When Anna Picket touched him, he started violently, a small cry of desolation razoring into the darkness.
"What happened in there?" he demanded. "Who are you people? What did I do to you? Please, oh please I'm asking you, tell me what's going on!"
"We absorb."
"I don't know what —"
"We take illness. We've always been with you. As far back as we can know. We have always had that capacity, to assume the illness. There aren't many of us, but we're everywhere. We absorb. We try to help. As Jesus wrapped himself in the leper's garments, as he touched the lame and the blind, and they were healed. I don't know where it comes from, some sort of intense empathy. But. . . we do it . . . we absorb."
"And with me . . . what was that in there . . . ?"
"We didn't know. We thought it was just the heartache. We've encountered it before. That was why Tricia suggested you come to the Group."
"My wife . . . is Tricia one of you? Can she . . . take on the . . . does she absorb? I lived with her, I never —"
Anna was shaking her head. "No, Tricia has no idea what we are. She's never been here. Very few people have been so needing that I've brought them here. But she's a fine therapist, and we've helped a few of her patients. She thought you . . . " She paused. "She still cares for you. She felt your pain, and thought the Group might be able to help. She doesn't even know of the real REM Group."
He grabbed her by the shoulders, intense now.
"What happened in there?"
She bit her lip and closed her eyes tightly against the memory. "It was as you said. The mouth. We'd never seen that before. It, it opened. And then . . . and then . . . "
He shook her. "What!?!"
She wailed against the memory. The sound slammed against him and against the hills and against the cold points of the stars. "Mouths. In each of us! Opened. And the wind, it, it just, it just hissed out of us, each of us. And the pain we held, no, that they held — I'm just their contact for the world, they can't go anywhere, so I go and shop and bring and do — the pain they absorbed, it, it took some of them. Lurene and Margid . . . Teresa won't live . . . I know . . . "
McGrath was raving now. His head was about to burst. He shook her as she cried and moaned, demanding, "What's happening to us, what am I doing, why is this doing to us now, what's going wrong, please, you've got to help me, we've got to do something —"
And they hugged each other, clinging tightly to the only thing that promised support: each other. The sky wheeled above them, and the ground seemed to fall away. But they kept their balance, and finally she pushed him to arm's length and looked closely at his face and said, "I don't know. I do not know. This isn't like anything we've experienced before. Not even Alvarez or Aries know about this. A wind, a terrible wind, something alive, leaving the body."
"Help me!"
"I cant help you! No one can help you, I don't think anyone can help you. Not even Le Braz . . . "
He clutched at the name. "Le Braz! Who's Le Braz?"
"No, you don't want to see Le Braz. Please, listen to me, try to go off where it's quiet, and lonely, and try to handle it yourself, that's the only way!"
"Tell me who Le Braz is!"
She slapped him. "You're not hearing me. If we can't do for you, then no one can. Le Braz is beyond anything we know, he can't be trusted, he does things that are outside, that are awful, I think. I don't really know. I went to him once, years ago, it's not something you want to —"
I don't care, he said. I don't care about any of it now. I have to rid myself of this. It's too terrible to live with. I see their faces. They're calling and I can't answer them. They plead with me to say something to them. I don't know what to say. I can't sleep. And when I sleep I dream of them. I can't live like this, because this isn't living. So tell me how to find Le Braz. I don't care, to hell with the whole thing, I just don't give a damn, so tell me!
She slapped him again. Much harder. And again. And he took it. And finally she told him.
He had been an abortionist. In the days before it was legal, he had been the last hope for hundreds of women. Once, long before, he had been a surgeon. But they had taken that away from him. So he did what he could do. In the days when women went to small rooms with long tables, or to coat hangers, he had helped. He had charged two hundred dollars, just to keep up with supplies. In those days of secret thousands in brown paper bags stored in clothes closets, two hundred dollars was as if he had done the work for free. And they had put him in prison. But when he came out, he went back at it.
Anna Picket told McGrath that there had been other. . .
. . . work. Other experiments. She had said the word experiments, with a tone in her voice that made McGrath shudder. And she had said again, "For McGrath hath murdered sleep," and he asked her if he could take her car, and she said yes, and he had driven back to the 101 Freeway and headed north toward Santa Barbara, where Anna Picket said Le Braz now lived, and had lived for years, in total seclusion.
It was difficult locating his estate. The only gas station open in Santa Barbara at that hour did not carry maps. It had been years since free maps had been a courtesy of gas stations. Like so many other small courtesies in McGrath's world that had been spirited away before he could lodge a complaint. But there was no complaint department, in any case.
