I hung up the phone, got through the press of idiots, put my elbows on the bar. Immediately the tavern’s breath soothed me. I expect always to be a small child in this place. That I can see over the tables surprises me briefly. In here I spent the most comfortable moments of my sonship, when Father was tipsy and told me stories and tossed me quarters, and I knew, at least, how to sit in a chair without disappointing him.
I ordered a glass of Carte Blanche, absolutely the world’s cheapest sherry.
Till well after 1:00 A.M. I sat at a little table in front of the forty-inch TV screen, sipping drinks and watching baseball and rerun comedies and news bulletins—the world was falling apart around me as well as inside; the president was emphatic that he wanted a war with Iraq, if fuzzy as to why, precisely, and refugees poured into Jordan, and the New York Mets left the field with their heads down—but I’d gone crazy and didn’t care who won or who lost, not in baseball, not in warfare.
And then around half past one I stood up, not the least bit drunk, and went to find out whether or not I’d committed a murder.
Aren’t they always saying, “I’ll never know how I got through the next few minutes, hardly remember,” et cetera? The hell with them. They don’t know what they’re talking about. I remember the exact length of my fingernails, the sherry’s sweetness, the bill I paid with—a five, face up, our beloved Abraham Lincoln—the give in the wooden floorboards under my shoes walking out, the wet smell of the air and the shine of moisture on my car, and two finger streaks in the dust that made an ideogram, unintelligible and scary, on the Porsche’s dashboard; and I remember driving in the moonless dark and passing through the streetlamp’s glow at the head of Winona’s drive as through the spongy boundary at the end of the universe, remember realizing, at the moment I stepped from the car in front of her house, that it would almost certainly rain tonight, remember feeling the laces flap on one of my Invader-brand jogging shoes, remember pausing to deal with it, remember deciding not to. The kitchen light burned. Otherwise the place was shrouded. Winona’s customized jeep, formerly mine, a Japanese jeep, a Subaru, waited by the walk. Out in the dark, Red bumped against his stall and snickered. I felt my left hand go out, palm up, in a gesture I often make in conversation. I was talking to nobody: I’ve come home to look for my wife, don’t know what I expect. Maybe I’ll warn her she’s about to be murdered. I don’t really want to go through with this. I’ll give Harry Lally the pot plants, Clarence will break some of my bones, that’ll be okay, then they’ll heal, that’ll be neat. No need for anyone to die.
—All the while humming with excitement in the center of my heart, because I’ve stumbled onto an explanation, correct me if I’m wrong, for the tendency of our race to grope toward tragedy: in order to ponder the imponderable—war, murder, our power to mutilate the planet—in order to concentrate our thoughts on these matters, we have to plan them. We have to be mapping out, not merely contemplating, the unthinkable. Or we can’t think about it at all. And I reflected, forgiving my own delirious pun, that designs just lead naturally to executions.
I put my head inside the door as any nosy neighbor might. I called: “Dear?”
No answer.
I willed this. Yes. But I’m not sure that’s why it’s happening. I think I willed it in order to ponder it more deeply. I’m not a doer, I’m a dreamer. Ask anyone! This isn’t me!
Had Van Ness stood here in this room?
Did something of his aura linger by the couch where I’d told him about the plan and read to him from Thus Spake Zarathustra? Nietzsche’s wisdom on sleep was somewhat on the order of this: to sleep well, stay awake. Winona would have done right to have read that!
When I’d showed Van Ness the Zielene and Nembutal, I’d read to him from Nietzsche on sleep—“Avoid all those,” Nietzsche’s Wise Man warns convulsively, “avoid all those who sleep badly and are awake at night.”
“I might apply that to you,” I’d pointed out to him.
“And vice versa,” he’d said.
Yes, yes, yes, I agreed with him tonight, half-aloud, running my finger along the spines of books…Oh yes. We should have avoided each other.
