellfish, silver ornaments, and then can not make money. Due to the scope of the use of gold than the narrow, half the money the two widely used, in fact, half the money in circulation in the two play a major role. The currency reform of the First Qin Emperor unified the shape of the coin, the currency the central government explicitly casting and distribution rights, thus putting an end to the situation of the Warring States currency disorder. Two semi-money, there are two semi-Qin and Han 22 kinds of semi. Qin Qin is the two half casting, the flow of the era of Emperor Wen Qin date from the early years of the Han Dynasty, about 130 years. Qin form two semi-simple, the beginning of non-circular hole round for Guo, later renamed the outer side with non-round Guo, currencybody surface there are half two the word. History books say that the as text , 34 that is semi-double, in fact, as a result of smelting technology was relatively primitive, are often the difference between the weight of gold. Unearthed in kind from, the weight of a lightmore than three. Two half-Chinese, is the early Western Han Dynasty cast. Qin Dynasty Western Han Dynasty chanel replica watch inherited the currency, but that the two semi-Qin too, the re-Qin difficult to use the money, but also the people , to cast the two semi-minor money, and allow non-governmental private casting, that is, the two semi-Han. From the Han emperor to the Emperorfour years 119 years ago, the two semi-Han exercised a total of 70 years. The shape of two half-Han and Qin is basically the same as half the two, but to reduce the weight constant, known as semi-two that is 12 baht, the actual only eight baht, four baht, three baht range. Piercing a little money and some big money in small thin body, the shape of Yu | ||
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| - Que a special inscription, quoted from the French Lenihan Grousset steppe empire Plateau early summer sunshine, the basin-shaped clouds overaccording to a white, bright, Huang was oneeyes. The air was filled with a herd of mountain lamb chewing garlic wild onion smell, thick and hot. People have been forced to blink his eyes, my eyes moisten. CHEN Zhen eyes new pastures and new observation positions, Sai Ying Pun, he was too afraid she-wolf with wolves to snatch the sheepand retaliation. Second Battalion of more than 30 yurts, bar close to the northwest in the basin at the foot of the slope. The formation of a two Mongolian hot, hot hot with less than a mile apart, all very close between the production group. Yingpan arrangements such groups than the previous distance apartin business, remember a few times. Bi Orgen Kyrgyzstan Selig and ordered to concentrate so camp, apparently to guard against the new district of the old wolves, or Joint Strike turns. CHEN Zhen-lun is the amount of the wolves never unassailable doggery this crowd-intensive line of defense. As long as the wolf was a Yingpan attack dogs would have been numerous jointMeng. Zhen Chen heart to put aside a little and began to appreciate the new pastureeyes. Battalion of horse and sheep have been dozens of groups into a new pasture, virgin grasslands between one day become a natural on the ranch. Voice heard in all directions,, sheep and cattle Cashmere roar sound, open a large basin full of popular euphoria, MA gas, gas, and arrogant in making the sheep. Chen and Yang Ke array of sheep are tired after a long distance, and scattered in yurts on the hillside near the back and eat it too. Yang Ke Chen array of emotion Road Summer pasture this year there is a huge difference between that piece of pasture, I feel like there is aproud, happy or more than regret. Sometimes feel like sleepwalking, the sheep came into the Garden of Eden. Yang says I agree, it39s a world outside the grassland, grassland Swan. If it were not shun your package, not youth, not just foreign households, the amount of the herdsmen Lun certainly peaceful coexistence with those of the White Swan. Swan flying in under the blue sheep, and more romantic, ah, even the Garden of Eden might have not the White Swan. In a few years, am married to a grasping tail of Mongolia live the wolf girl, a few dare to renewable hole drilling Mongol wolf hybrid, the Health and sufficient. Yang Ke also drew a deepsaid a mouthful Prince Datang have even wanted to be a Turkic steppe people, let alone me. Prairie dog is a dog and needs a place, not everywhere in Beijing, head smashed. I have made this reactionary academic authority and son of bitch can be rooted to the prairie home of the end-result is the best. Zhen Chen asked if it is not just a youth, you are not educated gucci replica watches youth ah? Yang Ke, saidin good faith in the soul of the wolf totem, I had a Mongolian. Mongolia steppe grasslands as the person is than their own lifeis also important to the pastoral, the agricultural area I think people are really hateful, it is not surprising nomadic farming nation with thousands of years to fight the battle. If I were born in ancient times, will take the initiative to request such as Wang Zhaojun as the excerpt, even when the guards Zhaojun entourage I do. Once a war breaks out once, I stood sidegrassland,for Tenggeli track for grassland-way street. CHEN Zhen smile said Do not hit you, the history of farming and grassland to the two national call to fight, and then another and pro-marriage, in fact, we have long been central plains and grasslands of the mixed descendants of the nation. Orgen Kat said, this allows the amount of new pasture the livestockLun in 2045, if theOrgen dictates, to re-power enough, and gucci watch I am concerned about is Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan and the complete power of their league grassland forces can have anti-predatory forces grassland. Yang says You too utopian a! I heard my father once said that China39s future lies in the agricultural population reduced to below 500 million. However, expansion of agricultural population, the momentum of a viciouswho? Tenggeli even Mongolia and China, also stemGod. Not to mention two decades, the farmers are becoming workers, public and urban intellectuals, and also wish all the intellectuals in the city rushed to the rural areas to become second-class farmers, millions of our youth is not all of a sudden out of the city was losing the it? Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan on the edge and the strength to complete this league ... ... even the mantis mantis not as good as cars. Chen array stare Road It seems that Wolf Totem has not yet become a totem in your heart true! Wolf Totem is what? Wolf Totem is, when a hundred, when the 1000, when the million strong spiritual power. Wolf Totem is the totem to defendgrassland, and the world has always been lifepipe, tube life of heaven. Desperately the world, human life is also what living life! If the real wolf totem worship, it is necessary to stand in heaven and earth, nature, grasslandside, that is, the rest have to fight a wolf go. Extremes meet you believe that the laws of nature, Tenggeli will take revenge for the grassland.stand aside, that is, the worst result of the forces and destructiondie, and then up on the soul Tenggeli. Life to have this outcome, it is a. The vast majority of prairie wolves were killed in action! Yang Ke-time silent. on a broad vision of the new environment very curious and excited, it sometimes on the river water line up to see the cattlemonths, and sometimes also a few groups have dazzling bright white sheep, repeatedSato after a while, overlooking the lake and the birds hovered over the water birds to fly. See39ll be spoiled for choice, all of a sudden it has never seen so many things. Before movingin grassland, Chen array of hot from the recent completion of the Selig family has four or five years away, when a group can only seecattle, a flock of sheep, a stone circle, two yurts and 67 cars carts. In moving the waywas a night for two days in the cow dung in the box, nothing to see. When it again to see the sun when it turned out around the same again.aexcited, if not that itchains, it will have to follow the dog to a new act wildlygrass, or with the crossings were fighting dog. Chen Orgen array had to listen to the views of Kyrgyzstan, will be dependenttied with chains.leather neck collar buckle in chains, the chains hold the other end even in a large hoop, the hoop and set loose his arm in a thick wood of the Elm Hill, the stakesdeepground, above the ground part of nearly one meter high. Wood on an iron and added a button, so that no wood piles Tiehuan off. This strong enough prisoners tied with a cow, its structure could also be avoidedlaps, it will be entangled chains stakes, the more the shorter Le, and finally strangled himself. 20th chapter 2 | ||
