The sea around me changed, thickened.
The surf was quiet. I was being tugged even farther from shore. I understood what was happening but registered it as a bad joke.
This was a riptide.
The sea made a humming, moaning sound as the water changed from a fluid that was all confusion to a cylinder, a gleaming black wall. I gulped air that tasted like powdered steel so I would have enough oxygen in my lungs.
I was treading water with legs that were nearly impossible to shift. My calf muscles knotted, twin cramps that would have been agonizing if my limbs were not numb.
The tide dragged me. The wind spun my hair, whipped my eyes now with spray. There was a cry, a long, human wail that I recognized only after several seconds was my own voice. The cry depleted my lungs, emptied them, spent all my air on a futile song. It was not a cry of fear so much as a cry of awe, a cry to accompany the thunder around me, as the bellow of a crowd might cause one’s own voice to rise.
I recalled a voice: What do you want?
Maybe you did want to die, all along.
It pulled me under. I was crumpled, flattened, pressed to the sand. This was not the wave-licked sand of the shore, either, but a hard, gnarled sand, stretched thinly over stone. This is what I felt. I could see nothing through my salt-stung eyes. The water was heavy. It was all darkness. All solid, like a man poured into the core of something, to harden, as though my body were gold and I had been allowed to flow deep within a crack in earth.
Breathe soon.
I will have to breathe soon.
My thoughts were distorted. I was warm. Yes, this is how it happens, said a voice in me, a travel narrator. First the swimmer is overconfident. Then he forgets. He can’t swim. He can’t breathe.
Then all thoughts slipped away, like the long, satin trains of a wedding, the half-thought: It’s over.
Save me.
If I had spoken the words, if I had been able to articulate my lips, the sound would have been quiet, but intense, unmistakable. It was a prayer.
Make me strong.
Aren’t prayers futile? Aren’t human wishes mere garlands, things turning into air? But this nothingness was no longer the flat slab of weight that had existed just an instant before. Something had lifted, the density of the water, or of my own body, was transformed.
Something had my arm. My arm was lifted upward, and my body began to rise upward, too, trailing after my arm in a way that struck me as barely comprehensible, as though my arm had become an eel, a vibrant, living creature of its own. And my other arm. And my legs, too, thrashing, driving me.
Part Three
21
Easy, I told myself wryly: a night’s swim.
A wave smashed over me, around me, carrying me to a place where my feet scrabbled along a sandy bottom. The surf erupted around me, but it was a beach, now, with the breakers dying on the sand.
Nothing to be afraid of.
I spat brine. So soon back, I marveled. So soon saved.
So this was earth. I had that profound sense of gratitude and dislocation that arises after danger. The waves hissed, bubbling, simmering to where I stood, so I strode higher, leaving suction scars on the wet sand, until I reached the flour-dry sand of the beach the waves rarely touched, sand graveled and littered with stones, and trash that rustled in the light wind.
Sometimes we take refuge in the certainty that life continues, the stars rolling gradually along their slope. But at times it seems inexorable, inhuman, the dull squat of objects upon the earth. There it was, the pile of clothing, where it would have been, loyal to nothing, if I had drowned.
The wind was strong. I hated the insensate nature of my clothes as I approached them. How dull and common everything was. I despised the warning signs, the sight of the tiny sparks of headlights on the road. Surely I would be unable to dress.
That is, however, exactly what I did. I planned my way into my clothes, and the plan worked. My skin was salt-sticky, but the sleeves accepted my stiff arms, the pants my clumsy legs, and I felt like a man purloining clothing that the very act of theft caused to become not only his own, but his own fit. My tailor, a patient man with a by-appointment-only shop off Union Square, would have been pleased.
It was difficult to thrust my sandy feet into the socks, but I welcomed the sensation. I usually left the surf glad to be alive, but now I felt life-stunned, dazed.
What had happened? I had found the strength to swim back to the shore. That was all. There was nothing remarkable about that.
