Seeking Samiel

by Catherine Jordan

"Caroline?" I called. Louder, "Caroline?" There was a muffled reply that sounded like it might have come from the bathroom.

  I made my way through the room, keeping close to the wall, and tiptoed into the bathroom. All the fixtures remained in place; the room was untouched and relatively clean, shower curtain open. I waited, listening. A muffled whine came from the bed.

  I hurried over. "Caroline. Are you under there?"

  With one great heave, the tower of furniture crashed onto the bare floor. I lifted the edge of the metal bed frame and shoved it aside. The box spring pushed away with ease, but I struggled with the mattress, dropping it twice before leveraging my shoulder under it. The mattress flopped onto the spilt furniture pile, and there, under a knotted pile of blankets, lay Caroline. I tried to lift her, but I couldn't. Even her arm, which I could barely lift for a pulse, was heavy and stiff. The memory of Caroline rigid in the street, weighted to the road, came back to me.

  "Lindsey!" I yelled. Then I remembered she had run out the front door. Caroline's bedroom door was partly closed, and I saw that damn hole in her wall. It was big enough to crawl through. "Fuck." I grabbed pillows, blankets, discarded clothing from the pile on the floor, and stuffed it all inside the hole, though I had the feeling that whatever had come was now gone. Glancing around the room, I took in the destruction one last time. Never, I thought, whilst rubbing the creases in my forehead, would I enter this room again.

  Lindsey must have made a phone call from her cell because sirens came screaming from outside.

  It took the ambulance driver, both paramedics, me, Lindsey and Nkumbi to lift Caroline high enough to slide her onto the gurney. The rubber wheels creaked, stalling in their tracks on the way. They constructed a makeshift ramp and pulley to get the gurney into the ambulance.

  As the paramedic drilled the IV into her arm, Caroline thrashed, tilting the truck with each one of her spastic movements. They pumped her full of tranquilizers, one shot after another, until she calmed.

  "I've used less on an elephant," the paramedic said, his eyes wide in disbelief. "Had to shoot one down about a week ago," he continued explaining, "The dumb thing wandered into traffic." He glanced at Lindsey and me. "What happened in there?" he asked.

  Lindsey kept quiet, and I wanted to explain, but Nkumbi chimed in and said, "This is all under investigation. Police affairs. And I want you to drive this woman to the hospital as quickly as possible."

  "Fine," the paramedic said with a shrug.

  Nkumbi put a hand on her shoulder as the ambulance drove away, back end sagging.

  44

  Five orderlies lifted Caroline on the count of three. "Een, twee, drie." The men, eager to release her, dropped her like dead weight onto the reinforced hospital bed.

  The room smelled medicinal, like strong alcohol. I welcomed the scent, and widened my nostrils to take it in whilst sitting in a chair beside Caroline's bed. Saliva pooled in the corner of her open mouth. Her white arms lay stiff alongside her body, too tense even for the tranquilizers to relax them. Her stiff legs also lay straight, feet arched, toes pointed. The bed creaked now and then under Caroline's weight as she twitched in her drug induced slumber.

  The humming machines settled me as Caroline's chest rose up and down. For a moment, I hated myself. I couldn't understand how things had got to where they were.

  You should have dropped everything weeks ago. Instead, you languished like an invalid, helpless.

  I looked down at Caroline lying on the hospital bed. What I felt right then--the most recent lasting emotion I remembered feeling--was pity. Where was love?

  Here, wasting away on a hospital bed and it is your fault.

  I looked over at Lindsey and she gave me a reassuring smile, her eyes sunken with fatigue. "They've got her on Dilaudid for the pain. It's supposed to be more effective than Morphine."

  Lindsey's hand gripped a little black thing. She saw me looking at it and opened her hand, displaying it in her palm. "Guess what this is?" Lindsey asked. She had an item of value, besides all those rings on her fingers, and she knew it. "Nurse, doctor, can he and I speak privately?"

  The doctor gestured to the nurse, and she followed him. "We can give you about ten, fifteen minutes. Okay?" He left, leaving the door propped open on its kickstand.

