“How old were you?”
“Four. I was four years old.”
We were at the hotel by then. As the motorcade swung across two empty lanes into the driveway, Gran’s words—
—that was your uncle’s clock, he couldn’t keep it—
—sounded in my head. The limo eased to the curb. Doors slammed. Agents slid past outside, putting a protective cordon around the car. The door opened, and cold January air swept in. Burton was gathering his things.
“Sir—”
He paused, looking back.
“Tomorrow morning, could I have some time alone?”
He frowned. “I don’t know, Rob, the schedule’s pretty tight—”
“No, sir. I mean—I mean a few hours off.”
“Something wrong?”
“There’s a couple of things I’d like to look into. My parents and all that. Just an hour or two if you can spare me.”
He held my gaze a moment longer.
Then: “That’s fine, Rob.” He reached out and squeezed my shoulder. “Just be at the airport by two.”
That night I dreamed of a place that wasn’t quite Dana Maguire’s daycare. It looked like a daycare—half a dozen squealing kids, big plastic toys, an indestructible grade of carpet—but certain details didn’t fit: the massive grandfather clock, my uncle’s clock, standing in one corner; my parents, dancing to big band music that seemed to emanate from nowhere.
I was trying to puzzle this through when I saw the kid clutching the lunch sack. There was an odd expression on his face, a haunted heartbroken expression, and too late I understood what was about to happen. I was trying to move, to scream, anything, as he dragged the pistol out of the bag. But my lips were sealed, I couldn’t speak. Glancing down, I saw that I was rooted to the floor. Literally rooted. My bare feet had grown these long knotted tendrils. The carpet was twisted and raveled where they had driven themselves into the floor.
My parents whirled about in an athletic fox-trot, their faces manic with laughter. The music was building to an awful crescendo, percussives bleeding seamlessly together, the snap of the snare drums, the terrible booming tones of the clock, the quick sharp report of the gun.
I saw the girl go over backwards, her hands clawing at her throat as she convulsed. Blood drenched me, a spurting arterial fountain—I could feel it hot against my skin—and in the same moment this five-year-old kid turned to stare at me. Tears streamed down his cheeks, and this kid—this child really, and that’s all I could seem to think—
—he’s just a child he’s only a child—
—he had my face.
I woke then, stifling a scream. Silence gripped the room and the corridor beyond it, and beyond that the city. I felt as if the world itself were drowning, sunk fathoms deep in the fine and private silence of the grave.
I stood, brushing the curtains aside. An anonymous grid of lights burned beyond the glass, an alien hieroglyph pulsing with enigmatic significance. Staring out at it, I was seized by an impression of how fragile everything is, how thin the barrier that separates us from the abyss. I shrank from the window, terrified by a sense that the world was far larger—and immeasurably stranger—than the world I’d known before, a sense of vast and formless energies churning out there in the dark.
I spent the next morning in the Carnegie Library in Oakland, reeling through back issues of the Post-Gazette. It didn’t take long to dig up the article about the accident—I knew the date well enough—but I wasn’t quite prepared for what I found there. Gran had always been reticent about the wreck—about everything to do with my life in Pittsburgh, actually—but I’d never really paused to give that much thought. She’d lost her family, too, after all—a grand-daughter, a son-in-law, her only child—and even as a kid, I could see why she might not want to talk about it.
The headline flickering on the microfilm reader rocked me, though. Two die in fiery collision, it read, and before I could properly formulate the question in my mind—
—there were three of them—
—I was scanning the paragraphs below. Disconnected phrases seemed to hover above the cramped columns—bridge abutment, high speed, alcohol-related—and halfway through the article, the following words leapt out at me:
Friends speculate that the accident may have been the product of a suicide pact. The couple were said to be grief-stricken following the death of their daughter, Alice, nine, in a bizarre shooting accident three weeks ago.
I stood, abruptly nauseated, afraid to read any further. A docent approached—
“Sir, are you all—”
—but I thrust her away.
Outside, traffic lumbered by, stirring the slush on Forbes Avenue. I sat on a bench and fought the nausea for a long time, cradling my face in my hands while I waited for it to pass. A storm was drifting in, and when I felt better I lifted my face to the sky, anxious for the icy burn of snow against my cheeks. Somewhere in the city, Grant Burton was speaking. Somewhere, reanimated corpses scrabbled at frozen graves.
The world lurched on.
I stood, belting my coat. I had a plane to catch.
I held myself together for two days, during our final campaign swing through the Midwest on January 3 and the election that followed, but I think I had already arrived at a decision. Most of the senior staff sensed it, as well, I think. They congratulated me on persuading Burton to run the ad, but they didn’t come to me for advice much in those final hours. I seemed set-apart somehow, isolated, contagious.
Lewis clapped me on the back as we watched the returns roll in. “Jesus, Rob,” he said, “you’re supposed to be happy right now.”
“Are you, Lewis?”
I looked up at him, his tall figure slumped, his face a fiery map of scars.
“What did you give up to get us here?” I asked, but he didn’t answer. I hadn’t expected him to.
