The Man Who Would Not Die

by Thomas Page

  They rented a jeep and drove out into the desert where the sun was so high the horizon shimmered into timid vagueness as though the land had given up the struggle to keep its own identity and tried to merge with the sky. Kate kept the oscilloscope in her lap with the static going on the screen. Edgy and preoccupied, they had a sullen picnic during which she said roast beef was bad for the system and Dutton snapped that the human race should eat for survival not vanity. Soldiers lived off tree bark, swampwater, and snakes; Brazilian Indians ate centipedes; concentration camp prisoners ate each other. Kate complained that the jeep was uncomfortable. Dutton said he was terribly sorry it was not a Cadillac. They tried to interest themselves in a rattlesnake caged in a mesh-screen box at a road stop. They watched cars full of weary passengers try to dunk themselves in the water fountain. Would Forrester step out of a car? Would he come walking out of the sands toward them, immaculately dressed as he would be for all eternity?

  The afternoon passed in a sun-broiled daze and silent unreasoning anger at each other. As they headed back to Vegas, the sunset speared titanic streaks of scarlet across the defeated horizon. Kate pointed to it and asked, “Is he up there? Up there in the sun?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he went straight down to you know where.”

  “Maybe that’s where we are,” she replied mordantly.

  Dutton pulled to a stop. He leaned over and finally kissed her on the mouth. “Don’t you ever say anything like that to me again. I’d rather find him in the motel room than think that.”

  After a good dinner of steak, artichokes, and apple pie, they were feeling better. In fact, they held hands as they walked into the casino, where Dutton sat down and won two hundred dollars at roulette. He was not even trying. That’s what convinced Dutton that Bickel was on to something with his synchronicity. Nothing else explained why Dutton, a notoriously poor gambler, watched winning numbers come up again and again. The law of averages was not functioning for him.

  “You’re the Hemingway hero,” Kate teased him. “The man things are always happening to.”

  “No,” he said firmly. “It isn’t over yet. The numbers are out of joint. Like the wheel of fire, Kate. Justice isn’t complete. Synchronicity. The numbers.”

  The tension between them stretched taut again and Kate blew her top. “It’s crap. Larry. Superstition, all these stupid laws of coincidence . . . you’re talking like a virgin about to be thrown into a volcano. This goddamned erector set of laws you can’t see or feel or trust.” Kate grabbed her sweater and stomped out of the casino.

  Dutton cried after her, “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” but she was out the door and he’d just put a stack of chips on the table. The numbers came up on his side again, as they did for the rest of the evening. At this rate, he would never have to practice medicine again.

  Much later he returned to the room to find her curled under the cot covers. Her eyes were red and swollen from crying. Again they tried to get along with each other. “How’d it go?” she asked.

  “Another thousand,” he said. “I ought to hide this somewhere.” He kissed her cheek but she did not respond. He turned off the lights and undressed. He set the oscilloscope on the table again and turned it on. The two of them drifted in and out of sleep, their eyes on the green screen, hanging onto it like it was an umbilical cord.

  Her voice came from the darkness, clogged with sleep. “We’re together, aren’t we, Larry.”

  “Yes.”

  “To die in Vegas. How romantic!”

  “We’re not dead yet,” he said. “A piece is still missing somewhere in all this.”

  Steve Rothman knew he was in for a bad day when his blender blades became so clogged with raw honey and protein powder that the motor whined and a thin acidy tendril of black smoke leaked out of the vent. He shut the thing off and sadly looked at the glutinous mess slithering around the inside of the bowl. He’d just dropped his last raw egg in, too. It would have to be whole wheat toast for breakfast. He popped it in the oven—his toaster didn’t work, it burned everything to cinders—and took it out a minute later. Dry whole wheat toast, yum yum. He ended breakfast with a piece of dental floss.

