Green Eyes

by Lucius Shepard

  With Brauer assisting, Ezawa opened Magnusson’s chest and they examined the organs. Bastards! Donnell switched off the mirror. He flipped through the ledger, skimming paragraphs. It was a peculiar record, a compendium of scientific data, erratic humour, guesswork, metaphysical speculations, and he drew from it a picture of Magnusson not as the cackling old madman he had appeared, but as he had perceived himself: a powerful soul imprisoned in a web of wrinkled flesh and brittle struts of bone. One of the last entries spoke directly to this self-perception:

  … Over the past months I have had contact with thirteen fellow patients, half of them now deceased, and in each case, as in my own, I have noticed we exhibit - manifest both in our work and our behavior - an obsession with nobility, with regal imagery; it seems to comprise part of our innate self-image. I suspect a psychiatrist might countenance this as a result of the death trauma, suggesting we had linked the myth of Christ arisen to our deep insecurity at having died and been reborn so changed and incomplete. But I sense in myself and the others nothing that reflects the gentle Christian fabrication; rather the imagery is of a pagan sort and the feeling of nobility is one of a great brooding spirit, half-animal, his perceptions darkening the trivial light of day. When I feel this spirit moving within me, I cannot believe otherwise than that all my illusory dry-as-dust memories of sorting test tubes and sniffing after some crumb of scientific legend have been foisted on me by the process of my life at Shadows, and that they are a veneer covering a reservoir of more potent memories.

  All of us now alive embody this spirit in individualistic fashion: Richmond, who poses as the hoodlum warrior; Monroe, with her alter ego the sorceress Luweji; French, the corporate duke; Harrison, the bleak poetic prince; Ramsburgh, the mad dowager who knits coverlets and shawls which depict Druidic scenes of haunted woods and graven altars. I believe that this common tendency is of extreme importance, though I am not certain in what way; but lately I have experienced a refinement of these feelings.

  One night, a splendid windy night, I went unaccompanied onto the grounds and sat in my wheelchair atop a rise close to the house. Everything, it seemed, was streaming away from me. The wind poured in a cold, unbroken rhythm off the Gulf, the oaks tossed their shadowy crowns, and silver-edged clouds raced just beneath the moon, which was itself a disc of silver, almost full. I was the single fixed point in that night’s flowing substance. Black leaves skittered across silvery falls of moonlight, and my clothes tugged and snapped as if they wished to be rid of me. Time was going on without me, I thought, and I was becoming timeless once again. That was all the rectitude of life and death, then, this process of becoming timeless. My whole attention was focused outward upon the flow of night and wind, and I felt myself grown stern and intractable in relation to the petty scatterings of these inessential things, felt my little rise swell into a lofty prominence, and felt my flesh to be the sounding of a music, fading now, but soon to sound anew after the indrawing of an ancient breath. Dreams, you might say, fantasies, an old man’s maunderings on mystery as his second death approaches. But it is dreams which make us live, and mystery, and who is to say they will not carry us away when life is done.

  They took Laura back to Tulane under sedation. “Bye,’ she said at the door, weakly, staring into Jocundra’s eyes with puzzled intensity, as if wondering at their strange color, and then repeated, “Bye,’ looking down to the floor, saying it the way you might say a word you had just learned, trying out its odd shape in your mouth.

  Like everyone else, Jocundra assumed Laura had been in the room when Magnusson slit his throat - if such was the case: the missing scalpel permitted the possibility of alternate scenarios, though it was generally held that Laura, in her distracted state, had picked it up and mislaid it. But unlike everyone, Jocundra did not believe the violence of the death was wholly responsible for Laura’s condition. That alone could not have transformed her into this pale doll creature who was led by the elbow and helped to sit in Ezawa’s gray Cadillac, who pressed her face against the smoked glass window and gazed wanly back at the house. Her apparent callousness toward Magnusson must, Jocundra thought, have masked real feelings which had most contributed to her breakdown.

  ‘She’ll be fine,’ said Edman at the staff meeting later in the day. ‘You knew there’d be some trauma.’