The election unfolded without a hitch. Leaving off their work in the graveyards, the dead gathered about the polling stations, but even they seemed to sense that the rules had changed this time around. They made no attempt to cast their ballots. They just stood behind the cordons the National Guard had set up, still and silent, regarding the proceedings with flat remorseless eyes. Voters scurried past them with bowed heads, their faces pinched against the stench of decay. On Nightline, Ted Koppel noted that the balloting had drawn the highest turnout in American history, something like ninety-three percent.
“Any idea why so many voters came out today?” he asked the panel.
“Maybe they were afraid not to,” Cokie Roberts replied, and I felt an answering chord vibrate within me. Trust Cokie to get it right.
Stoddard conceded soon after the polls closed in the west. It was obvious by then. In his victory speech, Burton talked about a mandate for change. “The people have spoken,” he said, and they had, but I couldn’t help wondering what might be speaking through them, and what it might be trying to say. Some commentators speculated that it was over now. The dead would return to the graves, the world would be the old world we had known.
But that’s not the way it happened.
On January 5, the dead were digging once again, their numbers always swelling. CNN was carrying the story when I handed Burton my resignation. He read it slowly and then he lifted his gaze to my face.
“I can’t accept this, Rob,” he said. “We need you now. The hard work’s just getting underway.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I haven’t any choice.”
“Surely we can work something out.”
“I wish we could.”
We went through several iterations of this exchange before he nodded. “We’ll miss you,” he said. “You’ll always have a place here, whenever you’re ready to get back in the game.”
I was at the door when he called to me again.
“Is there anything I can do to help, Rob?”
“No, sir,” I said. “I have to take care of this myself.”
I spent a week in Pittsburgh, walking t
he precipitous streets of neighborhoods I remembered only in my dreams. I passed a morning hunting up the house where my parents had lived, and one bright, cold afternoon I drove out 76 and pulled my rental to the side of the interstate, a hundred yards short of the bridge where they died. Eighteen wheelers thundered past, throwing up glittering arcs of spray, and the smell of the highway enveloped me, diesel and iron. It was pretty much what I had expected, a slab of faceless concrete, nothing more.
We leave no mark.
Evenings, I took solitary meals in diners and talked to Gran on the telephone—tranquil gossip about the old folks in the home mostly, empty of anything real. Afterwards, I drank Iron City and watched cable movies until I got drunk enough to sleep. I ignored the news as best I could, but I couldn’t help catching glimpses as I buzzed through the channels. All around the world, the dead were walking.
They walked in my dreams, as well, stirring memories better left forgotten. Mornings, I woke with a sense of dread, thinking of Galileo, thinking of the Church. I had urged Burton to engage this brave new world, yet the thought of embracing such a fundamental transformation of my own history—of following through on the article in the Post-Gazette, the portents within my dreams—paralyzed me utterly. I suppose it was by then a matter mostly of verifying my own fears and suspicions—suppose I already knew, at some level, what I had yet to confirm. But the lingering possibility of doubt was precious, safe, and I clung to it for a few days longer, unwilling to surrender.
Finally, I could put it off no longer.
I drove down to the Old Public Safety Building on Grant Street. Upstairs, a grizzled receptionist brought out the file I requested. It was all there in untutored bureaucratic prose. There was a sheaf of official photos, too, glossy black and white prints. I didn’t want to look at them, but I did anyway. I felt it was something I ought to do.
A little while later, someone touched my shoulder. It was the receptionist, her broad face creased with concern. Her spectacles swung at the end of a little silver chain as she bent over me. “You all right?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am, I’m fine.”
I stood, closing the file, and thanked her for her time.
I left Pittsburgh the next day, shedding the cold as the plane nosed above a lid of cloud. From LAX, I caught the 405 South to Long Beach. I drove with the window down, grateful for the warmth upon my arm, the spike of palm fronds against the sky. The slipstream carried the scent of a world blossoming and fresh, a future yet unmade, a landscape less scarred by history than the blighted industrial streets I’d left behind.
Yet even here the past lingered. It was the past that had brought me here, after all.
The nursing home was a sprawl of landscaped grounds and low-slung stucco buildings, faintly Spanish in design. I found Gran in a garden overlooking the Pacific, and I paused, studying her, before she noticed me in the doorway. She held a paperback in her lap, but she had left off reading to stare out across the water. A salt-laden breeze lifted her gray hair in wisps, and for a moment, looking at her, her eyes clear in her distinctly boned face, I could find my way back to the woman I had known as a boy.
But the years intervened, the way they always do. In the end, I couldn’t help noticing her wasted body, or the glittering geometry of the wheelchair that enclosed her. Her injured leg jutted before her.
I must have sighed, for she looked up, adjusting the angle of the chair. “Robert!”
“Gran.”
I sat by her, on a concrete bench. The morning overcast was breaking, and the sun struck sparks from the wave-tops.
“I’d have thought you were too busy to visit,” she said, “now that your man has won the election.”
“I’m not so busy these days. I don’t work for him anymore.”
“What do you mean—”
“I mean I quit my job.”
“Why?” she said.
“I spent some time in Pittsburgh. I’ve been looking into things.”
“Looking into things? Whatever on Earth is there to look into, Robert?” She smoothed the afghan covering her thighs, her fingers trembling.
