Hunting Midnight

by Richard Zimler

  I assumed he meant that I would inherit his things when he went to sea with his father. I wanted to beg him to come home with me. My parents and I would find a way to help him. But without warning he reached to his chest as though pierced by a bullet. “I’ve been shot,” he said.

  At first I was stunned, my senses dulled by wine. Then I understood that he was acting, pretending to have been wounded in battle.

  Daniel limped along the edge of the slick stones, his hands clutched over his heart. Then he teetered, tilting away from land. Squeezing his eyes tight, as though resigned to the inevitable, he fell into the muddy water.

  What was he thinking as he tumbled down? I cannot say for sure. I only know that when I imagine myself in his place, I sometimes feel the seamless wash of relief flowing through me as I enter the water.

  I waited, expecting him to surface wearing an exuberant smile. I recalled the kingfisher we’d seen on our first day at the tarn, who had disappeared under the water only to emerge with wings flapping, a tiny fish caught in its beak. I shouted his name, then ran to where he had toppled off the edge. I thought I saw his hands reaching toward me, then receding and disappearing altogether, like a dream withdrawing beyond the recall of memory. Two sailors were standing nearby, pointing toward the water where he had fallen.

  “Help me!” I shouted to them. “Please help me.”

  They didn’t move or call back to me, so I slipped out of my shoes and dived in after him.

  I was a strong swimmer. My father had made sure of that. I pierced the water with the arrow of my hands and swam down. The water was freezing, and fish jostled around me, battering against my face. Yet all I could think of was finding Daniel and getting him to the surface. I had to apologize – to tell him that the only thing I knew with certainty about Violeta was that she loved him.

  The water was surprisingly shallow – no more than ten feet. When I came close to the bottom, I twisted in a circle. I could make out what looked like an iron wheel planted in the riverbed, but the water was thick with mud from upriver and the current was fierce. It was tugging me away. It must have already carried Daniel a good ways downriver.

  I surfaced for breath and heard a man shout, “What do you think you’re doing?” but I paid him no heed. Other people called out to me, but since none of them had Daniel’s voice, I swam twenty strokes to the west, then flipped my legs up and dived down, reaching forward with my hands and pulling the water behind me with the most powerful strokes I had ever managed. Then I saw him, his hair swirling above his head like seaweed, his arms floating limply. I darted down for him and grabbed an arm. I tugged once, but he seemed to pull back. I tugged again and felt the weight of his resistance. He was alive! Yet his eyes, open, were staring neither at me nor at anything else. I was fully empty of air by now and was forced to surface. I took two quick breaths, then gulped a third deep down into my lungs, positive that I could rescue him. This time I threw my arms around his waist and locked my hands behind his back. Help me, goddamn it! I wanted to shout. I kicked and tugged for all I was worth. But he would not – or could not – help me.

  I have no idea how long I stayed underwater trying to pull Daniel up, but I vowed not to surface until I got his head above the waterline. I closed my eyes and kicked madly with my feet, but may Daniel, Senhora Beatriz, and Violeta forgive me, I soon grew dizzy. About three feet from the surface, my arms gave out. He fell away from me, swallowed whole by the greedy river. Now I was forced to struggle for my own life. The water was very dark and I could no longer tell which way was up and which was down.

  Then I heard my father’s voice shouting my name. I closed my eyes again so that I might hear him better. But he spoke no more. I felt myself being pulled down.

  After a few moments of complete blackness, I felt something brush against my hand. An instant later, light flooded my eyes. I was above the water. I heard jangling voices like scattered coins. “Good lad!” a man shouted.

  There was a rope in my hands and I was gulping down air. A man reached for me and lifted me out of the water.

  I was unable to catch my breath. My chest felt as though it had been scraped with rusty metal. “He’s down there,” I said between gasps. “My friend, Daniel. Please help him. It may not be too late.”

