Skyscape

by Michael Cadnum

  “How nice of you to call and ask for suggestions,” said Bruno.

  “Do you know that old phrase, ‘shooting fish in a barrel’?” said Renata cheerfully.

  Meaning: I’m the fish, thought Bruno. Already he could tell that Renata would not stay angry. After all, Bruno was too useful to her, and had been too amusing for too many years. “Yes, but I’ve always wondered about that,” Bruno was saying. “Does it mean fish in a barrel full of water, or just flopping around at the bottom. Because, if there’s water, the bullet might be deflected or slowed down.”

  “Not slow enough,” said Renata soothingly.

  23

  People outside the bathroom door were making a real fuss. All he wanted was to be left alone. That was not too much to ask.

  There was another knock on the door. “Dr. Patterson—are you okay?”

  Quite a bit of time had passed but he still needed to pull himself together. He was tired of rushing through everything, day after day. He deserved some quiet. The truth was, he had felt very shaky, and he was just now starting to feel okay. Not really wonderful, but not bad, considering.

  He sat before a mirror in the bathroom. The chamber was as big as some of the living rooms of his childhood, a spacious atrium with asparagus ferns and limestone tile. The shower stall was a niche, and the bath itself sunken, surrounded by fronds. The commode was discreet, parenthetical. There were little pockets in the tile, like acne scars, and if you looked closely they were the impressions of shells. You could pad around in your bare feet across a fossil record.

  Beyond the door, out there, people were very annoyed. They stood, like parents barricaded by a teenager, trying to be patient, failing, perfectly able to break the door down. At least, they thought they could. Patterson knew it would not be so easy. Besides, they were kept from battering it down by the feeling that Red Patterson had a right to lock himself in his own bathroom after everything he had been through not even two hours before.

  “Dr. Patterson, we just want to examine you,” said a male voice, one of the paramedics, or maybe even one of the neurologists from the university hospital. “We just want to verify your condition.”

  Unlike most residential lavatories, this door had a real lock, and a substantial frame. Patterson had explained to the designer that he did, after all, keep drugs in his home, and the door was equal to the average attempt to storm the room.

  Patterson had commanded the medics in the corridor to give him a little solitude, and since it was evident he was in no danger of dying they agreed, especially since a quick visit to the shower was what he needed more than anything.

  The light was very good. He had arranged for that, too, stipulating that he needed a Broadway-quality makeup glass in the bathroom. He could see his face very well.

  “He can’t hear us,” a voice out there was saying. “He’s passed out.”

  “I’m perfectly all right,” Patterson sang out. “There’s nothing wrong with me.” This was, Patterson had to admit to himself, somewhat contradicted by the situation. Perfectly all right people did not sit before a mirror as the hours dragged past. “I’m feeling fine.”

  He rubbed some alcohol on his forearm, primed another hypodermic, and skin-popped just a little cocktail of his own creation, one he would sell to a drug company someday if he ever got around to it, just the right balance of morphine and a brace of uppers. It cleared the head.

  His face was a mask of scarlet that had dried into a dramatic shade of cherry-cola brown. His hair was matted and spiked, stiff with gray matter. He smiled, and his teeth were white in the flaking visage.

  There was a familiar voice at the door. “Red, let me in.”

  No doubt they were all sure that this person would be able to get Patterson to open the door. “I’m not really receiving visitors at this point,” said Patterson coyly, rolling down his sleeve.

  “People are pretty much losing their sense of humor out here,” said Loretta Lee.

  “I am so sorry to disappoint them.”

  “You don’t sound good,” she said.

  “I am the picture of calm.”

  “You sound really strange, Red.”

  Patterson offered a stage sigh. He strode to the door and said, like a man holding hostages, actually making a joke of it, roughing-up his voice, mobster-style. “Okay, but you’re the only one who can come in.”

  Loretta Lee slipped in, and Patterson locked the door behind her.

