The Judas Glass

by Michael Cadnum

  “You were the only person—”

  “You did the right thing,” he said. “Who else could you turn to but me. I understand. That’s about all I do understand.” He kept talking. It seemed to help him maintain his composure. “I was working late, expecting to be up most of the night working on an article on the thickening of the pericardium. The lining of the heart.”

  I knew what the pericardium was. “You had a party.”

  “A young doctor who rented an office in my building. He’s starting up a practice in Seattle.”

  The artery in my leg was leaking. I held up my hand in an apologetic gesture, an indisposed house guest. The fluid on my hand glistened like water, but it had a strong chemical smell. It was flowing from my body, but it was not blood. The odor brought back memories—biology class dissecting bull frogs, my father using pinchers to fish the strangely elephantine lump of a human heart from a jar.

  He shook his head. “You have a pulse, Richard, but that’s all you have. I know what that liquid dripping onto the carpet is, and so do you.” He didn’t want to say, pausing like a man on the high dive platform, fidgeting, not wanting to take that final step. “It’s formaldehyde. Embalming fluid. You seem to be breathing, but I can’t believe any dynamic exchange of gasses is taking place.”

  “But I’m here, talking,” I said.

  Perhaps the pills he had taken, and the bourbon he had swallowed, were taking effect. I could feel some of the fear go out of him, leaving him rational, clear-headed but unnaturally calm. “Your pupils are fixed and dilated. Your skin displays a definite pallor. The blood vessels of your eyes show an absence of circulatory activity. I’m glad to be talking to you, Richard. I knew I had lost you. It was the death of a son.” He did not have to add: but this is not what I prayed for.

  I was thirsty, parched, dry inside. I couldn’t see very well, my eyes filming, my eyelids slow to respond, each blink an effort. “Don’t take me to the hospital.”

  He didn’t seem to hear me. “There was an autopsy. The medical examiner had a stroke two months ago, but the findings were very clear. You bled to death.”

  “Connie has a good case against the restaurant. I have one, I mean. I walked right through that glass door. Let me stay here. I trust you.” And I sent him the thought with my mind, begging him, from my soul to his. Hide me.

  There was something about my plea that surprised me. It was not like me to make such a request, not so insistently. I should have placed myself in Dr. Opal’s hands, and relied on his good judgment.

  “You must be tired,” said Dr. Opal at last, the solicitous host.

  “Very. But I’m afraid to go to sleep.”

  He considered this.

  “It looks like you’re planting some fruit trees,” I said. “Out in back.”

  “An orchard,” he said. “Plums.”

  We both heard it, a new voice downstairs, a lovely female singsong. “Dr. Sam?”

  “Good Lord,” said Dr. Opal. “It’s Susan.”

  “Samuel?” sang the voice.

  “Who is Susan?” I asked. Nobody had ever called him Samuel, except for his late wife.

  “A friend. A good friend.”

  “You weren’t staying up all night, not to finish an article. You expected her. You have—” I had to think of the right phrase, but my brain, my nervous system, was beginning to fail. “You have a woman friend.”

  He was pale. “I had a feeling Susan would come back.”

  “I don’t want anyone to see me,” I said.

  20

  He shut the door of the office, and told me to lock it from the inside. Locking the door became the focus of all the mental and physical effort I could muster. There was a click. I tested the door, and I was safe.

  Safe, but much weaker, now. I was depleted, every object in the room drained of color, all of it turning into a black-and-white photograph.

  “Did you hear that?” said Susan, somewhere downstairs.

  “No one ate the macadamia nuts,” said Dr. Opal.

  “I thought I heard a door,” she said.

  “They ate all of your vegetable pâté,” he said. “Look—there’s nothing left but this smidgen.”

  “You don’t have to sound so puzzled,” she said with a laugh. “Didn’t you like it?”

  Perhaps I was a little miffed at Dr. Opal for being involved with such a bustling person. The late Mrs. Opal had been a quiet woman with a kind smile, someone who never did anything like cook or wash dishes. She had been regal and charming, and—it was a handicap that gave her special weight in my childish view—color blind. It would have been a shock to see her peeling a potato.