  Lindsey waited until their footsteps faded before she said anything. "It's a tape recorder," she announced. "It's Caroline's. She had it under her pillow and she gave it to me before the um, the ..." Lindsey had told me that she couldn't describe or even name what she had witnessed up in Caroline's bedroom. Her best description: "It was like a tornado spinning in her room."

  Mashing her lips tight, her eyebrows drew together in thought. "I listened to the tape in her room, before the tornado. Caroline wanted me to believe her," she said. "She wasn't just hearing voices. Somebody was in that room with her, talking to her."

  "Who?" I asked, impatient.

  "One voice was louder than the rest. It sounded effeminate."

  "Let me hear that." I charged forwards and snatched the recorder out of her hand. I looked it over quickly, found the play button and pressed.

  Caroline and the mystery voice spoke in the same guttural language. I understood exactly what was being said, and I recognized the language as ancient Aramaic. I clicked the recorder off.

  "Well?" she asked.

  I raised an eyebrow. "I have no idea."

  "I'll have to give this to Nkumbi. Caroline said she didn't think we'd hear from Edward again. Why would she say that, Jeffrey?"

  The monitors bleeped louder and louder in my ears. I'd been clenching my teeth and opened and closed my mouth to relieve the tension. "Verdoem, dit seermaak," I said.

  "What hurts?" Lindsey asked. Then, "Jeffrey? When did you learn Afrikaans?"

  I didn't realize I'd spoken out loud. "I guess I've been picking it up, here and there."

  Lindsey wore a look of disbelief. But her face didn't concern me. What did was the small plastic tray on Caroline's bedside.

  It held two yellow, oval shaped caplets with tiny letters imprinted on them. They looked like something I needed and I wondered if one would be enough to help my pain. Boldly, I walked over to Lindsey and dropped the recorder.

  "Jeffrey!"

  She bent to pick it up and I swiped a pill, swallowing it dry. I knocked the tray to the floor and the last pill skipped under the bed. Lindsey raised her head, recorder in hand. "What's the matter with you? Those were her Dilaudid."

  Fuck. Fuck. On top of Caroline's Percocet I took twenty minutes ago. Part of me relished the oncoming oblivion, part of me wanted to get home and vomit it up before I could no longer function. "Let's go," I said.

  "Why? Do we need to leave before you break something?" Lindsey got down on her knees and stuck her head under the bed, her arm reaching. "I only see the one." She pulled her arm out from under the bed and sat back down in her chair, giving up the search.

  "There's nothing we can do now except worry," I said, trying to bury the urge to go, go, go, that I was sure she must have heard in my voice. "We can come back in the morning."

  Lindsey nodded with a deep sigh. "I wanted us to be on a plane by now," she said, slipping the recorder in her pocket.

  "She's safe here. We can't do anything more." My heels rolled under me. I was going down soon, and I didn't want it to be there.

  The nurse had returned, tending to her beeps and blips, reading the paper the machine spit out whilst a rapid needle scribbled jerky lines up and down, back and forth. She lifted Caroline's drip bag, then, as if satisfied, dropped it back on its hook. She did a double take at Caroline's empty pill tray. Looking first at Lindsey, then me, she asked, "What happened?"

  "Clumsy me," I said. "Lack of sleep. They rolled under the bed."

  Lindsey handed a pill to the nurse. "I can't find the other," she said.

  The strong bleach and sterile scent mixed with another strong, biting odour made the hospital room fade in my eyes. My knees buckled and I grasped Car
oline's leg for support, flinching at the cold, hard feel of her under my hand.

  "I need to go home," I said, the nurse at my side, easing me into a chair. I resisted; if I sat, I'd never get back up again. "Please, Lindsey, we can come back."

  "You're right," she said, standing, looking me over. "I'll take you home."

  45--LINDSEY

  Lindsey drove slowly, leaning up into the dash, trying to engage him in comforting small talk, but he slurred the last of his words and nodded off just before arriving at his flat.

  Jeffrey's sharp jaw line and long nose were outlined against the window. Blond hair clumped around his ears. He resembled his father, who was middle-eastern by birth, raised and educated in London, dark-skinned with jet black hair. Jeffrey's colouring obviously took after his German mother, but he had his father's bone structure.

