I stopped and listened. I stilled my breath, and discounted the rubber ball of my own heart, and listened to everything around me. I strained to hear distressed whispers, weeping silenced, ordinary conversation hushed. I pictured a boy, a youth awkward in his dark suit, leaning, sure he was right, afraid he was, certain no one would believe him, gesturing to an older sister. Two or three more people would be here now, listening to the two half-grown children explain that they heard something, and no they weren’t joking.
Why hadn’t I learned Morse code, I asked myself, kicking with both feet. Was SOS two long, two short, and two long? Or should I give in to all-out panic, make a noise that could not possibly be misunderstood by mourners with, understandably, some reluctance to realize that what could be lost in such circumstances might insist on being found.
I tried to calculate how long it would take for an assistant manager to be summoned, someone with a fist full of keys and a brisk sense of what to do in cases like this. Surely this happened sometimes. There must be procedures to be followed, workers skilled at levering open what they had a few days before sealed shut.
I braced myself, and kicked, repeatedly, furiously. I stopped and listened to the quiet. There was no one coming.
I wanted to sleep but knew I would wake only to sleep again, and if I woke after that I would only repeat the page after page of waking and slumbering until it was all over. I could feel it already, the long weariness I would never shake. The exhaustion was more than a condition of my body. It was a fact of nature, like gravity, and it had me.
I kicked again, driving downward with both feet. I was not dying yet. I was ready to return to whatever mistakes I had made, and do it all over again but right, this time, bringing justice and humor where before I must have hurried past on my way to—what?
This time when I kicked there was a difference. I heard a change in the note my heels struck against the heavy wood. I kicked again, and heard a high, fine tune, the sound of a seam in the wood parting.
I hunched, seized whatever I could find to steady myself, and kicked again, and kept driving my feet downward until the cracking sound could not be mistaken. I had hoped that as the casket weakened I would see light, but there was only further darkness. In a panic, I kicked harder than before, and the wood shattered, and something else gave way, too.
I scrambled halfway down the broken coffin, and kicked against a concrete seal. This time I did not stop to listen. I knew strength, something in me that would not weaken. The concrete slab was shifting, a low, deep note, nearly bell-like, solemn, a door of stone working outward.
It must have taken a long time. Perhaps I stopped and drifted into sleep, to wake and work again. That would explain why I was not aware of how long it took. At times it seemed that the stone trap fought against me willfully, sealing itself tighter than ever.
One moment there was dark. And then it all changed.
One edge of the concrete seal was gilded with light. The light widened into a wedge, a painful spear of illumination. And then as I kicked once more it fell away.
The sound was so loud, and the light so bright, I cringed involuntarily for an instant. And then, to my frustration, I could not easily snake my way down and out. I was held by the white satin fabric, gripped by the narrow box. I wrestled, straining slowly, out and into light so complete it was nearly blinding.
I fell. My perch was higher than I expected, and the fall much farther.
I spilled out onto a floor, and lay there and told myself that I didn’t have to move, ever. I could stay right where I was. They would find me. I had done enough. My joy was so thorough that I barely noticed the pain, the weight of so much light making me sit up, blinking, covering my eyes.
I was nailed into place, pinned by the light. It cascaded from above, and I crouched on a flat, polished surface trying to recover my vision. There was no moment in which I mistook this illumination for the sun. It was unmistakably artificial, tight, tiny coils of filament radiating this flavorless light.
I could not wait. I had to hurry. I was in a hall, in a building with a high ceiling. I was reminded of a post office, one of those mornings as a child when I had gone with an adult and seen the wonder of the post office boxes, the rolled sheafs of mail behind the small windows, eash message yet to be discovered, the whole veiled secret of one’s business and personal life.
My knees were weak. I took a step, and felt them buckle, one foot out, the other dragging. I fell.
I wanted to laugh. The clown returns from the lost! I stood again, and kept myself upright only by leaning heavily on the gleaming surface of the wall. As the wall supported me, I could feel the imprint of letters, words pressed against my skin through my clothes. A name was cut into the face of the marble, and a date of birth and a date of death. A tarnished metal vase held dying flowers.
The fragments of casket, the chunks of concrete and marble, lay behind me in a glaze of fresh dust. The concrete grit whispered beneath my shoes. What a mess, I chided myself, trying to make a joke of it. A hiker in the wilderness is supposed to pack out what he packs in.
I sensed the discarded husks, the earth-cold members of this assembly, all around me. There was an odor, concrete and spent flower petals underscored by the refrigerator-aura of old flesh.
Was there a moment just then when I was aware of being watched? I crouched. I was aware of an intruder. Or perhaps it was help, happening upon the scene at last. I tried to call out, attempting to call hello, like someone arriving home after a vacation to find the apartment not quite right.
I could barely raise a whisper. There was no sound, no movement I ran, and fell. My body slid, carried by momentum, and then I worked myself slowly upright. My need to flee this place insisted, and I felt my way along the empty vases, the impervious names and dates, sometimes disturbing with my passage a withered rose.
I saw the darkness of night, outside, beyond a hall. There was a desk, a large, empty executive-style block of furniture, and beside it a metal folding chair, left partly hitched-up, as though someone had started to fold it up and heard a phone ring.