I laid my hand across them, but she pulled away. “Gran, we need to talk.”
“Talk?” She laughed, a bark of forced gaiety. “We talk every day.”
“Look at me,” I said, and after a long moment, she did. I could see the fear in her eyes, then. I wondered how long it had been there, and why I’d never noticed it before. “We need to talk about the past.”
“The past is dead, Robert.”
Now it was my turn to laugh. “Nothing’s dead, Gran. Turn on the television sometime. Nothing stays dead anymore. Nothing.”
“I don’t want to talk about that.”
“Then what do you want to talk about?” I waved an arm at the building behind us, the ammonia-scented corridors and the endless numbered rooms inhabited by faded old people, already ghosts of the dead they would become. “You want to talk about Cora in 203 and the way her son never visits her or Jerry in 147 whose emphysema has been giving him trouble or all the—”
“All the what?” she snapped, suddenly fierce.
“All the fucking minutia we always talk about!”
“I won’t have you speak to me like that! I raised you, I made you what you are today!”
“I know,” I said. And then, more quietly, I said it again. “I know.”
Her hands twisted in her lap. “The doctors told me you’d forget, it happens that way sometimes with trauma. You were so young. It seemed best somehow to just… let it go.”
“But you lied.”
“I didn’t choose any of this,” she said. “After it happened, your parents sent you out to me. Just for a little while, they said. They needed time to think things through.”
She fell silent, squinting at the surf foaming on the rocks below. The sun bore down upon us, a heartbreaking disk of white in the faraway sky.
“I never thought they’d do what they did,” she said, “and then it was too late. After that… how could I tell you?” She clenched my hand. “You seemed okay, Robert. You seemed like you were fine.”
I stood, pulling away. “How could you know?”
“Robert—”
I turned at the door. She’d wheeled the chair around to face me. Her leg thrust toward me in its cast, like the prow of a ship. She was in tears. “Why, Robert? Why couldn’t you just leave everything alone?”
“I don’t know,” I said, but even then I was thinking of Lewis, that habit he has of probing at his face where the acne left it pitted—as if someday he’ll find his flesh smooth and handsome once again, and it’s through his hands he’ll know it. I guess that’s it, you know: we’ve all been wounded, every one of us.
And we just can’t keep our hands off the scars.
I drifted for the next day or two, living out of hotel rooms and haunting the places I’d known growing up. They’d changed like everything changes, the world always hurrying us along, but I didn’t know what else to do, where else to go. I couldn’t leave Long Beach, not till I made things up with Gran, but something held me back.
I felt ill at ease, restless. And then, as I fished through my wallet in a bar one afternoon, I saw a tiny slip of paper eddy to the floor. I knew what it was, of course, but I picked it up anyway. My fingers shook as I opened it up and stared at the message written there, Call me sometime, with the address and phone number printed neatly below.
I made it to Laguna Beach in fifty minutes. The address was a mile or so east of the water, a manicured duplex on a corner lot. She had moved no doubt—five years had passed—and if she hadn’t moved she had married at the very least. But I left my car at the curb and walked up the sidewalk all the same. I could hear the bell through an open window, footsteps approaching, soft music lilting from the back of the house. Then the door opened and she was there, wiping her hands on a towel.
“Gwen,” I said.
She didn’t smile, but she didn’t close the door eit
her.
It was a start.
The house was small, but light, with wide windows in the kitchen overlooking a lush back lawn. A breeze slipped past the screens, infusing the kitchen with the scent of fresh-cut grass and the faraway smell of ocean.
“This isn’t a bad time, is it?” I asked.
“Well, it’s unexpected to say the least,” she told me, lifting one eyebrow doubtfully, and in the gesture I caught a glimpse of the girl I’d known at Northwestern, rueful and wry and always faintly amused.
As she made coffee, I studied her, still freckled and faintly gamine, but not unchanged. Her eyes had a wary light in them, and fresh lines caged her thin upper lip. When she sat across from me at the table, toying with her coffee cup, I noticed a faint pale circle around her finger where a ring might have been.
Maybe I looked older too, for Gwen glanced up at me from beneath a fringe of streaky blonde bangs, her mouth arcing in a crooked smile. “You look younger on television,” she said, and it was enough to get us started.
Gwen knew a fair bit of my story—my role in Burton’s presidential campaign had bought me that much notoriety at least—and hers had a familiar ring to it. Law school at UCLA, five or six years billing hours in one of the big LA firms before the cutthroat culture got to her and she threw it over for a job with the ACLU, trading long days and a handsome wage for still longer ones and almost no wage at all. Her marriage had come apart around the same time. “Not out of any real animosity,” she said. “More like a mutual lack of interest.”
“And now? Are you seeing anyone?”
The question came out with a weight I hadn’t intended.
She hesitated. “No one special.” She lifted the eyebrow once again. “A habit I picked up as a litigator. Risk aversion.”
By this time, the sky beyond the windows had softened into twilight and our coffee had grown cold. As shadows lengthened in the little kitchen, I caught Gwen glancing at the clock.
She had plans.
I stood. “I should go.”
The Living Dead Page 7