A Corpse's Nightmare

by Phillip DePoy

  His sentence sounded more like a threat than anything I’d ever heard him say.

  “For what it’s worth,” I ventured, “Travis appears to have been trying to help me—in his own, weird way. Andrews and I think he was hoping to make me realize that Albert was from Chicago, and that he was the one who tried to kill me. I think Travis may even have shot the rear window out of my truck in an attempt to scare me away. Although he denied it when we asked him. He really might not be such a—”

  “Sympathy for the devil,” Skidmore interrupted, shaking his head. “I don’t care for it.”

  “Well,” Lucinda said, but that was as far as she got. She couldn’t seem to find the words she wanted.

  “Also, I come to find out,” Skid went on after a second, “there’s been an undercover FBI man somewhere around here for a couple of months, ever since you got shot in December. They’d been following the activities of these so-called Sons of Wingfield—”

  “Is that really an organization,” Andrews asked, “or is it just some ad hoc gathering of criminal lunatics?”

  Skidmore turned to look at Andrews. “Like a lot of these hate groups, they think they’re more official than they actually are. They’re a real nonprofit, but apparently they also tried to charter the name ‘Sons of Wingfield’—you know, like you’d charter a lodge: the Rotary or, I don’t know, an Optimist Club. But their petition was denied. And then the actual Wingfield family, those people over there in England? They got wind of what was going on with their name and issued some kind of legal proceeding against the group.”

  “I’d imagine that the family,” Andrews offered, “were extremely unhappy about the use of that name for such a—I mean there have been Wingfields in Parliament since the fifteenth century, for God’s sake.”

  “At any rate,” Skidmore went on, “the FBI has had a man down here for several months now—”

  “Wait,” I interrupted. “Do you know who that is? Do you know the agent?”

  He nodded. “I do now.”

  “Who is it?” Andrews demanded. “Have we met him?”

  “I really can’t talk about that. Why are you so interested?”

  “Everyone is going to have to stop talking in a minute,” Lucinda insisted. “This is a real live hospital room. There’s a patient and everything. You have to hush.”

  I started to explain to Lucinda what was really going on. We were all trying to think of anything to say—anything to avoid thinking about Melissa. No one dared mention the place in the room, the very real place, where our sorrow was standing, a sorrow that was just as palpable as any person. It had a size and a shape and a shadow. We just agreed not to acknowledge it.

  Instead of saying that to Lucinda, I tried to change the subject.

  “Do I really have to stay in this bed?” I asked. “Hooked up to these bottles?”

  “You’re dehydrated, exhausted, in shock, still recovering from an older gunshot wound and a previous coma,” Lucinda fired back a little more vociferously than was necessary, I thought. “So the answer is: yes, you really do have to stay in bed.”

  Stacey looked up from Andrews’s shoulder and said to Lucinda, “I’m going to—could I take a little moment, here? I need to—I can’t…”

  “Let’s go sit down,” Andrews said instantly.

  And they were gone.

  Skidmore stood a little like a scarecrow in the late November rain. There was almost no life in him.

  “Skid,” I said very softly.

  “Yeah, I know,” he answered. “I just—I shouldn’t have left her there.”

  And there it was, another specter haunting my oldest friend: undeserved guilt. There would be no telling him that what happened to Melissa wasn’t his fault. He would blame himself no matter what. I’d seen him do it before, and I knew there was nothing I could do about it. I had a sort of helpless, drowning feeling, watching him tie his grief in black knots over something that could never be undone.

  “You know, there’s a certain variation of the Atlas Complex,” I began, looking very deliberately at Lucinda, “which convinces a person that not only is the entire weight of the world on his shoulders, but that everything bad is his fault. And it’s often a very strange connection between action and consequence. Sometimes the person will say, ‘if only I hadn’t picked up my spoon, that airliner wouldn’t have crashed and all those people would still be alive.’”

  “Shut up, Fever, all right?” Skid whispered. “Not everything can be made better by a little speech from you.”

  I glanced in his direction. “Okay,” I told him softly.

  He just stood there; so did Lucinda. I couldn’t say whether minutes or hours passed, because all three of us were lost, for a certain span of indefinable time, in our own avalanche of images and regrets.

  Finally Skidmore tapped his hand on the footboard of my bed. “All right.” He looked around for a second as if he might find something important in the room, then he just left.

  “He’ll eat himself up about this,” Lucinda said softly, sitting down beside me on the bed.

  “How much would I have to pay one of these young orderlies,” I said, “to put a pillow over Albert’s face; rid us once and for all of that pestilence?”

  “Fever,” she answered sweetly, her hand on mine.

  “All right,” I responded, attempting to rally. “You do realize why I was asking about getting up out of this bed, right? I mean the real reason.”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “I have to be in my home on Saturday night,” I told her, taking her hand, “because I think I’m going to propose to my sweetheart then.”

  She shook her head and looked away, but there was a faint upturn at the corners of her mouth.

  “Why don’t you just tell me about your relation to Jelly Roll Morton?” she asked.

