The Man Who Would Not Die

by Thomas Page

  They took turns driving round the countryside. Clayton County was full of serpentine roads that meandered past meadows or slithered up pine slopes. On a local map, Forrester found a place called Birdhole, a lookout some two thousand feet above sea level where the whole valley could be seen. Forrester was a careful driver so they made it by four-thirty.

  As they trudged up a stairway of rotting, slippery wood, Kate appreciated the good physical shape Forrester was in. Despite his height, he walked with a tightly sprung, slightly bowlegged gait that confirmed every ounce of his bulk had a muscle in it somewhere.

  On the lookout, Forrester and Kate stood against a wood fence like a king and queen surveying their domain. Stupendous mountains marched away toward the horizon, snowy plumes whipping off their peaks to soften the chalky, white sullenness of the vista. The view was immense—too immense. It was spectacularly inhuman, overwhelming everything alive, turning cities, homes, lovers, children into mere afterthoughts and not very important ones at that. The sky gave Kate a sense of vertigo. The bulging mountains imparted a feeling of stolid serenity, but the sky was clotted with torn, ripped clouds gnashed and driven across the arid heavens. Kate felt sick and panicky looking up at that maelstrom of ice and air and crystals and vapors where there was no room for living flesh.

  Daniel Forrester wiped cold moisture from his nostrils and steadied her at the waist. Even his sizable personality was subdued. “It was probably great this morning when the sun was shining. Maybe that’s the problem. We can’t see the sun.”

  Kate rested her head against his chest. With a gloved hand, he tilted up her chin and kissed her lips. They decided to head back to the lodge before their spirits became completely soggy.

  Once they hit warmth, people, brandy, and burning logs, they cheered up. Much later, Kate decided they talked each other into bed. Forrester acted obsessively interested in her, pumping her for every detail of her past he could get. How many brothers did she have? Where did they live? When did her parents die? What kind of car did she drive? How did she decorate her apartment? What breed of cat did she have and what was its name? Mr. Fudd? What the fuck kind of a name was that for a pussycat? Kate had the feeling he talked to keep his mind off other things. The career change must be a serious idea. He wanted to overturn everything he had done for the past twenty years and do something else. Maybe he was thinking of including her in his future. After all, he’d never been married. Start over with everything.

  They both ate too much. Sitting at the same sundeck table as last night—it was their table—they stashed away rolled frankfurter appetizers, followed by chef’s salads with cheese dressing and strips of ham and turkey, a steak for dinner, ice cream and apple pie afterwards. Then they drank more brandy and watched the dancers filter in for the evening.

  During the second or third music set, they began kissing seriously in the dark, provoking envious, frustrated glances from the other people in the disco. Those two were going to score.

  Thoroughly bombed, Kate and Daniel Forrester lurched out of the lounge, kissing all the way to the elevator. Forrester protested that his room was over the disco lounge, couldn’t they go to hers? Kate spent an alcohol-fogged minute trying to get her key in the door till Forrester took it from her and wrenched open the lock. They stumbled into the room. Kate turned on the table light. Forrester hopped round the place trying to get his boots off without banging his legs on the bed. Kate had her sweater halfway over her head when the telephone rang.

  “Hi, Kate,” said her husband, Steve. “Guess who?”

  “Steve,” she stammered. “Can I call you back?”

  “I’m on my way to the drugstore. I’ve got this stomach bug of some kind. What was the name of that stuff you . . .”

  Forrester tumbled to the floor with a loud thud and a curse. He was buried under a welter of his own clothing—tie, jacket, shirt, pants, red socks.

  “I really can’t talk now, Steve,” Kate said, aware that Steve must have heard the sound.

  “I get it. Har de har har. Give me a ring when you don’t have your hands full.” Kate hung up on him. She was not free for another two hours, after which she felt no inclination to return the call.

  At three-thirty that morning, something awakened Daniel Forrester with a violent start that partially disturbed Kate lying next to him. His heart pounded tidal waves of blood through his body, rushes so strong he had to breathe carefully. Perspiration drenched him even though the cold in the room had made Kate snuggle deep in the covers.