A cord ran across the oak floor, into a desk drawer. I hooked my finger around the door handle, and pulled. There was a white, compact telephone, tucked away so the bereaved would not be troubled by the sight of such an ordinary object.
I suddenly saw what a piece of stage craft this mausoleum was. What a story I would tell. What a mistake you made, I would tell my—
My what? My family, my wife, my children, my friends? I was a man who had just that moment forgotten the right word.
Then I began to feel anger. This couldn’t be blamed on one physician, or on a mortician. The whole array of medical professionals and undertakers, everyone involved, had made a huge blunder.
I recalled my wife, but I had trouble actually seeing her in my mind. Her name was Constance. Connie. She had been deceived by people she trusted, medical authorities. It must have been terrible for her. My career, my associates—it was dim, but I was beginning to see it all now.
But there was another, more important woman. Rebecca—I wanted to call her, to tell her I was back again, it was all a mistake. I lifted the receiver to my ear. The dial tone was hideously loud, and I held the instrument away from my head. I tried to remember my own phone number. I struggled to remember Rebecca’s. I tried to make the numbers on the telephone make sense. I had trouble recognizing the characters as meaningful symbols.
I pushed the O. Something would happen. Some voice would respond. It was then, as I depressed the one button I was able to recognize, that I saw my hand.
My skin was mottled with discoloration, the way the mattress of a chaise longue dapples, when it is left out for too many rainy nights. I was mildewed.
I could not answer the steely muttering of the telephone. My voice was too soft, too broken. And besides, I was paralyzed by a question I had to ask myself, one little point of order before we resumed after this recess.
How long had I be
en asleep?
I slipped the phone back into its cradle, and shut the drawer, carefully, quietly. I was eager to cross the floor, eager to be outside, and so I hurried unsteadily.
I reached for the frame of the glass door, and when I had a decent grip, I pushed. Nothing happened. I pushed again, my weight behind the effort, and the door was solid. I turned my head, listening.
Surely there was movement, back there, behind me. Someone used this desk, a caretaker. He heard me. Sounds echoed in this place, and I had not even tried to keep quiet. There were footsteps.
I turned to listen, and then with desperation, and revulsion, I pushed again, and this time I felt something surrendering inside the lock, a catch showing its age. I leaned heavily, something snapped, and I was out.
17
There was a troubling, purring, breathy sound from the expanse of neighborhoods, and it took me a moment to realize that this was the normal sound of streets, freeway, railway, late night traffic, all the way down to the bay. The night was starless, furred with cloud.
The cemetery sloped downhill. I followed the road past yews, eucalyptus, and pepper trees dwarfed by excessive trimming. The smokestack of the crematorium was sheltered behind a peaked roof, and water flowed into a pool beside the empty parking lot.
How could I be sure this was really happening?
I ran my fingers through the wet grass. I gripped the metal gate that blocked the parking lot. I believed it. It was real.
I laughed windily, and shook the post of a stop sign, hanging on to it for support, feeling like a drunk in a cartoon. The vacant asphalt was a plain of rich smells, oil, the flat scent of sand and the perfume of wet earth and weeds, sour grass and dandelions. Poppies were trembling along the sidewalk, the blossoms closed tightly. An empty carton of food lay, half unfolded on the curb, letting off a smell of corruption, beef and vinegary ketchup.
It was useless to look for a telephone with my voice the way it was, so I made my way up Colusa, away from the lights advertising a dry cleaner and a florist.
Crumpled foil reflected the night sky, the wrinkles limned by the residual neon that reached even this far from the florist’s shop. The streets were relatively quiet here, only an occasional car turning a corner in the distance, turning into a far-off driveway. A few people were still coming home. It might be approaching midnight, I thought, or a little after. I had another, more troubling question.
I tried to put the question out of my mind. Shut up, I told myself. Don’t think. Just keep walking.
I had assumed that my coma had lasted a matter of days. How long could a body linger, dehydrated, unnourished? I could not calculate my survival beyond a week or so.
But the scene around me was one of late winter, or early spring, the soft rainy season of the Bay Area evident in the moist manure spread among the naked stalks of roses, in the drying tendrils of twigs and trash in the grill over a gutter drain. A cherry tree was in full blossom, the invisible blush of fragrance all over the neighborhood.
My memory stopped on a day I could remember with some difficulty, like someone sitting down to a game after a long break, wiping dust off the checkerboard.
The evidence was there, in the birch trees’ still-naked branches, in the puddle that ran along a seam in the street. I told myself not to think about it. I would have time to ask, time to fill in the calendar. I reasoned that I might have been hospitalized for several weeks, months, or even years, before I had been interred.
I had to stop and lean against a stone wall.
I held on to the wall for a moment, block upon block of cement chunks piled on top of each other. Were the cars around me the models I remembered, or had years of new design made them all strange?
I trudged on, trying to reassure myself. I passed a Honda, a Chevy pickup, a motorcycle on a driveway under a plastic tarp, the tarp held shut by a clothespin. This was the world I had left. Here was a cardboard box, sodden, and run over so many times the pulp was streaked up and down the street.