  The place Rothman shared with Diane was not so much a building as a jumbled collection of surprises, of cubbyholes and catty-cornered bedrooms with exposed beams perched at forty-five-degree angles on very unstable ground. When he first moved in with her he thought the place wondrously magical, like being a prisoner inside a pinball machine. It was coziness gone berserk, a bunch of surfaces covered with thick rugs or bamboo matting, with little corners of instant privacy, suitable for quick little bursts of sex. After three months, the coziness wore off for Steve and he felt like the place was the architectural equivalent of a hangover.

  It was sex that had neatly sliced his life away from Kate. He’d met Diane at a party. He was at that stage in his life where he hoped living had made him more seductive than he had been in his youth—he was only thirty-seven, but youth meant every second that passed—and Diane had come on to him. In four words, she had flipflopped his self-image. “Hi there, nice man,” she had said, turning him into melted rubber. He was a seducer now. He had sneaked out afternoons and evenings to be with her, coming home feeling rotten and telling Kate he was lining up clients. One day Kate said. “Why don’t you move in with her?” revealing that she had known all along. “We’re not getting along too well these days anyway.”

  And he had. Diane had said originally she was a rock singer. Then, just before she and the band were to have a gig at Knott’s Berry Farm, she became unaccountably interested in lieder. The gig at the Berry Farm was a bust and the band kicked her out; they took on another singer, adjusted their act, and were now cutting their second album. Diane, in short, was scared of success and pronounced this lost opportunity as something beneath her. Mere money was a desire to be overcome. This morning she was off at a German lesson, polishing up the language. Steve suspected—as Kate had suspected him—that she was sleeping with her instructor. For the past three weeks, he had been angling for ways to get back with Kate. He had patience, and he had will. All he needed was luck.

  The telephone jangled. Steve tossed pillows and scarves around to get at it. He could never find the phone in this place.

  “Hello, Steve?”

  “Kate,” he cried. “What’s new?” Bad news, he could sense it from her voice.

  “Trouble, hon. I’m going to be out of town for a couple weeks and I need a couple of favors.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “I need them pretty bad, Steve. I wouldn’t ask otherwise.”

  “You’re with a guy, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.” Steve rapidly calculated this development and stowed it away. That blond sonofabitch. Lumberjack. Forrester. Okay, he was not too worried, Forrester was not her type. “Anything, Kate. You in trouble?”

  “I don’t know. I think I am, so I’m staying where I am. I’ll tell you everything when I can.”

  “You want me to join you?”

  “That’s not a good idea.”

  He hoped to keep her on the phone and get a bit high at the same time, it was almost as good as having her back with him. “Where are you?”

  “I’m in Las Vegas at a place called the Sidewinder. Can you take this down?” Steve wrote down the list with a pink marker on the side of a grapefruit juice carton which just happened to be next to the telephone. Checkbook in the top dresser drawer, phone list next to it, appointment book, camera and accessories, prescription medicines . . . a strange list indeed, the kind of things one takes if planning to stay away a long time. “What about clothes? You know how I love to wear your undies.”

  Kate burst out laughing. “What did that singer do to you?”

  “Give me half an hour of your time and I’ll demonstrate, in person.”

  Steve wr
ote down the address of the Sidewinder. Regrettably, Kate had to go. He promised to box the stuff up and ship it out today. He wondered why she couldn’t take a quick flight to L.A. and pick it up herself, but he did not ask. He did not want to lean on her.

  He poked through a cigar box full of coke spoons and incense burners before finding the keys to her apartment. It took him forty minutes of crawling through smog-laden freeways to get to her building. He carried an empty cardboard box, a roll of mailing tape, and an address label up to her apartment.

  It took only five minutes to get the things together. There was stuff scattered on the floor; underwear and stockings and more dropped out of the open drawer of the bureau. The picture window and screen were wide open. Steve was appalled. Kate had lit out in such hurry that any four-year-old burglar with a lollipop could get in and vacuum the place out. He closed and latched the window.

  For a few minutes he lingered in the bedroom. Memories poured in on him; the scarves he had bought her, the wisp of perfume, the tiny cedar jewelry chest with the bracelets inside. . . . Maybe he would send roses along with the other things. He missed her. He wanted her back.