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| The shirt came yo! Really rich ah! Do notfirst, such cartier replica watch as Fang Fang! stare at him. Good! cartier pasha LIU Yong-jun cartier buckle to lay down their chopsticks, smile, look at. Upstairs in plainclothesdown the stairs on the. Fang Fang, fast down to eat ah! beckons. the stability of its own, down, sitting opposite the Yong-Jun Liu. No smiling face, and pick up the chopsticks to antique cartier watches eat. Yong-Jun Liu smiled,look, shook his head and also pick up the chopsticks to eat. watching, cartier Fang Fang, Estonia ... ... Estonia has been how? a bowl, Do you want to go and talk about the work of the President of Estonia?! | ||
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| Come see Tian Maverickssniper rifle was seized, it is feeling a little something more to say. China-made submachine gun of 85 micro-sound ... ... Mr introduce. Tian looked at calf or sniper rifles, pharynx spittle. Look? Next to Dong Qiang asked Tangshan recruits. Look at the gun, I like that gun. Tian said Mavericks wait. Called the sniper rifle! Laughter from the city of Dong Qiang. Right, right, sniper rifle! Tian said Mavericks, eyes still fixed on sniper rifles. You can be such a bumpkin when the special forces? Dong Qiang Xiao, Pigs can be a tree! Mahjong you go! Yesterday?! Tin Mavericks a stare, is a mule is a horse out! Territories of the night?crops will have to raise it! Tin Mavericks! Dong Qiang! Mr stern stand up and snapped, you two do? The cartier watch two hurried to stand at attention. | ||
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| It is in this dangerous situation, Chiang Kai-shek as the appointment chloe black of Mr Tung country composed of just the 1st chloe handbag Corps commander, and took over the chairmanship of Jilin Province, Changchun, then stay in the. March 18, 1948, that chloe silverado is, to Changchun Zheng-dong country a week before the inauguration, Lin Biao and Luo Changchun offensive ordered chloe to section 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, five independent division Changchun suburbs close cute chloe to its initial form surrounded by main force combat and battlefocus on the objective of | ||
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| Saying that chanel necklace a mathematician as to offend the King, was imprisoned in the Chamber of Secrets in. Chamber door is composed of 10 key figures, the chanel earrings King allowed his self-help, mathematicians fully confident that, then all possibility of calculation, and on 100 kinds of test. Day after day, year after year, mathematicians began to despair, doubt and so the impulse to be free replica chanel earrings energy and fade, and finally decided to wait patiently for death. Deathbed, he unwilling to climb the gate, trying to end. Yet, he has extremely thinbody near the door, the door was Gala A opens up! It turned out that the door has been open a matter of fact! This is a thought-provoking story, in chanel cc logo earrings the face of captivity, mathematicians in this impressive - the calculation of self-help action in an orderly, became ready to accept their imprisonment | ||
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| Air and the people I have a hard love. men louis vuitton backpack Remember childhood, dig deep, grain is the slogan of vocal sound.of me and asked why louis vuitton bags their parents dig Tibetan food? Parents told me that in order to prepare for war preparedness., my louis vuitton mahina partner and small adults have learned to look at the ridge of the wedge hole. At that time, living in poverty, very few aircraft to see the sky, the occasional aircraft flying over, the partners will be shouting into the hole to prevent the bombing. Insensibly we look, people often drew big laughter. Juvenile period, to see my favorite movie is tunnel is a movie mainly about the people39s War of Resistance Against Japan Jizhong use of tunnel warfare against the Japanese aggressors story vividly authentic reproduction from the cover to the defense to combat Road Road this particular development of the battlefield, showing the infinite power of the people39s war. Also the movie , the Chinese People39s Volunteers in the trenches in the enemy resistance, the enemy planes were bombing the mountain level, it could not bomb the Chinese People39s Volunteers, and finally won the victory. Looking at these lenses, so I feel satisfied and. Xu lovers of authentic reason, every time a business trip, I would like to visit the underground facilities. I have taken the subway in Beijing,underground shopping malls, stayed in the ground floor of the hotel in other cities have witnessed underground depot, library, such as underground oil reserves, the underground facilities have better entrances and exits, ventilation and out of Road and a variety of pipeline protective equipment and facilities, especially in some of these projects are marked on the sign of anti-project more features, more eye-catching. These air defense facilities, saving the city39s land, not only functional, but more importantly there is a protective function, respectively, as a city civil air defense in wartime evacuation roads, material and personnelpool of air strikes and to prevent and mitigate hazards to protect the people safety of life and property, have an immeasurable effect. My county-level city is small town, I engaged in the work of people39s air defense, air-raid siren to participate in regular exercise. Whenever this time, my mind would flash a tunnel, tunnel warfare, air defense Square underground image, I know very well that the people39s air defense in the importance of peace. Last year, my home for the refurbishment of the louis vuitton existing home, I will let construction workers dug deep in the foundations, built in the ground floor to the basement. His wife could not understand that not many people, the two-tier enough living, but also to build the basement? I said, air it! His wife smiled, you really got engaged in air defense work home. Built the house after his wife to the second floor of a room for me to do the study, I did not agree and insisted on elections in the basement of the library. From then on, whenever I had time, we slipped into the basement of reading writing, to avoid licensingand Friends, a rare quiet. Not long ago, I used the holidays to visit relatives back home, I stopped-year-old nephew of the small house I went to the ridge edge, so I visited the holes he dug, holes, he is a person can sit down. I asked himdug this hole? The nephew of a small drop of the nose that even this knowledge, this is the air-raid shelter me! Small nephew, then suddenly I felt that people39s air defense is no small matter, for each of us, the moment should air this string tension as a preventive measure. | ||
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| Between the stands and beauty Court on walls across the wall, then the name of a good listen to the wall, called the situation asked motion of wielding a sword. Beauty Court is not very high, not great, but very soft, very quiet. Courtoutside of the tree is one of the leaves, some lookair, swaying, hee heesuch as the presence of some cross in the air, but also gentle and amiable, down the wind shake, hang around like a son, but also down to the water, wind and brush, and more like a demon with my love. In the wall side by side from the Court beauty, that is, a stand. Stand this long, shorter than the beauty ko to, but better than it is to large. Although there is no beauty here, the Qing Court, but very thick, behavior was not the kind of architectural beauty ko like a crisp, thick but not stiff there. By comparison, natural, beauty Court wealth chanel cabas to the architectural style is soft. Is the wealth to the magnificent stands. These two buildings built next to the jar.coming and going, with these two buildings, the crowd seemed no thread is divided into a number of shares, of which two, on the influx of the soft and solid construction of the two. In, the most eye-catching look is the right piece of Fangcaodi. In addition, like the sword of the sisal, poetry, likebright red, it is necessary to keep balance in a pair of Ying-YingGreen prose like a rose. If you look again more spicy, you39ll see the general lay snoring of Zantedeschia, Begonia music in general, middle-aged people to pomegranates, the words rhyme poetry like the Sophorae drift, as well as text commentary Luan like morning glory Zhang a sexy little mouth,red, and this seems to be a strugglethe level of the stem. Distance issoft water areas. In the water area, leaf boat,side, dressed in, clearly the two main two servants one has a small eye, a blue water with a million years long, the daughter of two rich people. Pouilly 1, a pair of deep eyes, a servant is a boy suits, Yan Yan wonderful voice, clearly is a girl. Do not think that is full of water on lotus leaves and flowers, you look carefully, there are beautiful waterbelow, water area aroundDance. Ping afloat in the lotus leaf, or the place from time to time, like a sudden his son frog, or a thin head Enhydris tour twists and turns to come, Cyclops in the water also, such as water lice, though some form of color