The Judas Glass

by Michael Cadnum

  A strange map spread before us on the blue felt Ivory-yellow, a fine net stretched outward, a web of highways, a ghostly city in the the shape of a human body. “A nervous system,” said my father. “Belonged to a cleaning woman. She left it to the museum.” The nerves of the dead woman were busy around the empty hole of her mouth.

  It was appropriate that my most stark confrontation with the architecture of the body and my first insight into the power of a bequest should occur at the same moment. In the boiler plate and codicils of a will, the dead stand witness among us. In the macrame of the nervous system something of the cleaning woman remained faithful.

  “I’m worried,” Helen said, tugging paper towels from the roll. “About the psychological damage to Diane, especially. I have that plastic liner on the mattress from her bedwetting—”

  “And milk gives Randy a rash,” said Eric.

  She let the roll of paper towels fall. The cylinder of paper touched the swamp of blood and pink began to spread across the green-and-white floral print. I felt her anxiety. It passed through me like pain: He’s going to use the ax. He’s going to hurt her. She said, “I promise.”

  He heard it—wet fabric whispering. One hand felt for the ax handle. His fingers made sticky, kissing sounds on the wooden shaft.

  She said, “He’s moving.”

  After this was over, I promised myself, I would give my body to medical science. The graduate students would file in not ready to believe, every one of them doubting. Even as I stepped to the lectern and opened my notes they would not know what they were looking at. And I could tell them that memory is the cruelest faculty, the first, most lasting form of torture.

  I was so careful to deceive myself.

  36

  A house plant gleamed in a clay pot. The dark green foliage, the glaze of salts on the pot, the farmland scent of the potting soil—it was all so out of place where it was, beside a tattered pack of playing cards on a table. The ceiling was sheet rock—a plant has such power that it will ascend even toward a sky of stone.

  There was blood on the ceiling. I rose from the rug slowly, section by section, with the movements of an elderly dandy, straightening the crease in my damp trousers, adjusting my cuffs, steadying my head with the gesture of a man with one hand on his hat.

  Helen looked on with something like rapture. If I was alive, she knew, then the future held all manner of stunning possibilities. My presence worked in her like oxygen. She wanted to touch me. But at the same time she recognized that there was something grotesque about me, something terrible.

  Eric was sweating. He stood with the ax in one fist like a berserker about to jump from a great height. My neck muscles cramped, veins fitfully reasserting themselves. I wavered dizzily, so feeble that my movements were the slow, languid gestures of someone swimming through zero gravity.

  When he hefted the ax again, it took me a long time to lift my arm, the deltoid muscles of my shoulders weak, my forearm strengthless. I slipped the blow, and he staggered into it, landing on all fours. The house plant in the corner shook, stem and leaf.

  He flung the ax away and scrambled. He snatched something bright off the drenched carpet. The nap of the rug squeaked and squelched under our feet. He passed at my belly with the hunting knife. I saw how he must have borne down on Rebecca, how little she could have guessed about him, how helpless she had felt.

  I took him into my arms as the knife slashed me, tearing my shirt, my skin, the muscles of my belly. “Get the ax,” he cried, yelling, full-throated.

  He stabbed me, working hard, plunging the knife, ripping my jacket, tangling the blade in the cloth, fumbling, losing it as it tumbled to the floor. He told her to pick the ax off the floor. “Use the ax.”

  I laughed, a little sadly. I had wanted an adversary.

  “His legs,” he was gasping. “Hit him in the legs.”

  We rocked in a silent waltz. He had been young once. Music had meant so much to him. But he had always been coarsened by ambition, stubborn in ways that made him tireless when he should have rested, industrious when he should have walked beside the river, watching the leaves turn from green to scarlet with something almost audible, that sound like held breath.

  He knew this now: he had hurried to the bulletin board, across the plaza with its red and white umbrellas, the pigeons, the white crumbs of bread. He wanted to see the scores, to see where his name appeared on the roster of the gifted.

