by John Updike
Efficiently, Alice bent, released her bindings, and walked to the accident, making crisp boot prints. “Is she conscious?” she asked.
“It’s the left,” the casket face said, not altering its rapt relation with the sky. The dab of red was the only color not drained from it. Tears trickled from the corner of one eye into a fringe of sandy permed hair.
“Do you think it’s broken?”
There was no answer, and the girl impatiently prompted, “Mother, does it feel broken?”
“I can’t feel a thing. Take off the boot.”
“I don’t think we should take off the boot,” Alice said. She surveyed the woman’s legs with a physical forthrightness that struck Caroline as unpleasant. “We might disturb the alignment. It might be a spiral. Did you feel anything give?” The impact of the spill had popped both safety bindings, so the woman’s skis were attached to her feet only by the breakaway straps. Alice stooped and unclipped these, and stood the skis upright in the snow, as a signal. She said, “We should get help.”
The daughter looked up hopefully. The face inside her polka-dot parka was round and young, its final form not quite declared. “If you’re willing to stay,” she said, “I’ll go. I know some of the boys in the patrol.”
“We’ll be happy to stay,” Caroline said firmly. She was conscious, as she said this, of frustrating Alice and of declaring, in the necessary war between them, her weapons to be compassion and patience. She wished she could remove her skis, for their presence on her feet held her a little aloof; but she was not sure she could put them back on at this slant, in the middle of nowhere. The snow here had the eerie unvisited air of grass beside a highway. The young daughter, without a backward glance, snapped herself into her skis and whipped away, down the hill. Seeing how easy it had been, Caroline dared unfasten hers and discovered her own bootprints also to be crisp intaglios. Alice tugged back her parka sleeve and frowned at her wristwatch. The third woman moaned.
Caroline asked, “Are you warm enough? Would you like to be wrapped in something?” The lack of a denial left them no choice but to remove their parkas and wrap her in them. Her body felt like an oversized doll sadly in need of stuffing. Caroline, bending close, satisfied herself that what looked like paint was a little pinnacle of sunburn.
The woman murmured her thanks. “My second day here, I’ve ruined it for everybody—my daughter, my son …”
Alice asked, “Where is your son?”
“Who knows? I bring him here and don’t see him from morning to night. He says he’s skiing, but I ski every trail and never see him.”
“Where is your husband?” Caroline asked; her voice sounded lost in the acoustic depth of the freezing air.
The woman sighed. “Not here.”
Silence followed, a silence in which wisps of wind began to decorate the snow-laden branches of pines with outflowing feathers of powder. The dense shadow thrown by the forest edging the trail was growing heavy, and cold pressed through the chinks of Caroline’s sweater. Alice’s thin neck strained as she gazed up at the vacant ridge for help. The woman in the snow began, tricklingly, to sob, and Caroline asked, “Would you like a cigarette?”
The response was prompt. “I’d adore a weed.” The woman sat up, pulled off her mitten, and hungrily twiddled her fingers. Her nails were painted. She did not seem to notice, in taking the cigarette, that the pack became empty. Gesturing with stabbing exhalations of smoke, she waxed chatty. “I say to my son, ‘What’s the point of coming to these beautiful mountains if all you do is rush, rush, rush, up the tow and down, and never stop to enjoy the scenery?’ I say to him, ‘I’d rather be old-fashioned and come down the mountain in one piece than have my neck broken at the age of fourteen.’ If he saw me now, he’d have a fit laughing. There’s a patch of ice up there and my skis crossed. When I went over, I could feel my left side pull from my shoulders to my toes. It reminded me of having a baby.”
“Where are you from?” Alice asked.
“Melrose.” The name of her town seemed to make the woman morose. Her eyes focused on her inert boot.
To distract her, Caroline asked, “And your husband’s working?”
“We’re divorced. I know if I could loosen the laces it would be a world of relief. My ankle wants to swell and it can’t.”
“I wouldn’t trust it,” Alice said.
“Let me at least undo the knot,” Caroline offered, and dropped to her knees, as if to weep. She did not as a rule like complaining women, but here in this one she seemed to confront a voluntary dramatization of her own possibilities. She freed the knots of both the outer and inner laces—the boot was a new Nordica, and stiff. “Does that feel better?”
