So at last I plucked it from the sand. It was the right size, and the point of its quill would do. I slipped it into my jacket pocket.
I hurried home, not looking at the houses I passed, not looking up at the passing men and women on the sidewalk. I could not be distracted. I could not be persuaded to take any other course.
I knew how to save Nona.
I lit a fire in my study. The room was finished now, and the new ash paneling reflected the light of the eucalyptus wood fire. From the pantry, I brought one of the cups my mother had prized, thin bone-china that was translucent and fragile. I went up to my study and returned with a large, uncut sheet of super-opaque paper and a fountain pen. I also brought down an Exacto knife, one of the razor-tipped wands I used for precise cutting.
I spread the paper on the cocktail table. I uncapped the pen. And then I could not write a single word.
This was the way to save Nona. I knew that. But I could not keep from wondering at what I was about to do. What had I come to, this night?
On the page I wrote, carefully: My soul in exchange for power.
I could not move.
Does it really say that? Had I written that, with this hand?
I stood. I backed away from the page, all the way to the mantle.
My hands were trembling. I could barely cap the pen. I knew that this was the end of my life as a human being. From this night on I would be something else, something like a man, but not.
At the same time, I felt absurd. This made swimming in riptides look like a dull effort indeed. I was crazy. I made a sound, an ugly, dry laugh.
My soul. What was it, after all? A thing of legend, an artifact of myth. There were no souls. There was no life beyond death, no essence within a living creature that could be described truthfully by such an ancient concept. So what I tendered was a thing that did not exist. There was no reason to be concerned for even an instant. I was cheating the Powers, whatever They might be, offering Them a currency that was worthless to me.
I was a fool. Nothing would come of this. Still—there was something sick about what I was doing, something unclean. Why? What could possibly be wrong with me?
People did worse things every night. People destroyed lives, depraved, cruel people, and never suffered a moment’s conscience. Who was I to quail over this trifling deed?
And yet all the fears I had ever had about dying arose within me for a moment. Men and women dedicated whole careers to saving the soul, keeping it from endless suffering. Could I argue that not believing in the soul made this step any less serious? Perhaps. But I had the sense that I was about to do something ultimately sinful.
For Nona, I breathed. Or was it? Wasn’t I interested in the other rewards that would spring from this?
I had already enjoyed a taste of the prizes They could bring me. I was shivering. Wouldn’t I take my own life to win Nona back to the world of daylight? Of course I would. Then, what a cheap price my soul would prove to be.
The doctors were useless. The police powerless, or even in collusion with my enemies. I could not turn back. What was I waiting for? Didn’t I want to hear the sound of Nona’s voice?
I nicked the end of the quill, cutting a notch into it.
Then I lifted the sharp blade, a wedge no larger than a fingernail, before my eyes. I steadied my hand.
I cut my tongue. I let the blood from my tongue flow into the bone-china cup. The cut was deeper than I had anticipated. The blood made a chiming sound as it ran into the container, the sound growing deeper and more muted as the cup filled to one third of its capacity.
It was not too late. I could still turn back.
At first the cut had not hurt. Now it throbbed, and I found myself swallowing blood. I dipped the quill into the fluid. I squinted, making sure that the shaft of the feather was filling with the red ink.
Then I knelt over the sheet of paper, and signed my name.
I had to dip the feather into the cup twice, but when my signature was finished the final letters gleamed in the firelight, before they, too, faded to a brunette cursive.
Blood on a page, in the light of a fire, looks like tar, something originating with a living thing but far removed from it, a byproduct rather than the stuff of life.
There. Done.
And everything was fine. The firelight was bright. The cut on my tongue didn’t hurt anymore. Everything was going to be as I had wanted it. All I had to do was unwrap the night like someone receiving a gift.
And take what was mine.
37
I had never felt so alive.
I ran without tiring, with the steady stride of a marathon runner. There were almost no people out this late, and little traffic, but the streets were alive, the glistening reflections of bedrooms and stoplights pulsing in my sight.
For long periods I was aware of nothing but a sweet flavor in my mouth, and then I would wake to full consciousness and find myself, unexpectedly, in a garden, observing the slumbering carp, or in an alcove, aware of the drowse and murmur of sleepers above, around me.
I could taste the lives around me, as thoroughly as I could have tasted the smoke of a fine cigar, rolled it on my tongue, inhaled, and breathed it out again, enriched and poisoned.
It is in the closed places, the rooms, the hidden courtyards that we will never visit, that life takes place. The act of passion, the bribe, all begin the changes that will construct the life the streets can only deliver to be unpacked.
Listen, we say, pausing under a window. Someone is making love, or urging an infant to sleep again. Life possesses itself, complete, private, the wellhead sealed with the potted geranium, the stone saint staring into the crypt. It is a marvel.
And it is mortal. The people around me were distinct and comprehended, books I had read. I hurried, unaware of my footfalls, slipping from door to street to shadow. My clothing, my damp human garb, clung to me, the remnants of a life I was already forgetting.
Streets passed beneath me as I ran. “I see how beautiful it is,” I breathed.
