by Hugh Sheehy
My father continued to frown at the house. He seemed frail in his pajamas; the key to his biology was winding down. When I suggested that he return to his bed, he would not budge. His fists trembled, but when I put my arm around his shoulders he turned away.
“She was so nice,” he said bitterly. “She was so goddamn nice.”
“I know.”
“She was good to you.”
“I know.”
“All you had to do was be yourself, and she went on being an angel. I don’t know what sort of person can’t understand that.” He looked up at me. “Nobody asked for this.”
I couldn’t tell him that sometimes you don’t ask for what you have: a certain distance from the people, the right to be aloof. I knew this, and I also knew that philosophy is worthless just after a loss. So I told my father that he was right.
10.
Eventually the police would find their man, some younger creep Ellie worked with, a pimply faced goblin who had built a shrine to her in his basement and filled it with souvenirs from her house. The news would put to rest any remaining questions Henry or I had about what had happened that night. And by then I’d be gone, in another city entirely, training for a new cubicle, and it would prove a very easy thing to put off telephoning an old friend. When we did talk finally, we had little to say about Ellie or her killer or what happened the night of her memorial party, and the feeling between us was so poisoned that we hung up after ten or fifteen minutes of braying false good cheer.
After leaving the reception hall that night, we drove out toward the lake, like teenagers restless to skip town for a few hours. As we moved across the flat blue land, past little woods and silos and solitary houses, the conviviality of Ellie’s dinner seemed more and more a figment of wishful memory. It seemed rather that the laughter and the music had been the sounds made by people who wanted to distract themselves from the dark silence we now encountered along the shore. Out here we could stop at any point and look out on the water, to see that the dark and the silence had no end. They were simply the shade and texture that remained when the day burned out.
Henry was a harsh man in the green light of the dashboard. “Those people are cowards,” he said. “I guess a role to play’s a good hiding spot.”
“I guess.”
It felt familiar and fitting, the pair of us in the front seat, moving along the road beside the perimeter of the state park, but when Henry said he saw a figure run along the tree line and plunge into the woods I began to doubt whether he was thinking clearly. He braked hard, and we stopped just over the road’s frosty shoulder.
Concentrating on a point in the trees, he reached across my lap and got a handgun out of the glove compartment.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I saw him,” he told me. “He’s right back there. I saw the motherfucker.”
All I saw were the woods at night. “Really?”
Ignoring any doubt in my tone, he removed the gun’s magazine. He pointed it at the ceiling, and I eased up against the door as he counted the bullets inside.
The sunken ground he had indicated was covered with small ridges of snow collapsing on themselves. There were many holes, and it was impossible to see footprints. There was no telling what was out there. I looked at Henry, bent furiously at the window, studying the darkness, and it was then that I began to second-guess myself. What were the chances that this would happen to the woman I grew up next door to? What were the odds that my best friend and I would track down her killer when the cops could not? But then, what did I know at the end of the day? I’d lost a career, moved home when I should have been making adult strides. I hadn’t even known, even dreamed my best friend from childhood might actually take the woman of our dreams to bed. And there were far greater mysteries. Maybe Henry had seen the killer. I turned and looked out my window, then up the dark road, to make sure there was no one standing there. A heat began to run through my body, and my mouth dried up.
“Henry. Are you sure you saw someone?”
He stopped what he was doing and said, “Look. You can come with me or you can stay here. You can believe whatever you want.”
“Let’s go.”
He opened the door. A cold breeze washed over my face and tongue, giving me a taste of the lake, a stand of naked trees, a sky prizing a moon. I got out on the passenger side. He fiddled with the safety on his gun and crunched down through the snow toward the trees. I zipped up my coat and walked a few feet behind him. He drew strength from my presence, standing taller, lengthening his steps. We came to the line of the forest and looked in at the shapes of the trees that scurried deep to a point where we could see nothing else. We breathed patient clouds.
Henry looked at me and nodded, indicating I should lead the way.
I stepped into the woods, through ice and into freezing water and mud, my friend walking just behind me. The snow provided enough reflection for me to lead the way between thin trunks, and every few seconds a dark movement in my peripheral vision caused me to look one way or another. Suddenly I became aware of something else, something real and breathing on the other side of the trees ahead, something I could not quite see. I stopped and held up my hand. Henry came beside me, breathing through his mouth, and held out the gun in front of him. The figure was tall and wide, moving slowly, almost undulating, all colors flashing faintly in the blackness of its silhouette. I heard a snort; snow crunched. My eyes adjusted, and I saw the shape of the deer, at the same time Henry fired off three rounds.
He stood, panting. I heard myself swear softly.
“Didn’t it hear us?” His voice cracked as he said it, like that of a kid who’s destroyed something of value. He held the gun before him, balanced on two hands, waiting for someone to take it away. “Why didn’t it run?”
“She’s probably starving. Sometimes they forage all winter.”
We came nearer and looked at the dying doe. She kicked her hooves against a tree. Her breaths wheezed in and out slowly. Hunger had deranged her, and in a fit of idiotic blindness we’d killed her. There was nothing we could do but go home and try to pretend it hadn’t happened. We couldn’t bury her, not in the frozen earth. We were no detectives. We were barely even hunters.
