Robert sat back in the chair, took a few swigs of the scotch-and-coffee, and stared at the television mounted on the wall. Some mystery movie was playing now. Andy Griffith (as yet another small-town sheriff) was in a graveyard with several deputies, none of them Don Knotts. The camera moved in for a close-up of a headstone whose inscription could not be read.
That’ll be all of us someday, he thought. Sure, there would be mourners at the end, friends, family, old lovers you thought had forgotten about you, maybe someone you once had a crush on in ninth grade, and they would gather, and they would weep, and they would talk among themselves afterward and say, “I remember the way he used to….” Your belongings would be divided, given away, or tossed on a fire, your picture moved to the back of a dusty photo album, and, eventually, those left behind would die, too, and no one would remain to remember your face, your middle name, even the location of your grave. The seasons would change, the elements would set to work, rain and heat and cold and snow would smooth away the inscription on the headstone until it was no longer legible, and then, later—days, weeks, decades—someone who happened by for whatever reason would glance down, see the faded words and dates, mutter “I wonder who’s buried here,” then go on about their business. No one would be left to say that this man was important, or this woman was kind, or that anything they strove for was worthwhile.
He had no idea how long he’d been sitting there when Steinman came up to him and wordlessly put a hand on his shoulder.
Robert took a last sip of his now ice-cold coffee, then looked up. He opened his mouth to speak—he was certain of that, of opening his mouth...yes, of that much he was sure—but nothing would come out; it was still as if every functioning organ in his body had been stolen away without his noticing, leaving only this ineffective, meaningless shell.
“One of the nurses paged me when she saw you were still here,” said Steinman.
Robert managed to stammer: “Wh-what...what time...how long have I been here?”
“It’s been about two hours since your wife and daughter were sent down.”
Sent down. What a euphemistic way to put it.
Robert wiped his eyes, then began patting himself down in search of his car keys. “I, uh...I’m sorry, it’s just that I....”
Steinman took a seat next to him. “Take all the time you need, Mr. Londrigan.”
Robert nodded, not really hearing Steinman’s words. “You know, I told her that I loved her more than God, then had the nerve to feel hurt when it didn’t make her swoon. If I’d’ve been thinking, I would have realized that she knew I don’t really believe in God, so I was basically telling her that I loved her more than nothing.” A bitter laugh, tinged with anger. “Am I every woman’s dream hubby, or what?”
The two men sat in silence for another minute, perhaps two, and then Steinman slowly got to his feet, pulling Robert up with him. “Don’t say anything or make a scene, Mr. Londrigan, please.”
“You throwing me out?”
“Not at all, just...look, please follow me, all right?”
“Where—”
“—please. Just come with me. Now.”
It took every last ounce of strength he could muster to get fully to his feet and follow Steinman, but it was something to do, a purpose of sorts, a direction for a directionless soul to take, forcing him to concentrate on physically getting himself from one place to another. As they walked, he now and again was moved to reflect on his situation—to the effect that he already regarded himself as half-removed, as partially absent, from the activity (life?) going on around him. He tried to get himself to believe that it was literally true, that if at this moment he were to be photographed, when the film was developed it would probably reveal only his outline, or maybe it would show him to be merely a grey, semi-transparent shadow.
They stopped outside of Steinman’s office. “Please wait here,” said the doctor, then went inside and closed the door most of the way. Robert leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. He wanted to slump to the floor and fall asleep right here, just a quick nap, that’s all, forty winks, no more and no less, just enough to regroup so that he could awaken refreshed and ready to do all of the responsible things that needed doing.
He became aware of Steinman’s voice inside the office: “Oh, don’t tell me that you’re actually reciting policy to me?” The man sounded irritable, downright testy. Probably needed to catch forty winks himself, no more, no less. “Yes, I’ll assume full responsibility, just have everything ready. We’re on our way.” The sound of a receiver being slammed none-too-gently into its cradle, and then there was the good doctor, right next to Robert in the hallway. “Please follow me.”
He guided Robert through a maze of doors and corridors until they reached a door that required both Steinman’s card-key and his entering a security code. They got onto an elevator that slowly took them down, down, down.
“Alice in the rabbit’s hole, huh?” said Robert. He looked at Steinman. “Denise’s favorite book.”
The good doctor remained silent.
The elevator stopped just three floors above the Gates of Hell, and the two men emerged into a long, dimly-lit hallway whose floors shone like black glass. They went straight for several moments, then turned right and walked toward a slash of too-bright light that spilled from the small crack between two swinging aluminum doors.
Robert slowed his steps. “Is that...Jesus, is this what I think it is?”
Steinman came to a full stop and turned to face him. “Yes, Mr. Londrigan, it’s exactly what you think it is.”
“But why do I—”
Steinman raised one hand, palm-out, silencing the question. “Wait here for just a moment.” He quickly went through the doors. Robert leaned against the wall, noting that the walls down here were much cooler than those up-top. He closed his eyes and listened to the muted voices beyond the door. A few moments later two men dressed in lab coats stepped into the hallway, eyeing him. Steinman followed and pointed to an exit. “Go outside, take fifteen minutes on me. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.”
