“There’s enough left for an open-casket ceremony,” one of the attendants said softly.
How thoughtful.
Her face wasn’t touched. Somehow, there on the slab, she lacked even the red, soaking waistline I had been expecting. Possibly they had wrapped plastic around her middle, to contain the mess.
How very tidy.
I was offered a ride home, but I walked, and it didn’t even become real to me until I had gone quite a ways along the west side of Central Park, past one, two, three gaping mouths of the hungry subway; and I tried to think, not selfishly of myself, but of her, of the loss of her career, of the actress she would never become and the sets she would never design, and of the Off-Off Broadway production of something called Macbeth, Moor of Mantua, which would now look very different if it ever got as far as opening night. The script had sounded awful, pretentious and trivial—she had died for nothing, for less than nothing, for someone else’s verbal garbage, and life went on, the city went on, thank you, its great, glaring heart never missing a beat.
I didn’t feel anything at that. I was acting myself, forcing myself into the expected role of grieving husband.
The hurt came slowly, wordlessly, a fog of pain, and by the time I reached our building I was weeping softly.
* * * *
“I’m back,” she said.
* * * *
I sat in the apartment, my apartment now, no her apartment—still littered with pieces of her life, her hairbrush by the sink, her unfinished set design sketches on her drawing board, her books on the shelves, her cat hiding under the bed, somehow vaguely aware that something was terribly wrong—I sat there on the bed staring at her things, only beginning to feel the loss, like a soldier who’s shot in battle, and it’s only like a punch at first, a hard tap that knocks the wind out of him for a second or two before his nervous system can sort out the astonishing discovery that half his guts have been blown away.
I think hours passed. After a while, it was dark. The phone didn’t ring. No one, it occurred to me, no one who mattered anyway, was in on the secret yet. I hadn’t called relatives. I hadn’t made arrangements.
I could still pretend. I did something silly.
The black cat, Pazuzu, scratched my leg ever so gently, then hissed and scooted back under the bed. I looked down. Sarah’s white slippers were at my feet.
I thought of the guy on Soap who could only talk through a dummy, and when the other characters hid that, he had to resort to half a grapefruit to voice the otherwise unspeakable.
I wasn’t laughing as I put the slippers on either hand, working them like puppets.
It seemed the correct, even reverent thing to do.
“She really is dead,” said the right slipper. “You saw.”
“No,” said the left. “If we deny it, if we tell a really huge lie long enough—who knows?”
“You do,” said the right.
“Deny it. Moment by moment. That’s all any of us have anyway, ever. Just the splinter of time we call now. We never know if we’re going to live another minute, long enough to say that certain word, or even to exhale. So, deny it with every breath while you still can.”
“You had a lot you still wanted to say. A lot you never got around to,” said the right slipper.
“Yes, I did. I do,” said the left.
“Never wait. If you love someone, if you hate them, if you want to be excused to go to the bathroom, say it now. Not later.”
“It’s easy enough to tell me that now.”
“Words are easy,” said the right slipper. “It’s the timing that trips you up.”
I dropped my hands into my lap.
“Oh God, I want her back!” I said. “I want her to come back. That’s all.”
“Dead people don’t come back,” said the right slipper.
“Just this once—”
“Wish it,” said the left. “Wish it very hard. Lie to yourself. Dream it. Very hard. Day by day, second by second. Fool yourself. In the end it won’t matter. Imagine how it might be—”
“Things like that don’t happen in the real world,” said the right.
“This is New York,” said the left.
* * * *
I was sobbing out loud then, and I heard something stirring in the apartment, behind things, under things; I thought it was the cat at first; pans clanged in the kitchen.
“Peter. I’m back.”
I bolted up, tripped, and fell flat on my face with a sound that was almost a scream; terrified, puzzled, unbelieving, convinced I was crazy all at once. I recognized her voice. I knew it. Her voice.
The apartment was empty, of course. A pan had fallen out of the cupboard.
It was only much later, as I had sobbed for what seemed like hours, rolling on the bed, tearing at the sheets, amazing myself with the depth and intensity of my own feelings, only then was it all true, really, really true that she was gone, not here, had not returned; only then that my outraged nervous system had figured out what all the signals meant—
Eventually I slept, and imagined, and dreamed, and lied to myself very hard—and Sarah was there, lying on her back beside me, tall and thin and pale, her blonde hair almost white. She still wore her street clothes and high heels, her purse clutched firmly in her immaculate hands. She looked more like an investment broker than a theater person, spotless, proper, ideal—
I leaned up on my elbow and whispered to her: fond little jokes, funny things we’d said to one another when we were both twenty, telephone pickup lines, including the ever popular We can’t go on meeting like this, the perennial classic Doctor Mbogo’s office. Less-ay! Less-ay!, plus the inevitable Spooch!, the word which is inherently funny on a syllabic level.
But she did not answer. She just lay there, perfectly still. Moonlight and city-light streamed in through Venetian blinds, making the bedroom a grillwork of bright and dark, the colors muted, and Sarah a statue of flawless marble.
