Spin Dry Read online

  Spin Dry

  a novel

  Greg Hollingshead

  for David and Rosa

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  EPILOGUE

  About the Author

  Praise for Spin Dry

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ONE

  The address on Forebay Rack Road in the Millpond Industrial Park that Dr. Silver had given Rachel turned out to be concrete block fronted with opaque, tea-coloured glass and divided into number units of varying sizes. Hodge Moving was squeezed into No. 3 and ComputerGrafix into the phone booth-like No. 17, but Dr. Silver’s Morgan was parked almost at the very end, in front of the comparative sprawl of No. 23: The Silver Dream Research Centre.

  Rachel parked her Civic right up next to Silver’s Morgan, which of course was silver and had licence plates that said DREAM. She was late, almost clipped its rear fender. Back at the house she had got into one of those shock bag-packing states where the packer packs as if in the wake of a blow to the head. Telling her story twice a week in Silver’s office over in Village Market Squarewas one thing. Being given two hours to show up here with her bag packed was another. And also the reason why, though forty-five minutes late, Rachel did not right away get out of her car. Instead sat tracing the bumps on the steering wheel.

  Thinking: Nothing quite like no options, is there, to recommend the marginal? If my problem was medical, this would be a voodoo charter to Haiti.

  Thinking: Problem? I don’t even know whose problem I’ve got.

  Thinking: Her husband gets a little obsessive, and a sane wife will act the moderating influence, right? She doesn’t go hog-wild too. It’s a relationship, marriage, not a mania competition.

  Rachel took a deep breath. Listened to it. Attended to the tickle of her armpits dripping like caves. Homed in on that sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach.

  Thinking: Was a relationship. Even before he disappeared it was a relationship.

  Thinking: Great. Terrific. Why don’t we have a little cry here in the car? Double over with some racking sobs? Show up with our eyes all red and our face blotched? Do the cliché? Isn’t that what we’re here to recover?

  Thinking: Don’t think that.

  Took a deep breath. Listened to it.

  Checked her makeup in the rearview. Laid hold of her purse and bag.

  The opaque glass door of the Dream Centre opened into a narrow corridor in unpainted wallboard. Rachel advanced warily.

  “Dr. Silver?”

  She had come to a fluorescent room dominated by a machine whose smooth beige surface was a confusion of gauges and blinking lights.

  “Dr. Silver?”

  No one here. Funny how the most straightforward of arrangements will fail to be predictable. Or had she, in that shock, got the day wrong, and that was why she’d thought she had to be here so fast? Or he had, was here but busy with something completely different, was way too disorganized to be trusted? This was her first sign: small now, but later, as his craziness revealed itself, it would seem to have foretold all, if only she had trusted her own—

  Rachel looked to the machine, in its authority. It hummed, gauges softly glowing. At least six red lights on its surface discussed her advance.

  Don’t be silly.

  In the air the smell of cement floor. Perpendicular to one wall, separated by portable screens: three iron cots. White sheets and grey blankets folded and tucked with institutional severity. Directly on Rachel’s left, in that same wall, were two doors. One had Washroom stencilled on it, the other Keep Out. Farther down the opposite wall, the one on her right, a large metal desk, mounded with paper. Bag and purse tight in one fist, she edged towards it, peering. Graph printouts annotated with pencil jot—

  “Oh hi, Rachel—Sorry to startle you.”

  Dr. Silver was wearing his trademark glasses in scarlet frames but today with matching sneakers. He seemed shorter than ever before, his hair frizzier, and his belly caused that Born for Therapy sweatshirt to hang out over his jeans.

  “Listen Rachel.” He was also chewing gum. “I’ll be a couple of minutes. Why don’t you take Bed 3, the one on the end, and go right back to the start of this whole thing. What would that be, anyways? Think fast!”

  “Um—Cam Wilkes?”

  “Good enough. The first time you met Wilkes. Take it from there.”

