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My ­don nations of memory that have no trade with each other Because I loved Pearl Sugars, I had always been loath to think of her in context with her deether raised terrible questions to which I had long resisted seeking answers

Pearl Sugars knew that her daughter was one off hteen She nancy and the responsibility of child-rearing would stresspoint

Yet she did not interfere on hter I had seen evidence of this on nus and hot teh she was not intimidated

by anyone else and would not hesitate to take a swing at a threatening ars liked her rootless life too randchild Wanderlust, the lure of rich card gaas, Reno, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Dallas, San Antonio, New Orleans, Memphis - a need for adventure and excite­ment kept her away from Pico Mundo ars could not have iined either the intensity or the relentless nature of un and the threats that shaped my childhood

As I write this, no one knows except h Stormy has been told all my other secrets, I withheld this one from even her Only when Little Ozzie reads this manuscript, which I have written at his insistence, will I have shared entirely what my mother is to me and what I am to her

Guilt and shame have, until now, kept h, even if just twenty, to know that I have no logical reason to feel either guilt or shame, that I was the victi marinated in both eive this script to Ozzie, I will burn with humiliation After he has read it, I will cover my face, abashed, when he speaks of these portions of the narrative

Infected e their secrets

Shakespeare MacBeth, Act 5, Scene 1

That literary allusion is included here not merely to please you, Ozzie There’s bitter truth in it that resonates with me My mother had infected my mind with such a potent virus that I had not been able to confess my shameful victimization even to ed

As for Granny Sugars: I must noonder whether her peripatetic lifestyle and her frequent absences, co and restless nature, contributed ical proble that ht not be the result of inadequate nurturing, but enetics Perhaps Pearl Sugars suffered from a milder form of the sa ways than did ht have been an inversion of randmother’s wanderlust My mother’s need for financial security, won at the expense of a pregnancy that repulsed her,fever turned inside out

This would suggest that ars was but a different facet of the same mental condition that made my mother such a terror This disturbs me for reasons I can understand but also for reasons that I suspect will not be clear to me until I’ve lived another twenty years, if I do

When I was sixteen, Pearl Sugars asked me to come on the road with her By then, I had become what I am: a seer of the dead with limitations, with responsibilities that I must fulfill I had no choice but to decline her offer- If circuame, adventure to adventure, the stresses of daily life and constant contactwoht I knew

I enuine love that my mother lacks, and s are not true, thenfailed to banish these troubling thoughts on the drive out of

Pico Mundo, I arrived at the Church of the Whispering Comet in a mood that matched the ambience of dead pals on the slide to ruin

I parked in front of the Quonset hut where the three coyotes had encircled ht hunters In the noonday heat, they shelter in cool dark dens

The dead prostitute, charmer of coyotes, was not to be seen, either I hoped that she had found her way out of this world, but I doubted thatcounsel and platitudes had convinced her tothe ite that served as ht, the scissors, and the package of foil-wrapped , the towelettes had seemed to be a peculiar inclusion, the scissors even more peculiar Yet subconsciously I must have known exactly why I would need theers to ourselves; we only try to be

When I got out of the car, the fierce heat of the Mojave was matched by its stillness, a nearly perfect silence found perhaps nowhere else but in a dioramic snow scene sealed in Lucite

My watch revealed that time had not stood still - 11:57

Two desiccated brown phoenix palround in front of the Quonset hut, as if paving the way not for me but for an overdue messiah I had not returned to raise the dead, only to examine him

When I stepped inside, I felt as if I had cast o in the furnace of Nebuchadnezzar, though this was a heat, laced with an unspeakable scent, froel could not spare h the portal-style s,

but they were so sht

I followed the littered hallway to the fourth door I went into the pink room, once a den of profitable fornication, now a slow-cook crematorium

FIFTY-FIVE

NO CURIOUS PEOPLE OR CARRION EATERS HAD BEEN

here in my absence The corpse lay where I had left it, one end of the shroud open, one shod foot exposed, otherrapped in the white bedsheet

The hot night and the blisteringhad facilitated and accel­erated decomposition The stench washeat and the stink had the power of two quick punches to the gut I backed quickly out of the roo for a cleaner breath and struggling to repress the urge to voht the foil-sealed towelettes for this pur­pose, I ripped open one of them and tore two strips frorance I rolled the saturated strips into dripping wads and plugged hcorpse When I reentered the rooain, anyway

I could have cut the shoelace that secured the top of the shroud -

the one at the foot had broken the previous night - and rolled the body out of its wrapping The thought of the dead ain, convinced me to approach the problem with a different solution

Reluctantly, I knelt at the head of the corpse I propped the flash­light against it in such a way as to best illuminate my work

I snipped the shoelace and tossed it aside The scissors were sharp enough to tri at once I cut with patience and care, repulsed by the possibility of gouging the dead man