Big Daddy Says Yes, Big Daddy Says No

"Myself, I would not have believed all this," Tazio said. "Before, I would not have thought it possible."

"I, too, was a nonbeliever," Juan said. "Although Spanish and a Catholic, I was a nonbeliever."

"Is it a question of belief?" Peter said. "I think I'm dreaming. I don't believe it's happening."

"Certainly it is happening," Tazio said. "I am here. I speak. I know I speak, I hear myself speaking, it is happening to me."

"In my dream, it is happening to you," Peter said.

"You are dead," Juan said. "Dead men don't dream."

"I tell you something," Karl said. "We all dream, is not possible? Each dreams, and all the others are in his dream, yes?"

"Where are we?" This one was a little way off, by himself.

"You are ...?" Tazio said.

"Jerry."

"I don't know where we are," Karl said. "This place I have never before seen."

"Place?" Juan said. "How can you call it a place? There's nothing here, aside from ourselves."

"Hell with it," Jerry said. "Place or no place, I am goddamn well not dreaming. I'm dead, and I know I'm dead, because I can remember dying. I was pushing a helicopter from J. F. K. to Newark and the thing threw a blade over the East River. I had twenty-four people and a baby in that mother. It went straight in, chung! Son of a bitch. It was my day off, too. I was just filling in for a guy. I said no when he asked me the first time, then I got greedy and said yes."

"I have heard," Tazio said, "that there is a thing called a Jesus wheel in a helicopter?"

"Jesus nut," Jerry said. "When the Jesus nut goes, everything goes."

"Did your Jesus nut go?"

"Dunno," Jerry said. "I saw a blade come off and I knew we were through."

"I think with Karl," Juan said. "You dream, and I dream in your dream."

"Don't give me that," Jerry said.

"I think it strange that we are all men here," Tazio said.

"No," someone said. "Not all."

"Where are you?" Peter said.

She stood up, a small woman, almost pretty. "Marie," she said. "And I am not dreaming, either. I remember dying. I was a photographer for Agence Montafe. I was in Vietnam, just outside a village in the Nouc valley. I was with some American Marines. They had called in an air strike. I got up, just a little way, barely my head off the ground, I thought, to make a quick shot. I was using a Hasselblad and I remember thinking I should have used the Nikon, to keep my head down, when I was hit. Boom. In the middle of my chest. I felt it clearly and I died immediately."

"I, while the young lady talked, have been counting," Karl said. "We are thirty-two people. Now, of the thirty-two people, is there anyone who died in bed?"

"I," said a man, tall, thin, black. "Michael. I was walking on North Halsted. It was raining. I decided I'd have me a beer until it stopped. There was a bar across, so I started over there.

This brother was up on a scaffolding. He must have slipped. I heard somebody yell. I looked up; there he was, right on top of me, coming from five floors. They got me to the hospital, only just about. I dunno about him."

"I died in bed," someone said. "Larkin." He was fat and old. "My wife was after me to exercise, walk to work every day. One day I walked three blocks, then a bus came along, so I took it. I had just sat down, a woman next to me sneezed right in my face. I could never prove it, but nobody can tell me that didn't do it. I had pneumonia three days later."

"This is extraordinary," Peter said. "Karl, how did you die?"

Karl said, "I was on a walking trip in England. I was in a place called Eastbourne, on the Channel, a high cliff. We were going away--I was with a party of friends--when I decided I must have a last look. I could go right or left; I went right, no reason. I went too close to the edge. A piece of grass, turf you would say, broke under me, and I fell. You, Peter? How was it by you?"

"I don't know," Peter said. "I don't..." The others had formed a semicircle around him. They were staring. The mass of them, as a unit, scimitar-shaped, began to move toward him. He woke. Ruth was sitting up in bed beside him, holding his hands. The white light of morning filled the room.

"That must have been a beauty," Ruth was saying. "You were screaming 'No! No! No!' at the top of your voice. What in hell was going on?"

"I was in this crowd, everybody was dead," Peter said. "They were each telling how it happened: this one because he said yes instead of no, this one because he went right instead of left, all little, insignificant things got them killed....They asked me how I died, I said I didn't know, then they moved in on me, and that was when I woke up. Not too soon, either. Jesus, I've had some dreams, but--"

"Poor lamb!" Ruth said. "Stay put and I'll bring up your breakfast." She propped his pillows behind him, and hers. He picked up a Simenon he'd been reading the night before. He'd got through a couple of pages when the buzzer went.

"Bacon or sausage?" Ruth said.

"I don't know," he said. "Whichever you want."

"I'm dieting, idiot. You're not. Sausage or bacon?"

He tried, he tried hard, but he couldn't say it, not bacon, not sausage, not the one word or the other.