‘It’s Creole, sir.’ She sat on the bed facing him. There were food stains on his bathrobe. ‘My mother was part Creole.’
‘Was?’
‘Both my parents died several years ago. A fire. The police suspected my father had set it.’
Laura shot her a look of surprise, and Jocundra was surprised at herself. She never told anyone about the police report, and yet she had told Magnusson without the slightest hesitation.
He reached out and took her hand. His flesh was cool, dry, almost weightless, but his pulse surged. ‘I commiserate,’ he said. ‘I know what it is to be alone.’ He withdrew his hand and nodded absently. ‘Rigmor, my great-grandmother, used to tell me that America was a land where no one ever need be alone. Said she’d had that realization when she stepped off the boat from Sweden and saw the mob thronging the docks. Of course she had no idea to what ends the Twentieth Century would come, the kinds of shallow relationships that would evolve as the family was annihilated by television, automobiles, the entire technological epidemic. She had her vision of families perched on packing crates. Irish, Poles, Italians, Arabs. Plump girls with dark-eyed babies, apple-cheeked young men in short-brimmed hats carrying their heritage in a sack. Strangers mingling, becoming lovers and companions. She never noticed that it all had changed.’ Magnusson attempted an emphatic gesture, but the effect was of a palsied tremor. ‘It’s terrible! The petty alliances between people nowadays. Worse than loneliness. There’s no trust, no commitment, no love. I’m so fortunate to have Laura.’
Laura beamed and clasped her hands at her waist, a pose both virtuous and triumphant. Magnusson studied the backs of his hands, as if considering their sad plight. Several of his fingers had been broken and left unset; the nail of his right thumb was missing, exposing a contused bulge of flesh. Jocundra was suddenly ashamed of her presence in the room.
‘Perhaps it’s just my damned Swedish morbidity,’ said Magnusson out of the blue. ‘I tried to kill myself once, you know. Slit my wrists. Damned fool youngster! I was discouraged by the rain and the state of the economy. Not much reason, you might think, for self-destruction, but I found it thoroughly oppressing at the time.’
‘Well,’ said Laura after an uncomfortable silence. ‘We’ll let you rest, Hilmer.’ She laid her hand on the doorknob, but the old man spoke again.
‘He’ll find you out, Jocundra.’
‘Sir?’ She turned back to him.
‘You operate on a paler principle than he, and he will find you out. But you’re a healthy girl, even if a bit transparent. I can see it by your yellows and your blues.’ He laughed, a hideous rasp which set him choking, and as he choked, he managed to say, ‘Got your health, yes…’ When he regained control, his tone was one of amusement. ‘I wish I could offer medical advice. Stay off the fried foods, take cold showers, or some such. But as far as I can see, and that’s farther than most, you’re in the pink. Awful image! If you were in the pink, you’d be quite ill.’
‘What in the world are you talkin’ about, Hilmer?’ Laura’s voice held a note of frustration.
‘Oh, no!’ Magnusson’s bony orbits seemed to be crumbling away under the green glow of his eyes, as if they were nuggets of a rare element implanted in his skull, ravaging him. ‘You’re not going to pick my brain anymore. An old man needs his secrets, his little edge on the world as it recedes.’
‘Ezawa thinks he might be seein’ bioenergy… auras.’ Laura closed the door behind them and flexed the lacquered nails of her left hand as if they were blood-tipped claws. ‘I’ll get it out of him! He’s becoming more and more aroused. If his body hadn’t been so enervated to begin with, he’d already be chasin’ me around the bed.’
