Bad pain in the pit of his stomach.
As if he’d swalloved a stone.
Dark lightning.
When all of the patients had grouped in a circle around him, several minutes of torment had passed. Shana was returning to fetch him for dinner, but found him folded on the ground tormented by abdominal cramps, his face pushed into the grass, biting the earth. The nurse called out for help. Then she leaned on Alfred, who burned with fever, covered in sweat. The patients enlarged their circle, looking at Shana and Alfred like astonished and frightened babies.
“Alfred, honey, what’s wrong with you?” Shana asked in tears, turning him on his back.
“Your water…” Alfred wheezed.
“It’s the water’s fault?”
Alfred nodded, blinking fast and staring at some point in the sky.
Dr. Mark came along, with two assistants and a stretcher.
Immediately, Shana said, “He only drank a cup of water.”
Alone in his room, lying on the bed, Alfred had another spasm.
He turned on his side and a mass of blood poured from his stomach onto the floor. He didn’t seem frightened by that. The puddle exploded in every direction, and the gleaming pools of blood stretched themselves under the bed. The lamp on the night table was on, so Alfred could see the red puddle shining under his glance, dimmed by pain. Alfred thought he could see his shape reflected by the red fluid. His stomachache stopped fast. When Alfred’s sight became clear again, instead of his own face, he found a woman staring at him from the puddle of blood. “Mother,” he cried out.
His mother.
It was really her face on the red blood instead of Alfred’s.
Crying in silence, the man stretched his hand down toward the blood on the floor.
“Oh, mother of mine.”
Tears fell down into the red.
Alfred saw that his hand was not reflected on the bloody surface as he moved it toward his mother’s face. As if the blood itself was colored glass between mother and son. Or a hole in the floor showing a room full of plasma right under the bed. The woman moved her lips as she said something that her son could not hear. Alfred plunged his hand into his blood and touched his mother’s face. It felt as if his fingers had really done it. Then he pulled his hand back. He gazed at it, painted in warm fluid, turning it back and forth. Thinking he’d actually touched the woman. With trembling fingers that dropped red into red, he tried one more time.
Again, the hand went down and reached the woman’s face. She grabbed Alfred’s hand and put it gently on her cheek. She closed her eyes enjoying the caress, while her son felt on his palm the real consistency of her skin beneath the blood.
The touch ignited in Alfred’s mind his book of memories. His mother stared at him, austere looking. The hazel of her eyes was altered through the transparent red, but she could see everything, both Alfred and his room above her.
As if the scarlet puddle of blood was a skylight to the world.
Alfred began to see every moment of his life. And what he could see in the end was frightening. Unbelievably frightening.
So, his mother knew that her son had finally discovered his infinite fault.
“Oh, Mother,” cried Alfred. “Please, forgive me. I wouldn’t hurt you. It’s the voices’ fault. They told me to do it. I just obeyed their command.”
The woman slowly closed her eyes, to show God-like compassion and forgiveness. When she opened them again, their judging light had given way to the old sweetness that Alfred had known ever since he was a child, until the voices arrived and took him forever. The reason the voices had chosen Alfred remained encrypted among the unfathomable forces of the hereafter’s plans.
The woman strongly grabbed Alfred’s wrist and pulled her son to her, forcing him to go down, to get close.
“Oh, Mother. Really, can I?”
She only smiled, a spell of love and desire.
Alfred jumped off the bed, diving into the puddle, led by the woman who withdrew deeper to make room for him. Alfred held his breath and dove deeper into the red, his open eyes matching his mother’s, her sweet smile, her timeless love.
She embraced him.
He kissed her mother’s lips.
She smiled, eyes closed.
He felt ashamed for that unnatural gesture but, in that liquid space, human morality could only stay at air level just beyond the surface.
All around, Alfred could again see every face he’d already met and heard taking shape in that place where he was levitating with his mother. They coagulated, gaining features. Fluctuating, the crowd got closer and closer, forming a circle.
