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Show 207 man whose silver hair was combed straight back and lacquered into place and whose lower lip hung open exposing spotted teeth and the membrane, layered with bubbles, that connected his gum to his lip. There was the face of a young girl, the down on her upper lip bleached white and her cheeks etched with scarlet acne. There was a boy with a bumpy, triangular forehead and fangs made of celery sticks. There was a woman with one eye out, an angry mass of veins supplying its place. There was a man wearing a wide bristling beard but whose hair was parted in the middle and plastered down, forcing his ears out like wings. There was an unshaved derelict with no teeth, opening and closing his mouth like a grouper. The number of faces grew moment by moment until he couldn't tell any longer which were the spaces between the foreground heads and which were the heads grown small with distance. Such specificity informed these faces as they boiled up out of the distance and fell away that Lorin suspected he must have seen them somewhere, but for the life of him none looked familiar. Other impressions came and went. He saw coils of vegetation open and put out leaves that in their turn opened and contained spiders. He saw square doors open in blank skies and disgorge clouds of opaque light in which furtive things crept. He saw broken steps leading to a house in which something wrinkled sat behind the door and waited. He saw men in pantaloons dancing with alligators. As the critical moment approached (she was making strange cries in his ear) he was seeing sailboats at rest along the shore of a lagoon, their empty masts weaving patterns in the sunlight. The hillside over the lagoon was covered with houses and trees, with here and there the steeple and louvered dormer of a church, and in the distance (he discovered he was pulling back and could see farther now) more hills rose and fell, with houses and barns and siloes and the bright patchwork of fields, and beyond |