by Regina Doman
“Hey, let’s go out,” Paul said suddenly. “I’m sick of the caf. What do you guys say we go to Mulligan’s?”
Leroy shook his head. “I’m broke and I have to study.”
“I’ll go,” Alex said. “Come with us, Ben?”
“Sure,” Fish said, pressing his temples.
“Good Irish pub,” Paul said, “and their food is pretty decent too.”
“Sounds great.”
Mulligan’s wasn’t crowded on the weeknight, and the beer was excellent. The three of them commiserated over their drinks while they waited in a private booth for their meal.
“So here we are, set back again,” Fish said, rather non-humorously, emptying his glass. “And once again, I find myself wondering if this is even worth spending time on.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Alex said. “We’ve just lost our prime suspect. That’s all.”
“Well, where are we going to find another candidate for the unknown person in the barn?” Fish asked.
“Maybe it was Nurse Lucille Johnson herself,” Alex said. “She might be deeper in this than she seems. Maybe she tried to throw suspicion onto the hospital to throw you off.”
“Hardly seems likely,” Fish said dubiously. “If she was the assailant, she’d probably have told me a different kind of story. Unless she’s really dense. I’m inclined to give up on her for now. Which leaves us with a paucity of suspects.”
“I’ve thought of another suspect,” Paul said quietly.
“Who?” Alex asked, sipping his beer.
“Me,” Paul said, emptying his drink. Fish and Alex looked up at him in surprise simultaneously. Paul’s expression was joking, but his eyes were pained.
There was silence. Fish found that his hands were tensed into fists.
“Why do you say that?” he said at last.
“Well, because I knew where Rose was going on the day she fell. I knew how to get to the old barn, because I drove her there the first time. I even knew about what time she would be there. Heck, I even encouraged her to go. I told her she should take some time to go and look around again, and she said she would. Then I was alone for the rest of the day. Theoretically, I was in my room in my nearly-deserted dorm doing a paper. But in reality, I was playing Zorkmaster most of the time. But you know, I could have been doing something else. Like, borrowing a car, going to the barn, hiding out, and waiting for Rose.”
There was silence. Then Alex said, “Whose car?”
“I could have borrowed someone’s—or even taken a bus and walked,” Paul said. “But you see my point.”
“Well, what would your motive be for doing this?” Fish asked, still not relaxing.
Paul looked down at his hands. “Jealousy,” he said at last. “Maybe.”
“Regarding Rose?”
Paul nodded. “Because I could see I was losing the girl I’d been pursuing all semester to another guy.”
Fish’s face reddened, but he kept his expression cool. “You mean me, I assume?”
Still looking down, Paul nodded. Alex looked uncomfortable. Fish guessed he knew about this situation already.
“Well,” Fish leaned back in his seat and ruminated. “If that was the case, Paul—if you were in a murderous jealous rage, why would you go after Rose? Why not go after me? Rose could have easily told you how to get to me. You’d be a lot better off all around if you managed to bump me off. You could do me in pretty easily with your aikido, especially if you caught me alone at the National Park, which is where I was when Rose fell. Then I would be out of the way and you could have another shot at winning Rose. Wouldn’t you have thought of that?”
“I guess I might have,” Paul admitted, flushing.
“The only reason you would have gone after Rose is if it were more important to you to hurt her than to get her back. You know, ‘I can’t have her, so no one gets her.’ That sort of thing. I don’t know, Paul. That doesn’t seem like your character. You might have had the opportunity, but you don’t seem to have a particularly compelling motive.”
“I just thought I ought to bring that up,” Paul confessed, playing with his napkin. “Just to be fair. I didn’t think either of you were really suspecting me. But maybe you should have been.”
Alex laughed out loud. “Burrito, I know you so well. I live with you, for Pete’s sake. If you were a psychopath, it would have shown up before this. If you wanted to kill or maim anyone, you probably would have experimented on me first. Plus you have more against me than against Ben. All those times I beat you at Zorkmaster. And the Heather Kohlman affair…”
“Actually, that’s true,” Paul admitted.
