It was important for me to know this, my mother said, because my brother had finally gone to sleep. It was hard for my mother to tell me this, and even harder for me, in my pained confusion, to shape what I imagined to be an entire range of sensible questions an older child or an adult would ask. Instead, the only question I could think of was, “What was his name?”
In my present state of experience, I know that an adult would be only a little better equipped to comprehend the hardship and loss my mother’s story involved. And that a name, Andrew Morris Stirling, is as much as many of us ever have of each other.
And so I entered the prime years of my pre-adolescence with the opportunity to mourn a brother, to resent my parents for keeping him secret, to wonder at the nature of a handicap so severe the love of a younger brother, and two parents, would be meaningless.
It was a wisdom I would carry into my adulthood, and it colored my decision to study law. Love cannot struggle far up the steep foothills. Understanding, hope, delight—they all grow weary. Something about life baffles each of us, and only under the protection of experts with hands and habits like gardeners can some of us survive.
I believe that I fell at the end. It was a graceful fall, and I did not hurt myself.
When I outwardly resembled a human being again I was on the ground, on a walkway of crushed gravel. It took me some time, but the effort was a pleasure, recalling fragment by fragment the recent joy. A fountain trickled, and I recognized the neighborhood, one of the more exclusive neighborhoods of San Francisco, upper Broadway, housekeepers and security guards.
I gathered myself from the fine, hard points of stones, calculating my fingers, my teeth, assessing myself as a new creature, one that was like a man only in the most superficial way.
Someone beyond a hedge was walking slowly, a flashlight beam breaking through the wall of green. I tried to estimate the hour, but all I could tell was that there were still stars above, and that only toward the east did any of them seem to be growing dim.
The flashlight swept the gravel walkway. I had many miles to go before I could join Dr. Opal. I would not be able to make that journey tonight—or any other night. Now that I understood my own nature I could not stay with my old friend. I could not play out my nights in a mock-human existence, passing the nocturnal hours in the same routine thoughtlessness with which human beings spend their days.
I knew now what I was able to do, and I would not turn from this new course, this new responsibility I had undertaken in my heart.
In the growing dawn I found a swimming pool under a blue plastic cover. The cover was littered with pine needles. The needles rolled gently as I stirred them, slipping into the dark water.
Sleep. My mother said my brother was asleep, and I knew what she meant without question. It didn’t even strike me as euphemism, merely an alternate way of saying what we knew to be true. That death was a kind of sleep, and that oblivion could be cruel, but was by no means the greatest evil.
My body drifted downward, and I stretched out on the bottom of the pool.
And slept.
30
For a moment I didn’t know where I was. And I was happy.
I used to keep a journal. I knew the pointlessness of it, writing words no one would ever read. The writing itself became the point, covering the pages, what I had for lunch, what movies I stood in line to see, who sent me a letter after such a long wait. All through my college years I kept a variety of notebooks, spiral notebooks from the campus bookstore, handbound books from England.
In recent years I had dug them out of the box in the bedroom closet. It wasn’t by accident, one of those rainy afternoons, cleaning out the closets, absorbed suddenly in old photos, old letters, and the engaging embarrassment of one’s own old philosophical inquiries. I had sought them out deliberately when I knew that Connie was being unfaithful to me.
I had known it was only a beginning. Connie was a force of nature that could be observed, monitored, and perhaps ignored—but never stopped. I had read through my notes of nearly twenty years before, surprised at how only two decades had already yellowed the margins and faded some of the ink. To my relief the diaries were not embarrassing so much as a reminder of how much I had forgotten. I had noted with enthusiasm a new album by B.B. King, a production of Twelfth Night by the Berkeley Shakespeare Theater, and in almost every instance the party I described or the exam I had taken was an event I had completely forgotten.
Water gurgled. The sound kept me awake, listening to the slop of water in and out of the filter valves of the swimming pool.