A single black butterfly revealed itself on her chin, opening its wings suddenly, then darted off.
I reached out to touch her, in my dream, and my right hand went through her, cutting her in half, and came up warm and wet.
I drew back, disgusted. I felt the fear rising slowly within me, the helpless dread. I gagged myself with my other hand, to stifle a scream.
Then the image rippled and was gone, and I ran my hand over the bedspread and felt only dust and dirt and a few coarse hairs.
I was aware that I was dreaming then, unable to wake up, listening to traffic noises that surged outside the window like a restless sea.
* * * *
It was the smell that woke me.
I rolled over, sat up, and choked. The apartment air was thick was a putrid stench I could almost see in the filthy air.
I brushed hair and dust off the bed beside me, looking around angrily for the cat, wondering just what decaying treasure the little dear had dragged in. But I saw nothing.
Sarah’s workroom was a mess, papers scattered over the floor, the drawing table knocked over, ink smeared over the oddly Egyptian set-designs, as if some spastic infant had attempted finger-painting.
The inky hand-prints were small and thin, but distinctly adult, distinctly feminine.
The smell was strongest there, around the drawing table and the toppled stool.
I spent the rest of the morning cleaning up, disinfecting, wiping, spraying. The phone rang again and again. I ignored it.
Then I sat for hours at my own typewriter, telling myself the big lie, conducting a continuation of the dialogue of the slippers.
How shall I my true love know from the other one…?
She is dead and gone—
No she isn’t.
I want her back.
You might not like it.
No?
Yes, the inherent shortcoming of living on lies is that you lose touch with the truth.
Holy platitudes, Batman. That’s really profound.
Meaning, did y
ou really love her as much as you now think you did?
Yes. Goddamnit. Yes.
Wanna find out?
The phone rang and rang. Finally I rose, went into the bedroom, and answered it. Everyone had found out somehow, already. There were outpourings of sympathy from relatives I hardly knew existed. Level-headed uncles took over, made plans. The funeral was tomorrow. Should someone come and stay with me?
No, I told them. No. It isn’t necessary, because she isn’t really dead.
You’re crazy with grief, they said.
No. I’ve never been more clear-headed. She is here, with me now.
We’ll be right over, they said.
* * * *
It was then, as I still spoke, that Sarah put her hand on my shoulder and said softly, “I’m back.”
I dropped the phone. She turned me around gently. She was there, in the evening twilight, as I had seen her in my dream, immaculately dressed, her purse over one arm, her polished nails, glistening in the semi-darkness.
She didn’t flinch when I turned on the lights, but raised her head slowly and said, “Hello, Peter.”
“Hello, Sarah.”
The stench was horrible. She drew me toward her, toward a kiss. I gulped, tried to find something to say, tried to pull away. “No, please, no—”
“What are you afraid of, Peter? That I want to eat you? It isn’t like that.”
She let go of me. I sat down in a stuffed chair. She sat on the edge of the bed.
I turned off the lights again.
“What are you thinking, right now?” she said.
“I don’t know what to think. I can’t deal with this.”
“You wished it. You wished it very hard. You must have had a reason, a clear idea of what you were doing.”
I thought I knew then. For a flickering instant I was certain that somehow our whole life together was summed up in this instant, the lines of our existence converging to this pinnacle, this incredible reprieve, in which I would give everything meaning, heal all the hurts, demand satisfaction, make good every bit of neglect, anger, selfishness each of us had ever inflicted on the other. It was as if I were drowning and with everything flashing before me—
And I couldn’t find the words. I only felt numb, empty.
“This is just too…strange. I’m afraid,” I said at last, almost weeping for the feebleness of that excuse.
She smiled. I felt a twinge of hope just then. I tried to convince myself that she had actually returned to life, that we could go on as before and maybe do better; but, as I watched, her face seemed to crack slightly. The lines around her eyes were, ever so minimally, disturbingly, different.
“How do you think I feel?” she said. She laughed softly. It was real laughter, her real voice.
The phone rang again and kept on ringing. I turned out the light. The two of us sat there in the deepening gloom, staring at the phone. She nodded at last, and I reached over and picked it up.
The police sergeant I had met at the morgue spoke, his voice obviously straining for calm. He seemed in shock, unable to say what he had to say.
“Mister Riley…there has been a…desecration—I don’t know how to put it any other way.”
“A what?”
“Your wife’s body has disappeared.”
“But that’s impossible,” I said. “Body-snatchers in this day and age? Ghouls?”
“We don’t know, Mister Riley. We haven’t got much to go on.”
“Well how about this? How about, she got up and walked away, and she’s here in my apartment with me right now—”
“Please Sir. You’re understandably upset. It is very hard, I know. If there is anything I can do—”
“She got up and walked!” I screamed, and threw the phone away.
“Walked,” said Sarah softly. “I don’t remember.”
I sat back, staring at her. She was no more than an outline in the dark now. The stench was worse than ever.
Tell yourself the big lie.
No. Believe it.
“You’re the esprit de l’escalier,” I said.
“The what?”