I drove carefully. The passing streetlights, the CLOSED signs in the liquor-store windows, all were of the ordinary, the steady, reliable world.
Nona’s apartment was dark, her bedroom window a rectangle, and a gray, vague curtain. This was not unusual. She was working late, or gone: Dallas, Vancouver, Mexico City.
I locked the garage door. I tugged at the heavy padlock, testing it. Cold, and gritty with sand, I found my way into the garden in the darkness, and gazed up into the giant gingko tree. I could not understand the full green it now displayed, the vast full life that lifted and swayed in the wind.
Why was I reluctant to slip the key of my own house into its lock? It was raining now, and warm. My hand was shivering. The key missed, scratched, and finally found its slot.
I have to talk to someone about this, I thought. I have to talk to someone very badly. I’ll talk to Nona—or have her suggest one of her colleagues.
But where would I begin? Surely one of my old teachers would help me, one of the defrocked priests, the sort of men who declined evil into its categories as one might study Latin verbs.
I wandered the house, making an inventory of the familiar half-finished rooms with plastic draping the furniture. I ascended the stairs and poured myself cognac. I was pleased to get out of my limp, sandy clothes. I was sticky, and I felt the beginning of a soreness in my calves. Collie would see the sand all over the bathroom tomorrow and would, as always, not comment on what she considered yet another Fields eccentricity.
I took a hot bath, the water so hot it hurt. But I stayed in the steaming tub, adding some of the bubble bath I always bought when I was in Paris, at the shop in Rue Mouffetard. I let the water absorb the arctic from my muscles.
Don’t think, I told myself. Don’t think about DeVere, or what was left of him. Don’t think about the feather.
When I was out of the tub, monk-robed in terrycloth, my feet in slippers, I began to feel the first stirrings of appetite. A swim does that to me, and cold does it, too, and I had certainly, I thought dryly, been experiencing a little cold and wet lately. I would pad down through the shrouded furniture and find something Collie had left in the kitchen, perhaps one of her country terrines, or some of her hand-crafted sourdough.
I tried calling Nona, but she did not answer. Rick’s voice told me that I had reached his telephone number. I left a message: “I just wanted to make sure you were okay.” And as I spoke I became aware of the change in the house, the subtle alteration in the silence.
I listened. There could be no question. I put down the receiver carefully. I stood, my breath hushed.
I crept down the stairs. I leaned against the wall, just outside the study.
There was a fire in the fireplace.
So what? It’s just a fire. Some smoldering kindling had ignited. This was not, however, a small, minor fire among forgotten splinters. This was a blazing fire, a classic sort of crackle-and-glow.
I stepped into the room.
I hated myself for being disappointed. There was no waiting figure in white. Was I actually looking forward to seeing her? What a fool I was! It was like looking forward to an episode of psychosis.
Many people would trade places with you, I chided myself. This was an opportunity to see for myself what was only the subject of superstition, of legend. But as soon as this weak enthusiasm erected itself, I turned away from it. It might be madness—it might be the worst evil. Either way, I would leave it and return to my norma
l life. I did not comprehend, for the moment, how facile my thinking was. Like many optimists, I am primarily capable of keeping myself from grief, and from horror.
On my way through the shrouded sitting room I stopped. The half-plastered walls, the peaks of the plastic canopies over the furniture looked both eerie and homey. I made my way to the wall, but the light would not switch on, and I had not expected it to.
But my eyes were accustomed to the firelight by now, making it quite easy to see. All was well, I reassured myself. There was nothing amiss. But why did I stand there, unmoving? My hand was on the useless, obsolete light switch, the pushbutton type, the type attached to cloth wiring. I could not move from where I stood.
I could not take a single step, because there was something wrong. It was impossible to see what it was. But it was real. There was something that was not right.
Then I heard it.