The sheet, plastic and vast, lifted and fell with the very slight current, a current so slow in was almost nonexistent. If I could stay here, I knew, it would be like happiness. Water supported me, my body drifting with the slack current. It tasted of stale bleach, human body salt, and algae, a mixture of chlorophyll and mucilage. I opened my eyes.
I could not go back. I could not wake up in a bedroom with a woman, my closet filled with my clothes, my memories. It was not simply that Connie had thrown the box and its contents away by now, along with everything else that had been mine. I was never going to be able to engage in even a fitful, sporadic coupling with a woman I called my wife, or get up in the morning to sit in commuter traffic on the Bay Bridge.
The plastic tarp clung to me, stuck to my wet clothes. I was wrinkled, my fingers white and creased as the underside of a mushroom. I left sloppy wet footprints on the poolside concrete, and my trail reflected the stars.
A siren rolled along the edge of my hearing. Something else heard it, too. From beside the hedge came a diminutive howl. I was taking one slow breath after another, my heartbeat sluggish, heavy in my ears. The creature scrambled across the gravel, paws in the sharp stones. At the sight of me the beast froze. The animal would not take a further step, but stood trembling. The tiny haystack of hair showed teeth, giving a faint growl.
I smiled, stretching forth my hand. “Come here,” I breathed.
A back door opened, and a man’s figure in silhouette called, “Harold?”
The man could not see us; we were sheltered behind a juniper, a great, sprawling shrub. The wire-haired terrier looked back toward the house, briefly.
I felt a tender contempt for the man at his doorway, calling for his pet. How little the man knew about the hunter who ate dog biscuits from his hand. I laughed soundlessly, and the man put his hand to his throat.
He wavered in the doorway, thinking he should venture forth, prefering to stay where he was. I ran my tongue over my lips, over my teeth.
I sent a blessing, a farewell. I surprised myself—compassion swept me. For this man, tired, frightened of something he had sensed, for this dog, oblivious to everything but my hand.
I walked the streets, aware of my skeleton, soap-pale within my muscles, a glow-in-the-dark pirouette, a railway of calcium, linking tunnel to spire. Maybe, I thought, I will get by tonight without touching anyone, without doing any harm.
Each passing human was a village of smells, eddies, warm currents. When I found myself on Geary I turned west, and passed restaurants and bars, the traffic a stunning cascade of headlights and brakelights. Sometimes someone exiting a restaurant or a video store would catch my eye as I passed, I could sense her turn to gaze after me.
I could only guess how I must look, soaked through, my withered skin the color of the fat people cut from beef before they roast it. But people responded to me as they would the most handsome individual, the way people respond to the sight of a race horse in its prime. Surely tonight, I tried to convince myself, I would be able to find what I wanted without harming a living thing.
But as Golden Gate Park closed around me, the trees singing with the breeze, I grew weary. A whisper high up stopped me. Twin talons released a branch. The bird saw everything in its world. It saw me, the buttons on my shirt, the way each button reflected the lick of a passing searchlight in the clouds, a celebration somewhere. The owl took it all in, the field, the
city. Held it all in its vision.
The raptor circled, abruptly. Was I mistaken, or did it make a sound just then, an inward cry? The bird plummeted straight down. And had something. Something alive, something warm in the hook of its beak. Something that would not die, its heart beating, all the way back.
The streets were laid out in a grid, running east and west, the ocean not far away, shuffling and dragging, Ocean Beach. Small houses adjoined each other, and all I had to do was find the people who were watching, sense their alertness. Noriega Street was not far from here. I could almost sense their vigil, the intensity of their boredom, their worship of routine. For the police the pursuit of a killer was a matter of putting in the hours, filing the reports. They would be paid even if they caught no one.
I had a purpose now. I knew what I had to do. But I would need more strength than I had. Need. What a simple word, the sound of something common, sweet. I admitted myself into an apartment building, the door opening at a touch.
For Rebecca, I told myself.
I was doing this for her.
