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“God won’t get me a towel.”
Adam thumped by Opal and Chainsaw without seeming to even notice the two of them huddled by the door, and then he thumped back down the exact same way. Ronan’s dreamnoise hitched. Chainsaw rapidly tapped her beak open and shut and Opal aimed a fist at her to quiet her.
“Why is this happening?” Adam asked.
“I was hoping you’d tell me.” Ronan’s dreamnoise fuzzed and burned in Opal.
“How would I know?”
; “You know everything.”
“I don’t — maybe I should call Fox Way.” But Adam sounded dubious.
“Because that worked so well last time.”
Happiness and sadness were rising up in Opal, both at once. Now that she was not screaming, she knew what was causing the reappearance of the dark unmaking. Because even though she now would have preferred to be properly animally, she was still made of dreamstuff. Moreover, she was not just dreamstuff, she was excellent dreamstruff, a psychopomp, designed to save Ronan again and again, ever since he was a little boy. She knew what she sounded like as a dreamthing, and she knew what the ley line sounded like as a dreamsource, and she knew what Ronan was supposed to sound like as a dreamer. She knew it in the way that she knew all the time that she was a piece of him, a manifestation of a part of him. It was this terrible trueness that had drawn her to other things like her at the same time that it drove her away.
So she could save him now.
But if she stopped the black-oozing present, she would have an Adamless future. He had just said it: if it didn’t stop, he wouldn’t go away.
Ronan abruptly strode past her and Chainsaw, filled with such brisk purpose that both she and the bird reared back. But he didn’t pause; just opened the front door and went outside. Adam, Opal, and Chainsaw all hurried to follow him.
The three of them stood in the dull, friendly light of the porch and watched Ronan. He was not on the porch. He was next to his car, which was on its wheels next to Adam’s car, which was on its blocks, and he had all the doors open. The little interior light looked like the single shining eye of some kind of creature, and it winked sometimes as Ronan moved back and forth in front of it. He was harvesting trash from his car, which he did very rarely — more often Opal would have to do it as a punishment — and placing the papers and wrappers into a bag. Opal did not understand why he was doing such a thing with such furious import. He never ate the trash harvest. Surely he couldn’t really believe the trash harvest would help him with the unmaking. But he continued to rip great handfuls of paperwork from its roots before stuffing it into a Food Lion bag.