  “Good God!” she gasped, and she backed up, all the way to the marble column. She clung to it.

  “My new look,” he offered.

  “Jesus, are you all right?”

  “This is the residue of an anatomy not my own,” he said.

  She was pale, and he really thought she might crumple to the floor. “No, stay away from me.” She made herself smile. “Please.”

  “I understand perfectly,” he said. “I offend the fair lady.” It was really a fair knockoff of some sort of British actor, or maybe it was that upper-crust accent Tony Curtis used in Some Like It Hot when he was pretending to be the rich guy with the yacht.

  Loretta Lee, ever practical, gathered up the hypodermics and found a place for them in her purse. She seemed reassured, now that she understood the chemical inspiration for his mood. “Take off your clothes,” she said.

  “An interesting request,” he said.

  She looked off-green as she unpeeled the stiffened clothing from his body, but he had to admire the fact that if she did puke it was while he was in the shower.

  But the sight of all of it reconstituted by the stream of hot water was too much to look at without feeling the mind curdle. Stuff clotted on the drain. Too much to have really happen without losing some sort of grip.

  Angie had suffered several gunshot wounds, among them a wound to the side of her face. The force of the bullet had caused her front teeth and most of the mastoid process to burst into shrapnel. This assorted package of projectiles, blown backward, had struck Patterson with sufficient force to cause a mild concussion. Further, the failure of her cerebral assembly, the young woman’s frontal and parietal lobes had nearly caused Patterson to suffocate.

  Even now, calm as he was, he couldn’t help it. He retched, hard, dry heaves, nothing in his stomach at all.

  He shivered. Loretta Lee handed him a towel. “I have bad news, all kinds of it.”

  “You sound upset,” said Patterson.

  “Maybe I might as well tell you while you’re in this mood.”

  “I distinctly remember you—tell me if I’m wrong—I distinctly remember you shooting that cute little gun of yours. Am I right?”

  She did not respond.

  There was a bruise in his forehead, a burst of shade. Even the powder puff as it dashed lightly over the bruise caused some small pain. There was a distinct pattern to the bruise, if one examined it closely. It was the shape of a triangle, caused by a piece of Angie.

  “You can tell by looking at me something very bad has happened,” said Patterson thoughtfully.

  “I don’t know if you’re ready,” she said.

  “I feel all right. Actually, I feel wonderful. Tell me anything you want.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Talk.”

  “Jeff was in on it,” said Loretta Lee.

  Jeff of the perfect martinis and the excellent coffee. Jeff, the perfect servant. This hurt. This would take some getting used to. Patterson squared his shoulders, looked hard into his reflection. “The Jeffs of the world are always in on everything,” said Patterson, trying to convince himself, and succeeding. “He was too smooth.”

  Loretta continued, “You remember the record company guy, the one who talked about the Man Boy Love Association.”

  “The one with those interesting videotapes?”

  “The one who died in a single car accident last December. That one.”

  “I remember him. Fairly well.” Actually, Patterson had only the vaguest impression. Freckles? Hairy nostrils?
>
  “Jeff was his cousin.” She dried his back. “Helped build a vacuum cleaner around a Smith and Wesson so another cousin could do the job.”

  Patterson groped for the column, the neoclassical excess of real Canadian marble, and took a moment to focus his mind. “What a marvelous accomplishment.”

  “Jeff saw things weren’t working out, tried to come to his cousin’s assistance, and took a bullet. He confessed on the stretcher, just before he died. Arranged for his cousin to dress up like a fake carpet cleaner, made the fake appointment, saw him through the security.”

  “The guy was doing a pretty good job on the carpets, too, wasn’t he?”

  Loretta took too long to respond. “I guess.”

  “Jeff is dead?”

  “They tried but there was too much bleeding and he didn’t have any blood pressure.”

  “It’s hard without any blood pressure. I’ll miss him. How about the carpet cleaner with the special gun?”

  “Dead. Really dead. You’ll have to replaster and everything.”

