by Dean Koontz
By two-thirty, however, during a retreat to the blanket, a pleasant weariness, the kind that follows work well done, overcame him. There was something delicious about this fatigue, a sweetness that made him want to close his eyes and let the sun melt him into sleep….
As he was swimming effortlessly in an abyss vaguely illuminated by clouds of luminescent plankton, a voice spoke to him out of the deep: “Ryan?”
“Hmmmm?”
“Were you asleep?”
He felt as though he were still asleep when he opened his eyes and saw her face looming over him: beauty of a degree that seemed mythological, radiant eyes the precise shade of a green sea patinaed by the blue of a summer sky, golden hair crowned with a corona of sunlight, goddess on a holiday from Olympus.
“You were asleep,” Samantha said.
“Too much big surf. I’m quashed.”
“You? When have you ever been quashed?”
Sitting up on the blanket, he said, “Had to be a first time.”
“You really want to pack out?”
“I skipped breakfast. We surfed through lunch.”
“There’s chocolate-cherry granola bars in the cooler.”
“Nothing but a slab of beef will revive me.”
They carried the cooler, the blanket, and their boards to the station wagon, stowed everything in back.
Still sodden with sunshine and loose-limbed from being so long in the water, Ryan almost asked Samantha to drive.
More than once, however, she glanced at him speculatively, as if she sensed that his brief nap on the beach blanket was related to the episode at the beginning of the day, when he floated like a mallard in the lineup, his heart exploding. He didn‘t want to worry her. Besides, there was no reason to worry.
Earlier, he’d had an anxiety attack. But if truth were known, most people probably had them these days, considering the events and the pessimistic predictions that constituted the evening news.
Instead of passing the car keys to Sam, Ryan drove the two blocks to her apartment.
Samantha showered first while Ryan brewed a pitcher of fresh iced tea and sliced two lemons to marinate in it.
Her cozy kitchen had a single large window beyond which stood a massive California pepper tree. The elegant limbs, festooned with weeping fernlike leaves divided into many glossy leaflets, appeared to fill the entire world, creating the illusion that her apartment was a tree house.
The pleasant weariness that had flooded through Ryan on the beach now drained away, and a new vitality welled in him.
He began to think of making love to Samantha. Once the urge arose, it swelled into full-blooded desire.
Hair toweled but damp, she returned to the kitchen, wearing turquoise slacks, a crisp white blouse, and white tennies.
If she had been in the mood, she would have been barefoot, wearing only a silk robe.
For weeks at a time, her libido matched his, and she wanted him frequently. He had noticed that her desire was greater during those periods when she was busiest with her writing and the least inclined to consider his proposal of marriage.
A sudden spell of virtuous restraint was a sign that she was brooding about accepting the engagement ring, as though the prospect of matrimony required that sex be regarded as something too serious, perhaps too sacred, to be indulged in lightly.
Ryan happily accepted each turn toward abstinence when it seemed to indicate that she was on the brink of making a commitment to him. At twenty-eight, she was six years younger than he was, and they had a life of lovemaking ahead.
He poured a glass of iced tea for her, and then he went to take a shower. He started with water nearly as cold as the tea.
In the westering sun, the strawberry trees shed elongated leaf shadows on the flagstone floor of the restaurant patio.
Ryan and Samantha shared a caprese salad and lingered over their first glasses of wine, not in a hurry to order entrees.
The smooth peeling bark of the trees was red, especially so in the condensed light of the slowly declining sun.
“Teresa loved the flowers,” Sam said, referring to her sister.
“What flowers?”
“On these trees. They get panicles of little urn-shaped flowers in the late spring.”
“White and pink,” Ryan remembered.
“Teresa said they look like cascades of tiny bells, wind chimes hung out by fairies.”
Six years previously, Teresa had suffered serious head trauma in a traffic accident. Eventually she had died.
Samantha seldom mentioned her sister. When she spoke of Teresa, she tended to turn inward before much had been said, mummifying her memories in long windings of silence.
Now, as she gazed into the overhanging tree, the expression in her eyes was reminiscent of that look of longing when, straddling her surfboard in the lineup, she studied far water for the first sign of a new set of swells.
Ryan was comfortable with Sam’s occasional silences, which he suspected were always related to thoughts of her sister, even when she had not mentioned Teresa.
They had been identical twins.
To better understand Sam, Ryan had read about twins who had been separated by tragedy. Apparently the survivor’s grief was often mixed with unjustified guilt.
Some said the intense bond between identicals, especially between sisters, could not be broken even by death. A few insisted they still felt the presence of the other, akin to how an amputee often feels sensations in his phantom leg.
Samantha’s contemplative silence gave Ryan an opportunity to study and admire her with a forthrightness that was not possible when she was aware of his stare.
Watching her, he was nailed motionless by admiration, unable to lift his wineglass, or at least disinterested in it, his eyes alone in motion, traveling the contours of her face and the graceful line of her throat.
His life was a pursuit of perfection, of which perhaps the world held none.