So he went to the Hotel Miramar, and the night clerk was a woman in her sixties who knew every street in Santa Barbara and knew very well the location of the Le Braz "place." She looked at McGrath as if he had asked her the location of the local abattoir. But she gave him explicit directions, and he thanked her, and she didn't say you're welcome, and he left. It was just lightening in the east as dawn approached.
By the time he found the private drive that climbed through heavy woods to the high-fenced estate, it was fully light. Sun poured across the channel and made the foliage seem Rain Forest lush. He looked back over his shoulder as he stepped out of the Le Sabre, and the Santa Monica Channel was silver and rippled and utterly oblivious to shadows left behind from the night.
He walked to the gate, and pressed the button on the intercom system. He waited, and pressed it again. Then a voice — he could not tell if it was male or female, young or old — crackled, "Who is it?"
"I've come from Anna Picket and the REM Group." He paused a moment, and when the silence persisted, he added, "The real REM Group. Women in a house in Hidden Hills."
The voice said, "Who are you? What's your name?"
"It doesn't matter. You don't know me. McGrath, my name is McGrath. I came a long way to see Le Braz."
"About what?"
"Open the gate and you'll know."
"We don't have visitors."
"I saw . . . there was a . . . I woke up suddenly, there was a, a kind of mouth in my body . . . a wind passed . . . "
There was a whirring sound, and the iron gate began to withdraw into the brick wall. McGrath rushed back to the car and started the engine. As the gate opened completely, he decked the accelerator and leaped through, even as the gate began without hesitation to close.
He drove up the winding drive through the Rain Forest, and when he came out at the top, the large, fieldstone mansion sat there, hidden from all sides by tall stands of trees and thick foliage. He pulled up on the crushed rock drive, and sat for a moment staring at the leaded windows that looked down emptily. It was cool here, and dusky, even though it was burgeoning day. He got out and went to the carved oak door. He was reaching for the knocker when the door was opened. By a ruined thing.
McGrath couldn't help himself. He gasped and fell back, his hands coming up in front of him as if to ward off any approach by the barely human being that stood in the entranceway.
It was horribly pink where it was not burned. At first McGrath thought it was a woman, that was his quick impression; but then he could not discern its sex, it might have been male. It had certainly been tortured in flames. The head was without hair, almost without skin that was not charred b
lack. There seemed to be too many bends and joints in the arms. The sense that it was female came from the floor-length wide skirt it wore. He was spared the sight of the lower body, but he could tell there was considerable bulk there, a bulk that seemed to move gelatinously, as if neither human torso nor human legs lay within the circle of fabric.
And the creature stared at him from one milky eye, and one eye so pure and blue that his heart ached with the beauty of it. As features between the eyes and the chin that became part of the chest, without discernible neck, there were only charred knobs and bumps, and a lipless mouth blacker than the surrounding flesh. "Come inside," the doorkeeper said.
McGrath hesitated.
"Or go away," it said.
Lonny McGrath drew a deep breath and passed through. The doorkeeper moved aside only a trifle. They touched: blackened hip, back of a normal hand.
Closed and double-bolted, the passage out was now denied McGrath. He followed the asexual creature through a long, high-ceilinged foyer to a closed, heavily-paneled door to the right of a spiral staircase that led to the floor above. The thing, either man or woman, indicated he should enter. Then it shambled away, toward the rear of the mansion.
McGrath stood a moment, then turned the ornate L-shaped door handle, and entered. The heavy drapes were drawn against the morning light, but in the outlaw beams that latticed the room here and there, he saw an old man sitting in a high-backed chair, a lap robe concealing his legs. He stepped inside the library, for library it had to be: floor to ceiling bookcases, spilling their contents in teetering stacks all around the floor. Music swirled through the" room. Classical music; McGrath didn't recognize it.
"Dr. Le Braz?" he said. The old man did not move. His head lay sunk on his chest. His eyes were closed. McGrath moved closer. The music swelled toward a crescendo, something symphonic. Now he was only three steps from the old man, and he called the name Le Braz again.
The eyes opened, and the leonine head rose. He stared at McGrath unblinkingly. The music came to an end. Silence filled the library.
The old man smiled sadly. And all ominousness left the space between them. It was a sweet smile. He inclined his head toward a stool beside the wingback. McGrath tried to give back a small smile, and took the seat offered.
"It is my hope that you are not here to solicit my endorsement for some new pharmacological product," the old man said.