  A sailor took a rope in his hands and dived off the landing. He was under a short while, then surfaced. “Pull!” he shouted.

  Daniel, the rope tied around his waist, was soon tugged to the surface.

  “Help him!” I begged.

  The men lay him on his back. The sailor who had rescued Daniel and whose dark, alarmed face I will always remember pressed his hands into my friend’s chest at short intervals. Then he leaned his ear down to hear the lad’s heartbeat. After a few more attempts, the sailor shook his head. He reached for me in kindness, to take my hand, but by then I was unable to feel the touch of anything in this world. Though I was shivering, I was not cold. I was listening to the throbbing in my ears, and it was telling me that the impossible had happened and that I was partly to blame. That now I would have to grope forward into a future that was never meant to be.

  *

  Later that afternoon, before news of Daniel’s death had reached her, Violeta trudged home from the marketplace and discovered – leaning against her house, directly below her window – the tabletop he had carved with the faces of children. Though I was placed at the center, peeking out from behind a small sweeping frond of fern, it was the lass herself who had the only face executed in exacting detail. Indeed, her eyes were so accurately rendered that, as she knelt to touch his gift for the first time, it occurred to her that Daniel had seen further into her than even she had imagined. He had understood her loneliness as no one else ever would.

  X

  Imagine the naïveté of a lad born inside the soot-blackened warren of Porto’s crumbling streets, who still believed that he would walk a straight path toward happiness. But after the events of the Twenty-Seventh of April, 1802, the knowledge that life would never be fair blossomed black inside me.

  That first day, I refused to leave my room, too exhausted and bewildered to cry anymore. Sometimes I would close my eyes and try to find solace in sleep. When I was able to talk about what had happened to Daniel, Papa held me in his powerful arms. I told him the story from the beginning, even the part about my gulping down wine in the Cucumber Tavern, so I would never have to tell the story to anyone else ever again.

  When I had finished, he said, “Goodness, John, you are only a young lad. Do not take the responsibility of the world on yourself.”

  Sound advice, but those first few days I stayed in the dark of my room with the curtains drawn, for I could not risk seeing either the lad’s father or Senhora Beatriz – not to mention Violeta.

  I believed that I would see accusations of my weakness in everyone’s eyes. We all knew that Daniel could not keep himself away from danger. I had been on watch that day, and I had not fulfilled my duty. Even worse, by telling him about Violeta, had I not pushed him to his death?

  More than two decades later, I no longer think every day of the unfairness of his death and my guilt. Even so, it is nearly impossible for me to accept that I am now thirty-three years of age and he will forever be only fourteen.

  It comforts me to think sometimes that, more than his masks, I inherited something of his daring and courage. I would guess that I imitated these qualities at first and, by so doing, succeeded in incorporating a small portion of them into my being.

  The funeral was held three days after his death. My parents attended the brief ceremony, but I screamed and flailed when they suggested I go. In the end, Grandmother Rosa stayed with me. While I lay in bed, she said something to me I shall never forget: “It may be a good thing, you know, this lad’s death. His adoptive mother was nothing but a cheap prostitute. That’s why he never saw her. That stray dog was having a deplorable influence over you, my child.”

  Her words so infuriated me that I grew feverish. By t
he time my parents came home, my forehead was burning and my pulse racing.

  When we were alone, I told Mama what her mother had said. She never left me alone with Grandmother Rosa again.

  *

  The hallucinations began a few days later, when I was lying on my stomach in bed and clearly heard Daniel call my name from the street below. I rushed to the window and thought I saw him running down our street, near the jailhouse. I called out, but he had disappeared.

  *

  The following Saturday, I mustered what was left of my courage and approached Violeta in the marketplace.

  “I am sorry,” I began. “So sorry. I did not mean to let him die. I tried … I tried very hard. But I was … I was too weak. I apologize, Violeta – ”

  She reached out for my hand. My heart leapt as I sobbed in gratitude. But I was still too ashamed to confess that I had told Daniel she would go to America without him. Instead, I spoke again of the weakness of my arms.