“The French have an expression, the spirit of the back-stairs, meaning the right words that come to you after the situation is over. When you’re leaving, going down the back stairs, you suddenly know what you should have said, what you should have done, only it’s too late.”
She reached over and took my hand in hers. Even after those few minutes, her touch had changed. Now it was cold and hard. The smell was overwhelming. It was all I could do not to strike out frantically, not to run screaming and choking out of the apartment.
Instead, I sat there, trembling, and she held me, and she said, “Don’t leave me now. I think we have only a little time. This isn’t a return. It’s just a visit. Let’s use it well. So, please, just for this little while, accept me as I am.”
I couldn’t bring myself to flick the light back on, but I could tell from the street glare coming in through the window that she was crying and her tears were black, streaking her fish-belly white cheeks. The skin seemed to be peeling away around her eyes.
She reached up with her other hand, a shriveled, old lady’s hand, to brush her hair out of her eyes, and some of the hair came away at her touch.
“So soon,” she said. It was a question mixed with a statement. “So soon?”
There was a huge, dark stain on the front of her blouse.
I remembered what they’d told me over the phone.
You’re crazy with grief.
This can’t be happening.
We’re sending someone right over.
* * * *
“I think we should go out,” I said. “We can’t stay here.”
“Yes,” she said.
“A last night on the town.”
“Promise me one thing.”
“One thing.”
“You won’t be afraid of me?”
“I promise.”
“Promise me another?”
“Yes.”
“That you’ll remember me not as I am, but as I was.”
I wept then, again, exhausted, at the end of all resistance. I saw quite clearly that she was changing, by the minute. The flesh really was flaking away around her eyes, exposing her cheekbones. The smell wasn’t quite as bad now, like old, dirty straw.
“We have to go,” I said.
So we went. We walked for blocks, zig-zagging in and out of streets, south and east and west and south again, past a theater where a huge, inflated green boot seemed poised to stomp on passers-by. We crossed Times Square, now frantic with early evening activity, the buying and selling of trinkets, sex, lives. We fit right in. No one noticed. No one cried out, pointed.
Only once in a great while did either of us say anything, and then it was only trivial comments, dying sparks of wit, old memories.
We seemed to spend hours window-shopping at all her favorite places, now closed.
“My credit’s probably no good anymore, anyway.”
She laughed. It was still her laugh.
Later, when the streets began to empty out but for a few worried stragglers and the last of the hustlers, we came to a place I recognized, where, so long before, just before the two of us were married, we had stood for what must have been half an afternoon watching a street performer in silver tights and an ebony mask defy the laws of gravity as he moved through a machine-like dance with golden balls rolling all over his body.
Sarah paused there, searching for something, but the sidewalk was simply bare.
A single twilight-gray butterfly flew around her head, lit on her shoulder, then was somehow gone.
It had started to drizzle. Traffic hissed by.
We came to a fountain in front of a huge, granite office building. We used to meet there for lunch, back when the two of us had real jobs. Now she dipped her hand into the water, and the flesh fell away like sand, and she held up gleaming white bone. The butterfly lit there, the owl-faced one,
appearing for the first time, slowly opening and closing its wings, but I shooed it away and took her hand in mine—that hand, the skeletal one—and we walked on.
I wasn’t afraid now. I tried to think. I felt an enormous sense of guilt, that we were stalling, wasting what little time we had left with trivia, that there was some important thing we had to do, to get over with before it was too late, which would give order and meaning to everything. But I had no idea what.
I tried to explain everything then, to say, indeed, I was sorry, to go over our whole lives and marriage, to pick at the scabs and make the wounds run with genuine, living blood, but she put a bare-bone finger to my lips and said, “No. Hush.”
Then there were more butterflies: one, two, a swarm, fluttering against my ears, landing on her shoulders, on her head, one of them exploring the dark recesses of her ear with its flickering tongue.
She didn’t seem to mind. She didn’t seem to notice. She was becoming, with the arrival of the butterflies, somehow more distant. I was losing her. She was slipping away.
I remembered reading somewhere that in the Orient people believe that the butterflies they see in graveyards are the souls of the recently departed. But I knew it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t so simple. These were fragments of death itself, come to devour Sarah, to drag her back into the darkness from which she had come, to shorten her visit—
Angrily, I brushed them away. I tried to catch them in my hands and crush them, but it was like grasping at smoke.
There were only more of them.
Sarah walked. I followed her, into Central Park. For just an instant I thought of how reckless it was to go into Central Park at such an hour—I glanced at my watch; it was almost 5 A.M.—but I couldn’t convince myself that it mattered; not now, not this once.
Sarah walked on, relentlessly as a wind-up toy, and after a time she seemed, indeed, like some frail, mechanical thing. She did not speak now, even when I spoke to her. I could only follow.
A very late, sickle Moon rose above the skyscrapers, flooding the park with light the color of blood, until the trees were not mere trees and the stones and paths not mere stones and paths, but stark, symbolic, almost cartoonish representations, as if we had walked into a Henri Rousseau painting and fantastic beasts lurked all around us, among the cartoon fronds and ferns and intensely black tree trunks.
The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack Page 15