  “Dr. Silver, could you please tell me what this is all—”

  “Rachel? You can quit anytime. But. As I’ve said before. Until you do, you’re going to have to trust me, with an implicit faith. By the way, listen. We’re getting to know each other pretty well by now, right? Five sessions? Call me Alex.”

  “Alex. Tell me it’s not going to involve that machine over there.”

  “First things first. Stretch out and go back to Wilkes.”

  The Keep Out door closed behind Alex Silver with a double click. Rachel set her bag on Bed 3 and sat down next to it. Like a debutante in a motel room, tested the springs. Eyed the machine in its beige humming. Reached out to touch its white roll of paper under a dormant stylus. Tried to understand the pattern of the red blinks. The simpler the more innocuous, right? But it wasn’t simple. Not at all. Random, then—? Rivetted to the thing’s side, she noticed, were the words Hewlett Packard. These meant nothing to her…. Computers?

  For a while, like a dreamer dreaming she has already got up and is brushing her teeth, etc., is fully on the way to the office, Rachel had herself lying down, closing her eyes, and so on, except immediately jolting up like one with a night terror. Finally she really did lie down, close her eyes, lids quivering, stretch, relax all muscles each in turn, from toes to scalp, excluding tongue—she never could do tongue, had always figured she would have no problems ever again if only, just once, she could do tongue—and went back and back, the whole way back, to how it had all started.

  ——

  One incredibly hot Friday last summer she, Rachel Boseman, was on her way home from grocery shopping at a big new supermall six exits along Highway 303 from Village-on-the-Millpond, one moment rolling along on bearings of pure habit, the next straining into the windshield at identical, alien two-and three-bedroom houses in pastel and aluminum and at street signs she had never seen before (Arbour Avenue? Wheat Berry Drive? Sluice Way?), making another U-turn, hammering her palms on the wheel, turning the radio down lower and lower so she could concentrate, and thinking,

  For godsake, I’m lost in my own development.

  Finally, after seeing no one—not even, in that heat, a kid (“Get serious, Mum. It’s a meltdown out there.”)—Rachel noticed a man operating a backhoe in the middle of his front lawn. In streetlit darkness and practically forty-degree heat, digging thisbig hole. Now, Rachel had lived most of her life in the city, where strange sights were salt and vinegar and sometimes ketchup on the french fries of routine, but here among the lawns and fresh pavement of Village-on-the-Millpond they caused her to theorize. Maybe the job had to be done immediately: a burst pipe. Maybe night was the only chance he got. Maybe he came with the backhoe. Maybe he knew what he was doing.

  When he waved she veered in sharp. Immediately he shut off the backhoe and reached for something under the seat. He eased himself to the grass with care. He wore sunglasses, pajamas, slippers, a flesh-coloured workglove on his visible hand. The other hand he held behind him. He approached wearing a soft sad expression, not untheatrical. His stroll was a compendium of compensatory shifts and adjustments, like the sloping float of a camel. His nose was flattened and he was quite chinless; he had a long, forward-canting neck. His hair was wiry
and blond, and it stood back far and high off his florid face. He was tall and he was narrow. He was stooped, with a protuberant, forward-thrusting belly. Between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand he held a cigarette, its filter cupped in the upturned palm of the workglove. When he reached the passenger door of Rachel’s Civic he let those sunglasses slip down his nose to examine her parking: radials bulging over the curb, she just knew. He drew his right hand from behind his back. On it too was a flesh-coloured workglove, but it held a trumpet. This he put to his lips and with muted passion, his body curved like an S, the cigarette in his ear, he played the most haunting, sad, exquisite melody that Rachel had ever heard.”

  Thank you,” she said when he had finished. Already she’d had to wipe tears from her eyes about three times. “That was really, really beautiful.” This was what she said. But there was something more. It was as if the melody was for her.

  The man had removed the cigarette from his ear and brought a cupped workglove to his chin for a reflective drag. He squinted through the smoke.

  “What is it?” Rachel asked, meaning the melody. She needed a name, something.

  The man smiled a melancholy slow smile that kept slipping and replied, “Only a horn rendition of a love that will never die.”