  But Jocundra had not known there was a potential for collapse, for derangement, and she was outraged. ‘The end will be difficult,’ a vastly paternal Edman had told her at the briefing before she left Tulane. ‘But you’ll take from it something very human and strengthening.’ And she had swallowed it! She wanted nothing more to do with lies or with Edman, who was the father of lies; she would prepare as best she could for the inevitable crash of Donnell’s ending, and afterward she would wash her hands of the project.

  For the next two weeks she intensified her commitment toward cultivating a distance between herself and Donnell, and attempted as well to create distance between herself and the project, though this did not prove easy. The atmosphere of Shadows had grown more muted and clandestine than ever. It was as if there had been a unity in the house, some league now dissolved by Magnusson’s death, and no one could be certain of the new alignments which might emerge. The therapists passed each other in the hall with averted eyes; French and Monroe hid behind their bedroom doors, and Richmond wandered by himself. The doctors broke off whispered conferences whenever anyone of lesser authority came near and withdrew to the upstairs offices. Even the ubiquitous ferns in their brass pots seemed instruments of subterfuge, their feathery fronds capable of concealing sensitive antennae. Yet despite this divisiveness, or because of it, everyone pried and eavesdropped and agitated. Once Dr Brauer pulled Jocundra aside and heaped invective upon Edman who, he said, spent most of his time on the telephone to Tulane, begging the administration to keep hands off, not to disrupt the process.

  ‘But don’t you think a disruption is necessary? Haven’t the patients been exposed to enough of Edman’s incompetence?’ When she shrugged, unwilling to join in any power struggle, he drew his sour, thin features into a measly smile and asked, ‘How’s Harrison doing?’

  ‘Frankly,’ she said, furious at his false concern, ‘I don’t care who runs this damned place, and as for Harrison, he’s dying!’

  For several days Jocundra worried that Donnell had learned something about his own situation from Magnusson’s death. She picked up a change in him, a change too slippery and circumstantial to classify. On the surface it appeared to have affected him in a positive way: he redoubled his efforts at walking; his social attitudes improved, and he went poking about the house, striking up conversations with the orderlies; he finished his story and started a new one. But when they talked - and they talked far less often than before - the exchanges were oddly weighted. One afternoon he sat her down and had her read his story. It was a violent and involuted fantasy set upon a world with a purple sun, specifically within a village bounded by a great forest, and it dealt with the miserable trials of an arthritic old tradesman, his vengeance against an evil queen and her black-clad retinue, eerie magic, grim conclusions for all. The circuitous plot and grisly horrors unsettled Jocundra. It was as if a curl of purple smoke had leaked out of the manila folder and brought her a whiff of some ornate Persian hell.

  ‘It’s beautifully written,’ she said, ‘but there’s too much blood for my taste.’

  ‘Yeah, but will it sell?’ He laughed. ‘Got to make a living somehow when I get out of here. Right?’

  ‘I prefer your poetry.’ She shut the folder and studied a fray in her skirt.

  ‘No money in poetry.’ He walked to the desk and stood over her, forcing her to look at him. ‘Seriously, I’d like to have your opinion. I want to live in the city for a change, travel, and that takes money. Do you think I can earn it this way?’

  She could only manage a puny, ‘Yes, I suppose,’ but he appeared satisfied with her answer.

  Donnell’s new independence allowed Jocundra to c
ultivate her distance. Though the cameras continued to break down - ‘Like some damn bug’s in the wires,’ said the maintenance man - the orderlies kept track of his comings and goings, and each morning she put on shorts and a T-shirt, took a blanket and found a sunny spot in which to pass the day. She pored over graduate school catalogs, thinking she might go after her doctorate at Michigan or Chicago, or maybe Berkeley. Within a couple of years she could be doing her field work. Africa. Thatched huts on a dusty plain, baobab trees and secretary birds, oracular sacrifices and tattooing rituals, great fireball sunrises, the green mountains still full of gorillas and orchids and secret kingdoms. Each noon she could almost believe that Shadows was the seat of a lost African empire or some empty Eden; the grounds were deserted, the only sounds were those of insects and birds, and the sunlight hung in gauzy shafts straight down through the canopy, as if huge golden angels were beaming down from their orbiting ark to seed civilization. She drowsed; she read ethnography, the French theorists, rediscovering an old emnity for the incomprehensible Jacques Lacan, reacclimating her mind to the rigorous ingrown language of academics. But after a while, after a shorter while each day, it grew boring in the sun and Donnell would stray into her thoughts. Drowsy, nonspecific thoughts, images of him, things he had said, as if he were brushing against her and leaving bits of memory clinging.

