by James Sallis
You have to say it without saying it.
Most of the responses I got—well, most of them were just crap, but the ones that had a germ to them, a certain smell, those I followed up on—they were like that too, trying to say something without seeming to say much of anything. You’d get a headache from squinting, trying to read between the lines. Then you log in three, four responses and it gets really hard. Like you’re both waiting for the other one to blink, you know? That’s the point that most of them just fall away. So you keep plugging, poking about in there to see what’s what.
Till finally, and let me tell you, it took me a while, I had my A list.
Obviously an audition, some kind of trial run—show me what you got—wasn’t in the picture.
It was after work, this neighborhood place half a block off Camelback where I’d go afternoons, watch people, drink overpriced coffee. Looked up from my laptop and saw this guy heading out the door with one of those cardboard trays for carry-out coffee, but only one cup in it. How he’s dressed, look on his face, the way he goes through the door sideways, that single cup, it’s … I don’t know, not sad or anything, just … blank? I follow him and like I thought, he’s going back to work. I see where he works, an accounting firm, and the name, and I think no wonder the guy’s not beaming with pleasure at life.
There are two vehicles left in the parking lot out back, a shiny black pickup with locked cover, a recent Hyundai. No way this guy drives a truck, so I get the license number of the Hyundai. Only sign of life I see’s on the second floor, down near the corner, someone standing close to the window with a carry cup, looking out.
Next day I called up Quality Accounting, explained how I’d met one of their staff at a function and he’d given me his card but I’d misplaced it, and gave them a description. “At a function?” Ms. How-May-I-Direct-You said, as though I’d told her we ran into one another on Mars. So now I had his name, where he worked, car and license number. Another late-afternoon visit to the Brell building and a short ride later, I also had a couple of photos and where he lived.
Ducks in a row.
Good to go.
All five on my A list got the information. Four, I sent money; the last, I never heard any more from. So there I am, don’t know any of the four of them any more than they know me, who they are, what they plan. So now I’m a sentinel. Hanging. Watching. From the car, from benches or low walls, from a restaurant half a block up the street. Place probably has a name, but Home Cooking and Daily Specials is what you notice, painted on the front window, big yellow letters. I’d sit in the front, watch my building through those letters. Trying to suss out who worked there, who belonged. Who didn’t.
Drank a lot of coffee sitting there, and the whole thing happened on one of my bathroom breaks. Came back out to all this commotion across the street.
You know what happened, the guy that actually got in, the one that went for it, he bungled the job. And the others, they’re not around anymore, after that—if they ever were. Knew what happened and to stay away, maybe. Took the money and ran.
I had a suspicion, though. Just because I wasn’t seeing them didn’t mean they weren’t there. Once it’s quiet again across the street, I slide over and talk to some folks sitting outside, get some skinny, and find out where the ambulance was headed.
I think I saw him at the hospital. At the time … Well, no way I could be sure, just had that feeling, you know? But then, when I spotted him at the house, I knew. Had to be him. Watching the house just like me, nondescript car, nothing to draw attention to himself. Next thing I know, he’s passed out there in the car, close to dead for all I can tell. I make the call, firemen come—then before I can blink twice, he’s gone again, not a trace, not a footstep.
Christian.
So that’s all I know, all I have to hold on to. Still, in the long run, I did better than you guys, didn’t I?
Revenge? Yeah, right … How many things can you guys get wrong? Not that you’d have any way of knowing. How badly off base you are, I mean.
My father was a monster. I was a kid, I thought my mother’s skin was naturally purple. I’d hear things at night no child should ever hear. Then go down in the morning and there she’d be, fixing breakfast with her eyes swollen so bad she could barely see, using the one arm that was still working, sort of. Revenge? Hell, I was looking for the man to thank him. For saving my mother’s life. And for making my own possible.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
“YOU GOING IN, OR WHAT?”
“I have a choice?”
“Probably just as soon shoot yourself in the head.”
“Come right down to it, that’s pretty much what it feels like.”
“I’ll wait out here.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Sure I do.”
The moon made a long shadow of him on the drive as Sayles got out. A middle-aged woman with a decided limp, nurse or nurse’s aide, waited inside and opened the front door for him. They went down a lime green hallway he didn’t remember from the time before. The walls had waist-high tread marks where stretchers had bumped and slid along them. Three workers sat around a long table at the nurse’s station. All looked up. Soft music played on a yellow plastic radio at one end of the table. To him it sounded like hush-hush-hush.
Sayles figured he’d spent his life not caring about the things most people did, not reacting the way people thought he should, not saying the things people always say without once looking behind the words, and now he just sat quietly by the bed. The woman went away, came back some time later to bring him a portable phone, the doctor calling from his home to explain what had happened and offer his condolences. We know you’re in pain right now, the doctor said.
Nothing like the pain she was in, Sayles thought. And the pain, he figured, is always there, something we carry with us all our lives, just dormant until something wakes it up, reminds us it’s there.