  It was rare for her to be able to observe him like this, quiet and non-defensive. She had wanted to take this opportunity to tell Jeffrey that she had made a phone call at Nkumbi's prompting. She had called the priest he wanted her to contact, and though hesitant, as Nkumbi had rightly predicted, she knew it was the right thing to do. It was not only for Caroline's sake, but also for Jeffrey's. And now that he was involved with Eva, Lindsey worried that without Jeffrey's help, there would be no hope in saving Edward.

  She shook Jeffrey awake as soon as the car pulled to a stop and he spilt out of the car onto the pavement. Lindsey leaned over to see if he needed help, but Jeffrey scrambled to his feet. They parted ways silently with him weaving through the yard and through the door.

  Before driving away, she pulled out her cell and dialed. "Nkumbi, where are you?" Crackling and an occasional swoosh came across the line.

  "Burning her books," he said. He told her about Eva's book and about the sales girl, and described what he had read.

  "Wish I was there." She really did. "I want you to listen to this." She dug through her purse for the recorder, pulled it out and pushed play, hearing only the squeal of the cassette wheels. The recorder popped open. Empty. "Oh, Jeffrey." She dropped the recorder back in her purse.

  "It was a recording Caroline made in her room. There were voices on it. I didn't understand the language and wanted you to hear it." She assumed that even if he didn't know what was being said, he might have been able to make out the dialect. "I'm outside Jeffrey's. I just dropped him off. He took it."

  "Do not go in," he said. "Let us wait. He will ask Eva then come back to us with some answers. I will call you later."

  Lindsey sighed, both hands pushing loose hair off her face and behind her ears. She avoided looking at herself in the rearview mirror before pulling away. Her roots had grown out about a centimeter. She cared, but not enough to visit the salon any time soon. She hadn't been as fastidious with her looks as she would have liked. To tell the truth, she had been sleeping in her makeup and wearing her jewelry to bed. Unlike Caroline--and Jeffrey, as she had recently noticed--she had not given up on showering or changing her clothes. The roots could wait, but she knew her daughter couldn't.

  46--JEFFREY

  Pink tinged saliva strung from my mouth into the sink. A bicuspid teetered on the drain's rim. I turned on the faucet, hoping some of the lingering pain would wash down the pipes with the water and tooth. The pill I swallowed the other night at the hospital had worn off and since then--I had only been awake a few minutes--my clenching and grinding had escalated. I cringed in the mirror and felt as worthless as my broken smile.

  I had sifted through Caroline's medicines, laying out all the sleeping pills, tranquilizers and painkillers on the counter. The Dilaudid had given the most relief I had felt in months. There had to be some combination that would give a similar effect. "Damn," I said to my reflection. "You look like shit."

  After tossing back two Percocets and a Vicodin, and pocketing a few more, I pulled out Caroline's tape. If only I had a cassette player to hear it again.

  What I needed more than anything else, more than another pill, was an explanation. Whatever stories Lindsey had told in the past weeks, whatever boogie-woogie Tatwaba had seen or heard, I could no longer snub. The voices on the tape, the mess in Caroline's room. I pocketed the tape. A parapsychologist or an occultist of Eva's caliber could certainly provide answers. She would be awake.

  Waiting for you.

  The Wrangler refused to start. Of course. "Come on, come on, ya fucker," I muttered, banging my forehead off the steering wheel in frustration before giving the key one more twist.

  "Yes," I said as the Jeep stuttered to life. I backed straight out, glancing at the heap of crushed metal that had been my Town Car sitting in the garage.

  I almost drove past Eva's gate. Parking in front of her house, I pulled the tape out of my pocket and turned it over several times in my hand before staggering up to her door; the pills had already begun to work.

  Guert answered the door and I tucked the tape back into my pocket.

  47

  "Eva's upstairs," Guert said. The stoep light cast a glow directly into her face. Beauty lingered in her pale, sunken features, a beauty that was wasting away.

  Guert's feet thumped on the floor as she led me through the foyer and up the staircase. Was it the shoes these women wore that pounded as they made their way through the house? Eva's always went barefoot, and her walk was ground splitting.

  Always. As if you know her that well.

  As I noticed that no one had yet fixed the hole in the staircase wall, my tired legs tripped on a step's lip. "Ah, bloody fuck." I grabbed hold of the warm wooden banister.