  He was not the first human being to want too much. He fought me, fists, kicks, with all the loud bravado of a theatrical double, a man pretending to be in danger, miming a death-struggle, his voice draining to a shrill, piping No.

  He was senseless when I killed him, unpacking his body of its organs with the careful concentration I would have used on a trunk full of curiosities, heart, lungs, the pipes and ducts of food and air, until there was so little left of the living man, so little structure, that I had to stop my dismantling and attend to her.

  She was crouched at the door of the bathroom, and continued to scream when I touched her cheek soothingly. What she had just seen had broken through her joy at my presence.

  There was nothing I could do to quiet her, so I pressed my fingers over her eyes and told her to sleep. I draped her over the quilt on her bed, a sailboat pattern, an heirloom, beautiful, stitch by stitch.

  The children hid in the bathtub. They wore pink pajama bottoms, and each wore a T-shirt representing a superhero.

  Sleep. I did them no harm. Their bodies were warm in my arms as I carried them one by one to the bedroom, toys all over the floor and a few ants around the sticky half circle left by a can of cola.

  And now, Rebecca would say, you are going to turn yourself in. Now you will call Dr. Opal.

  Because it was over. I had accomplished everything I had set out to do.

  I wiped blood off the phone with a paper towel and told the operator I wanted to speak with Berkeley Chief of Police Joe Timm. Instead I was connected to the Berkeley Police Department, a woman’s voice.

  It was only after persisting and getting the answering machine in Joe Timm’s private office that I remembered a fragment of a phone number. I tried various combinations of digits, and when I heard Joe Timm’s voice at last I felt a flicker of satisfaction.

  This was miles from Joe’s jurisdiction, but he would know what to do. “I found Eric,” I said.

  “Eric,” he said, almost guessing what I was talking about, almost recognizing my voice. “Who is this?”

  “He killed Rebecca,” I said.

  “Where are you?” said Joe, mystified, but thinking fast.

  Joe was asking questions as I put the receiver down beside an ashtray, a bowl of blue glass. The sound of his tiny, electrified voice followed me until I was outside. I washed myself with a garden hose, but the effort wasn’t really necessary. Even my appearance seemed to regenerate, my clothing healing as inexorably as my flesh.

  As I turned off the water, twisting the handle of the garden faucet, a woman stepped out of the shadows, a man behind her. “We heard noises,” said the woman. “We almost called the police.”

  “Yes, it was a little noisy in there, wasn’t it?” I said. The melancholy I should have expected was setting in. I could stop now—stop everything, and step off this one-man merry-go-round. I had done everything I wanted. I could wait here for the call to be traced, for the police to roll up and take me in.

  Neither of the neighbors were afraid. They were dazzled by my smile, trusting me to join them, go with them back into their bungalow. “We just wondered if everything was alright,” said the woman, softening her voice seductively. Her accent reminded me of Connie’s, a country twang modified by years of watching television.

  “Everything is all right,” I said.

  I liked these people, the man in a baseball cap and jeans, the shapely woman in a plaid blouse. I could go back and play Scrabble. They would have been delighted to let me win, letting me make up words, all x’s and q’s, and for a whi
le I even walked back with them the woman taking my arm, leaning close to me, the man trailing, honored by my attraction for his wife, willing to participate in a night of voluntary cuckoldry, watching George Raft talk tough while I took my pleasure in the bedroom. And I nearly walked up the steps with them, almost closed the door behind me.

  But I knew what Rebecca would tell me. I knew I had lied to myself. I was not going to let the authorities take me in. There would be no audiences, no foreign experts. No release from my condition. I no longer wanted answers. This was what I loved—this minute linked to minute, this power to endure. I wanted more of this, night after night just like this one, two people standing close to me, offering me their lives.

  37

  I climbed high into the hills. Motorcycles had cut scars in the landscape. Rusting equipment loomed, chains and iron wheels scattered behind barbed wire. I plucked at the barbed coils, slipping through.

