Across the way, the snipers were still sending their zinging bullets toward me. From the top of the street, I could hear the rumble of the trucks and the tanks.
It was almost over. The tanks only invaded when this thing had worn its way down, when the hallucination had run out of steam, as if they were the final resort of the battle.
And that’s when I saw him. His face was clear as day, as if he were here, now, instead of reaching across seven decades of time and memories.
Young Charlie O’Shea stood near the elm tree at the edge of the property. He held his gun before him, clenched between hands shaking with the knowledge that he had only minutes to live, or maybe one chance in ten of survival. His helmet hung back over his head—it never fit him right. Even at this distance, I could see the sweat slicked across his brow, the whites of his eyes as he swung his head left to right, frantically looking for a way through the melee.
Then he turned to me, and our gazes met. That never happened before. I never saw the eyes. I never saw the faces.
But our eyes met as if we were only feet apart. He mouthed some words, really tried to send me a message, but all that hit me was the surprise at seeing him there, and curiosity at why.
Then the bullet struck. If his damn helmet had fit him right, he might have been okay. Those helmets could take a hit sometimes. But it was back on his head, with his forehead standing out like a shining, white target.
In a slow second, during which I felt I could see the bullet move through the air, his head disappeared in an eruption of red and white matter, and his body collapsed like a rag doll.
For the second time that night, I staggered backward to the arm of the chair and fell into the welcoming cushions. Charlie shouldn’t be there. I didn’t see faces, especially his. My head felt heavy, as if filled to overflowing with a thousand pounds of sand from that beach.
My breath came in short, sharp gasps, and I grabbed at my chest. If I didn’t get myself under control, my heart could give out. I didn’t want Charlie O’Shea’s exploding face to be the last thing I ever saw on this earth.
As I stared down at the worn, intricate design of coiled gold and brown vine carpet, from my periphery came the realization that the flashes had stopped. All that remained was a distant murmur of crackling and pops. I kept my head bowed until I felt sure it was over.
When curiosity enticed me to look up, I was again alone with the empty night. Pulling myself up, I moved back to the window.
It was then that I saw it.
If I hadn’t run my hand over it, felt its jaggedness against my palm, I wouldn’t have believed it. “Another illusion,” I imagined Doctor Clarke saying. But this was no illusion or mirage. This was real.
My fingers smoothed over the glass and followed the trail of cracks. One stretched from the base of the frame to the mid-section, and then fractured off into four lines of pure white. They were strong and solid, as if to say: “This is our window. We claim it as our territory.”
But it wasn’t that which caused my heart to pound, it was the cracks in the wall, the jagged lines running up from the window into the ceiling in splintering roadmaps of damage. I hadn’t registered them when I saw Charlie, but now I had a vague memory of seeing them there. But I’d thought they were part of it, part of the craziness.
Now I remembered: they were there before Charlie’s appearance, and after the grenade exploded. The grenade that should have disappeared, the grenade that couldn’t be real. And yet, somehow…
Chapter 2
“Mr. Baker, what’s happened? Mr. Baker.”
Claire’s voice sounded distant, tinny, as if captured in a box. It filtered through the thick darkness, pulling me awake long before I was ready to face whatever awaited in the world.
“You’ve hurt yourself? Are you all right?”
Unwillingly, I opened my eyes to find Claire’s round face and curly brown hair bobbing in and out of my vision. Uninvited, her arms reached under me, pulling and pushing my complaining body upright.
Her tutting and fussing sent my mood spiraling further downward. A five-foot-nothing, thirty-something woman having enough strength to maneuver a six-foot man so easily bemused and annoyed me in equal measures. My weight, though, was forty pounds less now than it was ten years ago—not skin and bone yet, but certainly more bone. So I’d stiffen my body to ensure she didn’t have an easy time of it.
After last night, today was not a good-mood day. I grunted a reply. Once she’d propped me up sufficiently, as if I were an oversized doll, with pillows tucked between the bed’s headboard and my head, she stood back and examined my face.
“What have you done here?” Her hand reached out and brushed across my forehead. “You’ve cut yourself?”
A sudden throb of dull pain brought back the memory of the cracked window. I must have hit my head on something when the grenade exploded. In the confusion, with everything going on, it must not have registered.
I waved Claire’s hand away, none too gently. Why did she keep coming here? I didn’t make her job easy. Over the years, many health workers had come and gone, spending only their allotted fifty minutes, but this one lingered.
And she talked. Constantly.
She prattled on about her children—two boys in school, middle school or something. She talked about her husband, her thoughts on the health system, her weather predictions, her beliefs on manners, and a repetitive exposition on the real reason for the fluctuating cost of gas. She shared her views on anything and everything, whether I wanted to hear them or not.
I didn’t try to be good company—had given up on civil manners years ago. Didn’t share thoughts, and didn’t offer her anything to suggest I cared a whit about her life. Yet every day she came, and cleaned, and cooked. And of course, talked.
When I asked her once—more out of annoyance than curiosity—why she bothered, she only replied with a smile. But I knew why she really came: the goddamn government paid her to check and see if I’d died yet. That was her real job. And one day she would come and complete the task.
