Free The Wild by Whitley Strieber

to him an impression which before the dream had been fuzzy, but which was now quite clear. His life seemed a series of paper cutouts, his own body merely a jointed thing, able to move only on command of some mystery that could neither be controlled nor ignored. When the music stopped, it was replaced by the sounds of eating, the clink of knives and forks, the working of jaws. Three ordinary people consumed an ordinary dinner deep in the flaring night of Manhattan, while the neon glared on the ceiling and the traffic crept past below, long lines of honking cars jamming Broadway.
    The clock that had been in Cindy's family since before the Civil War chimed eight times. "Any more homework, son?"
    "No, Mama. I want a tub bath tonight. I want to sit in the tub and read the Metamorphosis."
    "As long as you're in bed by nine, this can be free time. What did you have for homework?"
    "Do a book report on The Penal Colony. Do some algebra problems. Write a poem about a subject of my choosing. The usual sort of thing."
    "You're lucky you're in St. Anselm's. You could be at public school where you have to carry a knife in order to survive."
    "Obviously I wouldn't survive, Dad. As you well know." Bob did not say it, but he thought bitterly that nobody survives. Nobody. There is a story of some strange tiles from a floor in Spain in which the faces of the dead have emerged, terrible, glazed horrors, apparently hellbound. And in Lake Ontario there is an island that looks from the air like George Bernard Shaw, and most of the views in the Catskills look like the profiles of Dutchmen and Indians, and there is a plateau on Mars that looks like an Egyptian, and then there's the man in the moon, that most haunting of natural faces. Maybe we get trapped in matter, some of us, condemned to contemplate the starry world forever, staring at sky or cloud, motionless. We discover, then, the simple truth that meditation—real meditation—is a stupefying bore. If you must do it forever, even contemplating the cosmos must get frightfully dull. God's probably bored silly. Look at God's sense of fun—see the fish, the birds. How can something with the glee to create them stand playing such a passive role?
    Then again, maybe God is not passive, but coy. Shy. A coquette, or cocotte. A wallflower. A hermit. A zombie. A ghoul.
    Life is movement; finally it is nothing more than random movement, any movement, the twitch of a hand in the dark, the hiss of legs beneath a sheet.
    Kevin pushed back his chair and bounded off to his bath, with his boat and his book. "He's so beautiful," Bob said as the boy ran down the long hallway to the bathroom. "Don't forget to come tell us good night," he called.
    Perhaps there was no answer, or it might have been absorbed by the walls. Bob began helping Cindy clear the table. "Kevin hardly ate, Bob."
    "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have brought it up." The boy's psyche was an eggshell. When Bob felt wrong, he involuntarily hunched his shoulders.
    "Don't do that, I'm not attacking you. If you want to see Monica, see Monica. If you want to leave me, leave me."
    The words settled as wet smoke in the air. Bob was wary now. He often worried that a day would come when Cindy became exhausted with him. His self-absorption was that of an artist, but he had not the glory. There was no reward for the waitressing Bob Duke demanded. Only her kindness sustained her; for her any reward had to be internal to herself. Bob did not see what she got out of the relationship, which worried him.
    "Cindy, please, I didn't mean to imply anything like that. I need you. It's just that I also need professional help. I'm under a lot of stress."
    "We're running out of money."
    "I know that, don't hit me with it."
    "How dare you say that? I'm not hitting you. I'm just telling you so you'll know."
    Despite all the terror he had felt last night, the sense that the universe had ripped and he had been the one who fell through, there was also a sense of wonder. Once