in general insignificant, but there is vitality, Whitmania Paramisgurnus general, it is self-righteous. This is above the water surface, the most dynamic, in addition to people on the boat, that is, during the flight of the dragonfly, and it has large eyes, long hair like the girls on board. Its thin wings, tail small, the driving force behind a strong, long-haired girls like that. It fly freely in the water, and sometimes stop the valve in chanel the Lotus Hill, so that the flowers nodded, and sometimes stopped at Ping, the so-ping a swing back to ripple, like a general and lively girl with long hair. Water area is rich in the same four people to see the beauty of the water. The sun is shining fierce season, there are trees in the care of this water. The evening twilight, we can see a shadow, the night can be seen also the coldest month mottled. Most young around this green, that is, around the United States in the beauty of the flowers as butterflies. Butterflies, they blindly followed the general fashion in general as the only beauty ofalso not designed as a stylish yet. Their color, and leather chanel purse there is no strange, but with a moderate, so beautiful. Her manners, everything fit, soft feel generous. I do not know that that is called in the long yearsgirls are still talking about butterflies. I am a boy on the boat, watching the girls with long hair, small eyes look back at my boss, that guy I see, eat and laugh. Hearts can not help, lost in thought fascinated, as a crazy fanatic For. For example, in the beauty of butterflies as a pair of beauty is as beauty mellow Court building. In between this mellow landscape, there are a few of the toadmore ugly regardless of sense of manufacturing. I do not know because it is really admire, or out of animal instinct, in a pair of short jump,slowly into the long-haired girls, said I tempt you to,years , I want to love you. Sometimes, it sound innocent Yan toward the girl in front of the green in front of the girls that said eat you up, let me like a wolf in sheep39s clothing, like to eat you. But thatyears andcalled the girls, do not make things difficult, because, after all, a toad will give them more offensive Health. Anyone seen a toad-eating thing? Long as they do not close it and let it spray some venom for no reason, it is regrettable that the replica chanel handbag people can not. Butterfly makes things difficult is that even the Court, and stands in the middle of beauty of the web wall, wrapped in the beauty of the Butterfly Pavilion at the girls like that like to stand on the young green look at her, admire her for her gentle dancing like. She also would like to close with the green. Motion of wielding a sword off the wall but therenet, to non-stop, it is very dangerous.stand, he saw thatlovely butterflies, always terrible to see the network. This network is attached to one end of one of the chrysanthemum, the other end attached to a small eyes of the generaltake a butterfly, there is one attachment in the part of the ancient city. Wind, and a network of convex convex belly, so dependent on the Ju you, you butterfly flower, followed by shaking, but it is not broken, the taste of a martial arts leader. Therefore,like butterflies, like the dance tip. | ||
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| His wife asked for a divorce after he stabbed her with a plastic knife and tried to strangle her one-handed (he lost his arm and for a time his rational brain in the accident). He divides his wealth into four equal parts for his wife, his two daughters and himself and leaves Minnesota for Duma Key, a stunningly beautiful, eerily remote stretch of the Florida coast where he has rented a house. All of the land on Duma Key, and the few houses, are owned by Elizabeth Eastlake, an octogenarian whose tragic and mysterious past unfolds perilously. When Edgar begins to paint, his formidable talent seems to come from someplace outside him, and the paintings, many of them, have a power that cannot be controlled. Soon the ghosts of Elizabeth's childhood return, and the damage of which they are capable is truly terrifying. Like Lisey's Story, this is a novel about the tenacity of love and the perils of creativity. Its supernatural elements will have King fans reeling. 3 DUMA KEY By Stephen King Copyright (c) 2008 by Stephen King For Barbara Ann and Jimmy Memory... is an internal rumor. - GEORGE SANTAYANA Life is more than love and pleasure, I came here to dig for treasure. If you want to play you gotta pay You know it's always been that way, We all came to dig for treasure. - SHARK PUPPY 4 How to Draw a Picture (I) Start with a blank surface. It doesn't have to be paper or canvas, but I feel it should be white. We call it white because we need a word, but its true name is nothing. Black is the absence of light, but white is the absence of memory, the color of can't remember. How do we remember to remember? That's a question I've asked myself often since my time on Duma Key, often in the small hours of the morning, looking up into the absence of light, remembering absent friends. Sometimes in those little hours I think about the horizon. You have to establish the horizon. You have to mark the white. A simple enough act, you might say, but any act that remakes the world is heroic. Or so I've come to believe. Imagine a little girl, hardly more than a baby. She fell from a carriage almost ninety years ago, struck her head on a stone, and forgot everything. Not just her name; everything! And then one day she recalled just enough to pick up a pencil and make that first hesitant mark across the white. A 5 horizon-line, sure. But also a slot for blackness to pour through. Still, imagine that small hand lifting the pencil... hesitating... and then marking the white. Imagine the courage of that first effort to reestablish the world by picturing it. I will always love that little girl, in spite of all she has cost me. I must. I have no choice. Pictures are magic, as you know. 1 - My Other Life i My name is Edgar Freemantle. I used to be a big deal in the building and contracting business. This was in Minnesota, in my other life. I learned that my-other-life thing from Wireman. I want to tell you about Wireman, but first let's get through the Minnesota part. Gotta say it: I was a genuine American-boy success there. Worked my way up in the company where I started, and when I couldn't work my way any higher there, I went out and started my own. The boss of the company I left laughed at me, said I'd 6 be broke in a year. I think that's what most bosses say when some hot young pocket-rocket goes off on his own. For me, everything worked out. When Minneapolis-St. Paul boomed, The Freemantle Company boomed. When things tightened up, I never tried to play big. But I did play my hunches, and most played out well. By the time I was fifty, Pam and I were worth forty million dollars. And we were still tight. We had two girls, and at the end of our particular Golden Age, Ilse was at Brown and Melinda was teaching in France, as part of a foreign exchange program. At the time things went wrong, my wife and I were planning to go and visit her. I had an accident at a job site. It was pretty simple; when a pickup truck, even a Dodge Ram with all the bells and whistles, argues with a twelvestory crane, the pickup is going to lose every time. The right side of my skull only cracked. The left side was slammed so hard against the Ram's doorpost that it fractured in three places. Or maybe it was five. My memory is better than it 7 used to be, but it's still a long way from what it once was. The doctors called what happened to my head a contracoup injury, and that kind of thing often does more damage than the original hit. My ribs were broken. My right hip was shattered. And although I retained seventy per cent of the sight in my right eye (more, on a good day), I lost my right arm. I was supposed to lose my life, but didn't. I was supposed to be mentally impaired thanks to the contracoup thing, and at first I was, but it passed. Sort of. By the time it did, my wife had gone, and not just sort of. We were married for twenty-five years, but you know what they say: shit happens. I guess it doesn't matter; gone is gone. And over is over. Sometimes that's a good thing. When I say I was mentally impaired, I mean that at first I didn't know who people were - even my wife - or what had happened. I couldn't understand why I was in such pain. I can't remember the quality of that pain now, four years later. I know that I suffered it, and that it was excruciating, but 8 it's all pretty academic. It wasn't academic at the time. At the time it was like being in hell and not knowing why you were there. At first you were afraid you'd die, then you were afraid you wouldn't. That's what Wireman says, and he would have known; he had his own season in hell. Everything hurt all the time. I had a constant ringing headache; behind my forehead it was always midnight in the world's biggest clock-shop. Because my right eye