We’d talked about things other than sleep—he’d quoted at some length from Zarathustra—but what we’d read I couldn’t quite—fumbling among the shelves beside the couch for the book, which wasn’t there, scattering books to the floor in a spasm of irritation—couldn’t quite recall.
Where was my book of Nietzsche? Winona never would have touched it.
Had Van Ness come here, and found my wife comatose, and put the pillow over her face? And held it there for a long time, until she was dead, and then gone on to violate something—please be sensitive to this, it’s not absurd, please feel this corrupt truth—and then descended the stairs to violate something delicate and precious by stealing my Nietzsche?
I called out: “Winona?”
I looked around the living room. Nothing seemed disturbed. In the kitchen half a cup of coffee on the table and a scattering of mail, junk mail, and off by itself an envelope with a folded card jutting from it, a Hallmark card presenting the portrait of a little girl cuddling a dog. Inside on the left-hand page a printed cursive read “Just Thinking of You” and on the facing page in my own father’s weak hand:
Since you don’t have the care or interest it would take to pay me a visit, here’s a letter for you. I mean to cut your name from my will and testament. Everything goes to my boys but they can’t hack up the redwoods. Meeting my lawyers next week. You might as well clear out of that house, it’s Junior’s. And don’t come sniffling around here at this late date. Once I say a thing it’s solid.
I’d hardly begun to make sense of this communication before another one caught my eye—a postcard, the same kind Van Ness had mailed me—“Greetings from Santa Cruz,” where the ferris wheel meets the ocean and seems ready to glide into that gigantic blueness.
I turned the card over. The message read Now we’ll see. No postmark. He’d carried this card here in his pocket, and laid it down with his hand.
The spasm that wrenched me knowing that he’d actually entered this house set loose a spray of images inside me, bits and pieces blown above the forest, the forest of dreams—I’d walked in a dream through these rooms, but their walls had given onto other places, a ramshackle barn full of strangers who claimed I should know them, and I lied, saying that I did, and in that place this very tabletop had upheld a pile of fruit. It was impossibly strong, nauseating, violently so, the sense that I was both remembering and experiencing this, that I could, if I just stood still and collected myself, predict the next thing to happen in this kitchen.
According to the plan, the point of my being here was to discover the body. But I hadn’t considered that I’d actually have to discover the body. This was no theory. I was living it.
“Winona?”
The silence sank me. Told me that Van Ness had lived it too. And Winona had felt his hands on her throat—or, no, the pillow against her face—or dreamed a cloud had come down and drowned her. What had Winona dreamed? What had Van Ness felt? What is it like? Who are we really?
Had she known it was someone, a person, doing this to her? It seemed only right that even in a dream, even in total blackness, even in drugged dreams, we’d know the truth if we were dying.
A man walks into the house where his wife may lie murdered. And realizes that he’s twisted his life so badly that only this, the worst thing he’s ever done, could twist it back the other way.
“Winona!” I scream, and it echoes beyond the window, puny and garbled, down the arroyos and out to sea. I can’t bring it back. The name just disintegrates over the waters and that’s that. It’s impossible to bring it back!