“I honestly can’t say. I have no feeling below my knees whatsoever.”
“Shock,” Alice said. “Nature’s anesthetic.”
“My brother will be furious. He’ll have to hire a nurse for me.”
“You’ll have your daughter,” Caroline said.
“At her age, it’s all boys, boys on the brain.”
This seemed to sum up their universe of misfortune. In silence, as dark as widows against the tilted acres of white, they waited for rescue. The trail here was so wide skiers could easily pass on the far side. A few swooped close, then veered away, as if sensing a curse. One man, a merry ogre wearing steel-framed spectacles and a raccoon coat, smoking a cigar, and plowing down the fall line with a shameless sprawling stem, shouted to them in what seemed a foreign language. But the pattern of the afternoon—the sun had shifted away from the trail—yielded few skiers. Empty minutes slid by. The bitter air had found every loose stitch in Caroline’s sweater and now was concentrating on the metal bits of brassiere that touched her skin. “Could I bum another coffin nail?” the injured woman asked.
“I’m sorry, that was my last.”
“Oh dear. Isn’t that the limit?”
Alice, so sallow now she seemed Oriental, tucked her hands into her armpits and jiggled up and down. She asked, “Won’t the men worry?”
Caroline took satisfaction in telling her, “I doubt it.” Looking outward, she saw only white, a tilted rippled wealth of colorlessness, the forsaken penumbra of the world. Her private desolation she now felt in communion with the other two women; they were all three abandoned, cut off, wounded, unwarmed, too impotent even to whimper. A vein of haze in the sky passingly dimmed the sunlight. When it brightened again, a tiny upright figure, male, in green and yellow chevron stripes, stood at the top of the cataracts of moguls.
“That took eighteen minutes,” Alice said, consulting her wristwatch again. Caroline suddenly doubted that Norman, whose pajama bottoms rarely matched his tops, could fall for anyone so finicking.
The woman in the snow asked, “Does my hair look awful?”
Down, down the tiny figure came, enlarging, dipping from crest to crest, dragging a sled, a bit clumsily, between its legs. Then, hitting perhaps the same unfortunate patch of ice, the figure tipped, tripped, and became a dark star, spread-eagled, a cloud of powder from which protruded, with electric rapidity, fragments of ski, sled, and arm. This explosive somersault continued to the base of the steep section, where the fragments reassembled and lay still.
The women had watched with held breaths. The woman from Melrose moaned, “Oh dear God.” Caroline discovered herself yearning, yearning with her numb belly, for their rescuer to stand. He did. The boy (he was close enough to be a boy, with lanky legs in his tight racing pants) scissored his skis above his head (miraculously, they had not popped off), hopped to his feet, jerkily sidestepped a few yards uphill to retrieve his hat (an Alpine of green felt, with ornamental breast feathers), and skated toward them, drenched with snow, dragging the sled and grinning.
“That was a real eggbeater,” Alice told him, like one boy to another.
“Who’s hurt?” he asked. His red ears protruded and his face swirled with freckles; he was so plainly delighted to be himself, so clearly somebody’s cherished son, that Caroline ha
d to smile.
And as if this clown had introduced into vacuity a fertilizing principle, more members of the ski patrol sprang from the snow, bearing blankets and bandages and brandy, so that Caroline and Alice were pushed aside from the position of rescuers. They retrieved their parkas, refastened their skis, and tamely completed their run to the foot of the mountain. There, Timmy and Norman, looking worried and guilty, were waiting beside the lift shed. Her momentum failing, Caroline Harris actually skated—what she had never managed to do before, lifted her skis in the smooth alternation of skating—in her haste to assure her husband of his innocence.