"Are you Dr. Le Braz?"
"It is I who was, once, known by that name, yes."
"You have to help me."
Le Braz looked at him. There had been such a depth of ocean in the words McGrath had spoken, such a descent into stony caverns that all casualness was instantly denied. "Help you?"
"Yes. Please. I can't bear what I'm feeling. I've been through so much, seen so much these last months, I . . . "
"Help you?" the old man said again, whispering the phrase as if it had been rendered in a lost language. "I cannot even help myself. . . how can I possibly help you, young man?"
McGrath told him. Everything.
At some point the blackened creature entered the room, but McGrath was unaware of its presence till he had completed his story. Then, from behind him, he heard it say, "You are a remarkable person. Not one living person in a million has ever seen the Thanatos mouth. Not one in a hundred million has felt the passage of the soul. Not one in the memory of the human race has been so tormented that he thought it was real, and not a dream."
McGrath stared at the creature. It came lumbering across the room and stood just behind the old man's chair, not touching him. The old man sighed, and closed his eyes.
The creature said, "This was Josef Le Braz, who lived and worked and cared for his fellow man, and woman. He saved lives, and he married out of love, and he pledged himself to leave the world slightly better for his passage. And his wife died, and he fell into a well of melancholy such as no man had ever suffered. And one night he woke, feeling a chill, but he did not see the Thanatos mouth. All he knew was that he missed his wife so terribly that he wanted to end his life."
McGrath sat silently. He had no idea what this meant, this history of the desolate figure under the lap robe. But he waited, because if no help lay here in this house, of all houses secret and open in the world, then he knew that the next step for him was to buy a gun and to disperse the gray mist under which he lived.
Le Braz looked up. He drew in a deep breath and turned his eyes to McGrath. "I went to the machine," he said. "I sought the aid of the circuit and the chip. I was cold, and could never stop crying. I missed her so, it was unbearable."
The creature came around the wingback and stood over McGrath. "He brought her back from the Other Side."
McGrath's eyes widened. He understood.
The room was silent, building to a crescendo. He tried to get off the low stool, but he couldn't move. The creature stared down at him with its one gorgeous blue eye and its one unseeing milky marble. "He deprived her of peace. Now she must live on, in this half-life.
"This is Josef Le Braz, and he cannot support his guilt."
The old man was crying now. McGrath thought if one more tear was shed in the world he would say to hell with it and go for the gun. "Do you understand?" the old man said softly.
"Do you take the point?" the creature said.
McGrath's hands came up, open and empty. "The mouth . . . the wind . . ."
"The function of dream sleep," the creature said, "is to permit us to live. To flense the mind of that which dismays us. Otherwise, how could we bear the sorrow? The memories are their legacy, the parts of themselves left with us when they depart. But they are not whole, they are joys crying to be reunited with the one to whom they belong. You have seen the Thanatos mouth, you have felt a loved one departing. It should have freed you."
McGrath shook his head slowly, slowly. No, it didn't free me, it enslaved me, it torments me. No, slowly, no. I cannot bear it.
"Then you do not yet take the point, do you?"
The creature touched the old man's sunken cheek with a charred twig that had been a hand. The old man tried to look up with affection, but his head would not come around. "You must let it go, all of it," Le Braz said. "There is no other answer. Let it go . . . let them go. Give them back the parts they need to be whole on the Other Side, and let them in the name of kindness have the peace to which they are entitled."
"Let the mouth open," the creature said. "We cannot abide here. Let the wind of the soul pass through, and take the emptiness as release." And she said, "Let me tell you what it's like on the Other Side. Perhaps it will help."
McGrath laid a hand on his side. It hurt terribly, as of legions battering for release on a locked door.
He retraced his steps. He went back through previous days as if he were sleepwalking. I don't see it here anywhere.
He stayed at the ranch-style house in Hidden Hills, and helped Anna Picket as best he could. She drove him back to the city, and he picked up his car from the street in front of the office building on Pico. He put the three parking tickets in the glove compartment. That was work for the living. He went back to his apartment, and he took off his clothes, and he bathed. He lay naked on the bed where it had all started, and he tried to sleep. There were dreams. Dreams of smiling faces, and dreams of children he had known. Dreams of kindness, and dreams of hands that had held him.
And sometime during the long night, a breeze blew.
But he never felt it.
And when he awoke, it was cooler in the world than it had been for a very long time; and when he cried for them, he was, at last, able to say goodbye.
A man is what he does with his attention.
John Ciardi
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Angry Candy Page 29