Chapter 19 Section 10

He spreads mayonnaise.He spread mayonnaise on the bread and put the lunch meat on top.He never put mayonnaise on the lunch meat, but spread it on the bread, then covered the lunch meat, and watched the mayonnaise seep out along the edge of the bread. He took the sandwich and went into the next room.His father was watching TV, bent over in his periscope chair, as if about to fall on the carpet.His father was suffering from a disease that doctors could not identify, treating one disease to cause another.If one disease requires a certain drug, the drug may worsen another disease.There are disease recurrences and side effects.Richard and his mother tried to let him take the medicine according to the time of taking the medicine, and carefully read the halved dose and warning text written in the instructions, for example, if you need to take this medicine, don't forget that medicine.

Richard ate half of the sandwich and put the rest on the arm of his chair.In the kitchen, he called his friend Bud Walling.Walling, who lived in an unknown place forty miles away, was not really much of a friend. He drove to Bud's residence. The two sides of the road used to be farmland, which is now enclosed for real estate development.Here, high winds are a force that must be considered.A quarter of a mile from the middle school now, he could still hear the great flag whirring in the wind, the snap of the flag halyards against the posts.He drove into the wind, saw the dust sweeping the road, felt as if he were entering the white sky, and felt a sense of futility and stupidity.

Bud's house seemed to have been blown down from the hillside by the wind, where nature had left it here in its play.The yard door was open, and there were crooked piles of logs, and an unfinished porch stood on cinderblock so low that the whole house seemed to be sunken in sand.Bud kept a coyote, a cross between a coyote and a street mongrel, which he kept on a chain in a rickety shed at the back of the house.Richard felt that this dog was not as dangerous as the rumors said. Bud kept it purely to satisfy the young people's sense of excitement: owning an animal on a chain.However, he did things according to his own whim, and kept him alive.

He suddenly remembered that he hadn't poured two glasses of water for his father in order to take the blue and yellow capsules according to the instructions marked in bold on the medicine bottle.He knew it was his father's fault for not paying attention to his medication, and his mother's fault for not being there when she was needed, yet he felt his confidence had been damaged by his own small mistakes.In Richard's inner world, there are always trivial entanglements: whose fault is this?It's mine, sorry.I want him to die and be done with. He cracked a silly joke, knocking on Bud's door and saying, "Spirits, cigarettes, pistols."

Nothing happened.He went in and saw Bud sawing a small piece of lumber in a large room between two high stools.Bud has been working in earnest for several months, but the house is still a bare shelf.Richard felt that Bud was not building a house so much as destroying some terrible ghost.Perhaps, Bud is overcoming the habit of taking drugs that he has developed for many years, and has come to a one-off end. "There's something wrong with your phone," Richard said. "I think I should drive out and see if you're all right." "Why not?" "I've called the phone company for repairs."

"I myself think there's something wrong with the phone." "Sometimes, they can troubleshoot in the company." "The phone calls bring more grief than joy." At this time, Bud finally raised his head and noticed his figure. "The phone brings other people's voices into your life that you're not prepared to face." Richard walked along the edge of the room, palms on the planed window sill, examining the plastic-covered iron nails that held the sash in place.This motion acts as a distraction that stops the pain of everyday conversation. "I'm going to install a parquet floor," Budd said, "probably in a herringbone pattern."

"The effect should be good." "Preferably not bad. I may not even know what method to take, though." The wind blows against the plastic cladding, making an unnerving sound.Richard wondered, how could this man, who had been addicted to drugs, work all day in this noise?Plastic overlay bulges and makes screeching noises.Pure cocaine tricks people into thinking the drug is good. He thought of things he could say. "Tell you, Bud, I'm turning forty-two next week, next Thursday." "Time is not forgiving." "However, I feel that I am only half of this age, really."

"The reason is obvious. You live according to your own will." "What do you mean by that?" "With your gang," Bud said. "They can't do it themselves." "Who can? My question is directed at you." Bud threw the sawn half of the log into a corner and watched the other half as if someone had just handed it to him in a crowded street. "What are you thinking?" Richard asked. "Don't they smell?" "what?" "Old people. They're like spoiled milk." Richard heard the plastic window slam.

