The Judas Glass

by Michael Cadnum

  “It’s being repaired. It leaked or something.”

  “So here we are, and there’s no problem.”

  “I don’t feel good,” she said.

  She got up and walked away, tugging at her clothing.

  No, don’t hurt her, Rebecca warned me.

  Just as the young woman reached the back door, put her hand out to try the lock, a pair of wings touched her, the wingbeats blowing her flowing sweater, dislodging her hair from its clasp. For a moment, her head back, she was a woman listening to delightful, distant music.

  When I had finished taking as much as I could while still sparing her life, I stepped into the living room, confident that Rebecca would have embraced the young man. But Bruce was there alone, hunched forward, looking sideways at the television, its red mute, its scenes of distant carnage. I pushed the off button, and pleasured in the blank dark that filled the screen.

  “You scared me,” said Bruce, too heartily. “I thought you all were still on vacation.” Then, after studying me for a moment, he called, “Evelyn?”

  I stretched them both out in the master bedroom, fluffing up the pillows, unfolding a blanket. Each had a pulse, each had the expression of a person drowsing, not really deeply asleep, like someone stirred by a dream of homecoming or travel, life about to begin at last.

  Only then did I hear Rebecca in a distant part of the house, weeping softly, so that I wouldn’t hear.

  I found her in a room full of toys, shelves of stuffed animals and plastic monsters. I thought for an instant that this was what troubled her, the sight of some child’s innocent playthings.

  “You lied to me,” she said. “About Joe Timm.”

  If I didn’t talk I would be safe. “I didn’t kill him.”

  “But you did hurt him, didn’t you?”

  Was that how she thought of it—our touch, our kiss? I wanted to protest that it did not hurt anyone. But I kept quiet, rearranging the stuffed teddy bears, putting them on a shelf by themselves, away from the lions and naked plastic infants. I closed the vent in the floor, all that heat closed off to a faint whistle.

  “You lied to me about the hospital in Monterey,” she said.

  I wanted to deny it, but she silenced me with a glance. “I know you did. I knew what was really happening. I lied, too. To myself. To you.”

  I felt too full of life to be having this conversation, tossing a beanbag shaped like a hippo in my hand. How could anyone give a grotesque toy like this to a child?

  “What are we going to do, Richard? What’s going to happen to us?”

  It was a very simple question. “People travel, go to the hospital, die. They leave their homes empty.” I flung the beanbag animal onto a top shelf, a perfect toss.

  “I don’t mean that,” she said, with studied patience. “I mean—what will we turn into as time passes.”

  “Time won’t pass,” I said. Her question angered me. The willfullness of it. The deliberate attempt to be innocent. I was about to tell her that she wasn’t innocent, that she was going to forget what it was like to feel guilt. She would have to mature, I was going to say. She was fortunate to be here, breathing. But even before I spoke I felt the falseness of my words.

  I could not say such things, not to Rebecca. She left me without looking back, the door swinging silently behind her. When I heard the sound of wings I told myself to let her go. She was right. Richard Stirling was dead.

  53

  Silence, too, is a blank mirror. Winged, I strained after Rebecca, calling after her in that voice that was a color in the air, and there was no response. But I did not lose her. Even when she was a mote on the horizon, I followed.

  I caught up with her at last in a garden, somewhere well north of Monterey. A concrete gnome stood guard beside a birdbath, a blush of moss across his shoulders. A purple china cardinal ornamented a fountain. Rebecca wandered a garden, and I kept silent for fear of interrupting her mood.

  I scented a sharp perfume, dark, earthy. I recognized it only after a moment. A muted muttering reached us from the house above the lawn. A clock radio, I wondered, or a jolt of CNN to go with the cup of hot chocolate, the beverage I could smell from so far away.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’ve been doing all of this for me. If you lied it was to protect my feelings. All of this has been a wonderful gift, Richard.”