was fucked up, I was seeing the world through a film of blood, and I hardly knew what the world was. Nothing had a name. I remember one day when Pam was in the room - I was still in the hospital - and she was standing by my bed. I was extremely pissed that she should be standing when there was a thing to sit on right over in the cornhole. "Bring the friend," I said. "Sit in the friend." "What do you mean, Edgar?" she asked. "The friend, the buddy!" I shouted. "Bring over the fucking pal, you dump bitch!" My head was killing me and she was starting to cry. I hated her for that. She had no business crying, because she wasn't the one in the cage, looking at 9 everything through a red blur. She wasn't the monkey in the cage. And then it came to me. "Bring over the chum and sick down!" It was the closest my rattled, fucked-up brain could come to chair. I was angry all the time. There were two older nurses that I called Dry Fuck One and Dry Fuck Two, as if they were characters in a dirty Dr. Seuss story. There was a candystriper I called Pilch Lozenge - I have no idea why, but that nickname also had some sort of sexual connotation. To me, at least. When I grew stronger, I tried to hit people. Twice I tried to stab Pam, and on one of those two occasions I succeeded, although only with a plastic knife. She still needed a couple of stitches in her forearm. There were times when I had to be tied down. Here is what I remember most clearly about that part of my other life: a hot afternoon toward the end of my month-long stay in an expensive convalescent home, the expensive air conditioning broken, tied down in my bed, a soap opera on the television, a thousand midnight bells ringing in my head, pain burning and stiffening my right side like a poker, my missing right arm itching, my 10 missing right fingers twitching, no more Oxycontin due for awhile (I don't know how long, because telling time is beyond me), and a nurse swims out of the red, a creature coming to look at the monkey in the cage, and the nurse says: "Are you ready to visit with your wife?" And I say: "Only if she brought a gun to shoot me with." You don't think that kind of pain will pass, but it does. Then they ship you home and replace it with the agony of physical rehabilitation. The red began to drain from my vision. A psychologist who specialized in hypnotherapy showed me some neat tricks for managing the phantom aches and itches in my missing arm. That was Kamen. It was Kamen who brought me Reba: one of the few things I took with me when I limped out of my other life and into the one I lived on Duma Key. "This is not approved psychological therapy for anger management," Dr. Kamen said, although I suppose he might have been lying about that to make Reba more attractive. He told me I had to give her a hateful name, and so, although she looked like Lucy Ricardo, I named her after an aunt who used to pinch my fingers when I was small 11 if I didn't eat all my carrots. Then, less than two days after getting her, I forgot her name. I could only think of boy names, each one making me angrier: Randall, Russell, Rudolph, River-fucking- Phoenix. I was home by then. Pam came in with my morning snack and must have seen the look on my face, because I could see her steeling herself for an outburst. But even though I'd forgotten the name of the fluffy red rage-doll the psychologist had given me, I remembered how I was supposed to use it in this situation. "Pam," I said, "I need five minutes to get myself under control. I can do this." "Are you sure-" "Yes, now just get that hamhock out of here and stick it up your face-powder. I can do this." I didn't know if I really could, but that was what I was supposed to say. I couldn't remember the fucking doll's name, but I could remember I can do this. That's clear about the end of my other life, how I kept saying I can do this even when I knew I couldn't, even when I knew I was fucked, I was 12 double-fucked, I was dead-ass-fucked in the pouring rain. "I can do this," I said, and God knows how I looked because she backed out without a word, the tray still in her hands and the cup chattering against the plate. When she was gone, I held the doll up in front of my face, staring into its stupid blue eyes as my thumbs disappeared into its stupid yielding body. "What's your name, you bat-faced bitch?" I shouted at it. It never once occurred to me that Pam was listening on the kitchen intercom, she and the day-nurse both. Tell you what, if the intercom had been broken they could have heard me through the door. I was in good voice that day. I began to shake the doll back and forth. Its head flopped and its synthetic I Love Lucy hair flew. Its big blue cartoon eyes seemed to be saying Oouuu, you nasty man! like Betty Boop in one of those old cartoons you can still see sometimes on the cable. "What's your name, bitch? What's your name, you cunt? What's your name, you cheap rag-filled whore? Tell me your name! Tell me your name! Tell me your 13 name or I'll cut out your eyes and chop off your nose and rip out your-" My mind cross-connected then, a thing that still happens now, four years later, down here in the town of Tamazunchale, state of San Luis Potos?, country of Mexico, site of Edgar Freemantle's third life. For a moment I was in my pickup truck, clipboard rattling against my old steel lunchbucket in the passenger footwell (I doubt if I was the only working millionaire in America to carry a lunchbucket, but you probably could have counted us in the dozens), my PowerBook beside me on the seat. And from the radio a woman's voice cried "It was RED!" with evangelical fervor. Only three words, but three was enough. It was the song about the poor woman who turns out her pretty daughter as a prostitute. It was "Fancy," by Reba McEntire. "Reba," I whispered, and hugged the doll against me. "You're Reba. Reba-Reba-Reba. I'll never forget again." I did - the following week - but I didn't get angry that time. No. I held her against me like a little love, closed my eyes, and visualized the pickup truck that had been 14 demolished in the accident. I visualized my steel lunchbucket rattling against the steel clip on my clipboard, and the woman's voice came from the radio once more, exulting with that same evangelical fervor: "It was RED!" Dr. Kamen called it a breakthrough. He was excited. My wife seemed a good deal less excited, and the kiss she put on my cheek was of the dutiful variety. I think it was two months later that she told me she wanted a divorce. ii By then the pain had either lessened or my mind had made certain crucial adjustments when it came to dealing with it. The headaches still came, but less often and rarely with the same violence; it was no longer always midnight in the world's biggest clock-shop between my ears. I was always more than ready for Vicodin at five and Oxycontin at eight - could hardly hobble on my bright red Canadian crutch until I'd swallowed those magic pills - but my rebuilt hip was starting to mend. 15 Kathi Green the Rehab Queen came to Casa Freemantle in Mendota Heights on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I was allowed an extra Vicodin before our sessions, and still my screams filled the house by the time we finished up. Our basement rec room had been converted into a therapy suite, complete with a handicap-accessible hot tub. After two months of torture, I was able to make it down there on my own in the evenings to double up on my leg exercises and begin some abdominal work. Kathi said doing that stuff a couple of hours before bed would release endorphins and I'd sleep better. It was during one of these evening workouts - Edgar in search of those elusive endorphins - when my wife of a quarter-century came downstairs and told me she wanted a divorce. I stopped what I was doing - crunches - and looked at her. I was sitting on a floor-pad. She was standing at the foot of the stairs, prudently across the room. I could have asked her if she was serious, but the light down there was very good - those racked fluorescents - and I didn't have to. I don't think it's the sort of thing women joke 16 about six months after their husbands have almost died in accidents, anyway. I could have asked her why, but I knew. I could see the small white scar on her arm where I had stabbed her with the plastic knife from my hospital supper tray, and that was really the least of it. I thought of telling her, not so long ago, to get that hamhock out of here and stick it up her face-powder. I considered asking her to at least think about it, but the anger came back. In those days what Dr. Kamen called inappropriate anger was my ugly friend. And hey, what I was feeling right then did not seem inappropriate at all. My shirt was off. My right arm ended three and a half inches below the shoulder. I twitched it at her - a twitch was the best I could do with the muscle that was left. "This is me," I said, "giving you the finger. Get out of here if that's how you feel. Get out, you quitting birch." The first tears had started rolling down her face, but she tried to smile. It was a pretty ghastly effort. "Bitch, Edgar," she said. "The word is bitch." 