Through this feeling of helplessness suddenly burst a piercing nostalgia for the lost world of childhood. The way it came right up against the heart, that world, and against the face. No indoors or outdoors, only everything touching us, and the grown-ups lumbering past o
verhead like constellations. I can feel the big silence upstairs getting bigger. There’s nobody there and I’m not going up to see. Because I can’t move. I’m small and my hands and feet are too large. Tonight’s music was the moans of Gyuto monks and their smashed cymbals and rattling broken instruments and the unearthly squalling of their horns. Madness at first, adrenaline nightmare, nothing to grip, zooming madness, voices, a hundred thousand feelings, grief and regret chief among them. I’ve plunged into the water and I’m sinking, sinking. Memories roll over me. Italy—Rome, above all, Rome—pigeons lit up in the sunlight—and I saw the buildings in their dirty greatness but I kept thinking Keats, Keats died around here someplace…In Italy I felt closest to Winona, particularly in the churches, where I felt the farthest from heaven. In the cathedral in Milan I looked upward through twenty leagues of failure to the beautiful dome above. A bomb going off couldn’t have hurt that silence. Everywhere dripped the blood of stained-glass martyrs, too many of them, we’ll never get them sorted out. When we toured the duomo’s basement, a region that seemed to pre-date even its stones, something in the ripe, must-filled cloisters seemed to have gone out—not a light, but a time. And something about those skinny moldering rooms of deteriorating jewelry made the whole cathedral somewhere above our heads seem a lie, the pomp dissembling over the darker miracle worked in the streets, in the spermy churches of apartment flats, where lovers in their beds were getting high, or spilling toward the Sea of Love with eyes grown soft and blind in loused-up situations. Miracle!—your incense followed the blond American woman to Sicily, to the town of Monreale in the altitudes, and I, her husband, followed you. And felt myself erased by the cathedral…fading beside the flowers…This church in Monreale was smaller and more to the point. On the walls and ceilings, from the making of our wild, tearful earth to the martyrdom of Saint Paul, they’ve laid out Christian history in a billion tiny tiles…You have to drop money in a slot to get the lights to go on—as grand as all this is, it operates on the principle of the honky-tonk jukebox. The electric lights brighten and darken according to the random coins the faithful feed the meter box, and in the dome Christ’s concave face, the world’s second-largest mosaic portrait, lights up overhead, looks down awhile, blacks out again. It doesn’t matter that the church’s curators are niggardly. Nobody goes there who isn’t crushed by its beauty. In those vast religious places, as here, now, in life’s deepest abyss, we feel a plunging sexual vertigo. Is it any wonder that later, exploring secret passages in the church’s eaves, when we came out onto a parapet and found ourselves staring at half of Sicily and the ocean and the sky, I suddenly wanted to make love, right there in the daylight, to Winona? She said no. But later said she wished she had let me take her, in that high place overlooking a Palermo that seemed dreamed, with underneath us the massive mosaic Christ going on and off, Christ blooming and failing—
All right. In my breast pocket, a phial of Nembutal—replacement for the phony stuff, the Zieline. I turned, walked steadily through the house and up the stairs to the open door of Winona’s bedroom.
A man climbs the stairs toward the room where his wife lies motionless. His feet tread the vacancies of starlight…I flipped the switch at the top of the stairwell.
She lay on her right side, her back turned, her right arm flung behind her as if reaching toward me. Not Winona, but a corpse, a thing. Nothing worth looking at. I stepped into the room and stood beside the body but I was still alone.
I pushed open the double windows and looked out onto the dark pasture. No stars, no moon, no wind. Just the head’s unbelievable racket.
Something, a leaf or an ash, drifts down in front of my vision. No. Have I just seen a night bird drop dead out of the sky?
It strikes me suddenly that birds must actually, sometimes, die in midair. I’ve never seen this truth before—that sometimes they must enter heaven having lifted themselves halfway there. It seems such a little thing to understand, but I start shaking. I’m afraid if I try to touch something I’ll pass my shimmering hand through the mirage of my life.
I moved the chair from her desk and sat down beside the corpse and closed my eyes and looked at blindness. I would do anything to undo this.
I have made a mistake.
What could be more trivial and irrelevant than this true fact? A few plain words—over all of this the phrase came floating like a sports headline, FLYNN HURLS SEVENTH STRAIGHT, on the destruction of a maelstrom: steeples and living rooms and drowned puppies and little dolls, whole lives washing down out of sight, then a line of old news turning in the current: I have made a mistake.
I’m sorry, meaning, I want another world. Give me a different world.
I leaned over the bed and looked down at her for a moment, an incomprehensible moment, trembling, hollow, insane. Not a moment, but a life. Not a sentence to prison, but a prisoner’s life, not a moment of slavery, but the life of a slave. Converging darknesses like black cotton clouds…I hadn’t taken her life, but my own.
