After these matches I welcomed a walk by myself, and it was on such a walk that I saw the plane falter in the sky.
It was a yellow plane, with a single engine, the sort of aircraft the eye loves to follow. The airplane glistened in the afternoon sun. The wings banked, and then the aircraft found a wrinkle in the sky, a crease invisible to the eye.
Every child, I believe, wants to fly. I wanted to fly more than most children do. Airplane flight was not what I sought, and fantasized, and dreamed of so fervently. I wanted a hawk’s power to soar. I wanted wings.
And yet airplanes attracted me, as well as birds. And I watched with pleasure as this plane lifted its nose slightly, the same careless lift I had watched airplanes perform before, human will being exercised high up and far away. And then, abruptly, the plane tilted downward, a buzz-saw burr from high up, the sound of the engine following the airplane, trailing it in that familiar delay that never fails to puzzle: sound, the means by which we learn and receive warning, is so slow.
The airplane was no longer descending. It was not diving. It fell, the wings wagging, the drop without coordination, graceless. The aircraft was transformed from a weight-defying trace of craftsmanship to so much structure dropping, fast.
With people in it. Even as it was still falling I ran. With people in it, my mind shrilled. People are falling. And yet why I ran toward the place where the plane was falling, my boy’s legs pumping, I have no idea. It would have been better to have run away, for help, or to escape the truth. Perhaps even in my extreme youth I had that overly muscular sense that all would be well.
The plane was down, and without a sound. Then: a clap, a smack that was too distant to be anything associated with the plane. And I knew from movies that there would be a plume of smoke, and there was no smoke, only the bright afternoon. So, I told myself, all would be well. There would be no sad discovery at the end of my run. The thoughts all occurred within me with a hopeful lilt. See: no one’s hurt.
The lake brooded to the left, too blue, as always, in contrast to the late summer gone-to-seed foxtails. The housefronts beyond were bright as those chalky mints the hand loves to sort through for the right shade of pastel.
The plane had come down and disintegrated, although it took me several moments to acknowledge what I saw. Sheets of white and yellow lay in the fields, and there was a smell of hot metal and scorched rubber. In a recess of the wreckage a valve or tube exhaled, or a part still spun invisibly. A Plexiglas pane of windscreen gleamed in the branches of a cypress at an impossible distance from the crash.
It seemed that there must have been only one person in the aircraft, and the sight of him was almost pleasing to me, as I panted up, slowing down, my long run completed. So there he is, I thought. He must be all right, in his short-sleeved shirt, sitting in the cockpit. And then my mind sorted through what it beheld, and made sense of it.
A fence rail was stuck into the man, lancing him, passing all the way through him, and through the seat, upward all the way through the now skeletal fuselage. This was not a man, but a new sort of creature, like a centaur, a man with a bright shock-brightened span of redwood through him, a man with a fixed, angry expression.
I could not talk about it. My father, in my view, was a man who needed to hear good news so he could keep on being a good man, and my mother needed it to keep herself from having headaches. Furthermore, I felt guilty, as though the crash, the impalement, had been my fault, a shameful discovery, a monstrosity that I had perpetrated.
That crash had been my first real encounter with a truth: people can be hurt—badly.
Before she had been hospitalized, my mother had been in therapy with Dr. Ahn. Ahn had warned me that the “dissociative mental life” is seductive. This was Ahn’s way of warning me that my mother might never recover, or, at best, would recover slowly.
Perhaps I should try to contact Dr. Ahn. I saw this therapist’s books in airport bookstores and on the bookshelves of men and women I respected. Like many well-known individuals, Dr. Ahn had become both ubiquitous and remote, more of a name and less of a person one could actually meet.
Besides, why did I have to think of myself as mentally ill? Perhaps my life had given me a rare opportunity. I felt nausea, and cold, and a feeling like a fall that would not end.
People have been hurt. You know that’s wrong. You know it.
And what are you doing to help Nona? What are you doing to help Stuart, and all the other children? What are you now?
Doesn’t a human have something? Some essence, an interior shadow. A soul. I had sold it.
44
My handwriting had never looked quite this elegant, each letter an example of penmanship. It scarcely looked like my handwriting at all. I was dressed, feeling crisp. A pair of my great-grandfather’s gold cufflinks made a rodent-tiny rustle against the paper.
There was another, similar sound in the room—the gold nib of my pen against the paper. I was writing a letter to Fern’s sister, retired and living in Toms River, New Jersey. It expressed, in phrases millions of people had used before me, my honest condolences. I sealed the letter and pressed it carefully, as though my state of mind might cause it to become unglued, to become unwritten, to make the entire communication vanish.
I was anything but mournful. Fern had lived, and he had died. The writing of the letter struck me as quite remarkably absurd for a moment. But I knew that it was important to continue to behave like a normal man.
I had another bit of paper that required a personal check and a postage stamp: a bill from a towing company. The armored Mercedes was in a foreign auto salvage yard in South San Francisco. I understood debts.
My neck was sore. I was stiff. My tongue, too, was still healing from its cut. But I did not feel badly injured. Any sense of regret was fading in me. What was given to me in the place of conscience was the keenest sensation of being alive.