17 "The word is what I say it is," I said, and began to do crunches again. It's harder than hell to do them with an arm gone; your body wants to pull and corkscrew to that side. "I wouldn't have left you, that's the point. I wouldn't have left you. I would have gone on through the mud and the blood and the piss and the spilled beer." "It's different," she said. She made no effort to wipe her face. "It's different and you know it. I couldn't break you in two if I got into a rage." "I'd have a hell of a job breaking you in two with only one amp," I said, doing crunches faster. "You stuck me with a knife." As if that were the point. It wasn't, and we both knew it. "A plastic rudder knife is what it was, I was half out of my mind, and it'll be your last words on your fucking beth-dead, 'Eddie staffed me with a plastic fife, goodbye cruel world.'" "You choked me," she said in a voice I could barely hear. I stopped doing crunches and gaped at her. The clock-shop started up in my head; bang-a-gong, get it on. "What are you saying, I choked you? I never choked you!" 18 "I know you don't remember, but you did. And you're not the same." "Oh, quit it. Save the New Age bullshit for the... for the guy... your... " I knew the word and I could see the man it stood for, but it wouldn't come. "For that bald fuck you see in his office." "My therapist," she said, and of course that made me angrier: she had the word and I didn't. Because her brain hadn't been shaken like Jell-O. "You want a divorce, you can have a divorce. Throw it all away, why not? Only go do the alligator somewhere else. Get out of here." She went up the stairs and closed the door without looking back. And it wasn't until she was gone that I realized I'd meant to say crocodile tears. Go cry your crocodile tears somewhere else. Oh, well. Close enough for rock and roll. That's what Wireman says. And I was the one who ended up getting out. iii Except for Pam, I never had a partner in my other life. Edgar Freemantle's Four Rules for Success 19 (feel free to take notes) were: never borrow more than your IQ times a hundred, never borrow from a man who calls you by your first name on first acquaintance, never take a drink while the sun's still up, and never take a partner you wouldn't be willing to embrace naked on a waterbed. I did have an accountant I trusted, however, and it was Tom Riley who helped me move the few things I needed from Mendota Heights to our smaller place on Lake Phalen. Tom, a sad two-time loser in the marriage game, worried at me all the way out. "You don't give up the house in a situation like this," he said. "Not unless the judge kicks you out. It's like giving up home field advantage in a playoff game." I didn't care about home field advantage; I only wanted him to watch his driving. I winced every time a car coming the other way looked a little too close to the centerline. Sometimes I stiffened and pumped the invisible passenger brake. As for getting behind the wheel again myself, I thought never sounded about right. Of course, God loves surprises. That's what Wireman says. 20 Kathi Green the Rehab Queen had only been divorced once, but she and Tom were on the same wavelength. I remember her sitting cross-legged in her leotard, holding my feet and looking at me with grim outrage. "Here you are, just out of Death's Motel and short an arm, and she wants to call it off. Because you poked her with a plastic hospital knife when you could barely remember your own name? Fuck me til I cry! Doesn't she understand that mood-swings and short-term memory loss following accident trauma are common?" "She understands that she's scared of me," I said. "Yeah? Well, listen to your Mama, Sunny Jim: if you've got a good lawyer, you can make her pay for being such a wimp." Some hair had escaped from her Rehab Gestapo ponytail and she blew it back from her forehead. "She ought to pay for it. Read my lips: None of this is your fault." "She says I tried to choke her." "And if so, being choked by a one-armed invalid must have been a pants-wetting experience. Come on, Eddie, make her pay. I'm sure I'm stepping way out 21 of my place, but I don't care. She should not be doing what she's doing." "I think there's more to it than the choking thing and the butter-knife thing." "What?" "I can't remember." "What does she say?" "She doesn't." But Pam and I had been together a long time, and even if love had run out into a delta of passive acceptance, I thought I still knew her well enough to know that yes - there had been something else, there was still something else, and that was what she wanted to get away from. iv Not long after I relocated to the place on Lake Phalen, the girls came to see me - the young women. They brought a picnic hamper. We sat on the pineysmelling lakeporch, looked out at the lake, and nibbled sandwiches. It was past Labor Day by then, most of the floating toys put away for another year. There was also a bottle of wine in the 22 hamper, but I only drank a little. On top of the pain medication, alcohol hit me hard; a single beer could turn me into a slurring drunk. The girls - the young women - finished the rest between them, and it loosened them up. Melinda, back from France for the second time since my argument with the crane and not happy about it, asked me if all adults in their fifties had these unpleasant regressive interludes, did she have that to look forward to. Ilse, the younger, began to cry, leaned against me, and asked why it couldn't be like it was, why couldn't we - meaning her mother and me - be like we were. Lin told her this wasn't the time for Illy's patented Baby Act, and Illy gave her the finger. I laughed. I couldn't help it. Then we all laughed. Lin's temper and Ilse's tears weren't pleasant, but they were honest, and as familiar to me as the mole on Ilse's chin or the faint vertical frownline, which in time would deepen into a groove, between Lin's eyes. Linnie wanted to know what I was going to do, and I told her I didn't know. I'd come a long distance toward deciding to end my own life, but I knew 23 that if I did it, it must absolutely look like an accident. I would not leave these two young women, just starting out in their lives, carrying the residual guilt of their father's suicide. Nor would I leave a load of guilt behind for the woman with whom I had once shared a milkshake in bed, both of us naked and laughing and listening to the Plastic Ono Band on the stereo. After they'd had a chance to vent - after a full and complete exchange of feelings, in Dr. Kamenspeak - my memory is that we had a pleasant afternoon, looking at old photo albums and reminiscing about the past. I think we even laughed some more, but not all memories of my other life are to be trusted. Wireman says when it comes to the past, we all stack the deck. Ilse wanted us all to go out to dinner, but Lin had to meet someone at the Public Library before it closed, and I said I didn't feel much like hobbling anywhere; I thought I'd read a few chapters of the latest John Sandford and then go to bed. They kissed me - all friends again - and then left. 24 Two minutes later, Ilse came back. "I told Linnie I forgot my keys," she said. "I take it you didn't," I said. "No. Daddy, would you ever hurt Mom? I mean, now? On purpose?" I shook my head, but that wasn't good enough for her. I could tell by the way she just stood there, looking me in the eye. "No," I said. "Never. I'd-" "You'd what, Daddy?" "I was going to say I'd cut my own arm off first, but all at once that seemed like a really bad idea. I'd never do it, Illy. Leave it at that." "Then why is she still afraid of you?" "I think... because I'm maimed." She hurled herself into my arms so hard she almost knocked us both onto the sofa. "Oh, Daddy, I'm so sorry. All of this is just so sucky." I stroked her hair a little. "I know, but remember this - it's as bad as it's going to get." That wasn't the truth, but if I was careful, Ilse would never know it had been an outright lie. A horn honked from the driveway. "Go on," I said, and kissed her wet cheek. "Your sister's impatient." 