"I did not notice." "You didn't notice. Well. If you want to feel your right age, get a wife. It's good, it's scary to say, but it makes sense. A wife is the only way to save people like you and me .Of course, they don't make you feel young." Richard was in the corner, shifting excitedly, liking the idea of ​​women saving wayward men. "Where is she?" he asked. "On the night shift." Bud's wife worked for Texas Instruments on the assembly line, assembling circuit boards from microchips.That's something for the information superhighway, Bard said.Richard felt that he was almost in love with Bud's wife.This feeling appeared from time to time, hidden in his heart, which seemed to be half pitiful, as if his heart was made of some kind of cotton product.What would Itna think if she knew how he felt?The dread of the question actually made him physically manifest—a fever in his body, a fever in his back, a strain in his throat.

He thought of something else to say. "Left-handed, I saw it in the paper the other day." He paused, trying to recall the formal terms he had read in the narrow column. "In general, left-handers—I'm not—live a little less than right-handers. Right-handers live ten years longer than left-handers. Do you believe that?" "We're talking about life expectancy." "The usual age of death for lefties, let me see, is sixty-five." "Because they face the North Pole when they masturbate," Budd said, using sentences that Richard couldn't even analyze.

He saw Bud pry the nails out of the old floorboards, and went up to help, looking around for the hammer. "So, Richard." "what?" "You drove fifty miles here just to tell me my phone is out of order." Richard wonders if this is a trap?Is Bud Walling setting the stage for his usual snarky rhetoric?Perhaps, this is just an ordinary expression of gratitude. "Forty miles, Bud." "That makes me feel better. I'd like to buy you a beer." "Ok." "Probably, Itna drove fifty miles. I forget the exact number." Bud always talked about something private about his wife, her sexual orientation or digestive problems, for example.Whenever Bud mentioned his wife's name, old Richard held his breath, hoping and fearing at the same time that something private might be said.Richard knew that Bud was saying this to shock and repel him, but he was intent on understanding every word, understanding the description of shape and smell, watching Bud's long, wrinkled face, Look for hints of sarcasm. "She'll be sorry she didn't see you," Bud said, looking away from the rotting wood and rising dust to watch Richard. Richard is not left-handed, but allows himself to shoot left-handed.This is something Bud will never understand—he must insulate himself from his emotions in order to escape the isolation he finds himself in.He bases his argument on this: If you're sitting against the door and driving with your right hand, it's practically better to keep your right hand on the steering wheel and your left hand -- the one holding the gun -- out the window.This way, you don't have to shoot from the right side of the body to the left.Richard could have explained this to Bud, and Bud might have understood.However, Bud couldn't understand that Richard always told outsiders his privacy, shared it with others, and made such things an integral part of other people's history.It was the only escape available to Richard, in order to get rid of the frivolous details of his personal identity. Budd said, "Here's what the cop said, put your feet together, put your head back, and close your eyes. When he said please, Itna started laughing. Now, put your hands up. Take your left hand back," Budd said. Touch your nose with your index finger. I stood there in the heavy rain, and he explained it to me in the car. He told me, touch your nose with your index finger." "You're five times more likely to die in a crash while driving if you're left-handed." "More than a right-hander." "Better than a right-hander," said Richard, with an air of devout belief. Bud lifted a plank off the floor. "It's not my problem." "It's not my problem either." "I'm going to die of stress," Budd said. "I'm telling you, I'm stressed out." Richard waited for Bud to say the following.He had worked in a supermarket, sitting in a glass cubicle, batching individual checks, clearing shopping cards, rolling coins in paper and distributing them to the cashiers in charge.Somehow, however, he seemed to have forgotten his role, reappearing at the exit counter, scanning the goods with his hands, noting the prices of fruits and vegetables, and occasionally attracting insults from strangers passing by. "The bathroom wasn't built yet, so we had to be outside. I got a place outside, and it was the only way to do it for a while. But it was out of luck for Itna, and you can imagine how upset she was. " "It's hard to wait until I get off work, and I have to use something like this to go to the toilet when I go home." "The pressure was mounting and it was really uncomfortable." "You still have to drive in from this road." "It had to be. She quickly remembered, though. There was no toilet in the house, and she stared at me like she wanted to kill me." Richard's parents were sick at home, or one was sick and the other was very bad-tempered.However, before the express cashier exit of the supermarket, the obese woman waiting in line told him some irrelevant things.Like, sixteen cents off ketchup; that's not red pears, that's apples.He had to ask the question from the other side of the shopping area.It's not red, can't you see it?It's an apple, and I'm