I stepped into an elevator. I felt unsure what to do next. I pushed one button, and it lit up, and another, and it lit up, too. What a mistake it had been, I scolded myself, getting into this box. What would happen if some nice matron or some young wife with a load of groceries, or a whole family, stepped into the elevator at the next floor? What would I say? My clothes were still wet enough to drip water onto the floor. When the cell began to move it was slow, the walls and the floor vibrating.
The cable suspending the cage groaned, over my head. The machinery that lifted me was hidden, whirring somewhere in the shaft. The elevator was slowing down. It stopped. The door wasn’t opening.
When the elevator door opened I was happy to abandon the cell. The hall carpet muted my steps. I climbed out a window, onto the steel bones of the fire escape.
The young woman stood before a mirror. If she had been less absorbed in the sight of her own nakedness she would have heard me. Even when she felt the chill of me she was reassured by the mirror: she was the only person in the room.
But it was the reflection that made me hesitate, A tiny patch of sticker blemished the glass, the remains of a price tag. She stood close to the glass, her breath flickering on the surface, stroking her eyelashes with a fingertip. Like a parakeet who surrenders to its double, and courts it, plastering the image with disgorged seed, the woman freed a dark crumb of makeup from her lashes. She held a sweater of red cashmere before her, studying it in the mirror. She let it fall.
She touched one breast, one nipple. I had the impression of her depth, her sensations, the way she colored with laughter, with pleasure. Her blond hair was cut short, a scratch on her forearm, a cat or a thorn. Or a lover—she did not share the apartment with a cat, and the only garden was four stories below.
She turned and fell back against the mirror, crossing her arms over her breasts. An observor might have misunderstood our tableau and seen two people startled by an explosion, or a shout in the street.
A metallic rumble. Somewhere in the house. In the kitchen—a garbage disposal.
The mirror. Only after awhile does it occur to us again, the emptiness of the reflected world, its sterility. I reached past her to touch the glass, and to my surprise left a fingerprint.
Not a whole print, a smudge shape like an exclamation mark. I ran my fingers through her hair, soothing the line of her jaw. The garbage disposal was silent. Footsteps approached, and veered off into an adjoining room.
It is rich with proteins, serum albumin with the bland flavor of eggwhite, serum globulin, the taste of whey, and fibrogin, tasting like flesh, like meat. Antibodies, calcium, magnesium, sulfates, phosphates—blood knows nothing, loves nothing, never dreamed or grieved. It is a mix of urea and fatty acids, and more. Something I drank along with the flavor of an inland sea.
The mirror made a constant hum, a radio tuned to an empty wavelength. I had not been able to hear it before now. I could see every nuance of color in the light reflected by her lips, her teeth, her open eyes.
The door opened after a perfunctory knock. It was a snapshot, a woman shocked, unable to move. She was almost identical to the woman before me on the floor, but dressed in a white T-shirt and denims, her feet in fuzzy blue slippers. A long second. Nothing happened, and then the door shut, hard.
Leave now, I prompted myself. Go on—right out the window.
But I didn’t leave. Like an ordinary felon I wiped the mirror with my sleeve, removing the fingerprint. I made my way into the hall, listening. Why wasn’t the woman in the T-shirt on the phone? Why wasn’t she calling the police? Instead there was a scrabbling sound, heavy objects muffled by cloth, by cardboard boxes.
Run now, I told myself.
But she has seen me, I cautioned myself. She knows what I look like. I hesitated, telling myself that it didn’t matter. No one would believe her. Of course they will—there’s a dead woman in the bedroom.
What kept me, engaged in this mental debate, was pleasure. Deep pleasure in every breath I could hear from the room beyond this doorway, her frenzied breathing, the gasps of effort as she hurried across the room and into the hall, her eyes wide, her mouth twisted with some passion I could almost name. She was beautiful.
It was loud. The noise cancelled every other sound. The hallway was milky with a sudden pollution, and the Chinese New Year flavor of gunpowder. A spent shell spun on the floor at her feet.