They must not know. They must not be able to see by looking at you what has happened.
“You look so well,” said Collie. “Despite everything.”
She said this with a tone of approval. Grief had always been well hidden by my father, tucked in and knotted, dressed in wellcut worsted. And yet what I felt could not be called grief.
Your body is a disguise. Your feelings are relics.
“Despite everything indeed,” I said. But it was not simple happiness that made me feel clear-headed.
“Black doesn’t look good on some people,” she said, pouring my coffee.
“I’ve always admired black,” I said. “Not over other colors. The other colors are more lovely. But black gives the figure a certain definition. It gives everything definition, don’t you think? Light contrasting with dark.”
“I really can’t say, but I’ve always liked colors, myself, a little foolishly, I suppose. I always liked the greens and the oranges.”
“You’re a cheerful person, Collie,” I observed.
“I do appreciate you saying so.”
“How do you stay so happy?”
“My sister wonders the same thing. Sisters aren’t always alike, you know. She’s the one who worries. Watches the news and can’t sleep. It’s a habit, really. Or a gift, if you like. But you certainly look pleased with things this morning, if I may say so.”
This morning my hands had, quite without conscious guidance on my part, selected black trousers, a midnight-blue tie, and a black jacket. I watched myself butter toast with a detached interest. I wasn’t hungry, but I ate because that’s what a normal man does. He chews, he sips coffee.
What is our old friend Stratton Fields going to do today?
I should be taking notes. Something for a PBS special: what it’s like to have no soul.
Forget the latest fad in recreational chemicals, the latest sex manual, the latest computerized reality. Let’s check in with a man who has traded his soul for—for what?
Tell us, Mr. Fields—what did you get in exchange for your soul?
Well, for one
thing, it turns out I can get away with murder.
Quite literally. And the odd thing is that I like it.
That’s fascinating. And what else have you noticed about yourself?
The Children’s Hospice had never been so small, and the light there had never been so dim before. The door swung shut behind me.
I thought: He simply has to be here, still, in his usual bed.
But the place had changed. Nona’s ward had never resembled a hospice when she was in it. With her presence it had transformed from a hospital wing of children not expected to recover to a place of life, the kind of classroom that is a joy.
The pictures she had pinned to the bulletin board were still there. They were the artwork done by the children themselves, red, scraggly suns, big-eyed, lively humans with stick arms and legs, the style of drawing that children take to with pleasure.
The bright colors and the spritely figures announced to the viewer that the world was a place to stir the hand to take up the crayon and the chalk and try to get it all on paper—for fun, as an act of purest happiness.
I hurried down the corridor, my shoes squeaking on the freshly waxed surface.
To my relief, Stuart was there, turning his head to see who was at the door. His eyes brightened. His face wrinkled into a smile, and he held out his hand to me, and I took it. His hand was thinner than before.
Picking the right words might prove difficult, I thought. To speak would be to talk about Nona, and about her absence.
He touched a bead of water on my raincoat. He said, “Dr. Lyle is sick.”
“Very sick,” I agreed.
“Everything will be fine when she gets back,” he said.
Stuart looked away, up at the television. The silent set was a cartoon, multicolored androids of some kind locked in conversation, the animation jerky, nothing moving but the robot mouths.
Stuart stirred in his bed, as he often did during a visit, impatient, perhaps, with lying down, or with the feel of the sheets over his body. “I ate all my JELL-O,” he said.
I told him that this was good news.
I had picked out some special paper on leaving the studio in my house, a French drawing paper from a shop on rue du Bac, and I folded it carefully, slowly, into one of my puppets. It began, of course, as a stallion, but ended looking, after I tore one of its ears clumsily, and then botched the other, like a horse wanting to transform into a creature that could fly, a beast with talons and a beak.
Its ears looked like feathers standing forth along its neck, so I made a few more such feathers. I told Stuart that it looked more like a bird than a horse, and he said, “A flying horse.”
“Possibly.”
“I liked your other horses better.”
“This one looks strange doesn’t it?”
“A little bit,” said Stuart, dismissive but kind.
His bed was nearly covered with comic books; muscular, Vikingesque men battling metallic monsters, steel-clad creatures with pincers and hooks for limbs battling deathray-blasting titans. The epic battles looked both exciting and unimaginable, a boy’s universe.
Do this child a favor. Smother him.
I made another puppet, a well-turned horse, and Stuart laughed. He took it from me, and we made a little game of mock combat, the two horses outbiting each other.
But he was tired. There was no doubt that he had lost more weight, and the whites of his eyes were slightly yellow. I stood, ready to leave. In a sleep-heavy voice he said, “I had a dream about you.”
Do it. Kill him now. You believe in mercy, don’t you?
“I’ll have to hear about it sometime,” I said.
“You were in trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“You were hanging off a mountain.”
“Off of a cliff?”
“Off a cliff,” he agreed.
This story, idle as it had seemed, did not please me when I stopped to think about it. “What happened?”
“I had wings,” he said.