being charged the price of a red pear.He had to stand on the other side of the shopping area and talk to the other cashiers so loudly that those standing in both lines could hear them. "To me, it's not a problem," Budd said, "because there's a certain rationale for going outside for convenience. When you think about convenience, you'll see what I mean." They talked about brain trauma, about whether he had been adopted or abused.The issues they talked about were all about distance.If you shoot from the driver's side, if you don't want to shoot across the width of your car, between your car and the other car, you still have to face the problem: the other car's With the driver's seat on the side away from your steering wheel, you have to shoot from the distance between the cars plus the width of the other car.You don't shoot people in cars.If you shoot someone in a car, the driver tends to take evasive action, noticing your license plate, make, hair color, and so on.So, you shoot someone driving alone, hold the weapon in your left hand, and shoot from the driver's side.But the fact is, as he eventually found out, that if you hold a gun with your right hand—the hand you naturally use—the bullet travels roughly the same amount of space and distance as the left-handed way you learned to shoot. .He discovered this after he shot a fifth or six people—he forgot which.Although it made more sense to control the steering wheel with his left hand and shoot with his right hand—since the right hand is the natural dominant hand—he decided to continue to hold the gun with his left hand. "I just found out what I was wondering about," Budd said. They heard a dog barking outside.Richard peered through the dusty plastic covering and saw the dog dragging its chain, erect, balls tensed.He wished Itna had come home early.Itna had made meringue pies for them, and that was something he remembered.He was utterly disproportionately saddened to find that it was not she who had returned, but some animal in the woods which seemed to have alarmed the dogs.But everything is out of proportion now.The wind beat against the plastic cladding, making it quiver and snap.According to conclusions drawn from long-term studies, pure cocaine may be the best thing addicts can hope for. "You're wearing a tie," Bud said. Richard hesitated to speak, cautiously, thinking about how to respond, worried that this was a trap, and worried about the second half of Bud's words. "Oh, that's for work," he said. "I went straight home from get off work and didn't change." "But you're wearing a tie? Going to the food?" "Company rules, the whole state, presumably." He said to himself, keep calm. "And what Itna said, and she was right. You look like someone with glasses. You don't, though. We can't be sure when she said it. We said, he Wear it or not?" "Never," said Richard. When Richard walked into the house just now, Bud barely noticed him.There was nothing in the house, it was empty, giving him a lifeless feeling.Driving forty miles into transparency was scary, but he was used to it.But now Bud began to examine his clothes in detail, to examine his appearance, which surprised him and made him feel a wave of panic.He racked his brains, hoping to find a suitable topic.Maybe, say something about the dog.He looked through the plastic covering, hoping to see the dog.The plastic overlay traps dust, absorbs dust, and looks too dirty. "Well, maybe you should. Glasses change a person's appearance. Go for a pair of thick, dark frames to match your tie." He didn't understand why Bud talked to him in this way?Bud sat in a narrow gap in the floor, legs crossed, hammer on his shoulders, eyes fixed on Richard's face.Richard forced a smile on his face, trying to lighten the scene.He felt like he had a silly look on his face, as if the movement of his mouth could change the outside world. "I can think about it." "Think about it." "I should go back." "She will regret not seeing you." "Tell her my regards." "I will." The only person he could confide in was Sue Ann.Talking to her on the phone gave him a sense of authenticity, made him feel like he had found himself, into the state he'd always wanted, to be his authentic self.It's like a filling process, something pouring out from the center of the self to form the image that one wishes to realize.Have you ever felt like this?After all, that was how he felt talking to Sue Ann.You can doubt, you can ignore, but he only discovered himself after talking to her. He walked out the door to the car, and on the way he heard Bud splitting wood. Psycho killers roam the world, and cashiers wear ties to work. Bud, he thought, might have spoken the sentence. He was calling Sue Ann from a house he had broken into.There, he turned on the TV and called the mega-power station in Atlanta.He touched the object through the handkerchief, and fixed the device that processed the sound to the telephone.He had ordered it from a back cover advertisement in a promotional magazine, a publication Richard didn't usually read carefully.He was neither a security watcher nor a gun enthusiast.He used his father's old 0.38 caliber gun, which was not powerful enough to penetrate concrete walls or make big holes in portrait targets, but it could kill people. He drove out of the wooded area and into open space.As the road descended into the floodplain, he felt the true force of the wind. Sometimes he makes a phone call first and then turns on the TV, sometimes he turns on the TV first and then makes a phone call.The TV was turned off, and one hand was wrapped