25 She wrinkled her nose. "So what else is new? You're not overdoing the pain meds, are you?" "No." "Call if you need me, Daddy. I'll catch the very next plane." She would, too. Which was why I wouldn't. "You bet." I put a kiss on her other cheek. "Give that to your sister." She nodded and went out. I sat down on the couch and closed my eyes. Behind them, the clocks were striking and striking and striking. v My next visitor was Dr. Kamen, the psychologist who gave me Reba. I didn't invite him. I had Kathi, my rehabilitation dominatrix, to thank for that. Although surely no more than forty, Kamen walked like a much older man and wheezed even when he sat, peering at the world through enormous horn-rimmed spectacles and over an enormous pear of a belly. He was a very tall, very black black man, with features carved so large they seemed unreal. His great staring eyeballs, ship's figurehead of a 26 nose, and totemic lips were awe-inspiring. Xander Kamen looked like a minor god in a suit from Men's Warehouse. He also looked like a prime candidate for a fatal heart attack or stroke before his fiftieth birthday. He refused my offer of refreshment, said he couldn't stay, then put his briefcase aside on the couch as if to contradict that. He sank full fathom five beside the couch's armrest (and going deeper all the time - I feared for the thing's springs), looking at me and wheezing benignly. "What brings you out this way?" I asked him. "Oh, Kathi tells me you're planning to bump yourself off," he said. It was the tone he might have used to say Kathi tells me you're having a lawn party and there are fresh Krispy Kremes on offer. "Any truth to that rumor?" I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Once, when I was ten and growing up in Eau Claire, I took a comic book from a drugstore spin-around, put it down the front of my jeans, then dropped my tee-shirt over it. As I was strolling out the door, feeling jacked up and very clever, a clerk grabbed me by the arm. She lifted my shirt with her other 27 hand and exposed my ill-gotten treasure. "How did that get there?" she asked me. Not in the forty years since that day had I been so completely stuck for an answer to a simple question. Finally - long after such a response could have any weight - I said, "That's ridiculous. I don't know where she could have gotten such an idea." "No?" "No. Sure you don't want a Coke?" "Thanks, but I'll pass." I got up and got a Coke from the kitchen fridge. I tucked the bottle firmly between my stump and my chest-wall - possible but painful, I don't know what you may have seen in the movies, but broken ribs hurt for a long time - and spun off the cap with my left hand. I'm a southpaw. Caught a break there, muchacho, as Wireman says. "I'm surprised you'd take her seriously in any case," I said as I came back in. "Kathi's a hell of a physical therapist, but a headshrinker she's not." I paused before sitting down. "Neither are you, actually. In the technical sense." 28 Kamen cupped an enormous hand behind an ear that looked roughly the size of a desk drawer. "Do I hear... a ratcheting noise? I believe I do!" "What are you talking about?" "It's the charmingly medieval sound a person's defenses make when they go up." He tried an ironic wink, but the size of the man's face made irony impossible; he could only manage burlesque. Still, I took the point. "As for Kathi Green, you're right, what does she know? All she does is work with paraplegics, quadriplegics, accident-related amps like you, and people recovering from traumatic head injuries - again, like you. For fifteen years Kathi's done this work, she's had the opportunity to watch a thousand maimed patients reflect on how not even a single second of time can ever be called back, so how could she possibly recognize the signs of pre-suicidal depression?" I sat in the lumpy easy chair across from the couch and stared at him sullenly. Here was trouble. And Kathi Green was more. 29 He leaned forward... although, given his girth, a few inches was all he could manage. "You have to wait," he said. I gaped at him. He nodded. "You're surprised. Yes. But I'm not a Christian, let alone a Catholic, and on the subject of suicide my mind is open. Yet I'm a believer in responsibilities, I know that you are, too, and I tell you this: if you kill yourself now... even six months from now... your wife and daughters will know. No matter how cleverly you do it, they'll know." "I don't-" He raised his hand. "And the company that insures your life - for a very large sum, I'm sure - they'll know, too. They may not be able to prove it... but they'll try very hard. The rumors they start will hurt your girls, no matter how wellarmored against such things you may think they are." Melinda was well-armored. Ilse, however, was a different story. When Melinda was mad at her, she called Illy a case of arrested development, but I 30 didn't think that was true. I thought Illy was just tender. "And in the end, they may prove it." Kamen shrugged his enormous shoulders. "How much of a death-duty that might entail I couldn't guess, but I'm sure it would erase a great deal of your life's treasure." I wasn't thinking about the money. I was thinking about a team of insurance investigators sniffing around whatever I set up. And all at once I began to laugh. Kamen sat with his huge dark brown hands on his doorstop knees, looking at me with his little I've-seen-everything smile. Except on his face nothing was little. He let my laughter run its course and then asked me what was so funny. "You're telling me I'm too rich to kill myself," I said. "I'm telling you not now, Edgar, and that's all I'm telling you. I'm also going to make a suggestion that goes against a good deal of my own practical experience. But I have a very strong intuition in your case - the same sort of 31 intuition that caused me to give you the doll. I propose you try a geographical." "Beg pardon?" "It's a form of recovery often attempted by latestage alcoholics. They hope that a change of location will give them a fresh start. Turn things around." I felt a flicker of something. I won't say it was hope, but it was something. "It rarely works," Kamen said. "The old-timers in Alcoholics Anonymous, who have an answer for everything - it's their curse as well as their blessing, although very few ever realize it - like to say, 'Put an asshole on a plane in Boston, an asshole gets off in Seattle.'" "So where does that leave me?" I asked. "Right now it leaves you in suburban St. Paul. What I'm suggesting is that you pick someplace far from here and go there. You're in a unique position to do so, given your financial situation and marital status." "For how long?" "At least a year." He looked at me inscrutably. His large face was made for such an expression; 32 etched on King Tut's tomb, I believe it might have made even Howard Carter consider. "And if you do anything at the end of that year, Edgar, for God's sake - no, for your daughters' sake - make it look good." He had nearly disappeared into the old sofa; now he began to struggle up again. I stepped forward to help him and he waved me away. He made it to his feet at last, wheezing more loudly than ever, and took up his briefcase. He looked down at me from his height of six and a half feet, those staring eyeballs with their yellowish corneas made even larger by his glasses, which had very thick lenses. "Edgar, does anything make you happy?" I considered the surface of this question (the only part that seemed safe) and said, "I used to sketch." It had actually been a little more than just sketching, but that was long ago. Since then, other things had intervened. Marriage, a career. Both of which were now going or gone. "When?" "As a kid." 33 I thought of telling him I'd once dreamed of art school - had even bought the occasional book of reproductions when I could afford to - and then didn't. In the last thirty years, my contribution to the world of art had consisted of little more than doodles while taking telephone calls, and it had probably been ten years since I'd bought the sort of picture-book that belongs on a coffee table where it can impress your friends. "Since then?" I considered lying - didn't want to seem like a complete fixated drudge - but stuck to the truth. One-armed men should tell the truth whenever possible. Wireman doesn't say that; I do. "No." "Take it up again," Kamen advised. "You need hedges." "Hedges," I said, bemused. "Yes, Edgar." He looked surprised and a little disappointed, as if I had failed to understand a very simple concept. "Hedges against the night." vi 34 A week or so later, Tom Riley came to see me again. By then the leaves had started to turn color, and I remember the clerks putting up Halloween posters in the Wal-Mart where I bought my first sketchpads since college... hell, maybe since high school. What I remember most clearly about that visit is how embarrassed and ill-at-ease Tom seemed. I offered him a beer and he took me up on it. When I came back from the kitchen, he was looking at a pen-and-ink I'd done - three palm trees silhouetted against an expanse of water, a bit of screened-in porch jutting into the left foreground. "This is pretty good," he said. "You do this?" "Nah, the elves. They come in the night. Cobble my shoes, draw the occasional picture." He laughed too hard and set the picture back down on the desk. "Don't look much like Minnesota, dere," he said, doing a Swedish accent. "I copied it out of a book," I said. I had actually used a photograph from a Realtor's brochure. It had been taken from the so-called "Florida room" of Salmon Point, the place I had just leased for a year. I had never been in Florida, not even on vacation, but that picture 35 had called to something deep in me, and for the first time since the accident, I felt actual anticipation. It was thin, but it