  I knew she was only deflecting the conversation, maybe even hoping to distract me from darker thoughts, or to keep herself from thinking about recent events.

  “Jelly Roll Morton,” I obliged her, “apparently fathered a child in New Orleans, around 1900 or so, who was called T-Bone, by a Caucasian prostitute called Eulalie Echo. When Jelly Roll moved to Chicago, this Eulalie followed him. When he refused to acknowledge her or her son, she became embittered—though actually I think the word embittered doesn’t even begin to describe what she became. She turned into a certain kind of personified hatred, partially fueled by drugstore cocaine. She then schooled her other children in that hatred.”

  “She had other children?”

  “By other fathers.” I nodded. “She had an entirely Caucasian son named Chester who seems to be reincarnated as young Albert who lies in a room close by, if you believe in that sort of thing.”

  “Oh.” She cast an uncomfortable look toward the door.

  “It’s uncertain what happened to young T-Bone in his formative years,” I continued, “but a good bet is that Eulalie abandoned him to be raised by others because she was ashamed of mixed-race progeny. Ordinarily a sad thing, I believe this particular case of abandonment might actually have been a blessing. T-Bone grew up with his father’s talent and without his mother’s insanity. He fought in World War I and ended up in Paris. He played jazz there, fell in love with a woman who saved his life, and they had a child, a daughter. That child—all evidence points to the conclusion that the child was my maternal great-great-grandmother, I think.”

  “No,” she slapped my hand, grinning. “Get out.”

  “Well,” I began, “I believe that my mother avoided telling me about it, tried to keep me from finding out, for some reason, but also possessed and kept, in our house, evidence that confirmed it—some of which was in the missing tin box from my mantel, remember that?”

  “Your mother.” She shook her head, grinning even bigger. “She is what you would have to call ‘a caution.’”

  I nodded. “I’ve only recently begun to reassess some of my perceptions about my mother. In her favor.” />
  “Good.” She stood up. “You can’t stay mad at her for the rest of your life. She was a wild woman. People who’re like that, they make better stories than they do parents, but look what an interesting person you turned out to be.”

  “Uh-huh,” I mumbled. “If I were any more ‘interesting’ I don’t think I could stand myself.”

  “Oh, don’t I know it.” She checked something about one of my IV bottles and then sighed. “Right. I’m going to see—I’m just going to find out a little bit more about Melissa.”

  “You don’t want to hear about my gris-gris curses?” I asked. “That’s what actually saved me this time, you know, not you. I really didn’t need your help.”

  She gave me a look. It was her only answer. She left without another word.

  The room, so suddenly empty, immediately took on the cold, depressed aspect of all hospital rooms: nondescript, vagrant; anxious. The random exhalations and flying molecules of a thousand other patients and their visitors layered the walls, pressed into the floor, clung to the curtains. Worry colored the air. Fear and pain and loss all crowded the invisible tension between light and shadow.

  I began to wonder how any human being ever got well in a hospital.

  I also began what I thought might be a common exercise for me in the ensuing months. I tried to go over certain events since I’d come out of my coma. Clearly, I had encountered a bit of difficulty discerning reality from hallucination, or even waking experiences from dreaming visions. How much of what I had thought was memory would turn out to be, upon examination, merely a dream, I wondered.

  Unbidden, a quote from Poe, entirely unwanted and inappropriate in the spring of the year, invaded my thinking. “My days have been a dream … all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”

  I considered that it might be comforting to some people, the idea that everything was an illusion. To me, a strong contrast between solid things and the ethereal world was essential. If we can only know light by having the darkness against which to judge it, then how much more would we need the tangible world to be clearly distinct from the realms of fantasy? A ghost is only a ghost if it had once been a living person.

  Unfortunately, that line of thinking troubled me unmercifully as I tried to discern fact from phantasm in my days since coming out of the deep, dark sleep.

  Did I dream my angel? Wasn’t there some hidden letter that my mother had given me? Where was that? And what about my parents’ strange, momentary escape attempt in the early 1960s, their bid to get out of Blue Mountain? Had that actually happened, or had I only imagined it as an explanation for my own flight from home. And if it happened, what if that had worked? What if my parents had never come back to Blue Mountain? What if they had stayed in the city, taken up politics, gotten real jobs? I would have been a completely different man.

  Oddly, that thought settled me a bit, because, clearly, I was not a completely different man. I was the man I was. I could not be other than that. It seemed so simple an understanding of life: rail if you like, but your life is exactly your life—only what it is. There really was no other thing that I could have been.

  In accepting that, I found some strange, physical release from the grip of a dark hand that had held me for most of my life, though I was at a loss to explain the feeling exactly.

  Everyone, I concluded, has something like a phantom life at one time or another. We all mourn for the life we were supposed to have had, but didn’t. We envy the life we should be living but can’t. We long for the life we’re going to have one day—when everything works out.

  But none of these lives, not one, is real. We make them up.

  “I cannot be other than I am,” I said out loud.

  Saying it out loud felt good. It made several of the shadows vanish; actually seemed to make the room brighter.

