Then I hurried Sam down the subway steps. The tunnel was like a maze. It seemed to go down and down forever.
“There!” Sam screamed.
He broke away from me again. We had come upon a bag lady, a thing of tatters and filth, an animate heap of rags, knee-deep in trash as she pawed through a half-empty trash can, stooping over, picking, eating. Sam lunged at her, wrestled her to the ground, screaming, “No! Not like this! No!”
I tried to pull him off but only succeeded in hauling both of them to their feet. The bag lady grunted like a pig, her mouth full of half-eaten garbage. She clawed at Sam’s face, and for a horrible instant I believed the whole story and was certain his face would suddenly peel off.
Sam snatched a mother-of-pearl comb from the bag lady’s matted hair and turned to me while the three of us wrestled.
“It’s hers. It’s Joanne’s.”
The bag lady shrieked and began to vomit great gouts of filth.
“Sam! Stop it!” I hit him on the back of the neck as hard as I could. But for all he had been weak in his despair, he was now enormously strong in his frenzy. He flung me aside with one arm, so hard that I hit the opposite wall and fell down stunned.
When I looked up, he had the bag lady down on the ground. He was kneeling over her, gently peeling her face off. He held it up to me like a soiled rag. Then it was gone, and he was leaning low, speaking gently to the bag lady. All I could see of her face was a clean, pink mass.
She spoke back in a voice I almost knew, but faded into the whimperings of a frightened child, then into completely inarticulate mewlings.
Right there. Right there my own sanity snapped, my whole, lifelong conception of what is and isn’t possible, what is real and unreal shattered completely. I couldn’t judge my friend Sam anymore. I couldn’t say he was crazy or not. These things were no longer sane or insane. They merely were.
Sam helped me to my feet. I looked over to where the bag lady lay still amid the spilled trash, but he turned me away.
“Joanne was there. I couldn’t let her live like that, not even for a few seconds.”
“I thought you hated her,” I said.
“Come on. We have to go.”
Now he was leading me. Now I pulled away from him, and stood there shaking all over. I was afraid of him for the first time. The only thing I could think was that he would peel my face off. I only wanted to run away, to escape him forever.
But he asked me in an almost pathetically hopeful tone, “You will come along and help me now, Frank, won’t you?”
“Yeah, old buddy,” I said.
* * * *
He went into another of his monologues on the ride to Brooklyn. I just sat there helplessly, gazing at one face after another as passengers got on and off. Nothing made sense anymore. I concluded, at last, that Sam wasn’t crazy. No, he was the only one who was sane. He understood.
“I saw my grandfather one more time. Did I tell you about that? No, I didn’t. It was when I was fifteen and I went to some sort of music festival in Washington Square. I don’t remember why you weren’t along. I don’t remember what kind of music it was, either. That is not the point of this remembrance.
“An old man in a rumpled coat sat on a bench in the middle of the square. He hadn’t come for the music. He was one of those people who roost there every day, like the pigeons. The scary part was that I knew him. He was a complete stranger, yet the way he moved his hands when he rolled a cigarette, and something about his posture, and the angle of his hat—all these were a secret code, details of a message for me alone.
“I stood there for several minutes, gawking, and very, very slowly the face became more familiar, as if someone were surfacing from deep inside this man’s body. Like the way your face slowly becomes visible if you press it against a plastic tent and stare through.
“And I wanted to scream again, just like when I was six. I bit my fist, hard, and the shock of recognition—recognition of the gesture—made it all the worse. Everything came flooding back. It was that dim morning nine years before all over again.
“Grandpa was there and everything, all the secret details and codes seemed to say, If only you’d called out. If only you’d cared—
“I tried to speak. I tried to explain it all to him, then and there, to make him understand at last that it wasn’t my fault because I was so afraid. I wanted to ask his forgiveness, but the words wouldn’t come. All I managed to do was step nearer and say, ‘I—I—’
“But the old man looked up sharply, scowled, and said an obscene word. Our eyes met. There was a flicker of something, but in an instant whatever I thought I saw was gone and there was just this utter stranger angry at this kid for intruding on his privacy.
“I didn’t go to the music festival. I just ran and kept on running for blocks and blocks.”
* * * *
When we stood on the sidewalk outside Sam Gilmore’s apartment, the lights were on. It sounded like a party. There was music playing, the sort of 1960s folk music Joanne had always liked but Sam had never cared for. I couldn’t make it out clearly, but close to the window someone was singing along:
How many miles to Babylon?
Just three score and ten.
Can I get there by candlelight?
Aye, and back again.
Aye, and back again.
Sam turned to me, and once more it was he who was trembling and afraid, and I was the one who had to be strong.
“Will you help me?”
“Yes,” I said.
We went up. The door was unlocked. The apartment was not as I had seen it the last time I had visited Sam. Joanne’s things were everywhere, the posters, the furniture, the bookcases, the paintings on the walls.
There were four women waiting for us in the living room. One of them was black. I had never seen any of them before, but all were about Joanne’s age, all attractive in one way or another, all of them wearing what I recognized to be Joanne’s clothing.
Sam sank down into a chair. I just stood there. The record finished, but no one went to lift the arm. The needle went on scratching.
“I’m here,” one of the women said. Her voice was distinctly Joanne’s voice now. There could be no mistaking it. “I’ve been thinking about us a lot,” said another, the voice seeming to travel from one mouth to another, as if the speaker were running down a corridor, shouting out a series of windows. “I’m lost,” said the third, “but if I try,” said the fourth, “sometimes I can find my way part of the way back, for a little while.” The first sighed and said, “Sometimes I wake up in another place and I don’t know who I am or how I got there, and then I begin to remember, and sometimes I want to kill you. But sometimes I remember how it was for us in the beginning. Things were good once. I can remember that.”
Sam was crying like a baby now, clawing at his forehead and cheeks.
“Please,” I said. “Sam, don’t.” But he wasn’t talking to me.
“Jo—tell me what to do. Please tell me.”
She didn’t answer. She was gone. I began to understand then, that somehow her soul swam up from some unimaginable abyss toward the light, and for a few moments she could look out of a stranger’s eyes. Then she would sink down again. It must have taken all her strength to bring these four women, these four strange bodies together—four because she didn’t have enough control to focus on just one—and hold them there until Sam and I arrived. But that was all she could do, for just a few minutes; and, as I watched, every trace of whatever had been Joanne Gilmore faded from those four faces. I was even less certain that the four women were wearing Joanne’s clothes. All of them stared around the room, as if awakening from a trance. They filed out of the apartment like sleepwalkers. I was sure that very soon there would be four puzzled ladies outside, wondering how they had gotten to Brooklyn on this bitter night at such an extreme hour.
Joanne was like a stone in a pond, trying to swim. She had barely rippled the surface, but that was miracle enough.
>
Sam turned to me, his cheeks streaked with tears. “Will you help me, Frank, for friendship’s sake?”
“You know I will,” I said.
“I’m … I’m not as brave as my grandfather. I can’t do it myself.”
I reached out toward him with both hands. He nodded slowly. And I stood over him and I slid my fingers into his cheeks, into the scalding wetness beneath his skin.
* * * *
Later, after he had gone into the darkness in search of Joanne, and a complete stranger sat with me in the silent apartment, I understood one final thing, that Sam Gilmore was a pathetic liar, that his whole story had been a fabrication to the core, an excuse, a feeble band-aid over a terrible and mysterious wound.
He had been lying, even to himself.
He had never, never hated Joanne. I was sure that he would realize that—someday, in some strange place, when he finally found her again.
The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack Page 41