  “I’m sorry, did you lose your wife?”

  At first Rachel thought he turned away then to conceal weeping, but when he maintained this attitude for some time she realized he was gazing at that hole he’d been digging.

  Surely it wasn’t her gra—? “What are you—?”

  “Trying to find my gas line.”

  He’d come slowly back around.

  “But isn’t that dangerous?”

  “Can a bus ride change a person’s life?”

  “Pardon?”

  “When the foreseen comes as a big surprise, what’s the unforeseen come as?”

  “Thanks again for playing for me.”

  “I wasn’t playing for you.”

  Quickly she glanced at his face. Dark glasses to conceal eyes. Probably on medication. “I have to go now.”

  Where? You’re driving in circles. Normally I’d say, Don’t worry about it. Strangers are always getting lost in the Millpond. But you’ve lived here for two years.”

  “A year and a half.”

  “Twenty-one months.”

  Uh-oh.

  “Stood on the sidewalk and watched you and your husband move in,” he recalled, watching Rachel again now, over those shades. “Used to make myself go out more in those days. Used to sit and gaze across the waters of the millpond and wonder what it was all about. Used to lie on my patio and stare straight up, watching the evening sky turn navy then black while I waited for Della, my wife, to come home. Heavy dew in the suburbs. Almost caught pneumonia.”

  “So how do I get there? Just tell me.”

  “Dell Drive?” Slowly he twisted around, this time to his left and seemed to stare at his driveway. Again he remained in the attitude so long that Rachel felt obliged to follow his gaze. The driveway was simple black asphalt, quite empty. Under the streetlights it had a pleasing sheen, the scuffless look of fresh sealant. As she looked at his driveway, Rachel noticed that the windows of his house were blocked with aluminum foil. One of those.

  “I used to call that driveway Della’s Drive,” the man said, coming back around. “I’d tell her, ‘Della, there’s something wrong here. The part of our little home you know best is the driveway.’ That woman was always out. Notice: Dell, Della. What’s an a? If all you really had to do was remember—”

  “All I really have to do is get going.”

  “Yes, I did lose my wife. One day she was out all day, and that evening she called to say she wasn’t coming back. Della was always considerate. But this is bigger than that.”

  “What is?”

  He bowed his head and touched the toe of his slipper against the door of the Civic. His face came up in a rueful smile. “A little rusty—”

  Rachel shrugged. “My husband’s unemployed.”

  Nodding, he drew a long hand from a workglove and laid the glove on the door by his elbow. He reached into the car. “Cam Wilkes.”

  “Rachel Boseman.” Now why did she let him know that?

  “Nice to meet you, Rachel. But tell me honestly. Why have you moved to a hazardous place like the Millpond?”

  “Mr. Wilkes, I’d love to sit here and talk all night but—”

  “You don’t say to yourself it’s not hazardous, I hope.”

  “Everywhere’s hazardous for a—Listen. I truly do ha—”

  “My card.”

  His card was printed in tangerine letters on shifting aqua moiré like rumpled rayon. It said:

  PAGO* International Cam Wilkes, Founding Member and President Village-on-the-Millpond Chapter *People Afraid to Go Out

  “Rachel, do you ever have trouble leaving the house?” His voice had modulated to confidential. He was leaning with both forearms against the car. “That’s the first sign. Surprising how many Villagers are afraid to step out that door, ride a bus, or sit under a hair dryer. At PAGO we believe a good twelve percent of our neighbours are agoraphobic, and that’s not even counting us! A place like this is at least eight to ten percent above the national average.”

  “Uh-huh—”

  “Guess how many working hours are lost each year in the retail and light-industry sectors of the Millpond due to agoraphobia-related disorders?”

  “Two hundred and thirty thousand?”

