I actually said, “I believe you, about hearing him scream.” I lied! I didn’t believe her at all!
“It was his voice,” she said instantly. “Now that I remember it, I know it was.”
I reached out my hand, into the aisle between the twin beds; her hand was there to take mine. I thought about the way Barb Wiggin had kissed Owen; I was rewarded with an erection powerful enough to slightly raise my bed covers; but when I squeezed Germaine’s hand especially hard, she made no response—she just held on.
“Go to sleep,” she said. When her hand slipped out of mine, I realized that she had fallen asleep; I stared at her for a long time, but I didn’t dare approach her. I was ashamed of how I felt. In the considerably grown-up vocabulary that I had been exposed to through my grandmother and Lydia, I had not been exposed to lust; that was not a word I could have learned from them—that was not a feeling I could label. What I was experiencing simply felt wrong; it made me feel guilty, that a part of myself was an enemy to the rest of myself, and that was when I thought I understood where the feeling came from; it had to come from my father. It was the part of him that stirred inside me. And for the first time, I began to consider that my father might be evil, or that what of himself he had given to me was what was evil in me.
Henceforward, whenever I was troubled by a way I felt—and especially when I felt this way, when I lusted—I thought that my father was asserting himself within me. My desire to know who he was took on a new urgency; I did not want to know who he was because I missed him, or because I was looking for someone to love; I had Dan and his love; I had my grandmother—and everything I remembered, and (I’m sure) exaggerated, about my mother. It was not out of love that I wanted to meet my father, but out of the darkest curiosity—to be able to recognize, in myself, what evil I might be capable of.
How I wanted to talk to Owen about this!
When Germaine started to snore, I got out of bed and crept downstairs to the kitchen phone to call him.
The sudden light in the kitchen sent a resident mouse into rapid abandonment of its investigations of the bread box; the light also surprised me, because it turned the myriad Colonial-style windowpanes into fragmented mirror images of myself—there instantly appeared to be many of me, standing outside the house, looking in at me. In one image of my shocked face I thought I recognized the fear and uneasiness peculiar to Mr. Morrison; according to Dan, Mr. Morrison’s response to Owen’s fainting spell and fit had been one of shock—the cowardly mailman had fainted. Chief Pike had carried the fallen postal thespian into the bracing night air, where Mr. Morrison had revived with a vengeance—wrestling in the snow with Gravesend’s determined chief of police, until Mr. Morrison yielded to the strong arm of the law.
But I was alone in the kitchen; the small, square, mirror-black panes reflected many versions of my face, but no other face looked in upon me as I dialed the Meanys’ number. It rang longer than I expected, and I almost hung up. Remembering Owen’s fever, I was afraid he might be more soundly asleep than usual—and that Mr. and Mrs. Meany would be awakened by my call.
“MERRY CHRISTMAS,” he said, when he finally answered the phone.
I told him everything. He was most sympathetic to the notion that I could “remember” the audience at the baseball game by observing the audience at Dan’s play; he recommended that he watch with me—two pairs of eyes being better than one. As for my “imagining” that my mother had been waving to my actual father in the last seconds she was alive, Owen Meany believed in trusting such instincts; he said that I must be ON THE RIGHT TRACK, because the idea gave him THE SHIVERS—a sure sign. And as for my desire for Germaine giving me a hard-on, Owen couldn’t have been more supportive; if Barb Wiggin could provoke lust in him, there was no shame in Germaine provoking such dreadful feelings in me. Owen had prepared a small sermon on the subject of lust, a feeling he would later describe as A TRUTHFUL PREMONITION THAT DAMNATION IS FOR REAL. As for the unpleasant sensation originating with my father—as for these hated feelings in myself being a first sign of my father’s contribution to me—Owen was in complete agreement. Lust, he would later say, was God’s way of helping me identify who my father was; in lust had I been conceived, in lust would I discover my father.
It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies—inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities—made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me; but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
Of course, he agreed with me—how stupid Germaine was, to imagine she’d heard him screaming, all the way from the Gravesend Town Hall!
“I DIDN’T SCREAM THAT LOUDLY,” he said indignantly.
It was Grandmother’s interpretation of what he had foreseen that provided the only difference of opinion between us. If he had to believe anything, why couldn’t he believe Grandmother—that it was Lydia’s death that the gravestone foretold; that Owen had simply “seen” the wrong name?
“NO,” he said. “IT WAS MY NAME. NOT SCROOGE’S—AND NOT LYDIA’S.”
“But that was just your mistake,” I said. “You were thinking of yourself—you’d even been writing your own name, just moments before. And you had a very high fever. If that gravestone actually told you anything, it told you that someone was going to die. That someone was Lydia. She’s dead, isn’t she? And you’re not dead—are you?”
“IT WAS MY NAME,” he repeated stubbornly.
“Look at it this way: you got it half-right,” I told him. I was trying to sound as if I were an old hand at “visions,” and at interpreting them. I tried to sound as if I knew more about the matter than Pastor Merrill.
“IT WASN’T JUST MY NAME,” Owen said. “I MEAN, NOT THE WAY I EVER WRITE IT—NOT THE WAY I WROTE IT IN THE BABY POWDER. IT WAS MY REAL NAME—IT SAID THE WHOLE THING,” he said.
That made me pause; he sounded so unbudging. His
“real” name was Paul—his father’s name. His real name was Paul O. Meany, Jr.; he’d been baptized a Catholic. Of course, he needed a saint’s name, like St. Paul; if there is a St. Owen, I’ve never heard of him. And because there was already a “Paul” in the family, I suppose that’s why they called him “Owen”; where that middle name came from, he never said—I never knew.
“The gravestone said, ‘Paul O. Meany, Junior’—is that right?” I asked him.
“IT SAID THE WHOLE THING,” Owen repeated. He hung up.
He was so crazy, he drove me crazy! I stayed up drinking orange juice and eating cookies; I put some fresh bacon in the mousetrap and turned out the light. Like my mother, I hate darkness; in the dark, it came to me—what he meant by THE WHOLE THING. I turned on the light; I called him back.
“MERRY CHRISTMAS,” he said.
“Was there a date on the gravestone?” I asked him. He gave himself away by hesitating.
“NO,” he said.
“What was the date, Owen?” I asked him. He hesitated again.
“THERE WAS NO DATE,” Owen said. I wanted to cry—not because I believed a single thing about his stupid “vision,” but because it was the first time he had lied to me.