“I don’t got ‘em,” said one of the men.
“Oh, here,” said Robert, reaching into his coat pocket and removing the crumpled pack of cigarettes. He offered them to the two men. “You can, uh...you can keep ‘em.” A shrug and an attempt at a smile. “I promised the wife I’d quit.”
The men looked at Steinman, then one of them accepted the smokes with a perfunctory “Thanks,” and they were gone.
Steinman waved Robert over, putting a hand firmly against the square of his back and helping him get through the swinging doors; then it was past a pair of gunmetal desks and through another set of swinging doors—these much heavier than the first—into a chilly room where the walls were shiny metal doors. In the center of the room was a series of metal tables with drains. At the end of the row was a plastic curtain that had been pulled across the length of its track to shield whatever lay behind.
“I want to apologize again,” said Steinman, “about my being so abrupt with you earlier. As I said, we were quite pressed for time.”
“Were you able to—?”
“Yes, Mr. Londrigan. It was an unusually successful harvesting. Because of what you’ve done, a lot of lives are going to be saved and made fuller. I hope you’ll find some measure of comfort in that in the days to come.”
Robert nodded his head and stared at the curtain. “But for the moment....”
“Yes,” repeated Steinman. “But for the moment.” He patted Robert’s shoulder and gestured for him to move forward. “Go on, Mr. Londrigan. I’ve arranged for you to have ten minutes alone in here. Go and say good-bye to your family. I’ll be out in the corridor if you need...I’ll be right outside.”
Robert waited until Steinman left, then took a deep breath, looked at his shaking hands, wiped the perspiration from his forehead, stepped through the opening and—
—and if the man I once was were here now, I suspect he would deny wh
at went through his mind in those few seconds it took for him to step forward, but I know what was going through his mind, and he’s not here to stop me from telling you:
He was remembering one night when he was home with Denise, the two of them sitting in bed, she with one of many baby books she’d been reading since the doctor had given them the news, he with some novel he’d been trying to read—a best-selling legal thriller that read like any other best-selling legal thriller—and he realized that Denise was talking to him and he hadn’t been listening.
“What was that?” he asked.
“I asked if you remembered that story you guys ran a few weeks ago, about that behavior modification seminar at OSU?”
He shrugged. “Vaguely.”
“Well, I remember it. I thought it was interesting, especially that whole concept of consensual reality—the fact that we’re trained from infancy to see the same world our parents see? I even went to the library and found a couple of books about it.” She grabbed a thick textbook and flipped to a previously-marked section, her voice taking on the tone of a teacher: “Did you know that babies make every conceivable sound in their goo-goo-ing? Impossible Russian vowels, countless different clicks, multi-tones of Chinese, guttural tones of Basque—you name the language, it’s there in those sounds. So how come it finally settles on its parents’ language?”
He smiled at her—God she was beautiful—and touched her cheek. “I give up, Teach, why do they settle?”
She grinned at him, proud of herself for grasping this theory. “Extinction.”
“Say what?”
“That’s what the process is called, ‘Extinction.’ If a baby makes a sound that isn’t positively reinforced, it stops making that sound. It will repeat the sounds it hears, but it drops all others, then eventually loses them altogether. And most of these ‘extincted’ sounds can’t be re-learned as an adult. Isn’t that something? You know, I remember reading once in Sunday school that when a child is born, it possesses the knowledge of the one language that was originally spoken by mankind before that whole Tower of Babel thing, only it has to teach itself that language by combining all the sounds it makes—the multi-tones of Chinese, the Basque—”
“—the clicks and what-have-you,” said Robert.
“Yes! Only we—parents—make them stop it. Wouldn’t it be interesting if all parents were to let their newborns just go on making those noises? Maybe we’d get back mankind’s original one language.”
Robert nodded. “I guess maybe so, hon, but I don’t see what this has to do with—”
“—it has everything to do with it, because Extinction isn’t just restricted to the sounds a baby makes; it can be applied to behavioral patterns, too. Don’t you see how easy it can be to use consensual reality against a child? To take a first smile, a first kiss, a first laugh, and make them seem unacceptable? It’s too easy to ruin all the things that keep a child’s wonder alive. It’s too easy to taint a child’s view of the world and of itself. Do you realize how easy it is to take a child—a helpless, trusting child—and twist its view of reality?”
He opened his mouth to speak but she placed two of her fingers against his lips and shook her head. “Shhh. Listen; I want to tell you about this daydream I’ve been having lately, okay? In it, I’m still myself as a child, sometimes a teenage girl, sometimes stuck in that horrible land of twelve-years-old, but the point is, wherever it is that I start, I always come to this point in my life where things are about to go terribly wrong—you know, that moment when you realize that childhood wonder has no place in your grown-up world? But in this daydream, I hear this voice—like in that old Monty Python sketch?—that says, ‘Start again!’ and I’m sent right back to the moment before the veil of wonder is lifted from my eyes, right? Only this time I know it’s about to happen and I take action to make sure that I don’t lose that spark of childhood wonder. Cool huh? It’s like Instant Karma.”