  Forrester looked through the windows at the frozen explosions of the mountains under the sharp silver stars. He was completely awake, with no idea of what awakened him and no hope of sleeping again. A dream? If so, it was long gone. A breath of wind? If so, it was flying over the mountains by now. Kate? Her nude body lay still and limp, almost drugged with sleep. The disco music was faint and muted and a travel clock ticked on the table. Normally, Daniel Forrester had no trouble sleeping.

  He slipped out of bed and looked out the window. The room was cool, the planks cold against his bare feet. His breath fogged the window glass. No rats, bats, or burglars were concealed in the corner.

  Daniel Forrester decided to smoke a cigarette in the bathroom. He poked through his jacket till he found the pack and lighter and tiptoed into the room. He switched on the damned, stupid red sunlamp by mistake, cut it off, and turned on the regular light which was accompanied by a fan. The bathroom was just like the one in his room, with false-marble-topped sink and a shower stall to the left. Covering the length of the wall above the sink was a mirror.

  Forrester lit his cigarette and blew the blue smoke toward the fan vent. Then he looked at himself in the mirror. After a moment of paralyzing shock, he said, “Holy Christ!”

  There were two Daniel Forresters, two reflections of him with cigarettes in their hands, standing side by side and looking straight at him.

  “Kate?” His voice was low with an urgent resonance that was far more effective than a shout.

  Kate stirred on the bed and mumbled a reply.

  “Kate, can you come in here a minute?”

  “What?” she yawned.

  “Please? Come into the bathroom.”

  Without bothering to put on a robe, Kate rolled out of bed and went into the bathroom.

  “What could be better than Daniel Forrester in your room?”

  “What?”

  “Two Daniel Forresters in your room. Do you see it?” He indicated the mirror.

  She looked at the mirror. Then she looked back at him. “See what?”

  Feeling very heavy, Daniel Forrester sighed. The images sighed with him. “Okay. Something is very wrong inside my head, I am ready for the funny farm. Either that or there’s two reflections of me. What do you see?”

  “A man and a woman naked as jaybirds.”

  “Look a foot to the right of my reflection. Same height, same weight, same everything. He is standing between us.”

  Kate searched the glass but saw only one reflection.

  “Can you see anything at all? Any fogginess, flaws in the glass, anything?”

  “No, Daniel. But if I work at it, I will. Are you wearing contacts?”

  “No. And another thing, Kate. He’s moving just a little slower than I am.”

  “Daniel, look at me.”

  In the mirror, the two Daniel Forresters looked at Kate Burnham.

  “Now look back.”

  The two Daniel Forresters looked back at them.

  “So, I’m bananas,” Forrester said. “It happened this afternoon in the clinic. Only it wasn’t a reflection, it was a hallucination. I was lying in the LS capsule and it walked up to the top and looked down at me.”

  A shudder brought Kate fully awake. “How clear is it?”

  “No distortion. That’s the strangest . . .” He touched the glass. Three sets of fin
gertips met on the plane of glass. “It’s a funny kind of reflection, very sharp, very vivid yet you have to look twice for details. I think it might be a bit fainter than mine. It’s real and it’s not real.” Abruptly he did not want to look at it anymore. He dowsed the cigarette with a spurt of water from the faucet and threw it into the trash can. “Kate, you wouldn’t be a shrink among your other talents would you?”

  “I studied psychology for one semester. Are you superstitious?”

  “No more than the average astrologer. Why?”

  “I recall reading that Abraham Lincoln saw a double image in a mirror before he died.”

  “Wow.”

  “It was in 1860 or thereabouts. He saw just the face in some kind of swinging door mirror. Several times. His wife said it meant he wouldn’t finish his term. And of course everybody claims to see his ghost running round the White House. The Queen of the Netherlands said she saw him there. I think there’s a poem about it.”