Laura went down to the commissary to prepare Magnusson’s lunch, and Jocundra, in no hurry to rejoin Donnell, wandered the hallway. Half of the rooms were untenanted,, all furnished with mahogany antiques and the walls covered with the same pattern of wallpaper: an infancy of rosebud cottages and grapevines. Cards were set into brass mounts on the doors of the occupied rooms, and she read them as she idled along. Clarice Monroe. That would be the black girl, the one who believed herself to be a dancer and had taught herself to walk after only a few weeks. Marilyn Ramsburgh, Kline Lee French, Jack Richmond. Beneath each name was a coded entry revealing the specifics of treatment and the prognosis. There were two green dots after Magnusson’s name, signifying the new strain; his current prognosis was for three months plus or minus a week. That meant Donnell would have eight or nine months unless his youthfulness further retarded the bacterial action. A long time to spend with anyone, longer than her marriage. The Thirty Weeks War, or so Charlie had called it. She had seen him a month before. He had cut his hair and trimmed his beard, was deeply tanned and dressed in an expensive jacket, gold chains around his neck, a gold watch, gold rings… the petered-out claim of his body salted with gold. She smiled at her cattiness. He wasn’t so terrible. Now that he had become just another figment of the French Quarter, working around the clock at his restaurant, clinking wineglasses with sagging divorcees and posing a sexual Everest for disillusioned housewives to scale, he bore little resemblance to the man she had married, and this was doubtless the reason she could now tolerate him: it had been the original she disliked.
She had been standing beside Magnusson’s door for less than a minute when she noticed her right side - that nearest the door - was prickly with… not cold exactly, more an animal chill that raised gooseflesh on her arm. She assumed it was nerves, fatigue; but on touching the door she discovered that it, too, was cold, and a vibration tingled her fingertips as if a charge had passed through the wood from an X-ray machine briefly in operation. Nerves, she thought again. And, indeed, the cold dissipated the instant she cracked the door. Still, she was curious. What would the old man be like apart from Laura’s influence? She cracked the door wider, and his scent of bay rum and corruption leaked out. White hallway light spilled across shelves lined with gilt and leather medical texts, sweeping back the darkness, compacting it. She leaned on the doorknob, peering inside, and the sharp shadows angled from beneath the desk and chair quivered, poised - she imagined - to snick through the blood and bone of her ankles if she trespassed. Feeling foolish at her apprehension, she pushed the door wide open. He sat in his wheelchair facing the far wall, a dim green oval of his reflected stare puddled head-high on the wallpaper. The uncanny sight gave her pause, and she was uncertain whether or not to call his name.
‘Go away,’ he whispered without turning.
A thrill ran across the muscles of her abdomen. His head wobbled and his hand fell off the arm of the chair, half a gesture of dismissal, half collapse. He whispered once more, ‘Go away.’ She jumped back, pulling the door shut behind her, and she leaned against the doorframe trembling, unable to stop trembling no matter how insistently she told herself that her fright was the product of stress alone. His voice had terrified her. Though it had been the same decrepit wheeze he had spoken in earlier, this time it had been full of potent menace, the voice of a spirit speaking through a cobwebbed throat, its whisper created by the straining and snapping of spider silk stretched apart by desiccated muscles. And yet, for all its implicit power, it had been wavering and faint, as if a wind and a world lay between them.
Chapter 4
February 11 - March 24, 1987
Every morning at nine-thirty or thereabouts an astringent odor of aftershave stung Donnell’s nostrils, and the enormous shadow of Dr Edman hove into view. Sometimes, though not this morning, the less imposing shadow of Dr Brauer slunk by his side, his smell a mingling of stale tobacco and sweat, his voice holding an edge of mean condescension. Edman’s voice, however, gave Donnell a feeling of superiority; it was the mellifluous croon of a cartoon owl to whom the forest animals would come for sage but unreliable advice.
‘Lungs clear, heart rate… gooood.’ Edman thumped Donnell’s chest and chuckled. ‘Now, if we can just get your head on straight.’
Irritated by the attempt to jolly him
, Donnell maintained a frosty silence. Edman finished the examination and went to sit on the bed; the bedsprings squealed, giving up the ghost.
‘Had a recurrence of that shift in focus?’ he asked.
‘Not lately.’
‘Donnell!’ said Jocundra chidingly; he heard the whisk of her stockings as she uncrossed her legs behind him.
He gripped the arms of the wheelchair so his vertigo would not be apparent and concentrated on Edman’s bloated gray shape; then he blinked, strained, and shifted his field of focus forward. A patch of lab coat swooped toward him from the shadow, swelling to dominate his vision completely: several pens clipped to a sagging pocket. By tracking his sight like a searchlight across Edman’s frame, he assembled the image of a grossly fat, middle-aged man with slicked-back brown hair and a flourishing mustache, the ends of which were waxed and curled. Hectic spots of color dappled his cheeks, and his eyes were startling bits of blue china. Donnell fixed on the left eye, noticing the pink gullies of flesh in the corners, the road map of capillaries: Edman hadn’t been sleeping.