  It made no sense. But, at the same time, through his numbness, it did. “Christ, it proves we don’t know anything about anybody.”

  “Yeah, it proves that. Are you feeling okay?”

  “I realize that Angie is dead.”

  “I’m sorry, Red. There’s even more bad news.”

  Patterson was pulling a purple dressing gown over his shoulders. He couldn’t help it—he started to laugh.

  He couldn’t stop laughing.

  Loretta Lee looked troubled.

  “I’m sorry, Loretta Lee. Go ahead—hit me with the worst news you have left.”

  “Curtis Newns is dying.”

  “Loretta Lee, you have the worst sense of humor of anyone in the world. You could have it removed, you know, surgically repaired.”

  “Maybe I should have waited and told you all of this later on.”

  He stopped laughing.

  “It’s true,” she said.

  “How did that happen?”

  Loretta Lee told a tale of a freeway, a truck, a glancing but skull-shattering blow, the artist tangled in the chain link of the center divide.

  He needed another shot. He needed a drink—but not gin.

  At last he could talk. “I tried to do good, Loretta Lee. I wanted to be a doctor.”

  “It’s not your fault,” said Loretta Lee.

  “How could it be my fault?”

  “I said it wasn’t.”

  “Curtis Newns is suffering from acute anxiety, delusions, and years of psychological neglect.” He stopped himself. At least I sound like a doctor, he thought.

  “So no one will blame you.”

  “How could they blame me?” he said, keeping his voice steady, stepping toward her so fiercely that she stepped back.

  “They can’t.”

  “I feel great. They tried to kill me, and it didn’t work. Talk about surviving—it’s sweet, you know that? It has a flavor all its own.”

  It was true—he felt wonderful. He was fresh-washed, clean. He sat before the mirror again, and went to work. He looked like life. He would walk out to the steps of the house where, in the dark, videocams were awaiting his statement. The dawn-pink Japanese makeup was not working well enough to disguise a dramatic, if temporary, disfigurement in his forehead.

  I have escaped death, he thought. And I will bring life to Curtis Newns. No one will be able to stop me. I can do whatever I want to do.

  “Curtis isn’t going to die,” he said.

  “No one knows—”

  “I know. Look at me, Loretta. We’re going to the bedside of Curtis Newns.”

  He instructed Loretta Lee to bring him clothes, and stipulated which slacks and which shirt, and decided that he would not wear a tie. He would sport a manly careless appearance, suitable in a man who had been nearly assassinated that very evening.

  But Loretta Lee was not moving. She was just standing there. “I don’t think I can face Margaret,” she said.

  He puzzled over this for an instant. “His wife? Why not?”

  “I think, in a way, we’re responsible,” she said.

  “Responsible for opening up Curtis’s career for him? You should feel really good.”

  “Are you sure you’re feeling all right?” asked Loretta Lee.

  And then, there he was, sitting with his back to the marble pillar, which didn’t feel very good, digging into his spine.

  “You fainted,” said Loretta Lee.

  Patterson said that he might have fainted a little bit, but it was nothing to get excited about.

  Loretta was worried. Her eyes were big. “You have to be realistic, Red,” she said. “You’re going to need a long rest.”

  “Do you think we can go back and make things the way they used to be?” said Patterson.

  “Of course we can,” said Loretta Lee.

  As if she knew anything about it.

  24

  When Margaret first arrived at the hospital, Curtis was dying.

  Dr. Beal managed to be both elliptical and blunt. “He’s fighting, but in a case like this.…”

  “I want to be with him.”

  “He tolerated the procedures well,” said Dr. Beal. He gave her a tired smile. He looked older when he smiled, as though trying to inspire hope drained him.

  “Take me to him now. Why are we waiting out here? I belong with him.”

  “I just want to caution you.”