Closer and closer.
Alfred tried to get free from his mother’s embrace. He feared he would be crushed by the nearing crowd. All of them arriving in groups and fleets.
As he saw them get closer, like a moving wall of dead that finally had him, Alfred realized he couldn’t go back to the surface.
He could not re-emerge.
All of those faces.
The voices.
All of the hands that blocked him.
His room’s light, up there, above him, filtered by the red.
Someone turned it off.
Forever.
They got him in the dark.
In Dr. Mark’s office.
The light of the room trembled. Shana looked at the ceiling with tears in her eyes. She knew what the flickering lights meant. Her stomach was tied in knots as she spoke to the doctor.
“I think you got too involved in Alfred’s case. I can’t load you with all of this pain. You’re so precious to me, Shana.”
“Oh no, sir. I want to stay with him to the end. I have forgiven him. He has no faults.”
“You know if Alfred remains in here, he’ll have to go on with the shock treatment and remain in isolation. I don’t want him to rot in a common prison. They would kill him.”
“I’ll be strong, Doc. Though I strongly believe Alfred is not a schizophrenia case. He’s my brother, after all. I know him even if he doesn’t know who I am anymore.”
“I think so, Shana. But, please, go back home and take two weeks off. Alfred is with his new family, now.”
“Dr. Mark, Alfred’s gone.”
“Untie him, unplug the electrodes, and bring him back to his room. But remember, we must say he killed himself in his bed. So cut his wrists. The whole world must not think our methods are inhumane.”
The two assistants went back to Alfred’s body.
Dr. Mark, elbows on desk, thought about nothing for a while.
Until dusk.
Until Alfred’s voice whispered inside his head, “Thank you, Doctor. Thank you all the same.”
The doctor’s hands trembled.
WET SEASON
by Dennis Etchison
Madden watched the black crowd on the other side of the moving gelatin wall, as rainwater poured down in translucent sheets over the windshield. He did not listen to the patternless tattoo. Instead he followed with his eyes the group of black shadows floating past the car.
“I…I shouldn’t have made you come, Lorie,” he said at last to the black figure next to him.
She turned from the window, her lidded eyes not disapproving. “That’s enough, Jim. I wouldn’t have felt right, otherwise.”
Madden pressed his chin to his chest, squeezing his eyelids shut. He cleared his throat and rubbed his eyes, and his fingers came away moist.
Again his wife spoke, very quietly. “You…were very close to her, I suppose. James, I only wish there were something…Forgive me if I’m crude. But I only wish I could have gotten to know her better. That she might have become, in time, my little girl as well.”
He pressed her cool hand.
“It was—just—all the mud around her — ” He bit his lips and started the engine and roared up the cemetery road, spinning out and spattering mud as he went.
The Ford geared to a slippery halt under the wet sycamores.
Bart
stood at the end of the cracked driveway, behind the main house, propping open the sagging screen door to his apartment.
Through mist Madden saw the controlled, mildly pleasant line shaping his mouth, leaving the face somber in a new and ill-fitting mask.
“Forget about the rug,” said Bart. “It’s filthy anyway.”
“We’re so sorry to do this to you, Bart.” Madden’s wife brushed water from her clothing. “But we thought the twins were really too young to, well, exactly have their faces rubbed in it.”
Bart smoothed a hand over his protruding, black-T-shirted belly. “The kids are in the bedroom. Rain must have got ’em drowsy. Left them staring out the window, counting drops or something,” he added gently to Madden, testing a smile.
“Let me see to them.” Madden’s wife started across the room.
The men waited until she was gone.
Bart faced him. “Come over here and have a drink.”
“No.”
“Really, boy, really now. You know how I mean it. Come on.”
At once Madden felt his joints chilled and tired. “No, Bart. I…I don’t need it.” He lowered himself to the sofa that was bulging and splitting like a fat man’s incisions.
