The Judas Glass

by Michael Cadnum

  This new craft kept coming. I balanced briefly on the rail. Then I dived deep, slipping through the pods and stalks of a grove of kelp. A bank of fish broke around me, perch, shivering with the tide that swept through their fins, their gills.

  My arms warped, my legs deformed, muscling into a shape that powered through the water. I had no clear concept of my body’s configuration, only the awareness that I hunted and found nothing. Two otters tumbled through the water, awakened by me. They avoided me, and then tailed after me, urgent, curious.

  A sea forest surrounded me. The vegetation was gigantic, hollow tubes connected to the sandy bottom with yellow roots. Mats of tangled plant stuff floated on the surface, kept bouyant with hollow knobs speckled with limpets. The stalks of the trees were bronze-brown, and they clung to my limbs, slowing my progress as I writhed and twisted.

  The otters attracted my eye. They circled, and something about their curiosity guided me, as they began to wend onward ahead of me, as though they knew something.

  What had I become now, I found myself wondering, a sea lion, that man-seal of legend, the Great Selkie? I floundered through the waves, and there on the beach was a scattering of logs, piled haphazardly together. But the logs were creatures, nosing the air as I dragged my body through the water. What I expected to be an arm was a broad, wet paddle, cutting the sand, and when I tried to lift my head I couldn’t, my huge body clumsy and heavy.

  At the very last a surge of foam caught me and carried me high onto the beach. The dry sand crusted on my flanks, loose sand in my nose. I sneezed. This was not a sneeze like any I had experienced before, the convulsion of a strange body. I was helpless afterward, flailing. My body wrenched, bones reknitting, my skull swelling again into a human form. It was painful, but sudden, and when it was finished I clutched at the wet sand.

  I approached the sea lions with a thought that quieted them. At sea, the Coast Guard cutter bore down on our boat. Our baremasted vessel was caught in the kelp, kept by the island of plant life from running aground. The Coast Guard beam illuminated the heaving sea weed, and the mast of our boat was a bright needle. Then the light dismissed our boat, and searched the beach.

  Perhaps my presence would have made the beasts more restless, except for the distraction of the boat’s searchlight. The seals were ruddy in this bright beam, auburn, brunette, their fur knicked and scarred. A loudspeaker sounded, words I could not make out.

  I felt that some inner tongue, a power articulate in my psyche, could ask these animals where she was, and they would tell me. But it wasn’t necessary. The way they had shifted along the beach, the sand scraped and molded, showed me where to look.

  I found her human form on the beach, beside a huge mass of kelp. Her body left an imprint in the wet sand as I scooped her up and held her in my arms. I carried her through ferns, into the woods, to the side of a stream.

  Human flesh itself was clothing for something effervescent, but I could not awaken her. She lay still, one hand open in the current of the stream, water streaming through her fingers.

  A fox hesitated, one paw raised, ears cocked.

  The air whispered above him. Wind, or a night bird. He couldn’t tell. His dark eyes took in the sky, the leaves, everything that moved. But I did not move. I clung to the branch of a tree.

  He lowered his head and lifted it again without touching the water. He heard it, too. The far-off rattle of an outboard motor above the rustle of the surf.

  He sniffed the wind. Noise, and the scent of cold things, steel and rubber, and fuel. Silence was life. He lowered his nose and drank from the stream.

  I did not want to take this quickness, this color. I found myself in a tree, hanging upside down, my body enfolding itself. The sound of his tongue on the water was not comforting, as the lapping of a family dog can be. It was a furtive sound, paws pressed into the mud of the stream.

  I captured him. In an instant I knew what he knew, the field. And his prey, the sudden rush, the feathers, the warm heart, the quarry with its tiny bones, its stuttering blood.

  She opened her eyes. As always, she touched my face, still trusting her fingers more than her sight. Then she looked up beyond me in wonder, and a little fear.

  “Redwoods,” I said.

  Her lips shaped the question.

  “Somewhere south of Point Lobos.”