  Now here was a potential new Mrs. Opal, downstairs hustling party remains into the dishwasher, speaking in a loud voice over the sound of running water. Her voice’s carrying power made it easy for me to hear every word she said.

  Everyone else in the East Bay seemed to be asleep by now, and here was this jovial temptress beguiling Dr. Opal with stories of how the poor dear she had driven home couldn’t even put her house key in the right little slot. She had no idea a pineapple juice and something, vodka or rum, would do so much damage.

  “Good thing you offered to drive,” said Dr. Opal.

  “You look so tired, Samuel,” said Susan, her line of chatter pausing. “I’m sorry. I should be going home. Do you realize what time it is?”

  “No, I’m glad you’re here,” said Dr. Opal. He meant: and I’ll be glad to see you some other night, too. He was about to add that he could finish washing the cheese tray or whatever it was himself—I could feel his impatience.

  But Dr. Opal’s characteristic niceness was proving to be a handicap. “I told you I would take care of all the little chores,” she said, and Dr. Opal must have given her some sign, weariness, dismay, some expression she misunderstood.

  “And you’re so exhausted,” she said. Cupboards opened and shut. “I’m tired, too,” she added, her words full of meaning.

  Then I realized that Dr. Opal wanted this woman to stay. He enjoyed her company, and he did not want to be left alone in the house with me.

  “Why don’t you let me make you a hot toddy?” said Susan.

  I couldn’t hear Dr. Opal’s reply.

  “It’s no trouble. Go on upstairs and go to bed. I’ll bring it up in a minute.”

  Dr. Opal said he really had to be alone tonight to finish an article he was writing. It was a shame, he said. He would love one of her good lemon toddies.

  “Some other time,” said Susan, giving the words a forlorn twist.

  “I hope so,” said Dr. Opal said, with a fervor she could only partly understand.

  The mirror insisted. It had the same leaden commanding quality a sign has, far from any human agency, police or security guards, to enforce it, No Trespassing or No Smoking, words so black and so peremptory that most people feel compelled to obey.

  Come look the mirror said.

  I felt the mirror’s continuing pull. Surely I had been mistaken. Surely I could stand before that glass and see. The Latin mirari means to look at with wonder. The wonder of proving to myself that I was outrageously mistaken. Imagine my mistake, I would say, years from now.

  Some say Narcissus sinned, falling in love with his own reflection. Others say the reflection sinned, hungering for its image in the twin mirrors of Narcissus’ eyes. The invention that gave birth to our world was not the hearth or the wheel. It was the looking glass, like this rectangle, this window on the wall. I knew why Narcissus kept looking into his reflection in the quiet water of the stream.

  Pounding.

  He was outside the office, pounding, saying what people say when the knob won’t turn. “Richard, let me in—are you all right?”

  Had I fallen? Or had I lain myself down to sleep, without really wanting to. I don’t need rest, I told myself. But what I meant was: I didn’t want to lose consciousness.

  A rattle, and a period of intense quiet. At last Dr. Opal was in the room, th
e lock picked. Or maybe there was a spare key somewhere, a bottom drawer, a shoe box full of keys and foreign coins. But each old key clearly labeled—his life was intelligently cluttered, not chaotic, everything in its place.

  He bent over me. “She’s gone,” he was saying. “I practically had to drag her out of here. I thought she was going to move in this very night.”

  When I didn’t answer he felt for my pulse.

  “I’m going to go out for half an hour or so,” he said. “I’m coming back. I don’t want you to worry.” His reassurance made me worry all the more. I knew he had mixed feelings about returning.

  He saw the fear in my eyes. Don’t leave me.

  “I promise,” he said, “I’ll be right back.”

  Didn’t he know anything? Didn’t he know that a living person can make no such promise? Every sort of harm could happen to him out there, in the night streets. I tried to warn him, to ask him to stay here, but I felt absurdly wasted, withered and boneless, and I could make only a senile ah, the sort of noise proverbial doctors are always wanting you to make as they depress your tongue.

  It even sounded as though I agreed. Uh-huh, yes, go. Instead I was trying to say No.