The slightest rustling, the briefest whisper of a plastic drop cloth. Not a cloth being lifted, and not a cloth riffling in a wind. There was only a briefest noise, as of someone sitting quietly, turning his head, his head and body covered by a dust cloth.
And that is exactly what it was.
There was someone sitting in the radiance from the fire, light both poor and brilliant enough to make me wish I could mistake what I saw, the profile, the posture. There was a man sitting under that translucent canopy, and I knew who it was.
I knew, and I couldn’t breathe, shrinking to the wall, groping for something to keep me upright. I could not bear to stand just as I was, unable to turn my head.
And I didn’t want to look away. I didn’t want to do anything but stand as I was, with time finished, the world stopped completely.
I knew now why Mary falls to her knees in so many of the paintings of the Annunciation. If a messenger from Heaven arrives, even with good news, we cannot be human beings and fail to experience the sensation: May this not be true.
Even when the beloved voice spoke I sensed that this was not a voice from Heaven. As charged as I was with love I wished I could have fallen utterly deaf before I heard those words.
“It’s too late, Stratton.”
I stretched forth a hand, but could not take a step, wanting to speak, my tongue powerless.
“It’s too late,” he said again. “You can’t go back.”
It was my father’s voice.
22
The plastic canopy over the shadow figure shifted, began to slip away, and then fell clear with a slithering whisper as the figure lifted its arms.
My father, dead for eight years, sat stretching, as he always had when forced to wait, a way of releasing his cheerful impatience. He flexed, his fingers interlocked, his arms extended: handsome, graying. He wore one of his hunting shirts, a wool check that looked manly and outdoorsy, hand-tailored, and, I knew, as soft and easy to the touch as old linen. He stood and looked at me, as though wondering at my reason for holding back.
I had backed all the way into a corner. I wedged myself among wall studs and strips of lath, the vise of the corner gripping my skull as though it would have me look hard at this human figure, this wraith that looked as solid and breathing as any man I had ever seen.
He gave that half-smile, that eye-crinkling grin that I had known for so many years. He looked a little embarrassed at his sudden appearance; he had always preferred the low key to the dramatic. “I’m proud of you, Stratton.”
His words, so exactly what I needed, and wanted, to hear, suffocated me.
“You have,” he said, “done well.”
I commanded myself: Don’t listen.
“I knew you would. All those years of drawing. I remember watching you draw the Ferry Building one afternoon, do you remember?”
Madness. Can’t be happening.
“I’d had lunch at Tadich’s, I think it was, and was taking a stroll. And I came upon you, sitting there on the sidewalk, drawing the hands on the Ferry Building clock. I think that’s the first time I really knew what sort of person you were.”
I commanded myself: Whatever you do—don’t talk.
My father watched the fire, shadows shifting on his face. “What are you going to do now?”
I would not speak.
“You can’t turn back, now, Stratton, because They’ve already done too much for you.” The voice was reasonable, earnest.
Just stand here against the wall and don’t make a sound.
“Besides, now you’re in real trouble. The DeVere people are busy right now, this minute. They’ll never forgive you.”
He regarded me, waiting for me to respond.
“You have a responsibility to your mother. To Nona, and her children. To your brother. To yourself. You have a great deal to protect.”
My own voice was a hiss. “What are you?”
He did not answer my question. “You have to accept what has happened to you, and take it seriously.” It was my father’s old tone, a lecture both formal and kind, like a vicar on a Sunday afternoon, still warmed by his own morning sermon. He stepped toward me, and when he stood just before me he stretched out his arms. “We’re allowed to have a bear hug.”
It’s the way he always put it: a bear hug. The phrase allowed us to pretend we engaged in a brief tussle rather than a show of love.
I did not move.
He chuckled. He put forth his hand, and a palsy overtook me. And yet I could not flinch, wedged in as I was. My breath stopped. His fingers approached my face, and my eyes froze in my head.