  I felt my way downward, across a cliff face of glossy, green serpentine, into an old quarry. Rail tracks led upward to the base of a cliff, and then stopped, and the man-made canyon had that profound quiet of industry left to decay.

  I was hoping for a mine shaft, and had entertained the thought of finding a cave. But as dawn approached I had to be satisfied with one of the fissures in the cliff, cracks that stretched deep into the stone. I crept into the dark, not certain what form my body would take as I hid farther into the hill, whether human, or winged, or some new disguise I did not want to name.

  When I woke I fed again.

  This time I found a community of new houses, sod still rolled up like carpets, bare ground and huge boxes at the curb for recycling, the flattened cardboard that had contained refrigerators, stoves.

  I embraced a woman sitting on a brand-new patio set, blue canvas directors chairs, an iron table. She was half-turned to look inside, a stereo rumbling, a song I would have known in my other, human life. She was smoking a cigarette, the heat of her spiced with nicotine, the last words she spoke a laughing, “Stop it. I told you stop it,” trying to guess. Trying to name which friend I was, until she was silent.

  In my man-like guise I threaded a path through a bank of iceplants, the succulents in flower, a carpet of blossoms. Highway One was crowded with traffic, headlights, brakelights. It was still early evening, two men entering a bar, another man trying to use a pay phone, his fingers drink-clumsy, having trouble with the coins.

  Justice, revenge, I could hear Rebecca say. I had what I wanted.

  The beach was empty, except for a couple huddled near a huge gnarl of driftwood. The log smouldered, the wind kicking the smoke into flame. A face turned away from the firelight, and I heard a voice ask, “Spare some money for food?”

  So often in the past I had received such a request with little interest, although I had sometimes dropped a few quarters into an outstretched hand. But now when I could not, I ached to do something human, commit a simple act of generosity.

  I jogged south, away from the restaurant and the parking lot, across the sandstone rubble along the face of the cliffs, until I was was well away from sight or sound of human beings.

  The salt foam was cold, but to me it felt tropical. I climbed along the limpet-spiked stones. I considered trying to die again, wading into the water, drowning. With amused bitterness I realized that I could probably inhale and exhale saltwater like so much thick air. It could not take my life. But what I felt was not like true despair. I was finished with my inner sunlessness. Something new was beginning.

  A dark heap of animal life stirred. A snout lifted. A dark eye reflected the dim light. Two of the creatures were small, shielded by the adults. The sea lions observed my approach, one of them pushing himself up and out of the pile, wrestling toward me.

  Just as a page of writing reflects an author’s state of mind, and just as the concentration of a reader echoes in turn that mental landscape, so I was one of life’s seconds, not life, but free, as poetry is, or the image in a mirror.

  I cast no reflection in a glass because I was a reflection, broken out of the frame and glass.

  The sea lion dug his fins into the stoney beach, but with each movement he swung his body to one side. He could not approach me directly, because one of his fins could not bear his weight.

  He rushed me, a growl, a lunge. I hushed him with a whisper, and knelt beside him. The animal gazed into my eyes, and I had an instant comprehension of what he saw in me. I had begun the evening with a sense of self-loathing, but he saw me as a fellow mammal, possibly a curiosity, but nothing worse.

  The fishing line around his forelimb had dug into the flesh. I untangled the knot, and gently pulled the filament free. I tried to open the cut in my fingers, but it was healed. I punctured my hand with my teeth and let a little of my blood trickle onto his whiskery snout. He opened his mouth, like a hound eager for a treat, lapping the blood as it fell.

  The world was fertile. These sea lions, Connie, Stella—each thistle on the cliff above stretched its brambles into a future. And I fathered nothing.

  There must be some reason we love the end of the land, the emptiness of all that is left. We have to be in love to look at the turbulent void and feel that it belongs to us.

  Perhaps it was at that moment that I decided what I would do, but my future was predicated in my growing recognition of my powers, and in my constant love for Rebecca. What had been an obsession for a living man had flowered into faith.

  There was no reason for me to hope, and I had nothing like human expectation in the future as I circled, high over the surf.