Sometimes he imagined that he came close to it when writing lines of code for software. An exquisite digital creation, however, was as cold as a mathematical equation. The most fastidious software architecture was an object of mere precision, not of perfection, for it could not evoke an intense emotional response.
In Samantha Reach, he’d found a beauty so close to perfection that he could convince himself this was his quest fulfilled.
Gazing into the tree but focused on something far beyond the red geometry of those branches, Sam said, “After the accident, she was in a coma for a month. When she came out of it…she wasn’t the same.”
Ryan was kept silent by the smoothness of her skin. This was the first he had heard of Teresa’s coma. Yet the radiance of Sam’s face, in the caress of the late sun, rendered him incapable of comment.
“She still had to be fed through a tube in her stomach.”
The only leaf shadows that touched Samantha’s face were braided across her golden hair and brow, as though she wore the wreath of Nature’s approval.
“The doctors said she was in a permanent vegetative state.”
Her gaze lowered through the branches and fixed on a cruciform of sunlight that, shimmering on the table, was projected by a beam passing through her wineglass.
“I never believed the doctors,” she said. “Teresa was still complete inside her body, trapped but still Teresa. I didn’t want them to take out the feeding tube.”
She raised her eyes to meet his, and he had to make of this a conversation.
“But they took it out anyway?” he asked.
“And starved her to death. They said she wouldn’t feel anything. Supposedly the brain damage assured that she’d have no pain.”
“But you think she suffered.”
“I know she did. During the last day, the last night, I sat with her, holding her hand, and I could feel her looking at me even though she never opened her eyes.”
He did not know what to say to that.
Samantha picked up her glass of wine, causing th
e cross of light to morph into an arrow that briefly quivered like a compass needle seeking true north in Ryan’s eyes.
“I’ve forgiven my mother for a lot of things, but I’ll never forgive her for what she did to Teresa.”
As Samantha took a sip of wine, Ryan said, “But I thought…your mother was in the same accident.”
“She was.”
“I was under the impression she died in the crash, too. Rebecca. Was that her name?”
“She is dead. To me. Rebecca’s buried in an apartment in Las Vegas. She walks and talks and breathes, but she’s dead all right.”
Samantha’s father had abandoned the family before the twins were two. She had no memory of him.
Feeling that Sam should hold fast to what little family she had, Ryan almost encouraged her to give her mother a chance to earn redemption. But he kept silent on the issue, because Sam had his sympathy and his understanding.
His grandparents and hers—all long dead—were of the generation that defeated Hitler and won the Cold War. Their fortitude and their rectitude had been passed along, if at all, in a diluted form to the next generation.
Ryan’s parents, no less than Sam’s, were of that portion of the post-war generation that rejected the responsibilities of tradition and embraced entitlement. Sometimes it seemed to him that he was the parent, that his mother and father were the children.
Regardless of the consequences of their behavior and decisions, they would see no need for redemption. Giving them the chance to earn it would only offend them. Sam’s mother was most likely of that same mind-set.
Samantha put down her glass, but the sun made nothing of it this time.
After a hesitation, as Ryan poured more wine for both of them, he said, “Funny how something as lovely as strawberry-tree flowers can peel the scab off a bad memory.”
“Sorry.”
“No need to be.”
“Such a nice day. I didn’t mean to bring it down. Are you as ferociously hungry as I am?”
“Bring me the whole steer,” he said.
In fact, they ordered just the filet mignon, no horns or hooves.
As the descending sun set fire to the western sky, strings of miniature white lights came on in the strawberry trees. On all the tables were candles in amber cups of faceted glass, and busboys lit them.
The ordinary patio had become a magical place, and Samantha was the centerpiece of the enchantment.
By the time the waiter served the steaks, Sam had found the lighter mood that had characterized the rest of the day, and Ryan joined her there.
After the first bite of beef, she raised her wineglass in a toast. “Hey, Dotcom, this one’s to you.”
Dotcom was another nickname that she had for him, used mostly when she wanted to poke fun at his public image as a business genius and tech wizard.
“Why to me?” he asked.
“Today you finally stepped down from the pantheon and revealed that you’re at best a demigod.”
Pretending indignation, he said, “I haven’t done any such thing. I’m still turning the wheel that makes the sun rise in the morning and the moon at night.”
“You used to take the waves until they surrendered and turned mushy. Today you’re beached on a blanket by two-thirty.”
“Did you consider that it might have been boredom, that the swells just weren’t challenging enough for me?”
“I considered it for like two seconds, but you were snoring as if you’d been plenty challenged.”
“I wasn’t sleeping. I was meditating.”
“You and Rip Van Winkle.” After they had assured the attentive waiter that their steaks were excellent, Samantha said, “Seriously, you were okay out there today, weren’t you?”
“I’m thirty-four, Sam. I guess I can’t always thrash the waves like a kid anymore.”
“It’s just—you looked a little gray there.”
He raised a hand to his hair. “Gray where?”
“Your pretty face.”
He grinned. “You think it’s pretty?”
“You can’t keep pulling those thirty-six-hour sessions at the keyboard and then go right out and rip the ocean like you’re the Big Kahuna.”
“I’m not dying, Sam. I’m just aging gracefully.”