He touched me. His fingers brushed the tears on my cheek. See, his eyes said. You can’t pretend any longer. I am here.
“I missed you,” I coughed, the words painful. “I missed you so much.”
He held me, firm, warm, solidly corporeal: my father.
I withdrew from his arms, but kept him by the hand. I took a step so he would turn and the light could play across his features. Every detail was correct, including the tiny scar on the bridge of his nose, a childhood injury, the family nurse bumping him against the rail of a balcony. He was not a vague copy. He was himself. He looked as he did that day, relaxed, ready to spend a day on the bay, or hiking the East Bay hills, a man arrived at both health and wisdom.
“Mother,” I said, steering toward profound understatement, “isn’t doing so well.”
“I know.”
I had trouble speaking.
“You should go visit her more often, Stratton,” he said. “I know it’s difficult. I know the doctors don’t think it’s a good idea. But you don’t know how confused she is most of the time.”
My eyes were downcast. “I’ll go see her.” But then I rallied, aware again after a few moments what an enormity was taking place. My voice was a whisper. “But this can’t be.”
“They are so powerful, Stratton. So powerful that the ways of fire and skies are like toys to Them.”
It was my father’s diction, a man who would have loved to be a priest or a professor, a teacher or an actor, someone in command of the attentions and the affections of thousands. Instead, he had been a solitary public figure, and the only vocabulary his position offered was that of money. He had endowed scholarships and research, and he had saved his lectures for his family—for me. My mother had always been courteously detached from my father, despite her great love for him. She was more worshipful than attentive, and Rick had always played the role of the restless kid, the itchy youngster, even in early manhood.
“You left things in a mess,” I said, steadying my voice. “Financially we were in bad shape. And you shouldn’t have trusted Mother. Leaving so much in her hands didn’t turn out to be the best alternative.”
My voice lost strength. Here I was chiding a shade, an apparition I both longed to hold again, and did not believe was anything but an illusion.
“I know it, Stratton,” he said with what sounded like his old, gruff-voiced regret. “I know I made mistakes. I didn’t know I was going to vanish like that, walking down the stairs. I walked and walked,
and then I realized I was not walking at all, anymore. My face went numb. Bang—like being hit with the Sunday paper. And then—” He looked at me steadily. “It makes a noise, dying like that. A noise in your skull, in your brain.” He kept my gaze, telling me: I know, and you, my son, do not.
Then a smile crinkled his eyes. “Don’t stand here like this. Come and sit down. And what on earth is happening here? I thought you were a designer. Plaster dust everywhere.”
I stayed where I was.
“I’m not here for long. I’m here to prepare you. You should go upstairs and get dressed. Someone is coming for you.”
I shook my head.
“You have no choice anymore, Stratton. The powers you have enjoined are at your beck, but not at your command.”
This odd phrasing could have been my father’s, but it sounded strangely unlike any statement I had ever heard him use. His diction had always been bookish, both straightforward and polished. “Rick is doing fine,” I said, offering him news, buying time while I tried to believe that this creature was, in truth, my father.
“I remember how upset you were,” he said. “When you thought you had hit him so hard sparring. You were under the impression that you had permanently damaged him.” He sighed, half laugh, half sorrow. “You were the son I was fondest of, Stratton. You must have known that.”
Emotion swept me, seared me. When I could speak, I said, “I was worried about Rick. I always worry about him.” Again I was aware of water on my cheeks, and used the sleeve of my terrycloth robe to wipe my eyes.
“You’ve spent too much of your life worrying,” he said. “You’ve been concerned with the good opinion of people who should not have mattered to you. It’s time to give something to yourself, or, as Buddha would suggest, to accept that which is given to you.”
“It’s not easy being your son,” I said. “You were so admired by everyone. Including me.”
“I deserved the admiration. It’s true—I did. But I neglected you. I overlooked the people around me, wanting more. More than a man should want.”
The Horses of the Night Page 12