in a double-layered handkerchief.Before talking to Sue Ann that day, he never thought that talking on the phone, talking face to face, men and women can be so easy.He watched her there, and he was talking to her here.He saw her in a certain position in the room, her lips were moving, and her words were soft, carrying warmth, soaking into the depths of his ears.He talks to her on the phone and looks into her eyes on TV.This told him that he was really talking to her.The woman with the alien eyes and the hair was so glamorous that it shook his soul.As time went on, he spoke with more and more confidence, and gradually entered into a state of self, a little shy, but unashamed, even a little vain.However, he is honest, smart, and evasive when needed, standing under the shadowless lamp of a stranger's house.She listened, asked questions, watched him from ten feet away.She's radiant and might make people speak in an authentic way. This is an unused road.Drive thirty miles down this road and probably see no other traffic.In terms of perspective, the wires extend to the end of the field of view, sinking into the earth.After the strong wind stopped, a burst of suspense fell on the ground, reminding him of the tranquility before the Judgment Day that is said in religion. At this time, they switched the screen to that video.The vista on the video was different from what he experienced, so he was skeptical about the authenticity of that video.He kept thinking that the girl was going to move the camera and put him in the frame.He has watched it a dozen times, sitting next to his ailing father.Every time he thought, he'd be in his living room, separated from his real self, half-closed, looking at the wheels of his compact car. He later called Sue Ann twice, but the switchboard couldn't be reached - many people tried to speak to her.The people at the switchboard are cunning, have a bad attitude, and are suspicious.He needs her, uses her to keep him whole.He might tell her his name.She might call repeatedly, for days on end, spying on him on a screen, leaving him completely unraveled.He might surrender to her under the bright lights.Richard Henry Gilkey surrendered.Men in cowboy hats flocked him down the aisle, Sue Ann Corcoran at his side. He drove past the flagpoles, the flag halyards attached to them snapping.That was the sound of the strong wind blowing the flag halyard and hitting the flagpole.For some reason, the repetitive meaning of the noise made him feel guilty. He walked into the house and saw his father curled up in front of the TV.Mother was in the kitchen, operating a mixer in a large white bowl. "Look, there's something around your neck." "I went to Bud's." "Do you have time to go to Bud's house?" "We've got to give Dad some nitroglycerin." "Well, give him the medicine." "Well, should we call and ask about the new dose?" "I didn't. Did you?" she asked. That glass compartment has a small hole for talking.Instead, they made him go to the cash register and forced him to speak across the shopping area. "I'll call," she said, "but he's not there." "You'll hear the phone voice service." "I would hear the voice service on the phone telling me he wasn't there." "I was going to call," he said. "Let me fight," she said, "and you put ointment on him." After dinner, he applied ointment to his father's chest.My father was lying on the bed with stubble all over his face, like an abandoned old man, something abandoned on the island, only his eyes remained.Those eyes were teary, very deep, begging for more time.Richard applied the ointment and buttoned his slacks, thinking about the time.Maybe, at some point in the future, my father will need his help to wipe his ass. Waiting to notify next of kin. He lives in them, in their history, in the photographs in the newspapers.He survived in the memory of his family, with his victims, and continued to live on, blending into one, becoming a pair, becoming a double, becoming a double digit. He stood in the kitchen doorway, watching his mother stir some solution that would be his father's first meal the next day. "OK, good night." "Get a good night's sleep," she said. He went into his bedroom, sat on a chair, and took off his shoes.The whole meaning of a person's life is located in this action: leaning over to untie the shoelaces, put the shoes in a fixed position, and get ready for the beginning of the next day. He thought of the other man. When he was put in the cubicle, he spoke through that little hole.However, they put him at the cash register and he had to speak in the open where everyone could hear. He hid the pistol in his car and thought about it before falling asleep: On the same highway where he had shot a motorist, someone else had shot and killed a motorist a day later.This is the so-called copycat shooting.He didn't want to think about it, but recently he felt that there was always a sense of ridicule in his heart, and this feeling was getting stronger and stronger. He is used to getting up early.He heard the crackling of raindrops on the roof, got up and got dressed.He ate the muffin standing up, cupping one hand under his mouth to keep the pastry from falling to the floor.At this time, there were still three and a half hours before the check-in time.He heard rain running down the eaves and hitting the pie tin he sometimes fed stray cats. i know who i am.Who is he? He zipped up his jacket and put the glove on his left hand—a lady's white glove.He went out to his car.There was no one on the street, and the sky was gray, as if covered with a sheet of iron.