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Outside, crickets clicked and chirped, cicadas buzzed in the brush covering
the
vacant lot next door. From far away came the disconsolate howl of a dog. He
didn't like the way he was feeling; not at all. What the hell was wrong with
him?
The crap in the brochure. The cryptic phrases had echoed in his head all
afternoon. Even now. The Grass of Healing. Crazy stuff. The wounded earth
will
take it to its bosom ... What could it all mean? That which has bled in
innocence. Why would someone write junk like that in advertising material for
grass seed? He couldn't get it out of his mind.
He went down to the game room and rewrote his resume.
Kirby was still unemployed two weeks later (and still lacked a firm
invitation
to an interview), but the grass came up spectacularly well. He had not even
bothered to water it. It hadn't rained either-- unless he was badly mistaken;
the two weeks were a timeless alcoholic blur to him. The ground was parched
and
cracked, but thick, vibrant shoots were poking through all over, oasis green
and
resolute. Bare patches missed in seeding soon filled in, colonized by
aggressive
underground rhizomes snaking from neighboring plants. Weeds shriveled and
died
all over the lawn, and the dry husks of dead grubs surfaced, crowded out of
their hibernation chambers like slum tenants displaced by urban renewal. The
grass grew only so high--about two and a half inches--and stopped. Kirby
fired
up the Sears riding mower once, for form's sake, and
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mowed dutifully, but by late August, the grass had gone untrimmed for a month.
There was not much remarkable about the way it looked.
Kneeling, Kirby tore a tiny plug out of the thick pelt of turf around him and
examined it. Over time, he had become something of an expert. The stem and
blade
of the individual plant looked like any northern-climate bent grass, but at
work
here was an auxiliary above-ground growth mechanism--stolons, also called
creepers--that made the plant extremely prolific. In this it was no different
from the zoysias and other southern varieties such as St. Augustine grass,
but
those and others had failed here completely, and bluegrass, which utilized a
similar stratagem, had barely held its own.
Around the first of September, the lawn's growth curve seemed to reach a
point
of diminishing returns, and stabilized.
Then it began to die.
But not before Kirby started dreaming about Nazis in the vacant lot. The
dreams
started in mid July.
"I don't want to dream about fucking Nazis again. Please, God, don't let me
dream about them again."
Kirby was reduced to whimpering, slumped in the Eames chair with an all-night
cable movie station on the tube, buzzed out of his brain on Jenny's
prescription
diet pills, an old half-full bottle of which he had chanced across in a
kitchen
drawer among the balls of string and bits of aluminum foil and other oddments
(Jenny had taken most of the culinary utensils). But the beer would finally
get
through to him, and he would nod off and again dream about the fucking Nazis
standing out there in the tall grass of the vacant lot, black-helmeted,
black-coated statues of Aryan manhood, the red of their armbands like open
wounds upon their souls. They would stare at him, questioning him. He would
be
working on the lawn, usually reseeding by hand, scattering fistfuls of seed
angrily into the wind, sweat running in ticklish rivulets down the back of
his
neck. They would stand out there, occasionally moving from side to side, now
and
then stepping forward toward the lot but never coming out of the weeds to
step
on the grass. And he would yell, his throat constricted and burning, "What do
you want? What do
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you want from me?" And one of them would answer, "Wo bin die Unschuldeigen
Kinder?"
"Say it in English, motherfucker!"
"Where are the innocents?"
"Get out of here! Get out!" Still casting grass seed at them as if engaged in
some exorcismic ritual, he would walk toward them until he came close enough
to
see the death's-heads on their collars, insignia of the Totenkopfverbande.
"Wir mussen ... we must guard this ground. It is our duty."
And he would wake up with his arms twitching and electric shocks convulsing
his
body, half paralyzed and unable to scream.
He did not have the dreams every time he slept; if he had, Kirby's developing
psychosis would have swallowed him in very short order indeed. As it was, the
disease process, already considerably advanced by the time Jenny left him,
was
merely accelerated.
First to have some intuition that Kirby's condition might well be clinical
was
Jim DeLuca, a friend who dropped over one evening to see how Kirby was
getting
along. Over beers, they bullshitted awhile, and DeLuca got the unmistakable
and
disconcerting impression that he was talking to a man who was gradually
losing
his handle on things. Although he did not have a catalog of symptoms to refer
to, he had done enough general reading to be disturbed by Kirby's free flight
of
ideas, his short attention span, his abrupt mood shifts. And even if he
couldn't
go by symptomatology, the horrible mess of the house, Kirby's haunted eyes
and
cadaverous general appearance were clues enough.
Still, DeLuca wasn't altogether sure. At this point, Kirby still had
protracted
moments of rationality.
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