was there. "What can I do for you, Tom? If it's about the business- " "Actually, Pam asked me to come out." He ducked his head. "I didn't much want to, but I didn't feel I could say no. Old times' sake, you know." "Sure." Tom went back to the days when The Freemantle Company had been nothing but three pickup trucks, a Caterpillar D9, and a lot of big dreams. "So talk to me. I'm not going to bite you." "She's got herself a lawyer. She's going ahead with this divorce business." "I never thought she wouldn't." It was the truth. I still didn't remember choking her, but I remembered the look in her eyes when she told me I had. And there was this: once Pam started down a road, she rarely turned around. "She wants to know if you're going to be using Bozie." I had to smile at that. William Bozeman III was a dapper, manicured, bow-tie-wearing sixty-five, 36 wheeldog of the Minneapolis law-firm my company used, and if he knew Tom and I had been calling him Bozie for the last twenty years, he would probably have suffered an embolism. "I hadn't thought about it. What's the deal, Tom? What exactly does she want?" He drank off half his beer, then put the glass on a bookshelf beside my half-assed sketch. His cheeks had flushed a dull brick red. "She said she hopes it doesn't have to be mean. She said, 'I don't want to be rich, and I don't want a fight. I just want him to be fair to me and the girls, the way he always was, will you tell him that?' So I am." He shrugged. I got up, went to the big window between the living room and the porch, and looked out at the lake. Soon I would be able to go out into my very own "Florida room," whatever that was, and look out at the Gulf of Mexico. I wondered if it would be any better, any different, than looking out at Lake Phalen. I thought I would settle for different, at least to begin with. Different would be a start. When I turned back, Tom Riley didn't look himself at all. At first I thought he was 37 sick to his stomach, and then I realized he was struggling not to cry. "Tom, what's the matter?" I asked. He tried to speak and produced only a watery croak. He cleared his throat and tried again. "Boss, I can't get used to seeing you this way, with just the one arm. I'm so sorry." It was artless, unrehearsed, and sweet: a straight shot to the heart. I think there was a moment when we were both close to bawling, like a couple of Sensitive Guys on The Oprah Winfrey Show. That idea helped me get myself under control again. "I'm sorry, too," I said, "but I'm getting along. Really. Now drink your damn beer before it goes flat." He laughed and poured the rest of his Grain Belt into the glass. "I'm going to give you an offer to take back to her," I said. "If she likes it, we can hammer out the details. Do-it-yourself deal. No lawyers needed." "Are you serious, Eddie?" "I am. You do a comprehensive accounting so we have a bottom-line figure to work with. We divide 38 the swag into four shares. She takes three - seventy-five per cent - for her and the girls. I take the rest. The divorce itself... hey, Minnesota's a no-fault state, after lunch we can go out to Borders and buy Divorce for Dummies." He looked dazed. "Is there such a book?" "I haven't researched it, but if there isn't, I'll eat your shirts." "I think the saying's 'eat my shorts.'" "Isn't that what I said?" "Never mind. Eddie, that kind of deal is going to trash the estate." "Ask me if I give a shit. Or a shirt, for that matter. I still care about the company, and the company is fine, intact and being run by people who know what they're doing. As for the estate, all I'm proposing is that we dispense with the ego that usually allows the lawyers to swallow the cream. There's plenty for all of us, if we're reasonable." He finished his beer, never taking his eyes off me. "Sometimes I wonder if you're the same man I used to work for," he said. "That man died in his pickup," I said. 39 vii Pam took the deal, and I think she might have taken me again instead of the deal if I'd offered - it was a look that came and went on her face like sunshine through clouds when we had our lunch to discuss the details - but I didn't offer. I had Florida on my mind, that refuge of the newly wed and the nearly dead. And I think in her heart of hearts, even Pam knew it was for the best - knew that the man who had been pulled out of his ruined Dodge Ram with his steel hardhat crushed around his ears like a crumpled pet-food can wasn't the same guy who'd gotten in. The life with Pam and the girls and the construction company was over; there were no other rooms in it to explore. There were, however, doors. The one marked SUICIDE was currently a bad option, as Dr. Kamen had pointed out. That left the one marked DUMA KEY. One other thing occurred in my other life before I slipped through that door, though. It was what happened to Monica Goldstein's Jack Russell Terrier, Gandalf. 40 viii If you've been picturing my convalescent retreat as a lakeside cottage standing in splendid isolation at the end of a lonely dirt road in the north woods, you better think again - we're talking your basic suburbia. Our place by the lake stood at the end of Aster Lane, a paved street running from East Hoyt Avenue to the water. Our closest neighbors were the Goldsteins. In the middle of October, I finally took Kathi Green's advice and began to walk. These were not the Great Beach Walks I took later, and I came back from even these short outings with my bad hip crying for mercy (and more than once with tears standing in my eyes), but they were steps in the right direction. I was returning from one of these walks when Mrs. Fevereau hit Monica's dog. I was three-quarters of the way home when the Fevereau woman went past me in her ridiculous mustard-colored Hummer. As always, she had her cell phone in one hand and a cigarette in the other; as always she was going too fast. I barely 41 noticed, and I certainly didn't see Gandalf dash into the street up ahead, concentrating only on Monica, coming down the other side of the street in Full Girl Scout. I was concentrating on my reconstructed hip. As always near the end of my short strolls, this so-called medical marvel felt packed with roughly ten thousand tiny points of broken glass. Then tires yowled, and a little girl's scream joined them: "GANDALF, NO!" For a moment I had a clear and unearthly vision of the crane that had almost killed me, the world I'd always lived in suddenly eaten up by a yellow much brighter than Mrs. Fevereau's Hummer, and black letters floating in it, swelling, getting larger: LINK-BELT. Then Gandalf began to scream, too, and the flashback - what Dr. Kamen would have called a recovered memory, I suppose - was gone. Until that afternoon in October four years ago, I hadn't known dogs could scream. I broke into a lurching, crabwise run, pounding the sidewalk with my red crutch. I'm sure it would have appeared ludicrous to an onlooker, but no one 42 was paying any attention to me. Monica Goldstein was kneeling in the middle of the street beside her dog, which lay in front of the Hummer's high, boxy grille. Her face was white above her forestgreen uniform, from which a sash of badges and medals hung. The end of this sash was soaking in a spreading pool of Gandalf's blood. Mrs. Fevereau half-jumped and half-fell from the Hummer's ridiculously high driver's seat. Ava Goldstein came running from the front door of the Goldstein house, crying her daughter's name. Mrs. Goldstein's blouse was half-buttoned. Her feet were bare. "Don't touch him, honey, don't touch him," Mrs. Fevereau said. She was still holding her cigarette and she puffed nervously at it. Monica paid no attention. She stroked Gandalf's side. The dog screamed again when she did - it was a scream - and Monica covered her eyes with the heels of her hands. She began to shake her head. I didn't blame her. Mrs. Fevereau reached out for the girl, but changed her mind. She took two steps back, leaned 43 against the high side of her Hummer, and looked up at the sky. Mrs. Goldstein knelt beside her daughter. "Honey, oh honey please don't." Gandalf lay in the street, in a pool of his spreading blood, howling. And now I could also remember the sound the crane had made. Not the meep-meep-meep it was supposed to make (its backup warning had been broken), but the juddering stutter of its diesel engine and the sound of its treads eating up the earth. "Get her inside, Ava," I said. "Get her in the house." Mrs. Goldstein got an arm around her daughter's shoulders and urged her up. "Come on, honey. Come inside." "Not without Gandalf!" Monica was eleven, and mature for her age, but in those moments she had regressed to three. "Not without my doggy!" Her sash, the last three inches now sodden with blood, thwapped against the side of her skirt and a long line of blood spattered down her calf. 44 "Monica, go in and call the vet," I told her. "Say Gandalf's been hit by a car. Say he has to come right away. I'll stay with your dog while you do." Monica looked at me with eyes that were more