Shattered

pain brought him close to the edge of delirium. He stretched out on his bed, flat on his back, twisting the gray sheets in both big hands, and after a while he was not merely approaching the edge of delirium but had leapt deep into it. For more than two hours he lay as rigid as a wooden construction, perspiration rolling off him like moisture from an icy cold water glass. Exhausted, wrung dry, moaning softly, he eventually passed from a half-aware trance into a troubled but comparatively painless sleep.
        As always, there were nightmares. Grotesque images flickered through his shattered mind like visions formed at the bottom of a satanic kaleidoscope, each independent of the other, each a horrifying minim to recall later: long slender knives dripping blood into a woman's cupped palm, maggots crawling in a corpse, enormous breasts enfolding him and smothering him in a damp warm sexless caress, acres of scuttling cockroaches, herds of watchful red-eyed rats waiting to leap upon him, bloody lovers writhing ecstatically on a marble floor, Courtney nude and writhing on a bloody floor, a revolver snapping bullets into a woman's slim stomach…
        The nightmares passed. Soon after, sleep passed as well. Leland groaned and sat up in bed, held his head in both hands. The head ache was gone, but the memory of it was a new agony. Afterward he always felt crushingly helpless, vulnerable. And lonely. Lonelier than a man could endure to be.
        “Don't feel lonely,” Courtney said. “I'm here with you.”
        Leland looked up and saw her sitting on the foot of the bed. This time he was not the least bit surprised by her magical materialization. “It was so bad, Courtney,” he said.
        “Headache?
        “And nightmares.”
        “Did you ever go back to Dr. Penebaker?” she asked.
        “ No.”
        Her gentle voice came to him as if she were speaking from the far end of a tunnel. The hollow, distant tone was curiously in harmony with the shabby room. “You should have let Dr. Penebaker-”
        “I don't want to hear about Penebaker!”
        She said nothing more.
        Several minutes later he said, “I stood by you when your parents were killed in the accident. Why didn't you stand by me when things first started to go sour?”
        “Don't you remember what I told you then, George? I would have stood by you, if you had been willing to get help. But when you refused to admit that your headaches owl and your emotional problems might be caused by some-”
        “Oh, for Christ's sake, shut up! Shut up! You're a rotten, nagging, holier-than-thou bitch, and I don't want to listen to you.”
        She did not vanish, but neither did she speak again.
        Quite some time later he said, “We could have it as good as it once was, Courtney. Don't you agree?” He wanted her to agree more than he had ever wanted anything else.
        “I agree, George,” she said.
        He smiled. “It could be just like it was. The only thing that's really keeping us apart is this Doyle. And Colin, too. You were always closer to Colin than to me. If Doyle and Colin were dead, I'd be all you had. You would have to come back to me, wouldn't you?”
        “Yes,” she said, just as he wanted her to say.
        “We'd be happy again, wouldn't we?”
        “Yes.”
        “You'd let me touch you again.”
        “Yes, George.”
        “Let me sleep with you again.”
        “Yes.
        “Live with me?”
        “Yes.
        “And people would stop being nasty to me.
        “Yes.”
        “You're my lucky piece, always were. With you back, it would almost be as if the last two years never even happened.”
        “Yes,” she said.
        But it was no good. She was not as responsive and warm and open as he would have liked. indeed, talking with her was almost like talking with himself, a curiously masturbatory enterprise.
        Angry with her, he turned away and refused to talk any more. A few minutes later, when he looked back to see if she was showing any signs of contrition, he found that she had vanished. She had left him again. She was always leaving him. She was always going away to Doyle or Colin or somebody else and leaving him alone. He did not think that he could tolerate much more of that sort of treatment.
        
        A police cruiser blocked the entrance to the rest area off interstate 70, dome light and emergency blinkers flashing. Behind