  Somebody was moving furniture in the apartment above. The walls and ceilings shivered. Great California construction, he thought sarcastically; the weather is so mild they build houses with paper glue instead of nails, and thought plaster was something you drank booze for. He stuffed the box tight with some old newspapers, taped the flaps shut, and headed for the door.

  Sitting in the rattan chair in the living room was Daniel Forrester, watching him with baleful eyes. Steve nearly jumped clear out of his skin.

  “How’d you get in?”

  Daniel Forrester did not answer. He began to rock steadily back and forth in the chair, his hands tightly gripping the arms, the chair rocker making creaking little noises.

  “Okay, talk my head off. She’s not here, she won’t be back.”

  Daniel Forrester stopped rocking, his face twisted with anger. Steve was somewhat satisfied with that. Forrester was so cool, so Porsche-clean, crisp, and fast. Except he was a bit more formidable than that. Diane had been gut-terrified of him and couldn’t say why—“That guy’s karma stinks, Steve!”—so Steve decided not to push him. If he didn’t want to talk, that was okay with him.

  “She’s with some guy. I don’t know where. I’m just picking up a few things. If I was you, I’d get out before the super knows you’re in here. He unlatched the door. Daniel Forrester’s furious eyes watched him. “And I’ll give you a little hint. She’s not your type. You lost her. I lost her. Both of us. Except the difference is, I’ll get her back. Me! Not you. Understand? Good. Bye-bye.”

  Steve slammed the door and headed for the elevator before Forrester could heave knives at him. Steve was neither a coward nor a fool. Forrester was a lot bigger than he was and, from the look on his face, capable of anything.

  He mailed the package to Kate from a post office adjoining the apartment towers. Then he drove over to the freeway again and headed for home. He lowered the window to allow hot wind to cool off the hotter interior of the car and switched on the radio, trying to find something that was neither disco nor country.

  He pulled into the passing lane to get by a refrigerator truck. As he did so, he looked into the rearview mirror. A pair of red-rimmed eyes filled the frame looking directly at him. No rear window, no view of traffic, just a pair of outsized eyes. His first ludicrous impulse was to ask the intruder to move aside, so he could see out the back. His second was that it was impossible for Daniel Forrester to have gotten into the back of the car, therefore he was not sitting in the back seat, lips twisted in a snarl, bursting off the upholstery to clap his hands over Steve’s face.

  Nevertheless, Steve ducked. The hand, trailing a stream of freezing air that felt rather good considering the interior of the car was an oven, passed over his head. The hand balled into a fist and Steve lurched against the door.

  His car cut back into the driving lane and sideswiped the truck. In less than a second, the car flipped over, cartwheeled down the freeway, and then burst into flame before piling itself into a crumple of steel and melted rubber.

  The paramedics and highway patrol spent an hour cutting Rothman out of the car. They put him into an ambulance, pumped him full of blood, oxygen, and antishock medication, and roared off for the hospital. No one expected him to stay alive for more than a minute, but he hung on, barely conscious. The attendants marveled at his powerful will to live. He kept trying to speak to them and finally got some words out to one attendant who bent close to his mouth.

  Rothman whispered, “Murder.”

  “Who? What?”

  “That son of a . . . a . . .” Rothman gasped in delirium. “I’ll get him, the fucker . . .” His voice trailed off and his head lolled to one side.

  Every afternoon, Irwin Bickel received reports on the LS machine from Hillsdale, Clark Creek, and Los Angeles. At seven-thirty, the Los Angeles hospital informed Stendhal Holmes that a patient named Steven Rothman, aged thirty-seven, Caucasian male, victim of an auto accident, had been wheeled out of the operating room. His condition was hopeless. Burns covered sixty percent of his body, his back was broken, his chest shattered, his skull fractured. As part of his postoperative treatment, Rothman was placed inside the LS capsule. He was not expected to last the night. At six-thirty, his heart arrested for four minutes. Much to their surprise, the machine got it going again.