“What should we do, Nolan?” Henry said.
Seeing he didn’t want to accept the inevitable, I took the gun from his hands and aimed it at the deer. It had been a long time since I held a gun, but I recognized all the sensations. For a second I could hear all three of us breathing.
We wouldn’t officially say good-bye for another few weeks. Still, I’m pretty sure Henry understood what was happening, there in the woods. I stood beside him one more time, as I had done on countless afternoons of our damned childhoods, and pretended ownership just long enough to claim a life.
TRANSLATION
High above, propped-open windows let ghostly winter light into the station. Pigeons fluttered in and out, a constant disturbance of wings. He had seen five trains arrive and empty, fill with new passengers, and depart. He was trying to remember where he had seen the mosaic tiled into the wall across the tracks. It showed Lazarus emerging from his tomb, unwrapping the bluish shroud from his head as he walked out before the crowd. His arms were pale green by contrast to the peach-colored faces and arms of onlookers, his posture upright and solemn, as if the experience of death and resurrection had turned the former beggar into something other than human.
He had seen this in a church somewhere. A long time back. He could remember neither the name of the church nor the city, though he knew, studying the scene, he was not religious. His memory was blank, a dark sea of implications throwing him back into the present moment. He had come down here after waking up in a dingy hotel room with only a train pass, forty-nine crumpled dollars and change, and a ring of keys in his possession. There were no cards, no phone. In the emergency room at the hospital he had waited more than an hour between two patients with more visible woes — a boy with a broken nose and a
bloody shirt-front and a shivering woman with blue lips — before the nagging certainty that there was nothing wrong with him, at least not physically, won out, and he got up and walked out, feeling chills of liberation as he hurried away from the automated doors.
He reached into his pocket and took out the keys and ran a finger over their teeth. They were colored silver and dull gold. These details told him nothing.
A light appeared down the dark tunnel, and a rapid transit train screamed and clattered into the station, car after car of yellow-lit faces looking dully out. An internal clock, not a watch or other conventional timepiece, but a mechanism in him measuring time in its own way, prodded him to get up — perhaps motion would jog something loose, a street name, a trusted face. He looked into the dark window of the door and was momentarily stunned by the sight of himself: shock of black hair, face molded tightly to the skull beneath.
The car was full, the seats and the standing room at the front taken. He moved through making as little contact as he could, aware of faces pinching with annoyance as he eased by. In the back corner he came face-to-face with a small woman in a white and black plaid wool coat. Her blue eyes looked surprised to see him. She did not look away as he took hold of the pole beside her and the train resumed moving.
Passengers swayed as the car rocked back and forth along the rail. He felt her watching and wondered, if he knew her, how to explain himself. She sighed lightly, with what sounded like real disappointment. He turned back and gave a smile which might be an apology or just polite.
She frowned. “One of your moods today?”
“Sorry?”
“One of your moods.”
“I guess. I don’t know.”
She had a wide pale face that was used to smiling. “Is something wrong? Are you feeling sick?”
“Both, you could say.” He looked around at the nearby passengers. Only an old woman, looking tired to the point of anger, paid them any attention. “See,” he said, leaning in close, “I’m having trouble remembering.”
This won him a bigger smile. He supposed he must be a playful enough person to be considered a character.
“What do you mean?” she said, wrinkling her nose.
“I mean I think I’ve got amnesia. Like what people get in the movies.”
“Stop.”
“Really. I woke up in this hotel room this morning without a wallet. It looked like I’d been there awhile.”
“What hotel?”
“One near the station. The Arms.”
“You stayed there?”
“I guess. I woke up there.” He paused, wondering if he should say more. She held to the overhead bar with white wool mittens and looked him over. He wanted to talk to someone, put what he knew into words, to see if he’d missed something. “I kind of panicked and left. I felt like I knew the last station, the one with Lazarus on the wall.”
“Grant and Riverside,” she said. “Okay.”
“Maybe I live near there.”
She smiled more widely. “Are you serious?”
He swallowed roughly, his face still hot, and nodded.
She took a step closer and lowered her voice. “Oh my God, Marcus. What are you going to do?”
“So it’s Marcus.” The sound did not fit him like a name. But she said it with conviction, and she had recognized him, after all. “I’m not sure. Should I go to the hospital? The police?”
“You don’t look like you were mugged.” She reached out to touch his hair. He let her. It was pleasant and delicate, and she was comfortable putting her hands on him. The sensation felt vaguely familiar.
“I don’t feel like I was hurt in any way. In fact, I feel rested.” He flipped up the lapels of his pea coat and bounced his shoulders like a greaser in a leather jacket. “I feel spry.”
“Something’s wrong with you,” she said. “Listen, we’re almost to my stop. Come with me.”