  Fish are like this, pancaked on the bed of ice, eyes like the elevator buttons you push and feel the finger sink in and change begin to happen, levels descending, the floor rising. Fish have that tragic-comic gape, the comedy mask and the tragedy mask interbred to produce this, the never-closing expressionless gawp.

  I couldn’t move. When I was aware of anything, I could see the photos of my family, my father’s hairless arms, the gray net over half my mother’s face, like a mermaid who will escape the fisherman this time, but not for long.

  It was hard for him to move me. He had been trying, panting, the carpet bunching up under me. Now that I was awake he was trying to encourage my cooperation. He gave up and unzipped a black leather bag.

  “It took me a lot longer than I expected,” he said.

  I was against the wall in the next instant, sitting, trying to make sense of what was before me, the plastic bag of solid dark color, black, or near-black, an alloy of beet juice and mother earth.

  Dr. Opal was wide-eyed. I tried to encourage him, to tell him to hurry, but instead I could only open my mouth in what must have been an unsettling smile.

  A stainless-steel rack glinted in the light. Plastic tubing snaked in the light from the desk lamp, and my skin was numbed with alcohol. No, Doctor, I wanted to tell him. No need to worry about infection in my case.

  A needle slipped into a vein in my arm. The substance flowed, the loops of plastic tubing turning red, pretty as a Valentine’s Day streamer, the red defining its way downward.

  Into my flesh, this scarlet skywriting, this course of port wine up my vein. I could see it happen, all the way along my forearm, a serpent that gave pleasure as it pierced—pleasure and pain as the collapsed tunnels and cavities of my body inflated, tingling. Until even the black-and-white photos on the wall were rich with hue.

  “Thank you, Dr. Opal,” I said, the pole wobbling, the plastic bag of blood swaying. How did you know? I wanted to ask. How did you know exactly what I needed?

  My voice was strong. I could inhale deeply. My lungs were clear. I told him what to do next, and he followed my request, looking ashen, thin-lipped. When he was back in the room he carried a pan, something to do with stir-frying, I thought. A little nick in another plastic bag of blood and the fluid pattered musically, the notes growing more and more alto, until at last they were too low for human hearing, the bag empty, the final drops shaken out.

  I lifted the pan with its wobbly burden. I put my lip over the edge of the pan, tilting it like a punch bowl, a partygoer dispensing with glass cups and ladles, tilting the entire fragrant brew and drinking. I drank it all.

  When the pan was empty I set it down and slipped the needle from my vein. Dr. Opal was not quick enough to help me. A drop of blood glittered there, and then my body drew it in, the entire pearl disappearing into the tiny puncture.

  I sensed the neighborhood around me, the lives.

  He helped me into a spare bedroom, the one he saved for medical celebrities. “I painted the watercolor next to the closet,” he said.

  I let myself pretend to be weaker than I felt, while he showed me the amenities of this large guest bedroom, switching lights off and on, demonstrating the cord that opened the curtains, with all the brisk apathy of a bellhop. But I knew why he chose this room.

  He shut the door and left me alone, only to return with a piece of furniture. I listened as he slid it along the carpet, a stout oak chair, one from the dining room, I guessed. He propped it under the doorknob outside. This room had a particularly strong door, a barrier designed to protect the rest of the house from the snores and love-moans of visiting guests.

  The windows were double glazed, and had the gelatinous quality of bullet-proof glass. At some point in the past security precautions had been taken. A visiting Russian physicist could rest his sleepy head without the least apprehension. I was trapped.

  It was a pleasant room—floral print drapes, a gray carpet. A slapdash, colorful watercolor decorated one side of the room, a sailboat in a sunset—or sunrise. With difficulty I managed to make out the signature, SO, like a mild challenge.

  An Eisenstaedt portrait of Robert Frost commanded one wall, with that airless, preserved quality of certain photographs, the living moment turned to silver. Directly across from Frost hung a wood-framed, full-length mirror.

  I could not help looking, once more. Perhaps, I told myself, this mirror will be different. Surely it would. All I had to do was take one more look.