  May the 18th was her mother’s birthday. She had forgotten it until an orderly in the commissary asked her for the date, but all through dinner she thought about what her family might have done to celebrate. Probably nothing. Her father might have given her mother a present, mumbled a tepid endearment and gone out onto the porch to twang his guitar and sing his sad, complaining songs. Her mother would have tidied the kitchen, put on her frumpy hat and scurried off to church for a quick telling of the beads, for fifteen minutes of perfumed darkness at the chipped gilt feet of the Virgin. The Church had been her one stab at individualism, her single act of rebellion against her husband, who had been an atheist. Not that he had tried to dominate her. She had slipped into his shadow like a fearful mouse who had been searching her whole life for such a shelter and would be happy to scuttle around his feet forever. It annoyed Jocundra when she noticed incidences of her mother’s character in herself.

  After dinner she had intended to go to the staff meeting - the big showdown, it was rumored, between Brauer and Edman - but Donnell asked her to stay and talk. He had her sit on the bed and himself leaned against the windowledge, his cane propped beside him. For a long time he was silent, merely staring at her, but finally he said, ‘We’re having a private conversation. The cameras quit working.’

  His stare unnerved Jocundra; it was calm and inquisitive and not the usual way he looked at her. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He gave a sniff of amusement. ‘They have enough data on my psychological adjustment, and besides, my adjustment’s complete. I’m ready to leave right now.’

  She laughed edgily; though his tone was casual, everything he said had the weight of a pronouncement. ‘You’re not strong enough, not yet.’

  ‘I want to tell you something about yourself.’ The curtain belled inward, eerily swathing his face in lace; he brushed it away. The ceiling lights diminished the green in his eyes to infrequent refractions. ‘You’re not totally aware of it, because you try to constrain it, but I don’t think you can totally deny it either. You feel something for me, something like love, though maybe that’s too extreme a word tor what you feel because you have been somewhat successful in denying it.’

  He paused to let her respond, but she was at first too confused to answer, then annoyed that he would assume so much, then curious because he exhibited such assurance.

  ‘Of course I’m in love with you.’ He mumbled it as if it were hardly worth mentioning. ‘I know it’s part of the program for me to love you, that you’ve…’ He ran his cane back and forth through his hands. ‘I don’t guess that’s important.’ He stared at her, his mouth thinned, his eyebrows arched, as if what he saw offered a prospect both mildewed and glorious. ‘Do you want to deny anything?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ she said, and was surprised at the buoyancy she felt on saying it.

  ‘The day Magnusson died,’ he said, ‘I went down to a little room next to the lab and watched them chop him up.’

  ‘You couldn’t have,’ she said, coming to her feet.

  ‘The usual heavy infestation of the visual cortex,’ he said. ‘Remarkable changes in the ventral tegumentum.’

  She started to go to him, but then she thought how he must despise her for lying, and she sat back down, heavy with guilt.

  He picked up a paper sack from the windowledge and walked to the bed. ‘I’m going to do something about it. It’s all right.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ The foolish sound of the words caused her to laugh, and the bitter laugh dynamited the stoniness of her guilt and left her shaky.

  ‘Magnusson gave me his notes before he died,’ he said. ‘I think there’s a chance I can use them to prolong my life. I’m not sure, but I’ll never find out here. I’m going to leave.’

  ‘You can’t!’

  ‘Sure I can.’ He plucked a set of keys out of the paper sack: she recognized them as the standard set issued to orderlies, keys to the vans and the pantry and various other rooms. ‘The staff is in conference,’ he said. ‘The orderlies are playing poker in the lab. None of the phones or cameras are working. And the gate.’ He smiled. ‘It’s taken care of, too.’