“That’s sounds like fun.”
“I saved you,” he said, sleepily.
I offered to turn off the television, but he did not seem to hear me, only holding on to my hand as he turned away and drifted off, his lips moving, like the lips of the creatures still offering what looked like taunts or threats to each other on the screen.
One of the nurses was at the doorway as I turned to leave, and I wondered if perhaps she had been warned to keep me away from the children.
“It’s so good to see you, Mr. Fields,” she said. “The children ask after you when you don’t come. Especially now.”
It would be an act of mercy to kill them all.
“I really had to stop by and see them. I think about them all the time,” I heard myself say, with the smooth tone of a diplomat, an accomplished actor, a liar.
“Do stop by again. Stuart asks for you.”
I found myself lingering in a corridor. I urged myself to go and see Nona. To say good-bye.
To take her life.
Go back and show her mercy, too.
I stood there, breaking into sweat. Just a few quick steps to the stairway, just a quick walk across these polished tiles. Why did I hesitate?
Kill Nona.
Part Five
45
The wind was brisk, but I found myself not needing to button my overcoat. The cabdriver at Charles de Gaulle airport was doubtful. He looked at me with his mouth turned down and his eyebrows up, but I repeated the address. He looked at his map book and put the car into gear.
I was not sleepy, after my hours of sitting in first class, declining the champagne and the claret.
A great, long barge made its way past Notre Dame, and the sky was gray. The river reflected the sky, and the wavering image of the city around it. A bus had changed lanes unexpectedly, and a Citröen had been slightly damaged. Traffic went nowhere. Police in white helmets whisked up to the scene on tiny motorcycles, blue lights flashing. The cabdriver wrestled the steering wheel one way and another, and we managed our way onto the Quai Voltaire, past some of the shops where some of my paintings, and a good deal of my furniture, had been purchased.
I had called from San Francisco, before leaving for the airport, and while I had not spoken to Valfort himself, a woman’s voice had spoken clear English. I could hear her pause to make a note, and then she said that they would be expecting me.
Hadn’t there been, I wondered, a certain hesitation in her voice?
It had been more than a year since I had visited Paris. I had lectured, the last time I had visited, at an institute of design and architecture on rue Dupin. My lecture had been a comparison of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work in San Francisco, which consisted of the building he had designed on Maiden Lane, and the buildings he had drawn for possible construction on adjacent streets, but which had never been built. “Perhaps,” I had explained, in slow English, “in a city both charming and earthquake prone, he did not trust the landscape enough to commit his favorite work to it.”
The students had listened alertly, but my name had not been one to call forth a tremendous crowd, and I had been happy to be able to stroll toward the Luxembourg Gardens with a handful of polite students, as interested in smoking cigarettes and examining the clothes in shop windows as they were in anything I had to say.
The cabdriver was expert. As we turned from rue du Cherche Midi onto a crowded street I realized that I knew this neighborhood. And I saw that any progress was going to be impeded by the trucks double parked before us. I thrust currency into the hand of the driver, thanked him, and made it clear that I had decided to walk.
I found the street without much trouble. Rue San Mames was a tiny street, a demi-lane between fashionable apartment buildings. It was a short walk from Bon Marché, the big department store, but it was, as so often happens in Paris, in a neighborhood out of another time. There was a market in progress, aubergines and cheeses in stalls, and I could not keep from pausing, even in my g
reat hurry, to take in the sight.
Things love what they are, the courgette, the sheaf of leeks. How little they desire, the iron-dark beets beneath the hide of root callus, the black cylinders of wine. Only humans hurry from place to place, declining this potato, that sheaf of white onions.
I walked quickly, and when I reached 19, San Mames I was not surprised to find that the heavy glass door was locked. I was, though, surprised that there was no speaker box, no way to signal one’s arrival. I was on a street of considerable bustle, and could see no way to make my entrance.
The door buzzed, and I became aware of a camera high above me. The door opened easily at a push, and then closed firmly behind me, a solid and transparent door that reminded me of the windshield of my demolished Mercedes.
A voice spoke to me, a female voice in rapid French I could just catch. I marched forth my own fairly rusty French and told the intercom that I was here to see Dr. Valfort. I announced my name.
There was a long hesitation. The sounds of the Paris street were muted through the glass. I could easily guess the way my name sounded to the French ear, and could hear it, in my mind, being uttered with some distaste at the Anglo uprightness of the syllables.
But the wait went on too long. I sensed indecision, or even irritation. Or perhaps it was something worse. Perhaps Dr. Valfort knew my sort of case all too well, and received my visit, however expected, with regret.
Another buzzer released me into a courtyard, and I gazed upward at the shuttered windows, the walls stitched with ivy. Somewhere a baby was crying.
“It’s so kind of you to visit us,” said a voice.
A tall, very thin man stepped toward me across the courtyard. He was gray haired, and wiry, with steel-rimmed spectacles. He looked like a kind raptor, a benevolent hawk. He had a gray mustache, closely trimmed, and wore a jacket over his shoulders. His handshake was strong.
“I’m delighted that you could spare the time to see me,” I said.
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