  “Ninety-three thousand. You’re just trying to minimize. Last year we absorbed the Shy Persons’ Discussion Group. Turned out they weren’t shy at all! Just a bunch of misdiagnosed agoraphobics! Lately we’ve been holding discussions with the ultra-feminist group SMILE concerning their work on sexism in the Dick and Jane readers, initially a matter of strictly limited interest to us. But zealotry really is a marvelous stimulus to thought. Those discussions were so intense they sent me straight back to the old readers, and boy, did that ever trigger memories. It turns out Dick and Jane have plenty to say to PAGO. And what a dear, sweet little number that Jane is—”

  He seemed to drift off.

  “So you’re not going to tell me how to get home.”

  He drifted back. “An umbrella or a cane can be almost as reassuring on an evening walk as a dog, or a spouse. We’ve just assimilated the VCF—that’s Village Cane Fighters—”

  “Gotta go.” Rachel took the Civic out of Park.

  He pointed to his card. It was still in her hand.

  “Nice, eh? Evokes the vertigo. Listen. Our new motto. Passed only last week by our International Council. Ready? Oh, oh, oh!”

  Rachel watched her hand put the Civic back into Park. “From Dick and Jane,” she heard her voice say. Ever since Wilkes had mentioned those two, she’d been fighting off déjà vu, and now it had her. “‘Oh, oh, oh,’” she said. “‘See funny, funny Sally’?”

  Cam Wilkes was amazed. “How did you know that?”

  Rachel shrugged. “I guess they stayed with me.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know. Haven’t they with everybody?”

  “But this is you! This could be the key to your problem!”

  “My problem, Mr. Wilkes, is I’m lost and you won’t tell me how to get home.”

  “You’re not alone. Each day as Dick, Jane, and Sally set about their skill-enhancing tasks, what happens? Dick’s on roller skates with Spot on a leash, but Spot takes off after Puff. The caption for that one reads, ‘Funny, funny Dick,’ but Jane and Sally aren’t laughing, and Dick sure has nothing to laugh about. It’s all danger, surprise, and the constant nervous laughter of fear.”

  “Right—”

  “It’s supposed to be a safe, dependable world those kids live in, but that’s the last thing it is. Sound familiar?”

  “I really do have to go now,” dropping the card into her purse.

  Cam Wilkes’ eyes followed it. “That’s OK, Rachel,” he said quie
tly. “I suppose I set it up, talking like a one-track Willie the way I do. You’re not the first to ‘have to go,’ you know.”

  Before Rachel could respond to this, he threw down his cigarette, stepped back, and played a few notes: defiant, but sad.

  Rachel slipped the Civic into Drive.

  “You’ve been lost in here all along, haven’t you, Rachel?” He was back at the window. “Whatever you do, don’t blame yourself. It happens to people all the time. I see them from my window. Every pass and here they are back at the same old place that little bit worse off. You know, sometimes it seems like they’re just ordinary, good-hearted folks doing their best, and really it’s the whole place that’s—”

  “I’m really sorry, but I absolutely have to get going.”

  He looked at her sadly then off down the street, pointing. “First left, second right should get you onto Glen. Dell has to be around there someplace. Four, maybe five along. There is a certain simple plan. Glen, Dell. You know what I mean? This isn’t nature.”

  “Thanks,” Rachel reaching across to wind up the window.

  “Here’s the main thing we ask ourselves at PAGO.” Three hands, one bare, a flesh-coloured workglove on either side of it, were riding up on the glass. Rachel wound slowly to be polite. “What is the reason I am here? What knowledge, what grief, what unutterable emptiness?”

  The gap had disappeared; he was crouched to address the glass. “I’m serious, Rachel. Take a hard look in the mirror andask yourself why. Don’t ever pretend moving here just happened. Do that, and in three years a trip to the 7-Eleven will mean a complete change of underwear for you or for someone close to you—”

  In the rearview as Rachel accelerated she saw him wave one of those flesh-coloured workgloves while pointing at it in a frantic, attention-getting way, then pretend to sob briefly into his hands before curling his body around the trumpet. She wondered if he understood the true meaning of locating your gas line with a backhoe. She wondered if he really had seen her around. She wondered how many apparently humdrum residents of Village-on-the-Millpond were in fact seriously wacked-out crackpots.