  “Curtis wants to live,” she said. “He doesn’t want to die.” It sounded so stark. It frightened her to say this sort of thing. People only speak for the dead, or the nearly dead. Father would never have wanted this to happen. It was also something like a lie. Curtis had apparently wanted to die when he set foot upon the freeway.

  “We can only do what we can do,” he said. He was a well-known surgeon, a man with hair so close-cropped he looked monkish, like someone who had forsaken pleasure and adornment so that he could endure times like this.

  “I want to see him,” she said.

  “Of course,” said Dr. Beal. But the man made no move to escort her, only let her stand there for a moment, as though hoping she would change her mind. He was like someone who had learned to act in a gentle manner, without feeling much real sympathy.

  They let her into the recovery room. She spoke to Curtis. He was unconscious. His breathing made a sucking sound, like the hooked tube a dentist uses to suck up saliva, blood.

  Later, Dr. Beal said that he had heard of a baby who had drowned, and was found after twenty minutes at the bottom of the pool. The baby was taken out of the pool, and an uncle held her upside down, shaking her. She lived.

  Margaret was not sure why Dr. Beal felt the need to tell this story. Perhaps he wanted her to be reassured. The baby miraculously survived. So would Curtis. The story troubled Margaret. Curtis was not an infant. He had not been drowning. Margaret wished the doctor had kept the story to himself, or shared it with someone else, someone who could have found the story a source of hope.

  Perhaps her feelings distorted the experience. Perhaps the hospital’s tyranny was as sweet-tempered as possible. But Margaret felt the place dismissed her, seeing her as an appendix soon to be excised. Word came to her through a string of doctors who said less and less. “Maintaining,” said one surgeon. “Hanging on,” said another. “Clot-free,” said yet another. Adding, “so far.”

  After twenty-four hours, crisis became the norm. There had always been this state of war, thought Margaret, this state of deep panic that bleached out to a death-march weariness. The battle never faded in a place like this. People simply forgot, and went on with their lives.

  Even though the word she received was always couched in the terminology of gravest injury, it was evident that some hope was discerned in the blood chemistry, in the dilation of his pupils, in the determination of Curtis’s body to reassert its hold on the future.

  Margaret realized that her life, as it had been, was finished. The mailgrams, the faxed
messages were not merely messages of encouragement. They were evidence that Curtis was leaving her. If he lived, or if he died, Curtis Newns belonged to the world from which she had borrowed him.

  A stunningly beautiful woman from KPIX interviewed Margaret, and the hospital provided a publicity consultant, a woman with large hoop earrings who had once visited Arles “to see what van Gogh saw in his last days.” The problem was that the woman with the earrings had emphasized his, implying that these were Curtis’s own, self-tailored last hours, and that it was a solemn and exciting experience to be so close to history.

  Margaret ended the interview abruptly, saying that she wanted to be alone.

  Her mother joined her at the hospital, and watched the television in the other waiting room. She would return to Margaret’s room to report what the world was learning.

  Margaret sat in a private waiting room, one reserved for families of people like Curtis. The room had more tasteful venetian blinds on the windows and fresh flowers; instead of tattered magazines there were newspapers, and instead of a television a bookshelf sat in the corner, apparently just installed. It smelled of glue and varnish, and its shelves were empty.

  “Curtis is still critical,” said her mother. “But I can tell his condition is improving.”

  Margaret felt hope. “How can you tell?”

  “The spokesman for the hospital is calmer. He doesn’t have that haggard look he did yesterday. He even smiled, a little.”

  “So you can tell how Curtis is doing by how a spokesperson acts.” This was not a question. Her mother’s attitude made a kind of sense.

  “You can tell how things are going by reading between lines,” said Andrea. Margaret had the briefest conflict with the metaphor, the lines in a televised face being, as far as Margaret could imagine, generally enigmatic.

  But it might be true. It was true. Margaret was sure of it. A spokesperson was a human being, and you could often tell what a person was thinking.

  “Red Patterson is taking a break from his show,” said her mother. “He needs a different focus.”