I had spent my soul, and a new life had been given to me.
The Medical Center was a blaze of fluorescent lights. There was activity there, in contrast to the sleep of the rest of the buildings I had seen. One ambulance backed up, and the rear doors were flung open. Another approached, red light lashing the dark.
Once I associated this sort of emergency with myself, feeling that I, too, could have an accident, suffer, lose my life. When I was inside the hospital I glided past the desk, and the two women holding conversation there did not even stir to look in my direction because I willed them deaf to my presence.
An elevator would be too slow. I pounded up the stairs. I reached the room where Nona had slept, and hurried into it, aware that the chamber was too dark, devoid any sign of her. The room was empty.
She was gone.
An adjoining room held a man wide awake, staring into the half-dark. Another room was occupied by a gray-haired woman whose hands fidgeted on the coverlet. I plunged past room after room.
“What have they done with Dr. Lyle?” My voice was as calm as I could make it, but it still ripped the silence of the nurses’ station, a small domain of clipboards and scratch pads provided by the manufacturers of painkillers.
The nurse there considered me, and then, after she had finished thinking, continued to look at me blankly while her hand reached for the telephone. “Dr. Lyle?” she responded, stalling. “When was she admitted?”
I leaned over the counter. “Where have they taken her?”
The sound of my voice made her snatch at the telephone, and miss. The other hand clung to a ballpoint pen, one of those cheap, black, institutional implements. “I’ll have to check her file.”
“Do,” I purred, all courtesy and implied—but barely implied—impatience. For some reason she was not charmed by me. My tone did not strike her as well-mannered. I smiled, and she picked up the telephone.
I reached over the counter and took the re
ceiver very gently from her hand. “It won’t be too much trouble, will it, if you look through those files there beside you?”
“I’m not sure that I can help you—”
“I believe you can,” I said, with a smile that made her drop her pen.
She searched, hurriedly. “I don’t see it here, sir. If you would just let me make a call or two—”
Crush her, I thought. How dare she stand in my way?
Something about my eyes made her give me a fake, painful smile. “Please,” she began. “Maybe someone from security can help you.”
I had a struggle, within myself, for a rational thought. Make her tell me. Make her find out, without alerting anyone.
The nurse took a sharp breath, like someone pricked. There was a long moment. Then she picked up the phone and punched numbers.
At last she hung up and turned to me, her eyes bright with good cheer. “She’s been taken to the Omega wing,” she said.
The corridors had never seemed so narrow. The hospital had never seemed so jammed with trolleys of soiled laundry, with empty gurneys, with wheelchairs lined up against walls.
Omega wing was locked. I entered a side door, through a passageway of crisp, fresh white uniforms on shelves, dodged past a stack of boxes, and entered a hallway of muted light.
There was none of that sense of abandoned bustle here. There was nothing that reminded one of the fretful promise of most hospital wings. This place was badly lit, and the nurses’ station was unattended.
I had never realized how artificial the air of a hospital is, how empty of living fragrance.
Nona was curled in her sleep. There was a glaze of perspiration on her forehead. She was breathing, very slowly. As before, her hands were curled into fists as I looked down upon her, this concourse of fluids, this woman dead to life.
The only light came from the red numerals in the medical equipment, and a gray glow from the hallway.
“Nona,” I whispered. “Wake up and speak to me.”
The power was in my touch, and I felt my fingers hum as I touched her face. “Wake up, Nona, and be with me.”
Nona slept, and I could feel the dumb weight of her, the slung-down bulk of her flesh and bones, her stricken-animal stupor.
“Nona,” I cried in a loud voice. “Nona, I want you to live!”
Make her live, I cried in my thoughts.
I knelt to the floor, trembling. It was happening. Surely it was happening. There—her breath was quickening. Look—the red digits of the machines that measured her metabolism were flickering, the registers ascending, her pulse responding.
Surely she was stretching, about to whisper, about to roll upon her back and open her eyes.
I was on my feet again, and turning her over, a plastic bag swaying above me on a steel pole. I rolled her gently, tenderly, afraid that I might wound her somehow, aggravate a needle thrust into a vein. I kissed her.
I kissed her, willing all that I wanted, all that I needed to share with her, into my lips, into her. I held her, weeping, calling her name, over and over, the incantation, the one word I knew.
I wished, with all the power I had purchased with my soul, for Nona to return to me.
And nothing happened.
38
There was a sound I barely recognized as my own voice, calling her name. I swept her into my arms. One arm dangled. The metal pole that suspended the plastic bag of saline solution swayed and nearly fell.
She was slack in a way that disturbed me. She was thin, her bones apparent in the feel of her body in my arms. But she had no spark of even twilight awareness, no roll to settle inward against me, no sigh to show her relief to be in my arms.
Careful, I cautioned myself. Don’t hurt her.
She was beyond feeling. Her gauze-wrapped head lolled. One arm was bandaged, and her legs were swathed. She did not breathe so much as tug in air just a few slack inches and then, almost soundlessly, work it out again, like a person breathing the same exhausted breath over and over again.