  Then it didn’t matter so much what was illusion and what was reality because both had conspired to create that moment, there in that bed, hooked up to machines, still alive despite every effort to the contrary.

  I was so delighted and distracted by those thoughts that I barely noticed the man slipping into my room.

  “You seem to be all right,” he said.

  I jumped straight up in my bed—like a startled cat.

  “Whoa, sorry,” he told me, smiling.

  He was dressed in a crisp black suit, an antique narrow tie, and a pale pink shirt the color of a sunrise: the Earl of Huntingdon. He had one hand behind his back, something big tucked into his outside coat pocket, and he was carrying a thick, battered briefcase.

  I exhaled. “You did startle me.”

  “Didn’t mean to.” He moved closer to the bed. “Came to say good-bye.”

  “You’re leaving.”

  “Going home.”

  I realized that a good portion of his heavy Creole accent was gone.

  “Your work here is done,” I said.

  “Almost.” He brought his arm around from his back and set a small envelope on the bed close to my hand.

  “What’s this?” I stared at it.

  “Look and see,” he told me.

  I hesitated, but couldn’t resist looking. The envelope looked familiar. When I picked it up I could see that it said, For Fever on the front.

  “Is this what I think it is?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “What do you think it is?”

  I opened it. It was the letter:

  Dear Fever,

  If your mother has given you this letter, you must already suspect something. You’re looking at some of the photographic evidence. Maybe you’ve had an angelic visitation. Don’t be alarmed. Everybody has those. If you decide to pursue this matter, you’re in for quite a ride. If you find out who the woman is in that photograph, your life will change. Doesn’t matter. Everything you think you know in this life? None of it is real.

  “But this letter is real.” I could hear the relief in my voice. “I was just wondering about it. It is real.”

  “Real as me,” he said.

  “Right. You wrote this.”

  “Got this too.” From his coat pocket he produced a tin box. It was the one rimmed in red, the one that had been hidden in my mother’s room. “Used to have peppermint candies in it a long time ago, I think. It’s from England.”

  I opened it: old letters, newspaper clippings, some photos, a few poems, and several legal documents.

  “That’s the evidence,” he said. “Most of it.”

  “Evidence.” I looked into his eyes. “Of what, exactly?”

  “You know what I mean.” He smiled.

  “You got this—how?”

  “Rather not say,” he demurred. “Albert had it. I got it back.” He stopped talking but I could tell there was more that he wanted to say.

  “There’s more of this stuff around, you know,” I said. “I think I got most of it from the so-called library over in Fit’s Mill.”

  “I know.” He folded his arms. “But it’s all about to be confiscated by the FBI. I slipped in, got everything that might be yours. Didn’t want you to lose your precious keepsakes. It’s all in there now.”

  “They’re not my precious keepsakes,” I protested.

  “They were precious to your mother.”

  “How would you know that?”

  “I knew your mother.” He smiled.

  “Yes, well,” I told him, shifting around in bed a little, “I’m not surprised. A lot of men knew my mother.”

  He shook his head. “Not like I did. But I’ll save all that for another time. Your mother wanted you to have these things.”

  “My mother pretended that she didn’t want me to have them, or ever find out what they meant.”

  He grinned. “You know why she did that. She understood that the surest way to make you do something was to tell you to do the opposite.”

  “And she always let me think these things pertained to my father.”

  “But they don’t.”

  “I know that now. Sh
e let me think it because she was under the impression that I liked my father better than I liked her, that I would consider these things more important if they’d come from him.”

  “Wonder why she thought that,” he asked, but it was really more of a rhetorical question.

  “Fine,” I groused, “I get it: you knew my mother, she told you that we never got along.”

  “Yes.”

  “But would it interest you to know that I’ve recently had a—had a change of heart about her. A bit.”

  “Isn’t that interesting?”

  “When you almost die,” I explained, settling back in my bed, “you naturally start thinking about death as an eventual destination instead of an intellectual abstract. When that happens, you want to know more about your history, or I did, anyway. Because if I can’t be sure where I’m going when life is over, I can at least find out where I came from before life started. In short, I think, you become interested in genealogy.”

  “I suppose,” he allowed. “Of course some people use a near-death experience to reflect on the events of their own lives, not the lives of their relatives.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, “you also begin to examine your life and make new assessments of old facts. For example—just one example—I’m currently trying to discern the difference between how I felt about something at the time it happened and how I feel about that same event now, in the present.”

  “I guess for a person like you,” he laughed, “self-examination is a daily chore.”

  “It is, it is.” I nodded a bit too enthusiastically. “But now I’m looking at—now I’m interested in the larger picture.”

  “I see.”

  “All right.” I folded my arms to match his. “If you’re not interested in that, I have a more specific question for you.”

  “And what is that?” His smile grew.

  “Are you going to tell me who you really are, or not?”

  “Probably not,” he answered casually.

  “So all this nonsense about being the Earl of Huntingdon,” I began.

  “Oh, no,” he interrupted, “that’s all true. I am a more-or-less direct descendant of Guichard d’Angle, the Earl of Huntingdon in the fourteenth century.”