He thanked the doctor and sat there a while longer. When he climbed back in the car, Graves didn’t say anything. They pulled out, drove by Good Samaritan, tire stores, a Goodwill, a Mexican seafood restaurant, Glad Gals Lounge. Sayles thought about the yellow radio back at the hospice.
He was still thinking when Graves shut off the engine. They’d been sitting in front of his house a couple of minutes.
“Don’t want to go in, you can crash with me,” Graves said.
“Thanks. I appreciate all this, man.”
“It’s nothing.”
A 747 floated low overhead, gliding into Sky Harbor. Somewhere back in the oleanders behind the house, doves called.
“You ever think of yourself as a hero?” Graves said.
“You kidding?”
“Some of us, that’s what gets us on the job to start with. Do some good, stand up for what’s right. So you don’t?”
“Think of myself as a hero? No way.”
“Maybe other people do.”
“I doubt it.”
“But you never know, do you? Maybe other people look at you, they’ve been wondering why they go on when it’s so damn hard and getting harder all the time, and it keeps them on the job. Maybe they don’t know how to say that, even to themselves.”
“And maybe they go chasing some ghost, not because they think it’s worth doing, but because it’s important to a friend? You think I didn’t know that?”
Graves shook his head. “People.” He reached across and opened the passenger door. “Get out of here, Sayles, get some rest. See you in the morning.”
When he was young, he would get up early just to see the sunrise, to be a part of the morning. Sit out on the porch or in the yard under a tree, watch light gather, feel the new day come alive around him.
He can’t see much of anything now, but light and dark and shadow are left, so he knows it’s coming on to morning, and he feels the warmth on his skin here by the window. Curious how he is not asleep yet all these dreamlike images run through his head. Rooms, hallways, streets.
Always going somewhere else, or preparing to. Always a mix of anticipation and apprehension. And animals—every sort of animal. Kangaroos at the door when he answers it. Rhino snouts poking in at the window. Slithery things in the bathtub. A silver fox sitting at the table with him.
He remembers the cruelty of children back home, who would catch garfish, prop their mouths open with sticks, and put them back in the water to rise and dive and rise again and finally drown. They’d say they were making submarines.
He remembers Black Dog, sick and covered with ants.
He remembers sitting on the porch in the rain, reading his medical books, finding his way around bodies. Life and disease, life and its end, so intertwined.
He remembers, with an emotion he cannot put a name to, his first kill.
He remembers the art teacher he had in college, who kept saying You have to look! You have to see! They’d be there, the model sitting on a chair, and this teacher, Miss Formby, walking around, watching what they were doing. Not just the model, she’d say. Look at what’s around the model. What’s between her and the chair. What’s above and below her. The silence that enfolds her. Draw that.
At the time he’d had precious little idea what she was going on about. Now he wonders if it’s only in the surround—what’s around us, the silence and charged air, the places, other people, the sunlight of a new day—that we exist at all.
The TV is on behind him, back in the room, volume turned low. A program about the Impressionists, which, he realizes, is what brought him to remembering Miss Formby. Something else starting up now. He hears the calls of birds.
Chattering and flapping and cawing, the birds woke him. A yellow cat was after them, moving slowly, body lowered, along the wall by the birds’ favorite tree. He banged on the window and the cat poured off the wall, to the other side. He’d hit the window frame with the side of his hand, but now he felt pain, the throb of it, in his damaged finger.
Stupid.
Tatters and tendrils of dreams curled about his head. Trees so thick that you couldn’t see the sky, so green that the faces of the men walking next to him were green too. A child—there one moment, then gone as it lifted its head. An office, everything pale green and blue, walls hung with framed posters of the circulatory system, bones and joints of the feet, flexion exercises. A man whose eyes go empty as he looks down, watches.
Strange.
Pulling on his T-shirt, he wondered about the stains. Not too bad, you’d almost think they were part of the seascape or the bear or whatever was on the shirt long ago before it faded. But time to do laundry, definitely. He’d been letting way too many things slide.
Like having his hand looked at, when he wasn’t sure it was healing right. Mrs. Flores said she’d take him to the free clinic, or Felix would, no problem. He’d go over later today, find out what time was good for them.
Right now, though, he had business to take care of, and should get started. He grabbed a bottle of juice and booted up the computer but soon found himself wandering the halls of cyberspace instead of working.
Where Is Traveler?
He came to us, changed our lives, and now he is gone.
Followed by the usual spate of conciliatory posts: Traveler will always be with us. We are all Traveler. Everything happens for a reason. Traveler will return.
Jimmie thought how, in the initial post, the loss shone out so purely, so strongly, and how the rest, instead of responding to that loss, tried to pretend it wasn’t there, to disguise it, dismantle it, deny it.
People leave us, he thought, they leave us and they’re gone. Family, youth, places we’ve lived, what was once important to us. All our lives are a going-away. Maybe we have to pretend that we’re going toward something, hang the image there in the air ahead. A better, more equitable world. Life everlasting in a place that looks like Scottsdale only better. A desert oasis with seventeen virgins. Because we can’t bear the thought that this is all there is. All there was.