Now she stood there staring, hands on hips, as I wiggled my feet off the side of the bed. They made a clopping sound as they found the floor.
Claire leaned into me to offer assistance, and received my best don’t help me look. Still she swooped.
“I’m fine,” I said, waving her away, my voice cracked and whisper-weak. Sleep offered so little benefits these days, except a brief reprieve from thought.
“You are not fine. And I want to know how you cut yourself.”
Ignoring her, I moved to the dresser, faster than I would have had she not been there.
I stared into the mirror. The gash across my right eye was two, maybe three inches, but shallow. Dried blood trailed across my forehead in thin red smears. Ribbons of it had run into my eyebrows, transforming them from snow white to pink.
My unchanged clothes from the night before hung on me like a sack of gray-blue rags. I shambled out the bedroom door, leaving Claire staring after me. I needed to check that window. And the wall.
It had to be a dream, part of the hallucination. I expected to find nothing. But the thought pervaded my mind. Perhaps the head injury was the answer. There I was seeing Charlie and grenades and wilder things than I’d ever seen before, when I was actually out cold, fallen on a chair or table.
My feet followed the treaded path from the bedroom to the living room, and then to the window, my back complaining as it always did upon first arising.
“Where are you going, Mr. Baker?” Claire called from behind me.
The words bounced off, just like the shells and flashes of memory that invaded my life. The window. I needed to see the window.
It would be whole. It had to be. No cracks. No damage. The faded yellow and green flower-patterned wallpaper would be all that I would see. There would be no fissures sliding upward scarring it. It would be perfect, smooth, and right, because a seventy-year-old armament had not exploded in my flowerbed. And Charli
e hadn’t been there. He was dead, and he was gone, just like all the rest. And what had happened on Omaha Beach that day… well, it had died with him.
And yet… last night… the way he looked at me. It was as real as that day. The words he’d mouthed… just like then, I couldn’t hear them; would never hear them. Because he was dead. And I was alive.
My fingers dragged across the wall’s surface. What was real and what was not had merged. My tongue rolled around, dry and desperate, in a mouth that felt as parched as a noonday beach. A drone as loud as a dozen overhead planes filled my ears. They were there.
In the daylight, the pattern of cracks in the glass, feathered and fine, stood out in etched detail. Alongside the window, a two-inch-thick breach ran up the wall from floor to ceiling. Through it daylight streaked, leaving gold and silver lines on the mottled carpet.
And in comparison to the night before, the fissure in the window appeared to have enlarged. Maybe the coldness of the air, the shrinking and expanding of the wooden frame, had worked on it overnight. Or perhaps I simply hadn’t taken it all in.
“What’s happened here?” said Claire, moving alongside me. She, too, reached out to place her palm against the wall, her skin light pink against the dirge-green floral pattern Carmen had so loved.
What should I tell her? An explosion had drifted across time, damaged the wall, and knocked me on my ass? And, by the way, the ghost of Charlie O’Shea came by just to cap it all off?
“Settling,” I said, turning back to the kitchen. Claire would leave soon. Then I would come back and study it. Attempt to fathom its meaning.
“Settling? That’s not settling.”
She followed me.
“Houses don’t settle like that. It wasn’t there yesterday. You can fit your fingers through that gap. It’s dangerous. The house may be unstable.”
I’d made it to the stove—in good time, for me. Normally, it took me twice the time to travel the distance. The lack of normal was lessening the boundaries of age.
“I’m only worrying about coffee,” I said, as I pulled the kettle from the stove and swung it toward the kitchen sink. Before I’d completed the maneuver, Claire intercepted me.
“I’ll make that for you.” She pulled the kettle from me and pushed it under the tap. “You just sit down, Mr. Baker.”
Usually I would have argued, if only to see the way her lip quivered when I went too far. But today I obeyed. The quicker I convinced her all was fine, the quicker she would go.
But she didn’t go. She made two coffees and put both on the table along with a plate of sugar cookies. She pushed a steaming cup toward me, and instead of flitting off to the recesses of the house to do her “straightening,” she plonked herself down opposite me. Then she continued to talk, as if the cracks were a conspiracy in which we had both collaborated.
“What will we do with you, Mr. Baker? I want a doctor to check you. And we’ll need to get that wall and window repaired—immediately.”
She sipped her coffee and continued. “In fact, that window is dangerous. Promise me you won’t go near it?”
She set down her cup, staring at it. Then she stopped, as if suddenly remembering something, and looked up.
“Is that how you hurt yourself? Did you fall against the window?”
I shrugged my shoulders, the only true answer I had for her.
“No, you couldn’t have done that, could you? Maybe the window, but not the wall… no.” Her lips pursed, and she tutted and shook her head. “Maybe the local kids. Vandals? Do you think, Mr. Baker? Did you see anything?”
Oh, I saw plenty. But I’m not telling you.
She shook her head, picked up her coffee, and stared at the yellowed melamine table between us. “Vandals. I bet that’s it. Little so-and-sos.”
I stared at her and sighed loud enough to catch her attention, hoping she’d interpret it as a sign of exhaustion. Please just go, I willed.
She looked up from her headshaking, and her face softened. Here was my chance.