  “A forest,” she said at last. “How did we get here?”

  I counted off her actions on my fingers. “You untied the rope. You swam up into the boat. You got tired of waiting for me—”

  “Don’t tease me, Richard.”

  “You tell me—what happened when you dived into the water?”

  “I don’t know.” She meant: she didn’t want to remember.

  “I was very proud of that knot,” I said. “Was it difficult?”

  She gazed at her hands, her fingers, her nails. “No.”

  “So you do remember that much.”

  She sat up. Her fingers searched her surroundings, moss, wild iris, its blossoms folded, sorrel, like oversized shamrocks. She seemed to glow. “We need a doctor.”

  “That’s a brilliant idea. We’ll just drop in, sit in a waiting room, and then what? The doctor will ask us how we’re feeling, and what will we tell him?”

  She had already adopted the mannerisms of someone who could see, and expected to be seen in return.

  “We have so much to do,” I said.

  She stood slowly, shaking out the folds of her gown. “I am starting to believe it all.” She reached out to touch a sapling that was growing straight upward out of a fallen log. “I won’t be able to see Simon again, or my parents. I won’t be able to play the piano.”

  I had hoped to protect her. “You won’t be able to see the sunlight,” I said.

  “You make it sound like good news.”

  “You flew,” I said.

  She was examining a redwood branch, the evergreen needles, the way leaf connected to twig, to frond, to the trunk, the tree sweeping upward. “I don’t believe we can do that, Richard.”

  “Then how did you get here?”

  “You brought me.”

  I smiled, shook my head.

  She said, “I swam.”

  “I think the first thing you wanted to do when you woke up was take wing, like a gull.”

  “And I couldn’t.”

  Another motor brayed beyond the surf. I parted the shrubbery and gazed out across the beach. Our boat was brightly lit. Yellow rubber rafts were tied to it, and men climbed the cabin, leaned over the stern. It was hard to make out what they were doing at this distance, but it was easy to imagine the radios sputtering.

  She said, “They’re going to find us.”

  45

  We knelt beside the pawprints left by the fox. The stream spilled between two rocks, minnows asleep, each one flickering to stay in place.

  A drop of blood gleamed on the stones. She could not stop herself from touching her forefinger to the blood and tasting it.

  “Where is the fox?” she asked.

  “He ran off, back to his foxy life,” I said, trying to make light of his shocked agony, the way he had stayed still for a moment when I released him. The way he leaped at last, parting the grass. There was a path, still, where he had escaped. “I didn’t kill him.”

  She put her fingers into a pawprint, lightly, and I could see her wondering about such prints, what it would be like to trot on four legs. She looked up and it took her a moment to find me because I had moved away from the stream, not wanting to see its pools empty of my reflection.

  “But we do kill, don’t we?” she asked.

  As she bent over the stream I wanted to warn her. I couldn’t keep the tension from my voice. “Carnivores take lives. Normal people eat meat.”

  She asked the question with a tone of deliberate innocence. “Is that what we are—carnivores?”

  Even here the sound of outboard motors reached us, and the demand of an amplified voice, too far off to be understo
od.

  “The fox must be very weak,” she said. “If you took enough for both of us.” She fingered a pebble, balanced it in her hand. “I forgot how many different colors rocks can be. All these shades of red and—look at this!”

  The fox was very weak, but I did not tell her that. It had fallen twice, grass whispering, before it crossed the meadow.

  She reached into the stream, the water reflecting starlight. “I was listening to a baseball game in the front seat when we had the accident,” she said. “It was the last thing I remember seeing—the dials of the radio, my father’s hands on the steering wheel. I don’t think he really understood baseball. He wanted to, but it never made sense to him. I don’t think he ever listened to another game after that.”

  She plucked a flat green stone from the stream bed, and even in the dark of night it was easy to perceive the warm green, the way the rock was almost translucent, veined with dark.

  “I think it was harder on my parents than it was on me. Because they had so much faith in life, expecting so much for their children. Especially my father—he’s so self-willed. One cup of coffee in the morning, one glass of whiskey on New Year’s Eve.”