I have never done anything real. There is nothing to get back to. Everything I am is shit. Everything to do with me. Everything I’ve made. All I have.
I touch her arm. She is substantial—I look down at her face in profile. But this is nobody I know. I’d never seen her before. No mistaking it. I’ve thought often that this person, this Winona, couldn’t possibly be my wife. Now I know.
I’m not going to do anything wrong. I can’t have done anything wrong. I have not done anything wrong.
Before this moment I’d lived as a mind. Body, heart, soul, intellect, so we carve ourselves into parts. But the whole of us, what can it be? We’ll never name it. Before this moment I’d depended on the head, on thinking my way out of trouble, and when there was no way out depended on the head to tilt and revolve and distort until it found a new, a transcendent perspective, or a cheap rationalization for my shames, I didn’t care which.
Intellect rampant on a field of ice, now it plunged through and froze and sank down to the heart in its cage under the North Pole. Will you believe me please if I tell you that the nameless whole of me had arranged all of this—just to break my heart?
A man walks into the room where his wife lies murdered. And begins to realize that only this could have saved him. That this, the worst thing he could possibly have done, was his only hope.
And then something stuns him like a blow to the neck. What is it? The phone! It rings and rings…
He won’t respond. Won’t touch it. Won’t, ring, won’t, ring, won’t—two more and the machine would answer.
But she answers. Turns over. Reclaims her outflung arm. Fumbles with the telephone. Clears the death from her throat with a rasping sound.
“Hello?” my dead wife says.
Then says my name: “Nelson?”
Then lies back on her pillow, lets loose of the receiver and says, “Dear?”…This time she’s calling out the word. Groggy, sightless, calling out because she thinks I’m far away. Calling me dear because under the water of dreams she’s forgotten that I don’t live here, that we’re not close.
Dear—it can mean cherished, beloved, close. It can mean expensive, hard-won.
A man arranges to have his wife killed. (These things actually happen, tragedy does sometimes turn one particular night in people’s lives into a crashing metallic thing, and sometimes that this tragedy has been willed makes all of it majestic.) He walks into his former home because he’s arranged to be the discoverer of the body. Then the telephone rings. Then the corpse answers it, holds the phone out to the murderer, and calls the murderer dear.
He fakes it, takes the phone, clutches it in his hand.
She’s fallen instantly back to sleep. Out cold, not a muscle twitching. You can’t see her breathe. You could easily think she was…but yes. You certainly could.
He puts the receiver against his ear.
The voice of his brother says, “I have terrible news.”
A small fierce rain began. Van found himself standing in
it beside the Volvo’s open door, looking into the dark leather interior, completely distracted, his heart thudding with after-shocks. He’d looked right into the man’s face: his eyes like tunnels and a wild animal lurking in a stench of fear way back in there.
The joke had cosmic dimensions. But who was the joker? The trickster. Van made a mental note to get hold of a tarot deck, he seemed to remember a jester or some similar figure among its symbols, and then he forgot all about it as he supported himself by hanging on to the car’s open door and a wave of nausea and hilarity crashed over him.
Threads, only threads, nothing more than threads—the curtain between this life and the sweet core, he could nearly push through it, it was down to threads.
The physical sensations accompanying all this—blasting, shaking, wrenching—had a completely unexpected intensity: he’d do it again soon.
Navarro was stark naked, Mo was, too; still he could feel the badge.
Mo’s place lay above Anchor Bay, up the hill and overlooking the stores. It was damp and chilly out, but they had a fire going and a sleeping bag wrapped around them.
He liked her because she was happy. “Jolly,” even. It remained to be seen, though, who Mo really was. Sometimes people pulled out a whole new personality after sex happened. He’d been known to do it himself, and in fact he felt this might be one of those times. He was drug-out and lonely around here, starve-hearted. It was too easy in that frame of mind to start yanking on her like a security blanket. The worst thing about being a cop was the fear of disgusting somebody if you acted like a scared child. You get naked, and that’s when you really start to feel the burden of the invisible badge.
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