  I could see the entire room, if I shifted from angle to angle. But I could not see myself.

  21

  Was Dr. Opal on the telephone? Was he faxing word about me to people I did not know and could not trust? I crept to the door, but all I could hear was Dr. Opal’s restless quiet, the slap of his slippers as he tossed them on the floor, the tinkle of liquor into a glass.

  Dr. Opal stopped pacing his bedroom. He was listening. Don’t worry. It’s nothing. Only the house settling. Or that neighbor’s tom cat again, such a devilish creature.

  I turned the doorknob and pushed. The chair creaked, the joints straining. I visualized the chair, the glue, the legs, all of it fighting my weight. A chair leg snapped.

  I was in the hall. Time was not fluid. It jumped, like a badly mended movie. One instant I stood on the stairs. And then I was outside, just beyond the sliding glass door.

  Upstairs I could hear Dr. Opal wandering again, opening drawers and shutting them, unable to lie down and unable to sit still, taking reassurance by moving things from place to place. Springs whispered. I could almost see him, lying down, hands over his eyes, not sleeping so much as waiting for day.

  I would go for a walk.

  The sight of my own footsteps stirred something in me. I was here. I was real. On my way to the house, what seemed like hours ago, I had left footprints in the field.

  Suddenly I was sprawled beneath a tree.

  I rolled onto my back and gazed upward at the towering eucalyptus, scales of bark dangling from its branches. Bits of twigs and tangles of leaves rained after me, and gradually slackened, until a last leaf spun down and brushed my cheek.

  I blinked, and my vision remained clear. I will get up, I told myself, and everything will make sense. I could breathe freely, and I filled my lungs and exhaled several times, the air cool and flavored with eucalyptus and wet earth. A wadded com chips bag lay nearby.

  I had the impression that I had just fallen, hard, from a great height. I couldn’t recall in any detail the events leading up to this moment. Don’t think about it. Don’t ask yourself how you got here.

  I listened hard to the noises of a less sedate, more work-worn part of town. I pulled myself to my feet. As I had walked to Dr. Opal’s house my joints had creaked and strained, but now they were supple. I flexed the long tendons o
f my legs, stretched my arms. Each step crushed the bell-shaped eucalyptus seeds, and I groped my way through fallen twigs, down a slope, toward a creek. Flattened cardboard boxes had been used as sleds on the bare dirt, tearing paths in the weeds.

  A drainpipe emptied into the creek, horsetail reeds growing around the steady trickle. The vague, reflected light off the clouds swam in the current at my feet. A metal shopping cart leaned in the current, bearded with scum.

  Children murmured in their sleep. A car gleamed faintly in the creek bed, windows smashed, the doors missing. The seats were gone, the hulk abandoned, blistered with rust. I sat behind the steering wheel, my weight on the bare, crumbling springs. The chassis settled, groaning. This was where I could spend the rest of the night, I told myself, like a boy in his dad’s car.

  I had never felt so free of care. The weariness and the chill were gone from my body. The stream flowed into the car, eddying, and my feet splashed as I pretended to drive, stepping on the accelerator, a metal knob. To my surprise, when I turned the steering wheel the front end shifted, the bare wheel grinding on the stones.

  I was a boy. I had that feeling I’d had when reading alone, finding an amusing passage, laughing out loud, and feeling the Tightness, solitude blessed. I felt a thrill. I was a child again, but with a man’s knowledge. I had mourned, I had worked hard, I had seen thirty-eight summers fade. And now this legacy was mine. I had the powerful feeling that, if I willed it, the car would lurch out of the creek bed, and hurtle through the air, wherever I willed it to go.

  The flow of the creek was strong, parting around me as I left the car and waded upward, passing willows trees and mossy rocks. I dug my fingers into the bank and hauled myself up. I swung over a fence. A house ahead of me was pink halfway up, where the paint must have run out. The rest of the stucco was weathered and gray, iron grillwork over the windows. A clothesline dangled a few bone-white clothespins, and a bicycle frozen with corrosion lay abandoned behind an assembly of scrap wood, two-by-fours and warped plywood.