The Dark
THE DARK, he discovered, was mottled; was a luminous collage of patches of almost-color that became, as his open eyes grew at home, almost ectoplasmically bright. Objects became lunar panels let into the air that darkness had given flat substance to. Walls dull in day glowed. Yet he was not comforted by the general pallor of the dark, its unexpected transparence; rather, he lay there waiting, godlessly praying, for those visitations of positive light that were hurled, unannounced, through the windows by the headlights of automobiles pausing and passing outside. Some were slits, erect as sentinels standing guard before beginning to slide, helplessly, across a corner, diagonally warping, up onto the ceiling, accelerating, and away. Others were yellowish rectangles, scored with panes, windows themselves, but watery, streaked, as if the apparition silently posed on a blank interior wall were being in some manner lashed from without by a golden hurricane.
He wondered if all these visitations were caused by automobiles; for some of them appeared and disappeared without any accompaniment of motor noises below, and others seemed projected from an angle much higher than that of the street. Perhaps the upstairs lamps in neighboring homes penetrated the atmosphere within his bedroom. But it was a quiet neighborhood, and he imagined himself to be, night after night, the last person awake. Yet it was a rare hour, even from two o’clock on, when the darkness in which he lay was untouched; sooner or later, with a stroking motion like a finger passing across velvet, there would occur one of those intrusions of light which his heart would greet with wild grateful beating, for he had come to see in them his only companions, guards, and redeemers.
Sounds served in a much paler way—the drone of an unseen car vanishing at a point his mind’s eye located beyond the Baptist church; the snatched breath and renewed surge of a truck shifting gears on the hill; the pained squeak, chuffing shuffle, and comic toot of a late commuting train clumsily threading the same old rusty needle; the high vibration of an airplane like a piece of fuzz caught in the sky’s throat. These evidences of a universe of activity and life extending beyond him did not bring the same liberating assurance as those glowing rectangles delivered like letters through the slots in his room. The stir, whimper, or cough coming from the bedroom of one or another of his children had a contrary effect, of his consciousness touching a boundary, an abrasive rim. And in the breathing of his wife beside him a tight limit seemed reached. The blind, moist motor of her oblivious breathing seemed to follow the track of a circular running of which he was the vortex, sinking lower and lower in the wrinkled bed until he was lifted to another plane by the appearance, long delayed, on his walls of an angel, linear and serene, of light stolen from another world.
While waiting, he discovered the dark to be green in color, a green so low-keyed that only eyes made supernaturally alert could have sensed it, a thoroughly dirtied green in which he managed to detect, under opaque integuments of ambiguity, a general pledge of hope. Hope for his specific case he had long given up. It seemed a childhood ago when he had moved, a grown man, through a life of large rooms, with white-painted moldings and blowing curtains, whose walls each gave abundantly, in the form of open doorways and flung-back French windows, into other rooms—a mansion without visible end. In one of the rooms he had been stricken with a pang of unease. Still king of space, he had moved to dismiss the unease and the door handle had rattled, stuck. The curtains had stopped blowing. Behind him, the sashes and archways sealed shut. Still, it was merely a question of holding one’s breath and finding a key. If the door was accidentally locked—had locked itself—there was certainly a key. For a lock without a key is a monstrosity, and while he knew, in a remote way, that monstrosities exist, he also knew there were many more rooms; he had glimpsed them waiting with their white-painted and polished corners, their invisible breeze of light. Doctors airily agreed; but then their expressions fled one way—cherubic, smiling—while their words fled another, and became unutterable, leaving him facing the blankness where the division had occurred. He tapped his pockets. They were empty. He stooped to pick the lock with his fingernails, and it shrank from his touch, became a formless bump, a bubble, and sank into the wood. The door became a smooth and solid wall. There was nothing left for him but to hope that the impenetrability of walls was somehow an illusion. His nightly vigil investigated this possibility. His discoveries, of the varied texture of the dark, its relenting phosphorescence, above all its hospitality to vivid and benign incursions of light, seemed at moments to confirm his hope. At other moments, by other lights, his vigil seemed an absurd toy supplied by cowardice to entertain his last months.