Bart watched the misty screen door and compared it to the pale Scotch and water in his hand. Twice he shaped his lips to stillborn beginnings. He shook his head and said nothing.
“You look at the hole, and the mud,” Madden began finally in a low voice, “and you think of…that human being there in a box, being lowered into the ground, and you wonder how it can be that—that a part of your body, a piece that has come from you like an arm or leg, can be cut off, killed and buried away, and you never being able to feel with it again.
“But you know, I worked with a man once who had lost an arm in the Korean War; and he said he could close his eyes anytime and suddenly it was there again, the nerves were restored and he could feel down into his fingertips. But when he opened his eyes to see why he hadn’t touched what he was reaching for, his eyes told him there was nothing there anymore.”
Rain began to tap erratically on a metal vent somewhere in the roof.
“And you know, I can still see the world through my little girl’s eyes, feel it as she felt it, even…even though she’s been cut off me, like one of my sense organs. I still feel her, feel through her, and my nerves, my ganglia just won’t listen to the goddam facts.”
Outside, water continued to fall and fall illogically, relentlessly, in what seemed to be the result of a vast macrocosmic defrosting.
Giggling, the twins came out of the bedroom.
Madden saw them and smiled wanly from the sofa. The two little boys acknowledged him peripherally and grinned, grasping their mother’s hands more securely.
“How did it go, boys?” inquired Madden, generating concern, and immediately hated his own detachment. You are my sons, now, he thought, my only sons, and I should hold you tight against me—
“We had fun, Da-da. We had samiches.”
“An’ we tooka nap an’ went out an’ played an’ — ”
Why, noted Madden wearily, they’re actually speaking directly to me….She almost never lets them do that. What is this, some kind of show for Bart?
“Out? But it didn’t let up today, did it, Bart?” he said.
“Well, uh,” the dark man gestured firmly to Madden, “they — ” and he dropped his voice, ready to spell out words before the children, “they begged to go out. You brought them in their raincoats and, you know, it was one of those things. For a few minutes is all. Made ’em real happy. God knows I have no practice in child-rearing. Jesus, Jim, I hope they didn’t catch anything.”
“Tad and Ray never catch colds,” stated Madden’s wife, smiling her wide, smooth, peculiar kind of smile. “You did fine, Bart.”
Madden watched his wife. Svelte in the gray light, she snaked an arm around each of her children’s shoulders.
“We’d better go,” she said. “It’s Sunday and I have Women’s Guild meeting tonight.”
“Thanks, Bart. I mean it more than I can say.”
They walked together, heads down, to the door. Sunday comics section for her hair and Lorelei and the giggly children clamored down the shiny, fragmented driveway.
Bart gripped his arm, looking deep into his eyes and nodding.
“You know I know. I can’t say it. But I remember the Sunday we buried Mama.” Hearing it said now, Madden felt no longer a memory of pain but a bond with manhood. “Just so’s you know I know.” And a slap caught Madden between the shoulder blades and sent him into the rain.
To a car where a somehow strange woman and children waited.
He switched off the ignition and sat very still, staring into the liquid pattern on the windshield.
“Ready, children?” asked Mrs. Madden, not looking to the back seat, taking her purse into her lap.
From the back seat came giggling.
Madden lay his head back to let his eyes trace the headliner of the car. Half a minute earlier, shutting off the wipers, he had caught himself hypnotized as the twin arcs of the wiper blades melted away. Now, the motor silenced, he listened to the sound of endless beads beating their pattern into the top of the automobile.
In the back seat, there was whispering like the swishing of cars down an empty street.
“Let’s go, children,” prompted their mother. “There’ll be plenty of time for secrets when we get in the house.”
Abruptly Madden snapped to. He focused his eyes from the windshield to the woman next to him, attuned his ears from the drumming overhead to the whisper of cloth on plastic as the children slid across the back seat. He touched the handle of his wife’s door; it was cold. Almost as cold as his hand.