than grief-stricken, more than shocked. They were crazy. I knew that look well. I'd seen it often in my own mirror. "Do you promise? Big swear? Mother's name?" "Big swear, mother's name. Go on." She went with her mother, casting one more look back over her shoulder and uttering one more bereft wail before starting up the steps to her house. I knelt beside Gandalf, holding onto the Hummer's fender and going down as I always did, painfully and listing severely to the left, trying to keep my right knee from bending any more than it absolutely had to. Still, I voiced my own little cry of pain, and I wondered if I'd be able to get up again without help. It might not be forthcoming from Mrs. Fevereau; she walked over to the lefthand side of the street with her legs stiff and wide apart, then bent at the waist as if bowing to royalty, and vomited in the gutter. She 45 held the hand with the cigarette in it off to one side as she did it. I turned my attention to Gandalf. He had been struck in the hindquarters. His spine was crushed. Blood and shit oozed sluggishly from between his broken rear legs. His eyes turned up to me and in them I saw a horrible expression of hope. His tongue crept out and licked my inner left wrist. His tongue was dry as carpet, and cold. Gandalf was going to die, but maybe not soon enough. Monica would come out again soon, and I didn't want him alive to lick her wrist when she did. I understood what I had to do. There was no one to see me do it. Monica and her mother were inside. Mrs. Fevereau's back was still turned. If others on this little stub of street had come to their windows (or out on their lawns), the Hummer blocked their view of me sitting beside the dog with my bad right leg awkwardly outstretched. I had a few moments, but only a few, and if I stopped to think about what I was doing, my chance would be lost. So I took Gandalf's upper body in my arms and without a pause I'm back at the Sutton Avenue site, 46 where The Freemantle Company is getting ready to build a forty-story bank building. I'm in my pickup truck. Reba McEntire's on the radio, singing "Fancy." I suddenly realize the crane's too loud even though I haven't heard any backup beeper and when I look to my right the part of the world that should be in that window is gone. The world on that side has been replaced by yellow. Black letters float there: LINK-BELT. They're swelling. I spin the Ram's wheel to the left, all the way to the stop, knowing I'm too late. The scream of crumpling metal starts, drowning out the radio and shrinking the inside of the cab right to left because the crane's invading my space, stealing my space, and the pickup is tipping. I'm trying for the driver's-side door, but it's no good. I should have done that right away but it got too late real early. The world in front of me disappears as the windshield turns to frozen milk shot through with a million cracks. Then the building site is back and still turning on an axle as the windshield pops out. Pops out? It flies out bent in the middle like a playing-card, and I'm laying on the horn with the points of both elbows, 47 my right arm doing its last job. I can barely hear the horn over the crane's engine. LINK-BELT is still moving in, pushing the passenger door, closing the passenger-side footwell, splintering the dashboard in tectonic chunks of plastic. The shit from the glove-compartment floats around, the radio goes dead, my lunchbucket is tanging against my clipboard, and here comes LINK-BELT. LINK-BELT is right on top of me, I could stick out my tongue and lick the fucking hyphen. I start screaming because that's when the pressure starts. The pressure is my right arm first pushing against my side, then spreading, then splitting open. Blood douses my lap like a bucket of hot water and I hear something breaking. Probably my ribs. It sounds like chickenbones under a bootheel. I held Gandalf against me and thought Bring the friend, sit in the friend, sit in the fucking PAL, you dump bitch! And now I'm sitting in the chum, sitting in the fucking pal, it's at home but home doesn't feel like home with all the clocks of Europe ringing inside my cracked head and I can't remember the name of the doll Kamen gave me, all I can remember 48 is boy names: Randall, Russell, Rudolph, Riverfucking- Phoenix. I tell her to leave me alone when she comes in with the fruit and the fucking college cheese, I tell her I need five minutes. I can do this, I say, because it's the phrase Kamen gave me, it's the out, it's the meep-meep-meep that says watch it, Pammy, Edgar's backing up. But instead of leaving she takes the napkin from the tray to wipe the fret off my forehead and while she's doing that I grab her by the throat because in that moment it seems to me it's her fault I can't remember my doll's name, everything is her fault, including LINK-BELT. I grab her with my good left hand. For a few seconds I want to kill her, and who knows, maybe I try. What I do know is I'd rather remember all the accidents in this round world than the look in her eyes as she struggles in my grip. Then I think It was RED! and let her go. I held Gandalf against my chest as I had once held my infant daughters and thought, I can do this. I can do this. I can do this. I felt Gandalf's blood soak through my pants like hot water and thought, Go on, you sad fuck, get out of Dodge. 49 I held Gandalf and thought of how it felt to be crushed alive as the cab of your truck eats the air around you and the breath leaves your body and the blood blows out of your nose and those snapping sounds as consciousness flees, those are the bones breaking inside your own body: your ribs, your arm, your hip, your leg, your cheek, your fucking skull. I held Monica's dog and thought, in a kind of miserable triumph: It was RED! For a moment I was in a darkness shot with that red; then I opened my eyes. I was clutching Gandalf to my chest with my left arm, and his eyes were staring up at my face - No, past it. And past the sky. "Mr. Freemantle?" It was John Hastings, the old guy who lived two houses up from the Goldsteins. In his English tweed cap and sleeveless sweater, he looked ready for a hike on the Scottish moors. Except, that was, for the expression of dismay on his face. "Edgar? You can let him go now. That dog is dead." "Yes," I said, relaxing my grip on Gandalf. "Would you help me get up?" 50 "I'm not sure I can," John said. "I'd be more apt to pull us both down." "Then go in and see if the Goldsteins are okay," I said. "It is her dog," he said. "I was hoping..." He shook his head. "It's hers," I said. "And I don't want her to come out and see him like this." "Of course, but-" "I'll help him," Mrs. Fevereau said. She looked a little better, and she had ditched the cigarette. She reached for my right armpit, then hesitated. "Will that hurt you?" It would, but far less than staying the way I was, so I told her no. As John went up the Goldsteins' walk, I got a grip on the Hummer's bumper. Together we managed to get me back on my feet. "I don't suppose you've got anything to cover the dog with?" "As a matter of fact, there's a rug remnant in the back." "Good. Great." She started around to the rear - it would be a long trek, given the Hummer's size - then turned 51 back. "Thank God it died before the little girl got back." "Yes," I said. "Thank God." ix It wasn't far back to my cottage at the end of the lane, but getting there was a slow chug just the same. By the time I arrived, I had developed the ache in my hand that I thought of as Crutch Fist, and Gandalf's blood was stiffening on my shirt. There was a card tucked in between the screen and the jamb of the front door. I pulled it out. Below a smiling girl giving the Girl Scout salute was this message: A FRIEND FROM THE NEIGHBORHOOD CAME TO SEE YOU WITH NEWS OF DELICIOUS GIRL SCOUT COOKIES! ALTHOUGH SHE DIDN'T FIND YOU IN TODAY, Monica WILL CALL AGAIN! SEE YOU SOON! Monica had dotted the i in her name with a smileyface. I crumpled the card up and tossed it into 52 the wastebasket as I limped to the shower. My shirt, jeans, and blood-spotted underwear I tossed into the trash. I never wanted to see them again. x My two-year-old Lexus was in the driveway, but I hadn't been behind the wheel of a vehicle since the day of my accident. A kid from the nearby juco ran errands for me three days a week. Kathi Green was also willing to swing by the closest supermarket if I asked her, or take me to Blockbuster before one of our little torture sessions (afterward I was always too wiped out). If you had told me I'd be driving again that fall, I would have laughed. It wasn't my bad leg; the very idea of driving put me in a cold sweat. But not long after my shower, that's what I was doing: sliding behind the wheel, keying the ignition, and looking over my right shoulder as I backed down the driveway. I had taken four of the little pink Oxycontin pills instead of the usual two, and was gambling they'd get me to and from the Stop | ||
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