Death Will Have Your Eyes Read Online Free PDF

two, Planchat and myself. Meanwhile “out in the world somewhere” (as an old blues song has it), whereabouts unknown, identity unknown—if indeed he were still alive—there might be another. No one could be sure.
    No one had an explanation, either, for Planchat’s sudden resurfacing. All these years he’d quietly gone about his placebo life of employment, possessions, payments, polls, appointments. Then something brought him crashing back out of the closet.
    Twenty-three weeks ago two security guards were found dead at Compso, a high-tech electronics manufacturer and research facility in upstate New York. Both had been dispatched instantly, expertly: the first with a single blow, the second by severing the spinal cord through a narrow incision at the base of his neck. There were some blinds and red herrings thrown up, but whatever was missing, really missing, didn’t show up on any of the company’s various inventories.
    Four days later a military installation was hit; and in following weeks bodies turned up in hotel rooms, places of business, parks and storage facilities, warehouses, even once in a library. There was nothing definite to tie Planchat to any of this, but his name came up in one of those sotto voce conversations between our best jockey and his computer, and the more it was looked into, the more it started looking like a match.
    For one thing, Planchat wasn’t where he was supposed to be, and hadn’t been there for a while—about six months.
    He may as well have dropped off the edge of the earth, floated away in a balloon, gone to Tahiti to live among natives. Or been collected by extraterrestrials. The few spoors that existed were being tracked. Several calls had been traced to a phone booth in Dallas. That’s why I’d been routed through here on my way in. To connect, if a connection existed. If the arc was there.
    Rain hasn’t abated. I put the dossier down and look again out the window. The world remains obscure. An occasional car scales the curved back of the hill like a momentary moon.
    In that rented room of mine, the second month after I’d quit maybe, or the third, I got up one morning and, sitting still naked on the side of the bed, with frost plating the window outside and my own breath spilling out from me in spumes as a portable heater filled the room with the smell of raw alcohol, began a journal.
    At first I simply transcribed my day: what I read and saw, where I went, stray thoughts, observations. Before long, though, I found the journal pulling away from the day’s details and pastimes.
    Memory was strong then; I sank back into it. Scenes of my childhood, friends, family, the way spaghetti or milk and oatmeal cookies had tasted when I was a kid, the first time I kissed a girl (Trudy Mayfield, Friday after school, February 1962), stories about a bibliographic worm in Boy’s Life, my mother’s face. It all came back in a flood.
    Cedar Hill, I wrote. A two-story white frame house at the end of the block, with a scraggly weeping willow out front. We never locked doors, didn’t even have keys for them as far as I know. Ate at a gray Formica table in the kitchen; the dining room stayed closed off except for holidays. A ’52 Dodge with green plastic shades for the wing windows and windshield, and fluid drive. Pecans . They were everywhere, forever rolling and cracking open underfoot. Wasps in thick bushes that skirted the house. Honeysuckle .
    But soon I learned that, precise and detailed as my memories were, they were also in some incomprehensible way complete. Once I had gone over a period in my mind, it was set; if I returned to it, there’d be nothing more, just those same memories. There was no depth.
    There were also curious gaps. I could visualize my mother’s face exactly, curve of cheek into chin, the wing-like sweep of eyebrows, but I couldn’t, for all my efforts, recall how she smelled, or the touch