  Guert stopped a few steps above me, her leg poised at eye level. There was an open wound on her leg, pink and hollow. Guert's grin played on her face for a moment before she turned away and continued to climb.

  Walls that had been widely spaced were now close enough to touch. I reached out, placing my palms on both sides of the walls, feeling a rhythmic throb beat like a ceremony drum under my hands. The walls gave slightly under gentle pressure before meeting with bone-hard resistance. Knees buckling, gravity pulled me backwards.

  The ceiling creaked overhead, and then, "Mr. Jeffrey." Guert stood at the top and I found myself beside her.

  I had traveled those stairs before. And yet it seemed like I was in a completely different place.

  This place is different from anywhere you have been or ever will be.

  The stairs looked the same.

  You are traveling inside her. The house is her.

  Walls, soft with humidity, and the studs underneath; that's what I had been pressing against.

  Her skin is the walls, her bones lie underneath.

  Thump, thump, thump--my heart.

  Her heart.

  Those damn pills were working their fuckery.

  "Down the hall, sir, two doors on your left." Guert pushed the second door open.

  Papers were piled on a desk with pens and pencils in a leather penholder. My briefcase, I noticed, was open on the floor, the frame of my law certificate edging out. I did not remember taking it off the wall at home.

  This was not the same desk where I sat when I had visited. It was not the same room. Eva had originally confined me to a small space with only a desk. The room had been silent and empty, like my thoughts often were whilst there.

  My suitcase sat on the luggage rack. An open closet held my clothing, neatly displayed, shoes lined up underneath. A crinkled bath towel hung on a rack inside the bathroom door. Socks, undershirts, and underwear lay on the floor.

  I flared my nostrils. "When did you get my things? Who let you into my house? Better have a brilliant fucking answer."

  "I haven't touched your things, Mr. Jeffrey."

  "Really," I said. "Well who the hell did?"

  "You did, Mr. Jeffrey."

  Your bed. The one you share with Eva.

  I blundered through the room to the bed. On the side table, two pill bottles with Caroline's name on them lay like dead soldiers next to an empty glass.

  The
ones you pilfered from her medicine cabinet.

  I picked up the glass and examined the smudged fingerprints.

  Yours.

  Through it I looked at the disheveled bed. A memory of two entangled bodies twisting in between those silk sheets flooded my mind. "How long have I been here?" I asked.

  "A few months," Guert answered.

  This is where you now live. It was what you wanted.

  I threw the fucking glass and it bounced off the doorframe, landing in pieces on the floor. Guert leaned into the doorway, caressing where the glass hit. A purplish lump grew out of the frame then spread across the wall like a watermark. "Look what you've done," she said. She shook her head, ponytailed hair as stiff as her face, and thumped down the hall.

  I put my hand to the warm lump.

  A raised bruise. You hurt her.

  It pulsated under my palm and I snatched my hand away. "It's not real," I told myself.

  I tried to envision working in this room, moving in personal items as if I were here to stay. My eyelids drooped and I struggled to keep them open, to stay cognizant. But I fell onto the bed and faded into a drugged sleep, my memory scattered like the glass on the floor.

  48

  Knock, knock, knocking. I shot up, flinging my clumsy limbs, shaking the dreamlike stupor from my head. Eva peeked around the corner. I gawked at the bruise that traveled the length of her neck and disappeared under the bodice of her white dress.

  See what you've done to her? She and the house are the same.

  She turned sideways, bare toes toying with the broken glass, round stomach protruding.

  A picture of the two of us in bed, bodies together, limbs rubbing against limbs, flashed in my head. My mouth to her ear, nibbling, whispering.

  "You're pregnant," I said. Acknowledging the truth didn't make it any easier to believe. "What have I done?" I asked.

  "You told me you loved me," she said.

  "How long have I been asleep?" I asked.

  "This time? A day."

  I fell back down on the bed and closed my eyes.

  49

  I slipped in and out of a disturbed slumber, aware of the dull ache in the middle of my back. I tried to sleep some more, but the ache grew into a stabbing pain and my jaw clenched, teeth grinding. I was so fucking thirsty.