He had months and not years to live. This was the fact. By measuring with his mind (which seemed to hover some distance from his brain) the intensity of certain sensations obliquely received, he could locate, via a sort of triangulation, his symptoms in space: a patch of strangeness beneath the left rib, an inflexible limitation in his lungs, a sickly-sweet languor in his ankles, which his mind’s eye, as he lay stretched out in bed, located just this side of the town wharf. But space interested him only as the silver on the back of the mirror of time. It was in time, that utterly polished surface, that he searched for his reflection, which was black, but thin-lipped and otherwise familiar. He wondered why the difference between months and years should be qualitative when mere quantities were concerned, and his struggle to make “month” a variant of “year” reminded him of, from his deepest past, his efforts to remove a shoehorn from between his heel and shoe, where with childish clumsiness he had wedged it. How frighteningly tight the jam had seemed! How feeble and small he must have been!
He did not much revisit the past. His inner space, the space of his mind, seemed as alien as the space of his body. His father’s hands, his mother’s tears, his sister’s voice shrilling across an itchy lawn, the rolls of dust beneath his bed that might, just might, be poisonous caterpillars—these glints only frightened him with the depth of the darkness in which they were all but smothered. He had forgotten almost everything. Everything in his life had been ordinary except its termination. His “life.” Considered as a finite noun, his life seemed vastly unequal to the infinitude of death. The preposterous inequality almost made a ledge where his hope could grip; but the unconscious sighing of his wife’s sagging mouth dragged it down. Faithlessly she lay beside him in the arms of her survival. Her unheeding sleep deserved only dull anger and was not dreadful like the sleep of his children, whose dream-sprung coughs and cries seemed to line the mouth of death with teeth. The sudden shortness of his life seemed to testify to the greed of those he had loved. He should have been shocked by his indifference to them; he should have grubbed the root of this coldness from his brain. But introspection, like memory, sickened him with its steep perspectives—afflicted him with the nausea of futile concentration, as if he were picking a melting lock. He was not interested in his brain but in his soul, his soul, that outward simplicity embodied in the shards and diagonal panes of light that wheeled around his room when a car smoothly passed in the street below.
From three o’clock on, the traffic was thin. As if his isolation had turned him into God, he blessed, with stately wordlessness, whatever errant teenager or returning carouser relieved the stillness of the town. Then, toward four, all such visits ceased. There was a quietness. Unwanted images began to impinge on the dark: a pulpy many-legged spider was offered wrig
gling to him on a fork. His teeth ached to think of biting, of chewing, its eyes, its tiny intermeshing fluid-bearing parts, its fur.…
It was time to imagine the hand.
He, who since infancy had slept best on his stomach, could now endure lying only on his back. He wished his lids, even if they were closed, to be pelted and bathed by whatever eddies of light animated the room. As these eddies died, and the erosion of sleeplessness began to carve his consciousness fantastically, he had taken to conceiving of himself as lying in a giant hand, his head on the fingertips and his legs in the crease of the palm. He did not picture the hand with total clarity, denied it nails and hair, and with idle rationality supposed it was an echo from Sunday school, some old-fashioned print; nevertheless, the hand was so real to him that he would stealthily double his pillow to lift his head higher and thereby fit himself better to the curve of the great fingers. The hand seemed to hold him at some height, but he had no fear of falling nor any sense of display, of being gazed at, as a mother gazes at the baby secure in her arms. Rather, this giant hand seemed something owed him, a basis upon which had been drawn the contract of his conception, and it had the same extensive, impersonal life as the pieces of light that had populated, before the town went utterly still, the walls of his room.
Now the phosphor of these walls took on a blueness, as if the yellowness of the green tinge of the darkness were being distilled from it. Still safe in the hand, he dared turn, with cunning gradualness, and lie on his side and touch with his knees the underside of his wife’s thighs, which her bunched nightie had bared. Her intermittently restless sleep usually resolved into a fetal position facing away from him; and in a parallel position—ready at any nauseous influx of terror to return to his back—he delicately settled himself, keeping the soft touch of her flesh at his knees as a mooring. His eyes had closed. Experimentally he opened them, and a kind of gnashing, a blatancy, at the leafy window, which he now faced, led him to close them again. A rusty brown creaking, comfortable and antique, passed along his body, merging with the birdsong that had commenced beyond the window like the melodious friction of a machine of green and squeaking wood.