  I tried to silence her, but she turned away. I wanted to tell her she was right to be afraid of me. “I started studying the piano when I was six years old. There was no great epiphany, no discovery that I was playing Mozart with a teething ring in my mouth. My parents had a Wurlitzer spinnet. I thought it was the most handsome thing in the world. I loved it when my mother used Lemon Pledge on the mahogany.”

  A ancient sound, ugly and heartening at once, made me look at the sky.

  A rooster.

  I said, “We can’t stay here.”

  She heard the rooster, too, but she gazed upward with a smile. “I would play tunes that came into my head, but they were nothing special. Still, they must have impressed my parents. I studied under a woman who was herself partially deaf, with an old-fashioned hearing aid, one of those plastic boxes you pinned to the front of your sweater. I remember even as a little girl thinking surely I should have a piano teacher with good ears. That’s how I thought of it—good ears.”

  “I want to hear this,” I began. Some other time—not now.

  “My father said she was very polite, and my mother said she had been written up in magazines, world-renowned, gracing the Bay Area with her talent. They drove me to her apartment on College Avenue in North Oakland twice a week. I never complained. I never said, No don’t take me to her, she can’t hear. I was good. Good in the way children use the word. Dutiful.”

  The rooster unbent another one of his cries.

  She looked at me, put her hand over mine. “Isn’t it strange all the meanings a word can have? I was a good girl. I was obedient, and I wanted to please. My teacher was Sylvia Richter. No, you wouldn’t have heard of her. She had a framed letter from Arthur Rubinstein in her bedroom. I didn’t see it until after her stroke, but there was that air about her of being on the edge of greatness. She had drinks with Horowitz once, at the Biltmore in Los Angeles. And she met Kurt Weill in Malibu, and Stravinsky when he was in Hollywood, but I didn’t know any of this until later, when I met some of her old friends in Austria.”

  A hen began to cluck, or was it the rooster himself? How could people live around such noisy fowl? “We don’t have time for this, Rebecca.”

  “She told me I had to practice the sequence C,E,G, over and over again. She told me to do it five thousand times. I did. She directed me to play the Minute Waltz sixty times a day, and make a mark on a sheet for every five times I played it. And I did. Day after day, during those smoggy afternoons. The smog was worse, then. Remember? You couldn’t see across the bay some September afternoons.”

  “Please, Rebecca—”

  “I think she was a person like Eric—someone who would never be a concert pianist, someone who knew she didn’t quite have the focus and the talent. Or the good fortune. But she was a great teacher, Richard.”

  A robin fluttered in a nearby shrub, shaking itself awake, a whirr of plumage.

  “She said I would need two things to develop my talents. The first was the gift, and that I already had. The second was to look neither to the right nor to the left. Look neither to the right side, nor to the left side, but always straight ahead, on only your music.” Rebecca spoke in the voice of an older woman with a German accent.

  I remained silent. Maybe it was only right that we should fade out of existence encircled by this Stonehenge of fake animals. Each figurine spilled an elongated shadow across the grass. Shadows were everywhere, the birdbath casting a long, elegant shape like an inverted pawn.

  “After the accident, the piano was all I had. When I realized I could still see the keys in my mind, that the black and whites had not changed position, it was like
discovering that a promise had been kept.”

  The accident. What a way to refer to such a devastating event.

  She said, “We have been distracted by all this.” All this beauty, she meant.

  Each yellow dandelion was a shard of light, painful, the glare off a mirror. I pulled Rebecca into the shadow of the fountain.

  “I want to see my parents,” said Rebecca.

  “And you want the mirror.”

  “So do you,” she said.

  Of course I did. But now I wanted to find it to preserve it. “I want to destroy the mirror as much as you do,” I lied, with a throb of insincerity in my voice. “This will never happen to anyone else.”

  My father felt that organization was not a masculine virtue, and he was a person who modeled himself after a general idea of what was manly and what was not. Most surgeons are meticulous in their records, trusting those bulging patient records to save lives. But my father cultivated a casualness that was, perhaps, a compensation for the exacting nature of his profession. He left his mail, with a studied absentmindedness, throughout the house. My mother was always straightening out magazines on the coffee table, balancing the checkbook. She alphabetized, indexed, filed.