‘Actually’ - Donnell thought how best to exploit Edman’s lack of sleep - ‘actually, I had one just when you came in, but it was different…’ He pretended to be struggling with a difficult concept.
‘How so?’ Papers rustled on Edman’s clipboard, his ballpoint clicked. His eyelids drooped, and the blue eye rolled wetly down.
‘The light was spraying out the pores of your hand, intense light, like the kind you find in an all-night restaurant, but even brighter, and deep in the light something moved, something pale and multiform,’ Donnell whispered melodramatically. ‘Something I soon realized was a sea of ghastly, tormented faces…’
‘My God, Donnell!’ Edman smacked the bed with his clipboard.
‘Right!’ said Donnell with mock enthusiasm. ‘I can’t be sure, but it may have been…’
‘Donnell!’ Edman sighed, a forlorn lover’s sigh. ‘Will you please consider what our process means to other terminal patients? At least do that, if you don’t care about yourself.’
‘Oh, yeah. There must be thousands of less fortunate stiffs just begging for the chance.’ Donnell laughed. ‘It really changes your perspective on the goddamn afterlife. Groping, bashing your head on the sink when you go to spit.’
‘You know that’s going to improve, damn it!’ The blue eye blinked rapidly. ‘You’re retarding your own progress with this childish attitude.’
‘What’ll you give me?’ Jocundra stroked his shoulder, soothing, but Donnell shrugged off her hand. ‘How much if I spill the secrets of my vital signs?’
‘What would you like?’
‘Another whore.’ Donnell jerked his head toward Jocundra. ‘I’m bored with this one.’
‘Would you really prefer another therapist?’
‘Christ, yes! Dozens! Orientals, Watusis, cheerleaders in sweatsocks for my old age. I’ll screw my way to mental health.’
‘I see.’ Edman scribbled furiously, his eye downcast.
What gruesome things eyes were! Glistening, rolling, bulging, popping. Little congealed shudders in their bony nests. Donnell wished he had never mentioned the visual shift because they hadn’t stopped nagging him since, and he had begun to develop a phobia about eyes. But on first experiencing it, he had feared it might signal a relapse, and he had told Jocundra.
Edman cleared his throat. ‘It’s time we got to the root of this anger, Donnell.’ Note-taking had restored his poise, and his tone implied an end to games. ‘It must be distressing,’ he said, ‘not to recall what Jean looked like beyond a few hazy details.’
‘Shut up, Edman,’ said Donnell. As always, mere mention of his flawed memory made him unreasonably angry. His teeth clenched, his muscles bunched, yet part of his mind remained calm and watchful, helpless against the onset of rage.
‘Tall, dark-haired, quiet,’ enumerated Edman. ‘A weaver… or was she a photographer? No, I remember. Both.’ The eye widened, the eyebrow arched. ‘A talented woman.’
‘Leave it alone,’ said Donnell ominously, wishing he could refine his patch of clear sight into a needle beam and prick Edman’s humor, send the fluid jetting out, dribbling down his cheek, then watch him go squealing around the room, a flabby balloon losing flotation.
‘It’s odd,’ mused Edman, ‘that your most coherent memories of the woman concern her death.’
Donnell tried to hurl himself out of the wheelchair, but pain lanced through his shoulder joints and he fell back. ‘Bastard!’ he shouted.
Jocundra helped him resettle and asked Edman if they could have a consultation, and they went into the hall.
Alone, his anger ebbing, Donnell normalized his sight. The bedroom walls raised a ghostly gray mist, unbroken except for a golden fog at the window, and the furniture rippled as if with a gentle current. It occurred to him that things might so appear to a king who had been magicked into a deathlike trance and enthroned upon a shadowy lake bottom among streamers of kelp and shattered hulls. He preferred this gloom to clear sight: it suited his interior gloom and induced a comforting thoughtlessness.
‘… don’t think you should force him,’ Jocundra was saying in the hall, angry.
Edman’s reply was muffled. ‘… another week… his reaction to Richmond…’
A mirror hung beside the door to Jocundra’s bedroom, offering the reflection of a spidery writing desk wobbling on pipestem legs. Donnell wheeled over to it and pressed his nose against the cold glass. He saw a dead-gray oval with drowned hair waving up and smudges for eyes. Now and again a fiery green flicker crossed one or the other of the smudges.