  “John, please, do not blame yourself.”

  “So you do not despise me?” I croaked, my voice nothing but a whimper.

  “Of course, not,” she said, kissing my brow.

  “I cannot believe that he is really dead,” I said.

  Tears slid down her cheeks. She was so very fragile.

  When she had calmed, I said, “Will you still come to me sometimes at night? I am very worried about you.”

  “Yes – yes, I’d like that.”

  “You swear?”

  “You have my word.”

  *

  Despite her promise, Violeta never again came to throw pebbles at my window. I would pass her stall from time to time and wave at her, but she would turn away from me as though I were filth. Eventually, I stopped looking for her, believing she had reconsidered her opinion and now found me contemptible.

  I had murdered Daniel and there could be no reprieve.

  *

  Violeta disappeared nearly a year later. No one knew where she had gone. Once, Senhor Solomão the butcher told me that her uncle had returned secretly one night and killed her. But I knew a wee bit more about the world by now and was sure that she had escaped her fate in the only way that a lass without a farthing to her name might – by walking out of the city, never looking back, and earning a wage in whatever way she could. Just as I was certain that we would never meet again.

  XI

  Exhaustion laid claim to both my body and spirit, as I had suffered insomnia every night since Daniel’s death.

  One morning Mama discovered I had a high fever. Over the next several days, I suffered throbbing headaches that made it too painful for me to even open my eyes. I was crawling with body lice as well and plagued by intermittent chills.

  I still believed I heard Daniel calling to me occasionally. From my window I twice caught glimpses of him scrambling over the rooftops across our street.

  My mother grabbed my arm when I told her this. “I don’t want to hear another word about that lad again!” she screamed. “You hear me, John? Never!” While Papa led her away, she burst into tears.

  Mama’s theory was that Daniel’s soul had been unable to leave our earthly realm due to the violent nature of his death and his attachment to me.

  “More likely a bewitchment” was the differing opinion of Senhora Beatriz, who tied a sprig of rosemary to the back of my hair. She also placed around my neck the talisman that had belonged to Daniel. I kept it hidden under my nightshirt.

  When she had gone, Father came to my bedside and flicked my tail of rosemary. “All this superstition is rubbish,” he sighed, puffing at his pipe. “But it cannot hurt you, and if it makes Senhora Beatriz happy … All you need,” he declared, blowing out a snootful of sweet-smelling smoke, “is a few weeks of absolute quiet and Mama’s care to feel yourself again.”

  *

  A physician named Dr. Manuel came to see me the next afternoon. Papa explained that he had studied something called phrenology in the far-off city of Vienna – which meant, Mama told me, that he was able to diagnose illness and prescribe curatives based on his study of the skull.

  When he took hold of my sore head with his meaty hands, I almost jumped, as they gripped me like a vise. He massaged my skull with his fingertips, then said, “You are a clever lad but reckless.”

  “That he is,” Mother confirmed.

  After several minutes of squeezing, tapping, and knocking, he located a telling curiosity at the back of my head. “Ah, yes,” he said in his odd Portuguese. “Most swollen and fluidaceous.”

  “What in God’s name is he saying?” Father demanded of Mama.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Stewart, your son has a much-translocated visual cortex – caused by his plethoric condition. He has a dangerous excess of blood in his head, making him far too attached to visual memories.”

  “Yes, that sounds right,” Mother agreed again.

  “I recommend application of sanguessugas,” the phrenologist declared, tapping my skull in the spot to be sucked dry by the little gargoyles. “Then we shall see.”

  “Leeches,” he repeated in English, for my father’s benefit.

  He took a beige-colored ceramic vase from his leather medical case, from which he lifted a small perforated tube. I was so nervous that when I saw the first leech dangling in his gloved hand, I shrieked for help. I have little recollection of what occurred next, save for the unpleasant feeling of being rendered wholly immobile. I have every reason to believe that my hands were bound with a ligature, since that is what I suffered during my later treatments.