He thought back to his dreams before the birds woke him this morning. He’d been sitting on a porch listening to rain come down. He couldn’t see the rain, couldn’t see anything really, but that didn’t seem strange, and he could feel the warmth blowing in through the screens, smell the dampness, the green, life. And there too, in the dream, he could hear the call of birds.
CHAPTER FORTY
SAYLES GOT OFF THE ELEVATOR. Lights were low, even in the halls. It was like being underwater, suspended between day and night. Standing still, you could sense, just out of hearing, the thrum of hundreds of engines: heaters, cooling machines, ventilators, centrifuges, cookstoves, recording devices, phones, intercoms, pumps.
Graves was waiting for him by the elevator.
“Come on back, we’re good.”
They passed through automatic doors into an ICU with beds arranged in a fan around a central nurse’s station. Each room in the unit was a different color, with paintings to match. The rooms were carpeted as well. Thinking what went on here, Sayles found himself wondering how often they had to tear the carpet out and replace it.
“I had an alert out to all area hospitals. One of the few things we knew about him is that the guy’s sick, right?”
Their man was in a pale blue room toward the back. Four IVs hung at bedside, three clear, one bright yellow. Sayles took in the room, the monitors. Heart rate high—artificially sustained, or trying to compensate for a blood pressure of 90/55? Not good either way.
“Kid found him and called it in. He was living in an apartment out back of their house. Boy gave his name as Christian. They found my alert and the old ER records about the same time. So here we are.”
“It’s him?”
“Has to be.”
The man looked well groomed even at three in the morning in this ghostly light wearing a hospital gown—hair pushed casually to one side, features full and symmetrical, nails clipped in careful rounds. Sayles peered closely at the skin on his arms, the whites of his eyes. Mid-sixties, he was figuring. Right around five-ten, one-eighty. Tight build.
“He had a directive in his wallet, signed and notarized, requesting no resuscitation, no extraordinary measures. That was the only document on him. They’re making him comfortable, as they say.”
“Yeah, they do say that.”
“Sorry, Sayles, I—”
“No problem. And thanks for the call.”
“Almost didn’t, considering.”
“Good that you did.”
A nurse, male, Hispanic, came in to spot-check vitals, nodding to them. He glanced up at the TV with its newsman or commentator mouthing away silently, and turned it off with one hand as he adjusted the drip on an IV with the other. Nodded again as he left.
They stood quietly looking down at the man, his breathing so shallow it barely showed.
“Hard to imagine what his life must have been like,” Graves said.
“Hard to imagine what anyone’s life is like, from the outside.”
“Yeah, we see that every day, don’t we.” Graves looked up at the empty screen, then at the window, also dark. “How many men you think he killed?”
“I don’t think it matters anymore.”
“Yeah, I get that, too.” After a minute he added: “You think he knows we’re here?”
“Anybody’s guess,” Sayles said. “Staff always tells you, Talk to them, it’ll make a difference, they’ll know.”
Sayles bent close to the bed. In that moment he thought of all the things he might say—about understanding, about what mattered now, about it being okay to let go, about finding rest. But what he whispered, lips inches from the man’s ear, was something much simpler: You’re not alone.
He’d been sitting by the window, feeling the sun on his skin, his mind roaming. Floating. The jungle was there, and many rooms in many cities, many faces. Animals.
He remembers that much, then nothing.
It is dark again now, he can tell that, so time has passed. How much, he has no idea.
He wonders if he could move, should he try. Or speak. Surprised that he feels nothing of what one might reasonably expect: fear, grief, anticipation. Loss, yes, how could he not feel that. But most of all what he feels is a strange peace coming over him, filling him.
It is almost, he thinks, over.
One of the men bends to speak to him.
And now he remembers. A program about dogs in Moscow, swelling up in the room behind him—that’s what had been on as he sat there in the morning sunlight. Adapting to changing conditions, dogs had learned to use Moscow’s complicated subway system. Many were strays; others rode in daily from suburban locations to take advantage of the bounties at the city’s center.
When capitalism came to Russia, the old industrial complexes were shoehorned out of the city to make room for shopping centers, restaurants, and apartment blocks. Dogs, who had long used these as shelters, moved with them—and now commuted.
In the city, though color-blind, they had learned to cross the street with traffic lights. They were so much loved, so much a part of the city, that when one of the strays was stabbed to death, officials erected a bronze statue to it. Others fed the dogs, built winter shelters for them, shared their seats on the metro.
The dogs, scientists say, have an exact sense of time. They know their destination, their regular stops.
Moscow’s dogs work, another authority said, for peaceful coexistence. On the metro they are affable, even docile. They rarely beg for food, which is given them anyway. They cross streets with the other pedestrians. They are doing what we all do: their level best to adapt to a world forever changing around us.
He remembered.
He had turned his head to the television, and for a moment, just for that single moment, his vision returned. That was the last thing he saw, the last thing he would see. A dog standing on the platform waiting for its train.