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Show 394 rolled was really a pair of eyebrows. Lorin gripped the stair rail and climbed back up, feeling a little more control over his balance. He began walking back the way he had come, but on the opposite sidewalk, since the one he had come down on was now squirming with eels. The soles of his feet felt blistered inside his tennis shoes, and between the heat and the violet smog he was developing a headache, but that was all right; it meant his head was still behaving normally. The sidewalk broke open in front of him and he stared suddenly down into the black pilings of the pier with their scab of barnacles and the thrashing black water that rocked them back and forth, but he was too quick to be caught by surprise and darted around the thrusting beak of the split before it broke the pier in two. He was nearly hit by a car that was creeping toward the turnaround, and thumped its hood with the heel of his hand and said "Nice job!" to the driver, whose face through the windshield was a mass of wormtrails. He felt a little ill, but ocean smells always did that to him, and besides he hadn't eaten yet, except for the corn chips. He walked faster, passing a middle-aged couple with a yellow poodle on a leash, trying to keep his elbows from jabbing the air. He remembered a newsreel he had seen as a kid showing men in a walking race. Their elbows had jabbed the air and their pel vises had jerked back and forth in the effort to extend their strides and still keep one foot on the ground at all times. They had looked grotesque and self-important, and he didn't want to look like that. None of them had been trying to keep the lid on something that was going to shred their brains if they slowed down, but it wasn't necessary to look grotesque while you were keeping control. By the time he passed the carousel he realized he should have stopped and eaten something-a bowl of clam chowder perhaps-at the lobster house, |