  There was one surviving photograph of my brother. I found it in my mother’s papers after her death, in a folder that was not labeled. The snapshot was in an envelope, sealed.

  He sat on a brick wall, his legs dangling. He wore short pants and a white T-shirt, and looked sideways at the camera, and at the sun behind the photographer, squinting. He looked like any boy out of another time, in some subtle way, the way boxers in fading publicity photos, stripped to shorts and bare fists, look old-fashioned in ways that are hard to define.

  The shadow of the photographer barely crept within the white borders of the picture, just the top of a head on the lawn. Man or woman—it was impossible to tell. But I knew.

  The mind is masterful. It can file away even a living human being. The practical approach adopted by my parents scheduled the visits months ahead, a hug and a kiss on days kept apart from the rest of existence. The will could determine that the light of day would not include this creature.

  But my mother had never lived an hour without thinking of him. She snapped this picture, had it developed, and then never had to look at it. She carried him in her waking and in her sleeping, and in her last thoughts she took him up and held him in her arms.

  54

  If morning is such a treasure, dawn the noblest hour, why does it mature so quickly, ripening into common day? The brass-green nozzle of a garden hose gleamed. Chicken wire was a fine golden net, and a black rooster with red combs and golden talons stretched his neck and closed his eyes, pleasure in his own voice.

  A woman in a yellow shirt, denims rolled up to her knees, carried a red gasoline can, looking up, sensing but not seeing us. What was for us scalding light was to her false dawn, and I could hear her shiver beside a pickup truck, trying to get the cap off the can.

  Sometimes the observer alters the scene around him, the tourist descending from the bus, the videocamera entering the courtroom. We changed the woodland as we tumbled through it, snagged by branches, unsettling a brooding owl. A valley fell open below us, irrigation ditches bright with groundwater.

  Police cars, side by side at truck weighing stations, turning up side roads. But their search was feverish, disorganized. They knew who they were looking for, and they didn’t want to believe it.

  Walnut trees were in bloom. The ash-white petals distributed themselves over flatbed trucks and the discount clothing parking lot. The land was a photograph taken in bad light, nothing visible but the points of polished furniture, glassed-over lithographs, a mahogany piano.

  When we slept at last I had no sense of where we were, except that we were safe in that edgy, stupefied pride of crocodiles, stunned with sudden cold.

  Water was somewhere below, stone or brick rough at my cheek. I whispered her name, and the echo mocked me.

  The smell was wet sidewalk, concrete after a day of rain.

  I inched, finding cracks in the masonry. The top of my head met a sheet of steel. I forced upward, and the steel complained, barely moving. I worked my fingers into a thin arc of gray light and then managed to lever an entire arm, my head, my shoulders, out of the well.

  Plywood was in place over the windows of a farmhouse. The back door was open. Through the doorway, cracked linoleum reflected moonlight. My steps compressed bubbles and folds in the weathered flooring.

  A telephone receiver was dangling, hanging all the way to the floor. I held the instrument to my ear. There was a dial tone, an abrasive, aural sandpaper. She had been here just minutes before—that electronic banshee sound phones make, left off the hook, had yet to start in.

  A radio lay beside the sink, a transistor speckled with white enamel paint. I turned the dial and the radio chattered, an all-news station, a rush of words fading after a few moments, the batteries dying.

  The ordinariness of the dwelling was a comfort. A bar of soap with the manufacturer’s imprint still clear to the touch was stuck to the sinktop. Within easy reach of the back porch was a clothesline with a canvas bag of wooden pins dangling.

  I could change her mind, I thought. Just a few more nights. That’s all I wanted. But my desire lacked impetus now. The air tasted different to me.

  Outside a horse flared its nostrils, nickering, tossing its mane. Rebecca stroked the beast, patting her. The beast chomped weeds from the ground, a low, pleasing sound, roots sundering. With a leap Rebecca was astride the horse.