“Or Dharma for one.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Don’t make fun of me. Can’t you see why I brought all this up? So you’ll understand why I get so angry sometimes.
“I think about the life you had as a child, and the life I had, and realize that more than our baby sounds were extincted—we were trained to see the same world our parents saw, all right. My mother’s a manic-depressive who drove my father to an early grave while I was still a baby, and your dad was an alcoholic who’d pound you and your mother into hamburger any time he got too drunk. So what do we have? An emotional black hole on my side, fear and violence on yours.”
“You saw your share of violence, too,” said Robert, suddenly very much afraid for his wife. “C’mon, hon, I’ve seen those scars on you.”
“—and there’s our consensual reality—no treehouses or tea parties with dolls or ghost stories told by your friends around a campfire, none of those things that showed you it was all right to laugh, to have fun and enjoy being a kid. We were saddled with problems no kid should’ve had to deal with, and by the time we’d either gotten a handle on things or gotten the hell out of those environments, our childhoods were over. Bang. Gone. Extincted. We were robbed, and it pisses me off because I’m afraid that we’ll....”
“We’ll what?” said Robert, tenderly.
When Denise spoke again her voice was thick with dread; she sounded so tiny, so distant…a faraway echo dwindling into nothingness.
“Mother’s got two pictures that she always hangs together. One’s a photograph of her and my father on their wedding day. The other is a small painting of a battlefield. There were bodies and parts of bodies scattered everywhere, a lot of them torn open or blown in half or tangled in barbed-wire, there were piece of bodies inside other bodies...it was horrible. But there was one man left standing, his head wrapped in a dirty bandage, and you looked at him and just knew he was looking for anyone still alive. In a far corner of the painting, directly opposite where he stood, there was this hand reaching up through the bodies, like whoever it belonged to was scrabbling to the top, trying to be found. I used to wonder what she was trying to tell me with those two pictures. About the time I turned twelve, after her second suicide attempt, I finally figured it out. Love isn’t a smiling bride who holds a colorful bouquet and gazes lovingly at her husband; it’s a corpse-littered battlefield where the walking wounded have to keep searching for survivors or die themselves.”
He reached over to brush a strand of hair from her face and—
—pulled the curtain closed behind him.
He turned to face his family.
Denise lay on one of the metal tables with drains, her body covered by a sheet that had been turned down to expose her head, neck, and shoulders. He stared at her pale skin, tracing the crescent-shaped scars on her shoulders with his gaze. He’d always wondered how she’d gotten those scars—had even joked that her shoulders looked as if she’d once worn a bra with straps made out of piano wire.
She’d never told him how she’d gotten those scars, or any of the others.
He’d counted them once—or, rather, tried to; he’d gotten up to eight when she rolled over, opened her eyes, and realized what he was doing. She’d made him sleep on the couch that night, and he’d never brought up the subject again.
“There was so much about you I didn’t know,” he whispered to the corpse.
Next to her sat a smaller table, something that reminded him of a hotel room-service cart, and on top of that cart was a small plastic black bag with a zipper running down the center.
He turned from his dead wife’s face, unable to look at it, and touched the black bag.
After a moment, he remembered to breathe.
His fingers grasped the zipper.
Breathing means in and out, pal; in and out.
He slowly pulled the zipper downward—it stuck only once—until his daughter was revealed to him.
“...ohgod...”
They had left her open. He stared into the hollow chasm of her center and found himself marveling
at the intricate architecture of her spine, then gently, with great tenderness, he lifted her from the bag, feeling the cold, raw, exposed area on her back where the flesh had been removed. He examined her and saw that the same had been done to sections of her legs, the flesh removed with precision, along with cartilage and tendons, as well. He glimpsed bone through what tissue remained and forced himself to not look at it. He brought her closer. The harsh overhead lights gleamed off something rolling back and forth deep within her: a small puddle of dark liquid. Bobbing from side to side in the liquid was a laminated blue strip with numbers on it.
It wasn’t until he held her tiny body against his chest that his heart shattered once and for all and he was overwhelmed at the strength of his love for her, this small, cold, dead thing who hadn’t lived long enough to receive her name, who’d fought so hard to stay alive these past six months, and who’d been forced out into the hospital-bright sterility of a waiting death.
Something expanded in his chest and snaked its way up to his throat, trapping him in its grip and pressing in with its thumbs oh...so...slowly.
The first breath to escape him hissed out, dry and desert-lonely; the second emerged as more of a splutter, speckling his chin with saliva; but it was the third breath that undid him: a tight, wet groan that strained the cords in his neck and squeezed his throat to intensify the building pressure in his head until his eyes began leaking, then the groan turned into a soft, nearly inaudible, steady wail of pain and loss and sorrow and ohgod so much regret. He pulled in a soggy, ragged breath as he opened one of her small hands and wrapped her fragile fingers around one of his own, then turned toward his dead wife, an unsteady smile trespassing on his face.
In Silent Graves Page 4