“It’s been a few weeks since I heard from you.” She tore open a brown packet and poured sugar pellets into her coffee. She began to stir with her spoon, rattling the sides of the mug, then slowing so the light toffee-colored froth swirled on the darker liquid. She went on quietly. “You used to get on the train each morning at the same time. Always at the same spot on the platform. You stood next to me riding to work for six months. We would look at each other, but you never would talk to me. I thought it was because you were married. I thought it was for the best. I was mixed up with a married man one time, and it turned out bad.”
He looked at his left hand and its naked ring finger. He wondered if he had lost it, sold it, left it someplace.
“Your wife left,” she said, under her breath, as if she both feared and hoped the words would sting.
“Shortest marriage in history. Most painless, too.” He did not feel like laughing. They were in a coffeehouse in the lobby of a building near her job, crowded into a tiny circular table beside the cold window. Around them strangers sat typing at laptops, reading newspapers, eating, talking, stealing looks at each other. Outside a bum in a soiled-looking green coat held out a cardboard sign for bundled-up pedestrians to read. He was sure he usually avoided places like this. “I feel exposed here,” he said quietly. “Like there’s no privacy. Like that’s kind of the idea of these places.”
“That’s what you always say,” she said. “I can never get you to come here with me.”
He saw, among other things, she did not fully believe him. This news must be difficult to hear from someone you know, he reflected, especially if, as she said, it had been weeks. “Does that mean you and I were together? Is that why my wife left?”
She rested her chin on her hand, looking toward the brightly lighted glass counter filled with Danishes and bagels. “No. Not yet. We were being careful. Your wife left for some other reason. You never said. You didn’t like to talk about it.” She turned to him, narrowing her eyes with something new: the fatigue that sets in after sadness runs out. “You were always a mess.”
His face burned with embarrassment. He saw how he must look, either like someone mentally ill or like a total creep, depending on whether or not she believed him. “Look, I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s fine,” she said, with a swift, learned politeness.
“I guess I should go, try to figure out more stuff.”
“I have to get to the office.”
“Where do I work?” he said. “I have a job, right?” He was aware a girl at the next table had stopped reading her novel to eavesdrop. “I feel like the kind of person who would have a job.”
She had stopped buttoning her coat halfway. Her face was soft with pity. She reached across the table and he could see she thought he was out of his mind — it occurred to him he was, in a manner of speaking. She petted his hand as if it were a wounded bird. “You need to see someone, Marcus.”
He half stood, and his chair scraped noisily across the tiles. He had disrupted the moderate coffee bar noisiness, and customers were staring. “Seriously. Can you tell me?”
“You worked at Saint Anthony’s College. You taught classical literature and theater there. But you lost your job. Don’t ask me why. You never gave me a straight answer.” She turned and headed for the door, holding her pastel blue purse so low it hovered over the dirty pools on the orange tiles.
He went out after her into the bitterly cold morning. Buildings of stone and steel and glass loomed up massively, their upper stories lost in vapors, echoing the slishing, honking cars. A bank of granite-colored clouds threatened more snow, and out across the drifts and avenues flurries danced. The air was blue and gray. He walked beside her, neither of them speaking, to the corner, separation imminent.
“Don’t ask me to introduce myself to you again,” she said sharply.
“I won’t. Look, I’m not making this up. You shouldn’t be offended.” He sensed the words contradicted something that had passed between them. His face was getting cold, his ears stinging, his nose hairs stiffening into little birds’ nests. W
inds came up constantly now, and the right side of his coat flapped open.
She lifted her purse and hung it on her shoulder. “You used to tell me about what your mother was like right before she died,” she said. “How terrible it was that she never knew you anymore. You talked about how hard it was that you didn’t have any other relatives, how you were standing with her knowing she didn’t remember the only person she had left. It sounded so lonely.”
“She had Alzheimer’s,” he ventured.
She nodded. “It got really advanced, until she was just an old lady with the mind of a girl. That’s what you said.”
“Do you think that’s what’s happening to me?” he said.
“I think you’re too young. But I don’t know.” She sighed. “I don’t know, Marcus. I don’t know.” She took a tortoiseshell card wallet from her purse and gave him a rose-colored business card. Laura. “Call me when you find something out. Or if you need something.”
“Great color,” he said.
She nodded her head quickly. “I know.”
As he approached the red brick classics building, two youngish women on the front stoop stubbed out cigarettes in the cement ashtray and disappeared through the heavy cream-painted wooden doors. He had seen their faces when they saw him coming and was sure they were avoiding him. He walked up the salted steps and, standing before the great brass doorknobs, took a last look at the small snowbound campus, a haven in the middle of the city. Pines and naked beeches and maples grew tall over Georgian-style buildings and sidewalks dark with melted snow. It looked like an ideal place to teach, quiet and rich, a shelter for student theatrics.
Save for a few sparsely attended classes, the building seemed empty. A white-bearded man speaking in Hebrew to a class of five students looked up from his desk, saw him, and paused to stare for a moment, then resumed his lecture.
He found the main office on the second floor. The student secretary, a short girl with pink hair and blue- and green-winged angels tattooed on her chunky arms, looked up from the computer where she was reading messages on a web page featuring a picture of her dancing at a concert. She smiled kindly at him. “Hey, Dr. Schwartz. I didn’t know you were still around.”