  “It doesn’t look like a ghost. In fact it looks livelier than me.” He looked sidelong at the mirror, then the big salesman grin split his face. “Or rather it did. It’s gone now.”

  “Wonderful, Daniel. I guess you won’t croak in my room and ruin my reputation.” Standing on her tiptoes, she bussed his cheek. “Now come on back to bed.”

  Forrester switched the light on and off several times as if to surprise the phantom lurking somewhere in the polished surface but all he saw was himself in his birthday suit.

  Back in bed, he still could not sleep. He tried to restrict his turning so as not to disturb Kate, but she could sense his distress.

  “Poor Daniel,” she whispered in the dark. “Now I’ve gone and upset you.”

  “I’m not worried,” he lied. “I’ll outlive everybody I know.”

  For Kate the rest of the vacation blended into a seamless fabric of cold snow, warm flesh, and tired ski legs in which she could not tell later on which day certain events occurred. Daniel Forrester did not entirely dislodge the article from her head onto paper, but he did inspire clattering hours on the typewriter. Certain things about him were vividly imprinted on her memory.

  She remembered times when he was downcast. Once while sitting across from her at lunch, he interrupted her by blurting, “Marry me.” She never did know if he meant it or not because there was always a trace of a smile round his adoring eyes. So she laughed and said, “Sure. Right up on the mountaintop,” and he laughed.

  She remembered telling him about her husband and how violently unhappy the whole subject made her. She told him that when a marriage goes smash, nothing is left. All the years of effort, of living together, come to nought. Marriage is a more fundamental relationship than parenthood. And Forrester had remarked, “I think it’s harder to be a good lover than a good husband,” and she thought it such a great quote she typed it into the article that evening.

  They spent every evening at the table on the sundeck. But every time Kate thought she was seriously falling for Forrester, something warned her off. She remembered the evening he exasperated her at the indoor archery range. For hours he had tried putting an arrow through the target and each miss befouled his temper until she was ready to walk out on him. When he finally made a bull’s-eye, he became angry because she did not share his elation. He was a perfectionist in the worst sense of the word, obsessed with any project, no matter how small, and he had that curious insensitivity ingrown bachelors often have. In Clayton he crossed a street to the other side before realizing she was still waiting for the light to change. Sometimes he would talk for hours about technology without realizing how bored she was.

  Daniel Forrester’s worst peccadillo was his jealousy. A morning conversation with Steve threw him into a black funk that lasted all day, during which he spoke only in monosyllables. She realized he would not take her to the clinic to see the system because he did not want her to run into Dr. Dutton. “He’s got a great beard, hasn’t he?” he joked, teeth grinding together behind his smile.

  Adding up his pluses and minuses, Kate decided that on the whole he was a pretty good man. If he was jealous, he was also loyal. When she talked, he listened. He didn’t chase other women while with her or make stupid embarrassing remarks to her. As a muse he was not a success, but then again, she was not Dante, so it was hardly fair to expect him to be Beatrice. She cranked out pages every morning, skied every afternoon, and met him every evening at the sundeck table. It was a nice cozy arrangement and she fended off all his suggestions that they get together again in Los Angeles. “We’ll see,” she would say. He had fallen hard for her. She did not return that particular compliment.

  The little beep on Forrester’s watch awoke him at six-thirty in the morning. It was still dark outside, the air thick with damp dawn fog. He was not tired. He felt tense and ready for nothing in particular.

  The bathroom mirror was still clear. He washed and shaved and dressed, taking exquisite care lest he awaken Kate. She looked very small, a tiny body, practically a boy’s form, tan and brown as an almond against the white sheets.

  Forrester had packed his suitcase the night before. Now he checked his briefcase to see that all his materials were inside. Everything was in order. All he had to do was get to the chartered plane at the Clayton airfield.

  Should he kiss Kate? He bent over and brushed his lips on her cheek. Her breathing changed from deep, measured breaths to small quick ones, indicating she was about to wake up.