  I could hear it in her voice, how much she wanted to see them. “My mother had a cross made of stone like this,” she continued, “on a gold chain. It was the only jewelry she ever wore.” There was growing eagerness in her voice. “It’s jade. And look at this—” She looked up at me with a smile, as though she had just proved something. “Agate—the color of your eyes.”

  She was going to perceive what was missing soon, unless I drew her attention from the water. But she had turned back to it, searching it for stones.

  “This is why composers write symphonies,” I said, trying to distract her with conversation. “Isn’t this what music wants us to experience? This kind of life?”

  “You mean, why play the piano when you can have a forest?”

  “I didn’t mean anything quite so extravagant. Besides, you’ll have the piano, too.”

  “I don’t see how, Richard.” She leaped to her feet and took my hand, her fingers wet. “‘You’ll have the piano, too,’” she said, a perfect imitation of my manner, the way I spoke, saving up my words and delivering them in a burst. “How can I tell my parents I’m alive—”

  I tried to draw her away from the stream. “They’ll be happy to hear from you.”

  “If I am alive.”

  I felt an urgent need to deny what she was saying. “You’re as alive as you feel,” I said, responding to her probing with greeting-card wit.

  “Can I call them on a telephone?”

  “We can do everything we want to do.” Come away, I wanted to add. Come away and don’t notice what is missing in the stream.

  She grew pensive. “What’s wrong, Richard?”

  My laugh sounded forced.

  But it communicated something to her. She turned from me, gazing back at the trickling water, and before I could stop her she broke away. She waded into the water, dropping to her knees. She crouched there, the water breaking and re-forming around her, gazing into the glittering stream.

  Long afterward she did not speak. She would turn sometimes, and study her own footprints, how water flowed into them, how they filled with light from the sky.

  “Tell me how I look,” she said at last.

  With our mouths we swear to tell the truth, and with our mouths we lie. But when I kissed her now, feeling the fox-warmth that flushed her body, I no longer felt that I was touching Rebecca, the person I had once known. I was touching something more, something that I could name only with a shop-worn word, her spirit, her soul.

  “Don’t be afraid,” I whispered.

  She shook her head and smiled, bemused, not understanding why I was so happy. “When you look at me,” she insisted, “what do you see?”

  “Those hands I will always imagine on the keyboard. Or on me, on parts of my body. These.” I kissed her fingers, one by one. They call it power of speech because it is a power. For the moment it failed me.

  “If we don’t cast a reflection in water—” she began.

  “Don’t think about it.”

  “—then we aren’t real.”

  “There’s so much else we can do.” Meaning: if we can walk and talk we have to exist. It made sense, but I wasn’t that happy with the argument.

  She put her hand on my chest, a gesture she had always made during conversation, feeling my voice in my chest. This time it was to silence me. “Haven’t you asked yourself why?”

  “I ask myself every moment,” I said. “Why I inhale and exhale, why my heart beats. Feel it. Is it pumping blood, or is it just acting like a living heart, the way the image on a movie screen acts like a person?”

  Of course I knew what we were. I would not let her questioning look break my feeling of resolve, of exhilaration. To prove something to her, to dismiss her inquiries, I vanished.

  I folded my arms and when I spread them I was winged. She took a step back. Her eyes were alight with fear, her hair blown by the stroke of my wings. From far above the treetops I looked down, all I could see of her was a face and her pale hands; all I could hear was her voice calling my name.

  When something makes no sense we assume we have misunderstood. When reality stumbles we blame ourselves for inattentiveness, for a false assumption. She abandoned her sight, eyes, and trusted only her other senses, reaching out for a fern, for the trunk of a tree.

  Sometimes we expect to much of the ones we love. They can only think of what has been, not what we have become. The greeting, the plea, fail. From this height the Coast Guard cutter was made of light, whiteness shivering around it, the yellow rubber rafts glowing. Men cast lines to others on what had been our boat, the ropes invisible from here suddenly clear as a great beam of light from the bow of the Coast Guard cutter drenched the scene.