  The flight was long, or it was swift. I could not tell. I did not experience the journey as an event that took place within the fabric of time.

  When I arrived at the parkland of sepulchers and tombs I did not search—I only found, without hesitation.

  I was there, at the grave of the woman I loved.

  38

  I ran my hand over the dewy grass.

  Her name was in bronze, a plaque bordered by neatly trimmed grass. A metal vase sunk into the earth held three red carnations. They were not wilted, not even slightly. The grass had grown over the grave itself, although a careful eye could detect the border of the more recent sod from the rest of the lawn. Deer scat darkened the bare ground under the trees.

  The mausoleum where I had rested was up the hill. I gazed at it with no pleasure. A police car was parked at the entrance to the building. A policeman descended the steps, spoke to his partner without getting into the car, gesturing with a flashlight, the beam lancing the dark.

  The flashlight beam silvered the blades of grass, the trees, and almost reached me where I stood. After further discussion, the car door slammed. The police unit rolled slowly, headlights sweeping the trees and grave stones, brakelights all the way down the hill, where they vanished.

  Whenever I attempted to think like a man, to read, to plan, I felt myself become uncertain. It was a simple matter, discovering the gardner’s equipment, the small green tractor, the tarps, the red-and-yellow cans of fertilizer. But then I was lost in an inventory of possibilities.

  Tall rubber boots waited like prosthetic limbs beside huge bags of grass seed. There were so many tools to chose from, pitchforks, hoes, power saws, edgers with plastic containers of fuel riding piggy-back on the shaft of the tool, and all of it speckled with bits of grass and earth, plantlife long dried to yellow cellulose and dust.

  But I could not find what I wanted, not until I kicked open a wooden shed. Hoes and rakes tangled with each other, the sort of tools medieval peasants would have seized if called to battle, axes and hammers—and spades.

  Spades with sharp edges and long, grip-smoothed handles. I selected one, and felt the joy I had never appreciated in my years, the simple balance of a shovel.

  I withdrew the red carnations gently, and laid them on a nearby grave. I took a moment to wonder at what I was about to do.

  The first shovelful of sod was tough, the roots wire, the dirt gritty. I flung soil off
the blade, the steel ringing musically at the instant the mulch and pebbles sailed into the dark. Again, my sense of purpose faltered.

  And I thought as a person would, in the middle of the night, picking with futility at the hard earth. And worse—I felt the normal horror of such an act, the disturbance of bodies which had been committed to the ground.

  But even as these thoughts troubled me, I continued to scoop the moist soil, digging deeper. The upper level of the ground was vegetative, roots and plant stuff, but there was no true topsoil. The sod had been rolled out like a living carpet, and beneath that layer the earth was an assortment of gravel and yellow clay.

  As I dug I smelled the earth and breathed it, mud on my shoes. This work was not labor at all, any more than the stroke of a swimmer is labor. This soil was the source of my strength.

  No other doubt touched me. There was no sense of an hour passing, or two, or much of the night. All I knew was that there had been a grassy patch of land, a prison. And now there was a vault, the earth thrown into a peak at the base of a tree.

  Sometimes I thought I heard a sound, a voice, a footstep and I would stop for a moment, and then start in again with renewed strength. At last the shovel rang. There was a concrete box, the blade scraping it, the last dirt dug away to expose the slab.

  Kneeling, I broke a hole with my fist. I tore off chunks, letting the fragments sail high, out of the grave. When I had ripped away a large portion of the concrete, I gazed down at the glossy surface of the casket.

  Gently, I tapped at the wood. There was the lightest film of mildew on the polished surface, and my touch left bold fingerprints. The casket reminded me of nothing so much as the hard finish of a grand piano. But a piano reverberates when it is struck—it echoes. This box was silent. I smoothed away the layer of mildew and the dark surface reflected the dim starlight.

  The casket splintered with one last blow. The shattered wood caved inward, and I cracked open as much of the lid as I could easily reach. Don’t think, I warned myself. Don’t ask yourself what you’re doing.