  From the desk drawer, he removed a sheet of lodge stationery and wrote: Dearest Kate. It was too quick for flowers but better than most marriages. See you in Los Angeles. Love, Daniel. He folded the note and put it on the bathroom mirror. He was about to shut the desk drawer when he noticed a small Gideon Bible next to the stationery, the type found in hotel rooms all across the country.

  Forrester picked it up and curiously riffled the pages. For some mad reason he thought about stealing it from the room. That was crazy, he didn’t need a Bible.

  He checked himself in the mirror one last time. He was wearing a blue blazer and gray pants, his favorite gonzo outfit. He carried his briefcase and put on his smile. Zowie! Hot-shot salesman, a born city slicker.

  As he eased out the door, he saw Kate yawn and brush hair from her eyes. She turned over onto her back, about to wake up. Forrester softly closed the door behind him.

  A taxi with a yawning driver dropped him off at the airfield gate, from which he made his way to the hangar. By now the sun had begun to flood the mountains in the east but its light was so cold, blue, and feeble that the world might have been better off had it chosen not to rise at all. To Forrester it did not look like very good flying weather.

  There were two planes in the hangar, one a sleek blue twin Beechcraft, the other a Piper two-seater. At first no one seemed to be there. Forrester called out “hello” in the echoing gloom and banged his umbrella handle on the door.

  “Sorry,” came a voice from behind the Piper. A grease-stained man in a leather jacket emerged, carrying a wrench. “You’ll be Mr. Forrester.”

  “Yes, and I guess you’re Blackwell.”

  They shook hands. Forrester could not tell how old Blackwell was. He could be in his sixties, in which case Forrester was not anxious to fly with him, or, if his hair were prematurely white, he could be in his forties. Forrester looked at the wrench.

  Blackwell laughed. “Just checking things out. I do that before jumping puddles.”

  “Jumping puddles!” Forrester exclaimed. “When’s the last time anybody ever said that?”

  “Not in a coon’s age, I expect.” Blackwell looked Forrester over with an uncomfortably close scrutiny as the salesman examined the aging Piper. “The other one belongs to Dr. Jameson up at the clinic. He just flew back this morning from Canada.”

  “How old is yours?”

  “Oh, not so old. It ain’t swank but it does for me nicely.”
r />   “This doesn’t look like very good weather. Maybe we’ll make it tomorrow.”

  As Blackwell clasped his hands behind him and chortled, his age seemed to drop down to the thirties. “Oh, I’ve flown in worse than this, Mr. Forrester, yes indeedy.”

  “Yes indeedy?”

  “I’ve flown in blizzards, tornadoes, thunderstorms, and it’s tight as a tick inside.”

  “Tight as a tick. I suppose inside I’ll be snug as a bug in a rug.”

  Blackwell gave him an impish grin which did not cheer Forrester up. The crappy weather, the eccentric pilot, and the aged airplane did not seem very propitious to him.

  “Mr. Forrester,” said Blackwell, “this here plane will get you where you’re going.”

  “I couldn’t help noticing the tower was empty.”

  “Oh, there’s not much flying this early in the morning, but don’t worry, I put in a flight plan last night.” He opened the passenger door and Forrester, ignoring his lingering doubts, climbed in.

  “Well, I hope the parachutes are new.”

  “You won’t be needing any parachutes, sir, everything will be just hunky-dory.”

  Blackwell slid open the hangar door and climbed in beside Forrester. The engine sounded loud and steady enough. The plane edged out into the wet, dewy morning, positioned itself at the end of the runway, and, in a lifting glide that nearly sent Forrester’s breakfast Danish into his mouth, rose into the air. The engine sound all but ruined any possibility of conversation. The plane sailed into murky gray clouds which blanked out the sun, banked hard to the southwest, and bounced heavily as though it were rolling over a stony road.

  Rain sprayed across the windshield and tubes of wind slapped at the little craft. From time to time, the winds tore open the dirty clouds, affording them a view of more black clouds in their flight line.