Behind him, someone giggled.
Outside the picture window, premature dusk settled along the block like silent black wings.
“Won’t…won’t you eat something?” asked Mrs. Madden tenuously. She leaned into the living room, spoon in hand and spoke in silhouette from the yellow kitchen doorway.
He cleared his throat. “What?” Madden’s five fingertips moved involuntarily to the pane. The glass was cold.
“Well,” she intoned maternally, “you should have something. It’s almost dark. Let me turn on the — ”
“It’s all right, Lorelei.” For God’s sake, he thought, don’t patronize me. Not now.
Chilled and fatigued to the marrow, he sat in the newly rearranged and alien living room and tried to release his senses from the pain of here-and-now. He shut his eyes and tried to let his thoughts blow with the storm on down the blurred panorama of empty street.
She puttered for a time in the kitchen and Madden, curiously detached in the dark and the overstuffed chair, noticed again her effortless, liquid movements. The way she had of gliding over a floor as though it were polished glass, her legs flowing out and back with each step in a charming suggestion of no gristle or bone. No deliberate, angular bend to Lorie’s arm, no; in her, stirring and pouring out and rinsing away became a Siamese rubber-arm ballet.
“Your soup is in the oven, keeping warm. And the twins are tucked in, so don’t—I mean, they shouldn’t give you any trouble.”
Mrs. Madden paused in silhouette, then glided behind the enormous sagging hand that enclosed her husband.
“Lorie,” he swallowed. Away in the bright kitchen, an electric clock hummed.
She sat on the armrest.
“Lorelei, do you ever…think about the decision you made ten months ago?” He tried to stop his teeth from chattering. “I mean — ”
Her arms reached a pale circle around his shoulders. “You are the finest father my boys could possibly have. And I…” And she smoothed his hair with her oddly flat hands and did not finish. “Do you need to talk, Jim? The Guild meeting — ”
Yes, he thought, pressing his eyes tightly shut until shards of gray light fired inside his eyelids, yes, I need something. I hear your words but they’re only words,
I need more than talk, I need you warm against me, I need to live—
He drew her into his lap. And at once it struck him.
She was not warm. Her skin was cold, cold almost as—
He pushed her away.
“Jim, I’m sorry. Is there something I can do for you?”
“No.” He stared ahead into the night-filled room. “They’re waiting for you already. There isn’t anything you can do for me.”
Picking up coat, purse and overshoes, Mrs. Madden pulled back the front door to a sheet of rain. A reminder about the soup, and she entered the falling sea.
The telephone refused to warm in his hands.
A sputter and crackle of rain and whispers on the wires between and across town, a mile away, a phone purred to life.
And purred. And purred.
“Yeah?”
“Hello, Bart. What am I interrupting?”
“Jimmy? That you, boy?”
“I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
“No, no. Listen. Lorie gone to her meeting?”
“That’s right.”
“Then you’re alone.” Pause. “Everything all right over there?”
“Yes. Aw, look, I shouldn’t have called.”
“You wanna talk, Jim?”
“I guess. No….Bart, is someone coming over tonight? You going out?”
“In this weather? Look, is everything all right?”
Pause. “Uh, Bart, I wonder…I just wondered if…aw, never mind, I shouldn’t have bothered you.”
“Look. You wanna come over here? We could talk, if you want.”
“Can’t leave the kids.”
“They’re asleep, then, and you’re alone over there. You want me to come over? Talk or something until Lorie gets back?”
Pause. “I have no business bothering you.”
“Crap. Look, I’ll come over, okay? We can talk, you know, like we used to.”
“I’m pretty bad company tonight, I’m afraid. And the weather. Sure you want to?”
“My idea, isn’t it? And look, how can you turn down a lonely ol’ bachelor like me? See you in ten minutes.”
Death by Water Page 28