Jimmie turned his head through moonlight to look again at the clock. A little after four in the morning. No birds now. Soon, though. Been in this bed so long, and so long awake, that he felt the grit on the sheets against his skin. And when he threw back the sheet, the sweetish sour odor of his body drifted up to him.
Had he remembered bills this month? And for that matter, had he had any money coming in recently? When was the last time he’d gone hunting for bargains? Man, he used to love doing that. Things were changing. He started to understand a little how his parents would lose track, how they couldn’t keep up.
He’d always paid such close attention. He had to get back to doing that.
He had gone to sleep almost at once, then woke an hour later feeling … empty? He was lying in exactly the same position as when he first lay down, left side, knees drawn up, face turned into the pillow. He hadn’t moved.
For a moment upon waking he thought he heard music far off, then decided it was nothing more than random sounds around him, wind, water in pipes, the old house settling, that his mind turned to something more.
He lifted his hand, the finger cleaned and rebandaged before he went to bed, into the light. Sirens started up close by, at the firehouse three streets over, he assumed, then abruptly stopped.
Maybe he’d get up after all, fix some food. Whack another finger.
Or check out his usual sites. But that prospect didn’t do much more for him right now than looking for stuff to buy and sell. It felt to him as though something had changed forever, and he didn’t even know what the something was. And that, the pretense of it, made him laugh, at the very moment the sirens started up again. He listened to them squall down the street out of hearing, off to whatever fire, accident, emergency waited. How frail our hold is, he thought. And what a small wind it takes to blow it all apart.
He understood then why he’d awakened, what the emptiness was.
He had been dreamless.
The dreams that had come to fill his nights, the dreams that had become so much a part of his life—they were not there. And he felt their absence with the same uncomprehending despair a man feels at the loss of arms, legs, the ability to stand and walk. An ache, an emptiness.
Jimmie looks to the window where a moth flutters at the pane, across which car lights periodically sweep. With no premeditation and no true realization of what he is doing, Jimmie parts his lips and says quietly: “Are you there?” He says it again, and waits.
Later, with dawn advancing tile by tile across the floor, he’ll get up and go to his computer. He will sit there a long time, listening to the sound of the day starting up around him, before turning the computer on. It will be many long months, a winter and a spring, before he dreams again.
A Note on the Author
James Sallis is the acclaimed author of more than two dozen volumes of fiction, poetry, translation, essays, and criticism, including the Lew Griffin cycle, Drive, Cypress Grove, Cripple Creek, and Salt River. His biography of the great crime writer Chester Himes is an acknowledged classic. Sallis lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with his wife, Karyn.
Novels
The Long-Legged Fly
Moth
Black Hornet
Eye of the Cricket
Bluebottle
Ghost of a Flea
Death Will Have Your Eyes
Renderings
Drive
Cypress Grove
Cripple Creek
Salt River
What You Have Left: The Turner Trilogy
Stories
A Few Last Words
Limits of the Sensible World
Time’s Hammers: Collected Stories
A City Equal to My Desire
Potato Tree and Other Stories
Sorrow’s Kitchen
My Tongue in Other Cheeks: Selected Translations
As editor
Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R. Delany
Jazz Guitars
The Guitar in Jazz
Other
The Guitar Players
Difficult Lives
Saint Glinglin by Raymond Queneau (translator)
Gently into the Land of the Meateaters
Chester Himes: A Life
A James Sallis Reader
Copyright © 2011 by James Sallis
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Walker & Company, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Published by Walker Publishing Company, Inc., New York
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Sallis, James, 1944–
The killer is dying / by James Sallis.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-8027-7945-8 (hardcover)
1. Phoenix (Ariz.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.A462K55 2011
813'.54—dc22
2010038548
First published in the U.S. by Walker Publishing Company in 2011
This e-book edition published in 2011
E-book ISBN: 978-0-8027-7946-5
Visit Walker & Company’s Web site at www.walkerbooks.com