  “Imagine living like this,” she said. “It would be so wonderful.”

  “You forgot to hang up the phone.”

  She ran her fingers through the horse’s mane. “One of them died, Richard,” she said.

  Flowering mustard crowded a field of artichokes, a valley surrounded by redwoods. The artichoke plants bristled, all thistle and raspy leaves. Acacias bloomed, shedding pollen over wheel ruts and puddles. Our footsteps had tracked through the yellow dust, yellow chalk all over my shoes.

  “One of the two housesitters,” she said. “The young woman.”

  This could not possibly be true. I wanted to laugh.

  “The young man is expected to live,” she continued, “but he almost died, too.”

  Weak, I thought. They were weak, something wrong with their hearts.

  “You make her nervous,” she said, as the horse shied away from my touch. It was an artful way of changing the subject. Or reminding me of something.

  An animal like this can be wrong, I thought, but she cannot lie. The horse flung her mane from side to side, lifting a hoof, avoiding my touch.

  “We have to trust each other,” I said. Was there something about Rebecca that made me uncertain?

  Rebecca leaned forward and murmured something. The horse did a brief caracole, dancing through the deep grass, and then returned to me.

  I tried to sense what Rebecca was thinking, and I couldn’t. The horse stepped forward, and the twin gusts of air from her nostrils were hot. This mare had no belief, no questions. Rebecca’s touch made her peaceful again. I stooped and pulled up a handful of green.

  The horse accepted the grass from my hand, chewing with a sound like footsteps in gravel. “Who were you trying to call?” I asked.

  “Listen,” said Rebecca.

  A tractor was plowing a nearby field, its headlights knifing the dark.

  “They never rest,” she said.

  That’s exactly what the living were. Insistent, restless, always waiting to begin, and, once begun, eager to stop. I remembered being like this, pacing, waiting for the football game, the basketball game, on television.

  “Maybe they’ll think we’re farmers,” I said.

  “Here on our own little artichoke ranch.”

  “A quiet life,” I said. “Herbicide and tomato worms.”

  “You can be called Tommy Billy, and my name can be—”

  “Nobody h
as a name like that.”

  “Country people do. They have names like Joe Bob and Mike Pete—”

  “Sure,” I agreed. “But not Tommy Billy, that’s goofy.”

  “Better take the cultivator to that mustard, Tommy Billy. It’s too bright and wonderful. It’s time to plow it up.”

  It was all over. Something had changed. “You’ll go see your parents,” I said. “And I’ll find the mirror.”

  “And what will you do when you find it, Richard?”

  She was giving me an opportunity to be honest. She knew what I was thinking. When we lie we are a mirror reflecting a face that is not there. Before this evening I had been stronger than Rebecca. Not more graceful, and not more loving—but more powerful.

  The pollen all over the ground was a desert of trees that would not flower. The world squanders. We are not enough, says the thoughtless flicker of the leaves—make more, spend it on the air and on the water, a dune of life that will not happen. Not even death—a scattering of all that acacias know. We will be trees, says the silence, this dust, and there is nothing. And there are trees.

  I asked, “Who were you trying to call?”

  She was different now. “You’ll tell yourself you don’t know how to destroy the mirror. Will you break it? Smash it? You won’t want to be so violent. It’ll be too hard to make up your mind. I know how you think—that it might be best to let scientists do research on the mirror. You’ll keep it nice and safe for a while. You’ll lie to yourself.”

  “Who did you call?”

  “You think you’ll be able to see your reflection. That’s where it is, that’s what stole it. It’s in that mirror, waiting for you. Isn’t that what you think, Richard?”

  Don’t make me lie to you.

  “You want to find the looking glass,” she said. “And take it away. I wonder where you think you’ll be able to keep it. Buried somewhere?”

  “Tell me.”

  Her tone was affectionate, even then. “I wanted to call my parents, but I couldn’t. I wanted to hear their voices. I didn’t want to suddenly be there with them. I wanted to warn them.”