No feeling. No pain.
She shot me again. This time my hand was on the gun, and the flash seared my flesh, my rib cage resounding with the shock, my feet almost knocked out from under me. I snatched the weapon from her hand and tore at it with my fingers, wrenching it, bending it, the firearm making tin-woodsman creaks as I twisted it in my hands. I let it fall.
You will remember nothing. None of this.
My thoughts hammered her. They stunned her. I never touched her, but she fell back, as though struck. Her eyes went blank.
I nearly made it to the fire escape before I slipped on the blood streaming down from inside my jacket, down my pantleg. I collapsed again on the steel steps, tumbled, caught myself. I could feel them now, the two bullets inside me, dragging me down.
I closed my eyes and cried out, the sound of my voice an outspreading ripple, a flame touched to a clear plastic sheet. With my eyes tightly shut I could still see, as with a ghostly sonar, a street, the cars, the trees.
I released my grip from the fire escape but did not fall. My sense of purpose stayed with me, as I rolled to avoid a high-tension wire, and looped high over a rooftop. My wings rustled, a riffling, gentle repetition, the sound of someone doing card tricks in the dark.
31
When I found them I was not surprised. There was only one car, a pair of watchers, one youthful, the remnant of a pimple on his chin, the other using the time to fill in reports, pressing hard with a ballpoint pen.
They were bored, but remained vigilant in a careless way. The focus of their desultory attention was a pink stucco duplex, two twin houses adjoined, the floorplans mirroring each other.
I used a certain caution as I closed in. Some instinct guided me back into human form, and as I groped, staggering, surprised to be so suddenly a man-like being again, one of the policemen saw me.
The car door opened. The young cop hiked at his pants, made sure his weapon was in place at his hip. But then I could feel his conviction fade. I was only a shadow, a blowing, dark rag, shapeless.
I pressed against a wall, and knocked over a plastic baseball bat left leaning against a drainpipe. The comically oversized Whiffle bat rolled, all the way out to the driveway, and down, following the slope out to the gutter, where it stopped.
Both cops were watching now. Their alertness awakened, I could feel their suspicion, worrying at me, prodding. What was that? The older cop buttoned his jacket, both of them in plain clothes, dark jackets, light brown pants.
It was hard for me to breathe. There was
a throb deep inside my abdomen, and my shirt front was wet again.
Alongside the house ran a sidewalk, redwood chips crowding in over the concrete, all the way to the back garden. I had expected weathered squalor, piles of discarded newspapers gone soggy, an old lounge chair. Instead there was a quality of tidiness, clay pots with aloes and pear cacti, and a newly painted picnic table.
A small green bottle of ant poison lay on its side, beside a yellow-sponge squeeze mop. The back porch was slightly warped, steps weathered, but the impression was of domestic order, plain, nondescript, but homey. The back door window shivered as I gripped the doorknob, twisted it, and the lock gave way, the door splitting, glass breaking.
Pain prevented me from entering the place. Sharp pain. I sat on the back steps, retching. I coughed. An ugly joke was being played on me. I could survive two gunshot wounds only as a winged creature. As soon as I was human again the two projectiles were right where they had been, and they hurt.
I could use the telephone inside, I thought. I would call Dr. Opal. I would have to act quickly. But I couldn’t move. I sat where I was, breathing hard.
I coughed again, a juicy, broken wheeze. The pain was changing, my innards shifting. I tried to stand up. A stone worked its way up my throat as I gagged. I spat.
Darkly glistening, a bullet lay in my hand. Coughing again, my body laboring, I produced another slug. I threw them both hard, into a recess of the yard, and took a moment to steady myself.
“I heard it,” said the older cop, much older, retirement perhaps months away. I could hear the resignation, the feeling that it would be much easier and more pleasant if nothing happened. They stood in front of the house, on the sidewalk from the sound of it.
“Somebody getting sick,” said the younger cop.
The Judas Glass Page 16