I ceased abruptly. Someone was coming. I did not move, listening hard to footsteps in a far-off corridor. The steps pattered, receded, and at last left us alone together.
Lowering her to the floor, I slipped the IV from her arm, withdrew the catheter, carefully as the most skilled nurse, working to detach her from the courses and alternates of her bodily fluids. I cradled her recumbent weight, and I made hushing sounds, as though to encourage her to sleep. “Don’t worry,” I whispered. “Don’t worry, Nona.”
I would not surrender her. I would take her away. I would flee with her—I stopped myself, holding her there in my arms. Where would I take her?
Nowhere. I was outside the room, but I did not carry her any farther. Where would we hide?
I did not move again for a long time. Then I hurried toward a green EXIT sign.
I was determined: No one would take her from my arms. My feet echoed in the stairwell. There was a scent of old concrete dust. Light reflected dimly off the handrails. I was climbing upward, carrying Nona.
I leaned into the pushbar of a door. The door did not budge. I leaned into it again, hard, and the heavy barrier made a scraping rumble, and slowly gave way.
The smell of night surrounded me, the sea air, the tannic flavor of trees, the purr and mutter of faraway traffic I had never been alive to before this night.
I stretched her on the gravel of the roof, massaging her hands.
She did not stir.
She was waking up, I told myself. Keep talking to her. Keep massaging her arms. She’s coming back. Look.
Her lips were parted, unmoving. Her eyes were closed, her breath so slow I could barely hear it, even when I held my own breath.
I swung a fist into the dark around me. “You lied!”
There was no response, but the silence was like that of a retreating wave, a falling back full of capability—and promise—to return.
A step pressed the surface beside me, a sound that was inaudible but which I felt in the lacquer of my own thoughts, like a sensation within my own flesh, a brain surgeon’s probe calling forth this memory and that desire.
At first I felt joy. So, I thought, I was not alone. This was not insanity.
My joy did not last. “Lies,” I whispered.
This presence was a source of light. I could not look at her. Her gown made a sigh as it brushed the skin of air, the last remaining heat of sunlight radiating from the roof.
“That’s all you offer, isn’t it?” I heard myself say.
The light did not answer.
“Perhaps I lied to myself,” I said.
There was a long silence. Then a voice, like a whisper at the very edge of hearing. “There is a way for you to stir her,” the voice said. “But in your selfishness you will not discover how.”
Gravel scattered. “Tell me!”
There were no further words.
“Tell me how to wake her!”
The thought came: Soon you will forget all about her.
I said, carefully, deliberately, “We have no contract.”
A force wrenched me to my feet, and slammed me against an air-conditioning duct. A weight pressed my ribs. The breath was crushed from my lungs. All the air was flattened out of me, and I went numb. I struggled, my arms twitching. I could not make a sound, or think any thought except: air.
I was suffocating.
The invisible grip let me drop, sprawling to the sharp stones. I tasted my own blood, and wiped the water that flowed from my nose on my sleeve.
The whisper again, a sound I could barely make out. “You think of us as evil,” she said. “So that is how we appear to you.”
“How can I win her back?” I asked.
There was no response. Her presence was like the flickering fragment that precedes a migraine, like the shard of light associated with a blow to the face.
They won’t give you Nona, I said to myself.
What can they give you?
Sometimes the cheers o
f a crowd are so complete that they deafen, a solid wall of noise. Sometimes a leader steps before his adoring subjects and, when he speaks, is silenced by the love his supporters feel for him.
I was this prize, this man who stood before the senate of the dark and found myself buffeted by their acclaim. I was no longer a man who had lost his humanity. I was one of their creatures, and while I had no hope, what hope did any man possess?
For a moment I thought I could escape, forgetting that what I breathed was the same air that sustained Nona, except that she was still alive, however vanquished, while I already felt the socket in me, the stump that had been my soul.
I gathered Nona into my arms. The gravel was unclean. So was I.
Perhaps I had struck a bargain with nothing more than my own insanity. I lectured myself in a wry, peevish inner voice: Your own mental illness, your own circus of hallucinations, would make nothing happen in the world of plasma and blood gases.
Whatever I had bargained with, I could not turn back.
“Let them attack me again,” I said. “The people who did this.”
Again—silence.
“That’s what I want. Let them try again.”
There was a silence, and the light around me was dimming.
“I can have that, can’t I? If I can’t have Nona, then I can have revenge.”
There was no answer.
39
It was a bad question to have to ask myself: How did I get here?
I did not recognize this room. There was firelight, and I was not alone. That peculiar fear had me, that sensation of not knowing the walls, the floor, the furniture.
There were two people with me. I was very near to guessing who they were.
I was on a sofa. There was a soft footfall. Rick adjusted the blanket that covered me, a heavy afghan. It was the sort of action our mother must have made when we were children, a lift of the blanket, and a careful folding over and adjusting of the counterpane. A bed, even a temporary one such as this sofa, is a magical place, a place of refuge, of dream, of procreation and healing.
The Horses of the Night Page 19