  His arguments were smooth, logical, insistent. He had, he said, a right to go where he chose, to spend his time as he wished. What was the future in remaining here to be probed and tested and eventually dissected? He needed her help. Where did her true responsibilities lie? To herself, to him, or to the project? She had no contrary argument, but the thought of being cast adrift with him made her afraid.

  ‘If you’re worried about my loss to the scientific community,’ he said, ‘I can assure I’m not going to co-operate anymore.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ she said, hurt. ‘I’m just not sure what’s right, and I don’t think you are either.’

  ‘Right? Christ!’ He lifted a small tape recorder out of the sack; the cassette within it bore Edman’s handwriting on the label. ‘Listen to this.’

  ‘Where’d you get that?’

  ‘Edman’s office. I told him I wanted to see how life looked from inside a crystal ball. It thrilled his tiny soul to have the beast sniffing round his pantry. These were lying about like party favors on the shelves, so I collected a few.’ He punched down the play switch, and Edman’s voice blatted from the speaker:

  ‘April 27th… (a couch)… Despite all reason to the contrary, romance blooms between Harrison and Verret. I expect one morning I will walk onto the grounds and find a valentine containing their initials carved upon an oak. I’ve today received the package of information concerning Verret’s divorce proceeding. In layman’s terms, it might be said that Verret seems to have a penchant for losers. Her husband, one Charles Messier, a musician; apparently misused her physically: the divorce was granted on the grounds of physical and mental cruelty. I haven’t had time to study it in detail, but there are obvious similarities between the two men. Artistic avocation, both four or five years older than Verret, a general physical resemblance. Of course I am not yet clear how large a part these similarities play in what is now transpiring, but I am convinced we will soon begin to learn. The relationship is, I believe, at a stage of breakthrough… (a sigh)… I must admit to feelings of paternity toward Harrison and Verret in that I have served as their matchmaker… (a laugh)… It does not seem wholly improbable that we may one day be treated to the pageant of a nuptial, one of those such are consummated between prisoners and their loving correspondents - or, more aptly, between terminal patients and their fianc6es. I can easily imagine it. Verret, beautiful in white beneath the arching oaks. Harrison, his eyes ablaze, the lustful groom. And the priest intoning sonorously, “What Ezawa
hath joined, let no man put asunder…’”

  ‘Is that right?’ Donnell smashed down the off switch. ‘To have this fat vulture perch in his crystal cave and drool over our libidos!’

  Jocundra ejected the cassette and read Edman’s inscription: ‘Harrison, Verret - XVII.’ She turned it over in her hand; it was like holding a jar containing her appendix, a useless organ which once had poisoned her, but was now trivial, powerless. Leaving offered no secure hope, but neither did it offer the hopelessness of Shadows. They had no choice. At the very least, Edman was dangerously unethical, and it was probable he was mad, cunningly mad, passing his madness off as a clever form of sanity, infecting everyone and fooling even himself. It was, she thought, a little dreamlike to be doing something so extreme.

  ‘We’ll need money,’ she said. ‘I’ve got credit cards and… Why are you looking at me that way?’ ‘For a minute I thought I’d lost you,’ he said.

  The engine caught, exploded to a roar, then died as Jocundra’s foot slipped off the clutch. Overanxious, she failed twice to restart it, but finally succeeded and backed the van until it was facing the drive and headed out. The headlights veered across the grounds, spotlighting a menagerie of leafy shapes, and the side mirror showed the house receding against the darkness, doll-sized, a lantern-lit confection of rose and white topped by a rhinestone bauble. Jocundra’s throat was dry. She had almost lost her resolve half a dozen times before they reached the parking lot, and Donnell’s plan for the gate -what little he had revealed of it - did nothing to bolster her confidence; her hands and feet, though, honored her commitment, working the gearshift and pedals seemingly without her cooperation. She pulled up close to the gate. Branches of the magnolia bush beside it scraped Donnell’s door. He slumped down, pretending unconsciousness. The headlights sprayed between the bars, playing over the glistening tarpaper of the gatehouse and the guard sidled forth, sleepily scratching his ribs. ‘What you want?’ he called. He yawned and blinked away the glare, settling his holster around his hips: a pudding-faced, pot-bellied man wearing chinos.