‘You shouldn’t worry so about your eyes,’ said Jocundra from the door.
He started to wheel away from her, upset at being caught off guard, but she moved behind his chair, hemming him in. Her mirror image lifted an ill-defined hand and made as if to touch him, but held back, and for an instant he felt the good weight of her consolation.
‘I’d be afraid, too,’ she said. ‘But there’s really nothing to worry about. They’ll get brighter and brighter for a while and then they’ll fade.’
One of the orderlies sang old blues songs when he cleaned up Donnell’s room, and his favorite tune contained the oft-repeated line: ‘Minutes seem like hours, hours seem like days…’
Donnell thought the line should have continued the metaphorical progression and sought a comparative for weeks, but he would not have chosen months or years. Weeks like vats of sluggish sameness, three of them, at the bottom of which he sat and stewed and tried to remember. Jocundra urged him to write, and he refused on the grounds that she had asked. He purely resented her. She wore too damn much perfume, she touched him too often, and she stirred up his memories of Jean because she was also tall and dark-haired. He especially resented her for that. Sometimes he took refuge from her in his memories, displaying them against the field of his suffering, his sense of loss, the way an archeologist might spread the fragments of an ancient medallion on a velvet cloth, hoping to assure himself of the larger form whose wreckage they comprised: a life having unity and purpose, sad depths and joyous heights. But not remembering Jean’s face made all the bits of memory insubstantial. The hooked rugs on the cabin floor, the photograph above their bed of a spiderweb fettering a windowpane stained blue with frost, a day at a county fair. So few. Without her to center them they lacked consistency, and it seemed his grief was less a consequence of loss than a blackness welling up from some negative place inside him. From time to time he did write, thinking the act would manifest a proof, evoke a new memory; the poems were frauds, elegant and empty, and this led him to a sense of his own fraudulence. Something was wrong. Put that baldly it sounded stupid, but it was the most essential truth he could isolate. Something was very wrong. Some dread thing was keeping just out of sight behind him. He became leery of unfamiliar noises, suspicious of changes in routine, convinced he was about to be ambushed by a sinister fate masquerading as one of the shadows that surrounded him. T
here was no reasonable basis for the conviction, yet nonetheless his fear intensified. The fear drove him to seek out Jocundra, she in turn drove him to thoughts of Jean, round and round and round, and that’s why the weeks seemed like goddamn centuries, and the month - when it came to be a month and a little more -like a geologic stratification of slow, sad time.
One summerlike afternoon Jocundra wheeled him out to the stone bench nearest the gate and tried to interest him with stories of duels and courtship, of the fine ladies and gentlemen who had long ago strolled the grounds. He affected disinterest but he listened. Her features were animated, her voice vibrant, and he felt she was disclosing a fundamental attitude, exposing a side of herself she kept hidden from others. Eventually his show of boredom diminished her enthusiasm, and she opened a magazine.
High above, the oak crowns were dark green domes fogged by gassy golden suns, but when he shifted his field of focus he could see up through the dizzying separations of the leaves to the birds perched on the top branches. His vision was improving every day, and he had discovered that it functioned best under the sun. Colors were truer and shapes more recognizable, though they still wavered with a seasick motion, and though the brightness produced its own effects: scroll works of golden light flashing in the corners of his eyes; transparent eddies flowing around the azalea leaves; a faint bluish mist accumulating around Jocundra’s shoulders. He tracked across the glossy cover of her Cosmopolitan and focused on her mouth. It was wide and lipsticked and full like the cover girl’s; the hollow above her lips was deep and sculptural.
‘How do I look?’ The lips smiled.
Being at such an apparently intimate distance from her mouth was eerie, voyeuristic; he covered his embarrassment with sarcasm. ‘What’s up in the world of bust enhancement these days?’
The smile disappeared. ‘You don’t expect me to read anything worthwhile with you glowering at me, do you?’
‘I didn’t expect you could read at all.’ Flecks of topaz light glimmered in her irises; a scatter of fine dark hairs rose from her eyebrow and merged with the hairline. ‘But if you could I assumed it would be crap like that. Makeup Secrets of the Stars.’
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