He woke in absolute darkness, with the undulant motion of the sea beneath him. Disoriented, he thought for a moment that he was lying faceup on a surfboard, beyond the break, under a sky in which every star had been extinguished.
The hard rapid knocking of his heart alarmed him.
When Ryan felt the surface under him, he realized that it was a bed, not a board. The undulations were not real, merely perceived, a yawing dizziness.
“Sam,” he said, but then remembered that she was not with him, that he was home, alone in his bedroom.
He tried to reach the lamp on the nightstand…but could not lift his arm.
When he tried to sit up, pain bloomed in his chest.
THREE
Ryan felt as though concrete blocks were stacked on his chest. Although mild, the pain frightened him. His heart raced so fast that the beats could not be counted.
He counseled himself to remain calm, to be still, to let the seizure pass, as it had passed when he had been floating on his surfboard.
The difference between then and now was the pain. The racing heart, the weakness, and the dizziness were as disturbing as before, but the added element of pain denied him the delusion that this was nothing more than an anxiety attack.
Even as a small child, Ryan had not been afraid of the dark. Now darkness itself seemed to be the weight on his chest. The black infinity of the universe, the thick atmosphere of the earthly night, the blinding gloom in the bedroom pressed each upon the next, and all upon him, relentlessly bending his breastbone inward until his heart knocked against it as if seeking to be let out of him and into eternity.
He grew desperate for light.
When he tried to sit up, he could not. The pressure held him down.
He discovered that he could push against the mattress with his heels and elbows, gradually hitching backward, three feather pillows compacting into a ramp that elevated his head and shoulders. His skull rapped against the headboard.
The weight on his chest forced him to take shallow inhalations. Each time he exhaled, a sound thinner than a whimper also escaped him, offending the black room like a nail drawn down a chalkboard.
After he had hitched into a reclining position, not sitting up but more than halfway there, some strength returned to him. He could lift his arms.
With his left hand, he reached blindly for the bedside lamp. He located the bronze base, and his fingers slid along a cast-bronze column with a bamboo motif.
Before he found the switch, the ache in his chest intensified and swiftly spread to his throat, as if the agony were ink and his flesh an absorbent blotter.
The pain seemed to be something that he had swallowed or was regurgitating intact. It blocked his airway, restricted breathing, and pinched his cry of shock into a half note followed by a hiss.
He fell from bed. He did not know how it happened. The bed became the floor, leaving him with no awareness of the fall, with only a recognition that mattress had been replaced by carpet.
He was not alone in the house; but he might as well have been. At this hour, Lee and Kay Ting, the couple who managed the estate, were asleep in their quarters, on the lowest of the three floors, in the wing of the house farthest from the one that contained Ryan’s third-floor master suite.
In the same way that he had fallen unawares from bed, he came to the realization that he was dragging himself across the floor, his torso raised on his forearms, legs twitching as feebly as the broken appendages of a half-crushed beetle.
Rapidly intensifying, the pain had spread from his throat into his jaw. He seemed to have bitten on a nail so hard that the point had penetrated between two teeth and into the mandible.
Suddenly he remembered that the hous
e intercom was part of the telephone system. He could buzz Lee and Kay by pressing 1-1-1. They could be here in a minute or two.
He did not know in which direction lay the bed, the nightstand, the phone. He had become disoriented.
The room was large but not vast. He should have been able to find his way in the dark.
But pain seared, vertigo spun, weakness drained, fear twisted his thoughts until he had no capacity for calculation. Although the fall from bed to floor was only a couple of feet, he seemed to have been cast down from a great height, all grace pulverized on impact, and all hope.
His eyes were stung by hot tears, and his throat burned with refluxed stomach acid, and the balefire in his jaw would surely consume the bone and collapse his face.
The darkness spun and tilted. He could not crawl farther, but could only clutch the carpet as though gravity might be repealed and he might be whirled away, weightless, into a void.
His heart hammered faster than he could count its blows, at least two hundred a minute.
Pain spread from his throat into his left arm, radiated across his shoulder and down his back.
A prince of the Internet, richer than most kings, he lay now as prostrate as any commoner abashed in the presence of royalty, at the mercy of his body, mere clay.
The black ocean swelled under him, and he had nothing to which he could hold, neither a surfboard nor the dorsal fin of a shark. The sea was infinite, and he was as insignificant as a tracery of foam on a single wave. A great mass of water shouldered up, and he slid down its back into a trough, and the trough became an abyss, the abyss a vortex that swallowed him.
FOUR
The alarm-clock feature on the TV had been set for seven in the morning. The volume remained low, and Ryan woke slowly to murmuring voices, to music scored for drama.
The glow from the screen did not fully relieve the darkness. As the value of light changed in a scene and as figures moved, phantoms throbbed and flickered through the bedroom.
Ryan lay on the floor, in the fetal position, facing the screen. William Holden, many years after Sunset Boulevard, was in an intense conversation with a lovely young woman.
In thirty-four years, Ryan had experienced only two hangovers, but he seemed to be suffering a third. Headache. Eyes crusted shut, vision blurry. Dry, sour