  How long would we have, I wondered as I glided, settling down through the wet branches, the scent of earth rising up to me, the fragrance of the redwood bark and the centuries of redwood needles.

  “Where did you go?” she asked in a whisper. I gestured upward, indicating the sky, but her eyes followed my hand, puzzled.

  “Richard, don’t do that again. Don’t leave me.”

  They searched that morning, a small army of dogs and men. They gave directions through transmitters, shifted the gears of off-road vehicles, flattened ferns, tread moss, muddied streams. Their hunt was a dream that pricked me during my hours of torpor, images of men pouring coffee from thermoses, taking binoculars from cases, focusing on the distance.

  We had climbed a tree from inside. The trunk was charred, the broken vault of the redwood more than enough room for two creatures. The day passed as nights pass. Rebecca was nearby, and that was all that mattered.

  It was late in the day when a dog found us. His tags tinkling, his panting echoing dully in the chamber of the tree, the big hound whined, yelped, standing on his hind legs to get closer to our hiding place.

  His barking stirred me. The dog lunged, struggling upward, climbing. The dog was clawing upward, charcoal raining down the shaft of the tree. He fell, hard.

  But he started in again. He barked, a peculiar, falsetto shrill. “He treed something,” said a voice.

  “Idiot,” said another voice, as though the word were a sign of affection.

  The dog made a strangling sound when they dragged him away, snorting, panting. Was it another dream that brought the dog back? No other dog was so persistent, no other dog so eager. He yelped. He pawed the charred inside of the tree. Surely, I thought dimly. Surely this wasn’t happening.

  It was almost sunset when a metallic sputtering broke into my trance. It was loud. It was close. A motor was kicking, failing.

  There was nothing I could do. My arms, my legs, were lifeless. I could only listen, unable to shake myself awake. The engine rattled powerlessly, and then it caught, full-throated power.

  I could not stir against this paralysis, this
drowse that shackled me. The entire tree resounded. The air screamed.

  A chain saw.

  46

  Men shouted to make themselves heard above the shriek of the power saw. The saw lowered in pitch, sputtering, almost stalling. It cut into the tree.

  The cathedral trembled. I opened my eyes slowly. Any last hope that this was a dream died. I found myself standing, my arms crossed over my chest, on a gnarled shelf high in the interior of the wooden shaft. Below me was an oblong of light, an opening too narrow for most humans. The illumination that spilled into the tree was the color of sunset.

  The saw stopped. Men cursed, a dog barked, not barking so much as a hysterical canine tirade—There they are. The saw puttered like a motorcycle, gained strength, and sliced into the wood.

  There they are! Motor exhaust drifted upward. I would be able to shift my arm soon. The men worked feverishly, trying to race the setting sun. The bulk of the big tree trembled, echoing with a series of methodical blows. An ax. The sawdust smelled like cinnamon.

  It didn’t surprise me, I told myself. None of this surprised me. Now, I urged myself. Move your hand. Turn your head. Rebecca must have taken refuge higher in the tree. She must be hiding up near the tapering chimney open to the sky. Black dust sifted down from the interior. The scream of the saw shifted to a new position, and another saw stuttered and started up, the men working fast, sundown nearly here.

  With copious effort I discovered movement in my right forefinger. And then, like someone doing complicated mental calculations, I moved the forefinger of my left hand.

  I had experienced dreams like this, my closing arguments, the jury’s impassive faces, my best three button suit, and my tongue would not work. My voice dead, my mind blank, my notes gibberish.

  Hands tore the bark and light broke into the base of the tree. The dog leaped into the opening, and clawed, trying to climb the interior, barking crazily, his handler calling to him, the dog furious that he couldn’t get at me. Let me go. Let me sink my teeth into him. He could taste me in his mind. How sluggish we seemed to this dog, how obstinate and stupid. I’ve got him!