“All right then,” Fish said, looking up as the server approached with their food. “Let’s write this off.”
As they left the bar a while later, Fish turned to Paul and offered him his hand. “Thanks.”
Paul shook it, a bit perplexed. “For what?”
Fish said, “For having the guts to tell me. I should return the favor—I confess I was pretty jealous of you, too.”
Paul shuffled his feet. “I didn’t want to be in competition with anyone. Sorry if I let it show.”
“You didn’t,” Fish said. “But I’m sure I have, on occasion. I have a jealous temperament, and it gets the better of me at times. I’m sorry.”
“Hey, it’s no problem. I just stepped into a situation without realizing it,” Paul said.
“What situation?”
“You know, you and Rose. She really liked you best, Ben. I’m sorry I interfered.”
“You weren’t interfering. I had told her I wasn’t interested in her, and I wasn’t making any moves,” Fish said, turning towards his car. Paul fell into step beside him.
“I know. But she was waiting for you. I could tell,” Paul paused and looked at him. “I bet she still is.”
Fish drove out to see Rose after dinner, but when he reached Graceton Hall, he was stopped at the door by Dr. Murray, who was talking with a thin blond doctor. After an instant, Fish recognized her as Dr. Schaffer.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Denniston—we ended visiting hours early today,” Dr. Murray told him briskly. “No visits this evening.”
“Oh,” he paused, his keys in his hand. Having driven out so far, he was unwilling to turn around and leave immediately.
“Do you mind if I take a walk around the grounds before I go?” he asked. Since the college students had gotten the staff so cross before, he thought it was prudent to be careful.
Dr. Schaffer seemed about to object, but Dr. Murray said, “That’s fine.”
“I just want to stretch my legs,” he assured her, “See you tomorrow.”
“See you tomorrow,” she smiled. “I’ll tell Rose you said hello.”
He walked into the woods, alone, solitary. Now he didn’t even have Rose’s presence, which he had been looking forward to, to assuage him.
Tramping through the dead and rotted leaves and occasional heaps of still-melting snow, he looked up, from time to time, at the windows of Graceton Hall. The structure itself was lovely, if a bit Gothic, and Bear had remarked on the quality of its stonework. Dr. Murray had told him it had once been a mansion, donated to a medical foundation and developed into the existing facility. On the medical wings, the rows of windows looked down at him like many half-shut eyes, dimmed with shades.
He made a huge circle around the building, trying to locate the window to Rose’s room. At last he made it out, a golden square looking down over the woods behind the hall. He stood in the black strip of the shadow of a tall tree, looking up.
Beside the portal doors,
Buttress'd from moonlight, stands he, and implores
All saints to give him sight...
But for one moment in the tedious hours,
That he might gaze and worship all unseen;
Perchance speak, kneel, touch, kiss—
in sooth such things have been.
That passage from Keats was about the knight in the poem daring
death to steal one glimpse of his love... He could picture Rose, asleep in her bed, oblivious to the activities of the medical personnel around her. What was she thinking? Was she aware on some level of what went on around her, as some people in comas were said to do? Or was she walking in a dream world, conversing with minotaurs and fairies, and all the people of her archetypal reality?
A blank loneliness came over him, comfortless, and he turned away.
As he tramped through the woods, he saw two staff standing outside on the flagstone porch in the back, smoking, the back door propped open with a stone.
He thought about going back to his car, but he was still feeling internal turbulence. I should let it just come and pass over me, he told himself. If I keep on repressing it, I’ll only get another nightmare, or another headache.
As he passed through the woods as quietly as he could, he caught sight of a security guard taking a furtive swig from a bottle. The night breeze wafted the scent towards him, and his memory opened, relentlessly.
In the cellar, there had been a smell of mustiness, and alcohol.
Freet had been sitting in front of him, sloshing brandy from a bottle into an ornate golden chalice. His own hands were tied in front and suspended above him, around a hook on the far side of a wooden pillar, so that his arms hugged its angular sides and his head was pulled up against the wood. His teeth gritted on the tight band of cloth that gagged him. He was kneeling, his ankles tied together, and he had been in that position for hours.