  I awoke at dawn to discover Mother and Father asleep in my room, fully clothed except for their bare feet, entangled together on a settee they had moved in from their bedroom. Papa was snoring a comical rat-tat-tat with his mouth open, his right arm resting on Mama’s shoulder, and she was curled like a cat, her head on his lap. Fanny had been let inside by them, and she was sprawled on her back at the foot of my bed, her feet in the air, her moist nostrils flexing in and out, as though she were dreaming of floating.

  When I think of my parents and Fanny today, I like to remember that moment; I could not have felt more protected. I presumed that the worst of my treatment was over.

  *

  Success in a medical case is determined by the physician, however, and never the patient, who is much too subjectively minded to be trusted. In the case at hand, which unfortunately was my own, Dr. Manuel’s initial treatment was considered a stupendous victory over the putrid accumulation of my bile, which he discovered to be responsible for what he called my “plethoric skull transmigrations.” Many years later a far simpler explanation was given me by an English physician: typhus. It frequently causes the delirium, hallucinations, headaches, and high fever I suffered intermittently for weeks, and it is caused by lice.

  Though I have thankfully forgotten most of the details, I know that over the next three days more bloodsuckers were applied to the back of my head, and I was also purged twice daily by my mother. By the end of the third day of treatment, Dr. Manuel pronounced me cured, by which he must have meant that I had lost enough blood and absorbed enough poison to die slowly of my own accord. In any event, he’d not be back to torture me in the morning. I was delivered.

  I slept soundly that night, stirring only in the wee hours, my belly growling from the mixture of metallic and mineral substances forced down my throat. I craved something substantial to eat and envisioned a banquet of sponge cakes, rice pudding, and rabanadas – bread soaked in egg, then fried and covered with sugar. I began to make my way on tiptoe to the kitchen to forage for sweets, but a quarrel in my parents’ room distracted me.

  “If you insist on leaving,” Mother shouted, “then John and I will not be here when you return.”

  “May, try to understand that I am doing this for the three of us,” Papa replied, calling Mama by his favorite name for her. “If you could just – ”

  “The three of us! How can you consider leaving with your son in the state that he is?”

>   “I have already put off leaving twice before. The ship sails the day after tomorrow. I must be on it.”

  “And how will you tell this to John?”

  “I shall tell him the truth, as I always have.”

  “Shall the truth take care of him while you are gone? Shall the truth keep him from madness?”

  My pulse began to race when I realized that Papa might be leaving out of disappointment with me. I turned the handle of their door.

  “John?” Mama gasped. She was standing in her nightdress, holding in her hand a pewter candlestick with a lighted taper.

  Father was naked except for the nightcap on his head and was sitting on their bed. Had I been feeling myself I surely would have had a good laugh.

  “Come in, laddie,” he said, beckoning me forward.

  When he reached for me, I ran to him, crying. He picked me up and held me tight. I burrowed my head into his shoulder.

  Mama came to us and kissed me where the leeches had sucked out my lifeblood. I shall never forget how she kept repeating, “Everything is going wrong – everything …”

  Father informed me that he was leaving on a long voyage.

  “Is it … is it because of me? Do you hate me, Papa?”

  “Of course not, John. I could never hate you. It has to do with us – with the family. Give me a moment, and I shall tell you.” He slipped on his dressing gown, then took his pipe from their dresser and began filling it with tobacco from his pouch.

  “Are you leaving too?” I asked my mother.

  “No, John, I shall be right here with you.” She sat with me, left a kiss in the palm of my hand, and balled it into a fist for me to keep. “I shall always be with you.”

  After fiddling with his pipe and lighting it, Papa announced in a grand exhalation of smoke, “I am making a voyage to southern Africa, John. Please do not be upset, but I shall be gone for some time.”