“Can you help me back to the bedroom? I think I need to rest.”
“You need a doctor,” she said, nodding her head with each word.
“I need to rest,” I firmly repeated. “Really, that’s all. I bumped my head. I don’t remember. It’s nothing.”
She took a deep breath and slowly expelled it, as she tilted her head sideways and back.
“I don’t think I should—“
“Please. I’m just tired.”
She breathed another “tsk,” as if I were now part of the vandal’s gang.
“Please,” I said, as an ache behind my eyes began to build.
She chewed her bottom lip, staring at a point behind me. Then her face relaxed. “Okay. But—one proviso. You call me the instant you feel lightheaded, or if a bad headache comes on, or you feel unbalanced. Anything not normal. All right?”
My head bobbed up and down.
She herded me into the bedroom, changed me into my pajamas, and tucked my body in as if I were a weary five-year-old returned from a big day out.
“I’ll make you something to eat and pop it in the refrigerator. And I want you to eat all of it when you get up again. Do you hear me?” She patted my hand.
Her tenacity would have impressed Mavis. She would be my wife’s version of “a keeper.” I called her “a keeper” too, but I was thinking more of animals in a zoo imprisoned until the day they died. Yes, she was “a keeper,” Mavis.
And more.
But I wouldn’t know that until later.
Chapter 3
An explosive rumble, followed by the sound of cracking and splintering wood, jolted me awake. It was dark when my eyes opened, my senses immediately alert.
Flickering light lit the slit below my bedroom door. For a moment, I thought Claire was playing games with the light switches.
Now I faced a familiar choice. Go watch the spectacle, which always seemed to shorten it—some kind of strange reward for my attendance—or stay here and wait. They would eventually go; they always did. Except for last night, the anomaly. That made this a different choice, one that was uncertain and somehow—
A flash again.
The vibrations of this explosion I felt through the bedclothes. My hand shook as much from the tremors as from my shock. Normally I could control my emotions. It had taken decades of familiarity with fear, but eventually we’d become bedfellows in life. But tonight my heart leapt like a trapped animal.
Then I heard the voice.
At first I thought it was just another new part of it, just like the grenade and Charlie O’Shea and his silent mouthing. But after another tremor and another flash from beneath the door, it came again. The muffled words were indiscernible and muted, but the terror in them resonated loud and clear.
My neatly folded dressing gown lay at the foot of the bed, courtesy of Claire. The chaos I heard propelled me to my feet; I threw the gown on more quickly than my eighty-eight years usually allowed. The only thing slowing me down was the complexity of forcing arthritic fingers to knot the sash while panicked. Intermittent flashes, like rapid fireworks, continued outside the door as my hands slipped and contorted around the material.
Was I mistaken, or were the explosions growing louder?
Finally I’d tied the damn knot and gathered my faculties, and I was in the hall. From here, I had a straight view to the living room and the cracked window. The cracks now reflected a fiery light playing through from the front yard.
And there was Claire at the window, staring out, a silhouette against the illuminations, an intruder in the drama.
“Claire?”
She swung about, her eyes saucers in her pale face, her hand cupped to her mouth. When she saw me, her hand dropped, and she cried out, “What is it? What’s happening?”
She saw it.
But how? These were my nightmares. They belonged to my past. They couldn’t be here for her to see. What would that make them?
I used everything in my
trick bag to stay calm and steady, my heart beating like that of a startled animal. Reds, yellows, and brilliant whites burst in from outside, dappling the darkened walls like grains of brilliant sand thrown against them.
“You see it?”
Claire nodded, and then seeing me move toward her, she swung back to face the window, where the filament cracks had multiplied, urged on by the proximity of this night’s explosions.
When I moved beside her, she didn’t turn to me, but continued to stare out, bewildered, hypnotized. She stuttered barely recognizable words, “I… I s-s-see some… What’s—?”
A loud bang sounded, followed by a crack. It came from a tree near the perimeter of my property. Then a boom, and a second later the hissing of sand and dirt spraying against the window.
Claire screamed and took a step back, one shaking hand pressed against her mouth. The reflection of my creased, strained face looked back at me from the glass. How could she and I both view a scene that didn’t exist?
Mist surged and swirled in a sweeping wave of gray. Through the smoke, red-gold flares shot upward, only to fade in moments, then fall back to earth fifty feet away, exploding on impact. Glowing remnants lit the ground like scattered embers, except these were not of warmth but of destruction, of killing.
Shrill, sharp gunshots echoed in the street, until the whir of a machine gun spilling its rounds drowned out the lesser sound.
My hand found its way to the glass again, as if touching it might cause the mirage to disappear. At first touch, as if my fingers were electrified, the glass shattered with an ear-splitting crack. Glistening shards and splinters exploded into the air, raining down on Claire and me. Cold air and smoke rushed in, laden with the smell of gunpowder and the wretched stench of death.
Instantly our arms flew up in an attempt to deflect the glass. I caught sight of my hands and saw blood seeping out through cuts in the creases. But I felt nothing.
The destruction of the window must be another part of the illusion. Damn, it was so vivid, I could taste the air.
From the Indie Side Page 19