  At eight o’clock that night, Lawrence Dutton took his usual seat at the Sidewinder casino with Kate standing behind him. He put chips on black thirteen, red twelve, and a scattering of other numbers. Much to his and the casino’s surprise, he was stung.

  Before the evening was out, Dutton lost nearly half of his earnings before calling it quits. He said to Kate, “Something’s happening.”

  Kate scoffed, “Hogwash.”

  And residents at the Santa Monica tower apartments were startled by a loud blue explosion that came from Kate Burnham’s apartment. Led by the super, a group of neighbors crowded into the place. It was empty, as though deserted in a hurry. More mysteriously, the apartment was spotless, untouched by any violence at all. That was the second time in a week that had happened and the super made a note to tell Kate to stop messing round with her chemistry set, or the management would give her the heave.

  Someone pounded on the bungalow door at eight in the morning while Kate was in the bathroom and Dutton was playing solitaire Scrabble. He pulled on his bathrobe and opened it.

  “Package for Miss Burnham.”

  Dutton tipped the bellboy and tossed the package on the bed. It was postmarked Santa Monica. He called to Kate, “At last the postal service works.”

  “Can you turn down the air conditioning?” she called from the bathroom.

  The room was rapidly cooling. Dutton poked at the control switch, turned it to zero, and listened. “Nothing works in this place. It’s off when it says on, it’s on when it . . .” The words strangled in his chest.

  The static was gone from the oscilloscope. A green line with a bump in the middle was inching upward into a cone. Dutton tapped the machine. The line stayed.

  Face ashen, eyes glassy with terror, Kate ran out of the bathroom for the door. Dutton grabbed her before she could make it. “Wait,” he bellowed. She struggled to get away and he hoisted her off the floor.

  They felt him come in, a presence invisible yet palpable as poison gas. The cold froze their fingers and they could smell a wet stale odor.

  Dutton looked round but he could not see him anywhere. Instead they heard a grunt of anger from the ceiling corner by the air conditioner.

  Kate sobbed and buried her face in Dutton’s shoulder as the grunt traveled across the ceiling and centered itself in the light fixture. The fixture groaned, then ripped out of the ceiling and crashed to the floor near them.

  On the bed, the s
heets, the Scrabble game and letter blocks and pillows flew into the air, swirling round the frigid room, and landed on the floor, the Scrabble pieces clattering across the wood.

  “Where is he?” Kate cried. “Why can’t we see him?”

  Dutton shouted, “Forrester?”

  There was a brief pause during which the bed screeched to the side leaving tear marks in the rug, then a crack opened in the wall and a burst of steam blew bits of plaster and paint into the room. The voice grunted, “Bastard.” Then after opening and slamming shut once, the front door opened again. The visitation was over, the room neat and undamaged.

  They held each other tightly, for the first time. Kate was shivering violently and he could feel the small movements of her head against his chest.

  She said, “Why couldn’t we see him?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he’s weakening or something. Maybe he’s going to that higher plane or whatever your friend called it.”

  “How did he find us?”

  “I don’t know that either.” Reluctantly he released her. “If that’s as bad as it’ll get, we can live with it.”

  “I can’t live with it,” she said bluntly. She sat on the bed. “I’ll end up in an institution if this keeps up. You, too. What do we do?”

  “We can keep moving. Hell, I never stayed longer than five years in any town. I was ready to scram from Clayton anyhow. If we went really far away, he wouldn’t find us for years.”

  “That’s no good.”

  Dutton knew she was right. He picked up the oscilloscope and examined it. “This thing doesn’t give you any lead time. It sees him at the same time we do.”

  “What do we do?” she repeated.

  “Okay. There’s three things keeping him here. Me. And you. And the house.”

  Kate looked at him, rather impressed. “You know I forgot about the house completely.”

  “And we need an expert. I was thinking about your friend Nora.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Nora Stone would be delighted to see Kate. “I knew you’d call, Kate, you must come to dinner, the kids are at camp. Mike’s in Chicago, and I’m all alone with my cat! Do you and the doctor like corn on the cob?”