If a police car had passed I would have flagged it down, but as it was I had a long walk before I found my way home. I ran when I could, but my stride was strange, drunken, my ankles turning and nearly causing me to stumble.
I tried to believe that I grew stronger as I walked, more sure of my stride. As I hurried I tried to think of ways to tell my wife that I was here again, that I was alive, and that everything was going to be fine. I also had time to explore how I felt about Connie. I wanted to give her the good news, and see my house, familiar furniture, friendly walls.
Farther away, across town was the house where Rebecca lived. She was the sole human being I really needed to see. But first I would go home. I needed clothes, and I needed to orient myself just a little more firmly in place and time. I knew that Connie was not the person I most wanted to see, but I accepted her as a part of a homing instinct that led me forward.
I remembered the route as I traveled it. I had a wonderful secret, but I also realized that the shock would be great—maybe too much. I tried one fantasy after another, the rung doorbell, the whispered announcement of who I was as Rebecca unfastened the chain. But it wouldn’t be Rebecca, it would be Connie. I didn’t want to hurt Connie. I considered a trip to a police station so I could scrawl a note and have them make a call first, before I drove up in the backseat, grinning officers slapping my back all the way up the front steps.
I stood on the front lawn of my house.
The walk that ascended to the front steps was cracked, and in the cracks were the spurts of new grass. The grass here, and the lawn on all sides, had been mowed recently, within the last day or so.
I climbed the front steps, and then I hesitated. I was so close, but I could not bring myself to press the doorbell. There was a new anxiety.
What if Connie had moved? What if this house was inhabited by strangers? The new inhabitants would waken, someone fumbling down the stairs. The porch light would flood the steps, and a stranger would stand there, blinking, suspicious, telling his dog to stop barking.
I tried to prepare some remarks that would explain my presence, like a fatigued salesman pulling together his spiel. It was amusing, in a way, but I could think of nothing that I could deliver that would do anything but cause confusion, or even alarm.
I was wearing black shoes, and a black suit I did not recognize. My tie was probably silk, a solid color, black or navy blue—I didn’t recognize it, either, and I found myself wondering who had picked it out.
There would be time for doctors to marvel at my recovery. I could visualize the photocopied documents, surprise tempered with explanation. I would enjoy that, reading how they would attempt to explain away the most egregious medical blunder of their careers.
I found my way to the back fence, and the gate creaked, dragging slightly as I opened it, scraping over a length of garden hose. I closed the gate behind me, and stepped over a large plastic bag of Vitagrow mulch, unopened. A rake lay beside it, tines turned upward. It wasn’t safe to leave a garden implement like that.
I leaned the rake against the wall. How foreign such things can look—a pair of gardening gloves on a back step, a steel claw, used for scratching weeds, a box of snail poison, with a drawing of a snail, horned and muscular, printed on the side.
The back door was locked. I should have expected this. I twisted the knob, and my hand slipped off. I had trouble getting a grip. I jiggled the door, considered knocking, and told myself that this was an even worse plan than ringing the front doorbell.
I was glancing around, telling myself not to make noise, telling myself not to lose my temper, telling myself that this was only a minor setback, when I gave the knob another determined turn, and the door popped open.
It hadn’t been locked after all, only warped in its frame. This could mean that the house was abandoned, neglected for months, the doorjambs swelling with the wet weather.
I called her name, a scratchy whisper. The kitchen was warm, a compost of coffee grounds and lettu
ce leaves somewhere under the sink. There was a cup in the dish rack, and a kitchen towel neatly folded. I searched eagerly.
Here was her leather appointment diary. Here was her address book, her favorite gold ball-point pen, with a matching refillable gold pencil she never used. Here was the mail, the bills to be paid in the pigeonhole of the downstairs desk.
There was a set of handle bars, a large front wheel, a wrench gleaming on the carpet. She had been setting up an exercise bike. And here on the coffee table was a plate of smoked almonds, with a space in the salted nuts where someone had pawed a handful. There was a paper napkin, folded once.
The magazines were on the side table, photos of smiling, evidently newsworthy faces I didn’t take the time to recognize. I was trailing one hand along the banister, making my way up the stairs. Her name was on my lips, my tongue, my vocal chords ready to call, as best I could, in whatever stage whisper I could manage, when I stopped outside the bathroom.
And for the first time I began to be afraid of myself. Not of any situation I found myself in, not of any lingering health problem I might suffer. I loathed myself for hesitating. I meant that one part of my mind admitted the irrational possibility.
I didn’t need to drop by the bathroom, with its sink and its tub and its toilet. I found myself reasoning, like a traveler in an airport, asking himself if he should empty his bladder now or wait until later, on the plane. I was stalling, afraid of waking Connie.
I needed time, I told myself. I was blundering ahead, sure that I just needed a few minutes to understand what was happening to me.
I was afraid to go into the bathroom. I was afraid of something very specific, something that waited alongside toothpaste and deodorant soap.
But as soon as I let myself realize how frightened I was, I knew how badly I needed to talk with someone. I strode down the hall, put my hand on the bedroom door, and let the door swing inward.
The Judas Glass Page 9