Thirsty Read Free Page A

am recognized by one of the damned, the hunger is very bad.
    I lie with my head under the pillow.
    Everyone else is asleep.
    I dream of a straight road. It is night, and my headlights define a row of beeches.
    I stop at a crosswalk where there’s a single flashing yellow light. A fair-haired woman starts to cross.
    She makes it halfway across before she turns and peers through the windshield.
    Her look is of fury and hatred.
    She is the vampiress.
    She crosses; and I drive on, shaken.
    At the next crosswalk, I pull to a halt. She crosses again. When she reaches the halfway point, she turns and stares at me.
    I do not know if I have murdered her and she is haunting me.
    I am wrapped in her arms, my face buried in her neck. I feel the softness of her breasts against my chest and move my hands up toward them.
    “Do not worry,” she croons. “You are mine.”
    You are mine.

T o make the Wompanoag Reservoir, they flooded two towns on purpose. It is the kind of thing that would be embarrassing to do by accident.
    They arranged for great walls and trestles to be thrown up and aqueducts to pass through the forest.
    They evacuated two little villages and paid some people to live somewhere else. Then at the time appointed, someone closed the sluice gates, and the river slowly rose and covered miles of the valley. The water crawled up tree trunks and ate steeples and hymnbooks and empty drawers. People say that there are still two towns under the reservoir. It is a strange idea, eels and sunfish hanging in windows and bedrooms.
    The town of Clayton dribbles down the slopes of a deep valley on either side of the river. The whole town — the white houses, the new Catholic church, the old brick Victorian factories — faces the white wall of the dam. When we were younger, Tom and I used to talk about what it would be like if the dam disappeared and there were a huge tidal wave. We talked about it covering the school and leaving only the drifting oil from Cindy Brandt’s big hair.
    Huge square buildings of granite and marble are spaced around the dam and the shores of the lake. They are like tombs or maybe whited sepulchers. In fact they are water purification plants and well houses, and I think one of them is a pump. They have made a park on one side of the reservoir with grass and paths. Leading across the still river and up a hill are the giant trestles that used to support the aqueduct. Now they are just columns, and they support pieces of the air.
    We are walking down the precipitous steps. On some trees, the buds are out. On others, they are just a sort of red fuzz.
    I want to talk to Tom alone about some things, mainly things like feeling strange wild thirsts and longings in your chest when the evening falls, and what to do about desire, but it’s difficult to bring that kind of thing up just after lunch. I want to know what I should do about Rebecca, and whether the hopping, giddy feeling I have is love; I want to know why I’m having trouble sleeping sometimes and what this strange hunger is. And I want to ask Tom because Tom knows Rebecca better than I do, and he is better looking than I am. We can sit by the shores of the obsidian lake and talk of whether I am in love.
    “Then Choi goes into the central torture chamber,” says Tom. “There are all these people with hypodermics stuck into them and stuff. There’s this guy with nunchaks.”
    “I don’t understand the hypodermics,” I say.
    “Like shots,” says Tom.
    “No,” I say, “why are they in the torture chamber?”
    “Because they’re injecting people with heroin or something.”
    “Later in the movie, did you see the scene with the truck?” asks Jerk from behind us.
    I am bored. I keep looking around and fantasizing that we will run into Rebecca Schwartz on the buzzed grass.
    Tom is saying, “So the guy with the nunchaks starts spinning them around in front of his face and so on, like, showing off.”
    This could go on for some time.
    Tom and Jerk