Now Freet raised the sacred vessel to his thin lips and drank it, watching him the entire time over the rim with sardonic eyes.
You still haven’t told me yet, Benedict.
Finishing his drink, Freet ran his tongue around the edge of his mouth, licked the golden rim of the cup, then deliberately spat into it. He tossed it away with a blasphemous phrase. It clanged on the cement floor, and rolled against Fish’s bare knee.
You can’t hold out on me forever. You haven’t the strength. You know that. We’re equally matched, but I’ve got the better of you now.
Now Fish kicked at the bits of branches in the parking lot as he walked. Equally matched. Freet had always made a big deal about that. They were the same height, the same physique. Partners, Freet used to say tauntingly. But Fish had resisted any partnership, turning it inevitably into a contest between predator and prey.
Tell me now, or we’re going to do this again.
He heard Freet’s voice whispering in his ear as his face was pressed into the splintering wood, his own teeth clenched so tightly against the pain that he cut his cheeks, and the blood ran into his mouth.
Now you tell me.
And he had shaken his head violently, the only resistance he was still capable of making.
Then this will happen again. You know you can’t win. You’re just like me, though you don’t want to face that fact. It’s pitiful to see you denying it. Struggle will only prolong your agony. But perhaps you enjoy self-torture? Many Catholics do.
Fish paced savagely around his car, tired but almost afraid to stop moving. Freet had said someday he would beg for it. And at times it seemed to Fish that all his defiance had been useless, as useless as his first interrupted escape from the ropes, which had ended with his recapture and being beaten senseless. The hunger, thirst, and loneliness that Freet had cursed him with still dogged his heels, even now.
You’re different from him, though. Rose’s voice came back to him. Your eyes are different. You have a different kind of soul.
He looked up at the row of windows in the patients’ wing, but they were all dark now. The nighttime routine had ended. All was still in the palace of sleep, but he was outside, cut off from the peace of her presence by a hedge of thorns, alone. And the thorns wouldn’t part for him. If he dared them, he would only be torn to shreds.
Only the pure of heart shall see God.
Rose, he didn’t doubt, could see God. But right now, he couldn’t even see her.
Hers
She lay beside the palace window, looking out at the eternal night of the realm of sleep, waiting for him.
Was he staying away because somehow he knew she hadn’t been able to keep his secret? She prayed that if he ever found out, he would forgive her. Now she thought about him constantly in the night world as she lay pinned in her bed, looking at the moon tapestry, waiting for the execution that she knew would come eventually. Sometimes in her deeper sleep, she saw Fish as she had found him in the cellar, tied to that pillar by more ropes than she would have thought anyone would have needed to keep him down. But he was wrestling against them with all the strength that was in him. That, she remembered, was when Freet had been trying to kill her, in front of him.
She remembered thinking at the time, I mustn’t die. Because the only reason Freet is killing me is because he knows it will hurt Fish. So if I don’t die, I can stop him from hurting Fish.
But she hadn’t been able to save Fish from all the harm that had been done to him before.
What are you thinking about? The serpent had slid inside and was fondling her arm before she quite realized it. Since she had no feeling in her limbs, she only noticed the serpent once it appeared in her line of vision.
Him.
He’s not coming, you know. He’ll never come.
She could feel the tears sliding onto her lashes.
I’m sorry to have to destroy your hopes… There’s no way you can escape from the coma. And even if it were possible, this man can’t save you. Why, if he’s been violated the way you told me, that’s a debilitating psychological condition. And his other problems. He won’t come for you. He can’t. He’s an emotional wreck, too caught up in his own hurts to be a hero. Men like him are perennial victims, not knights in shining armor. I hate to see you waiting for him.
The shadow was behind her, at her shoulder, whispering in her sleep-clouded ears.
Trust me. I’ve met men like him before. They’re unpredictable, and sometimes unstable. They’re victims, and they use their victimization as an excuse to be selfish. And to victimize others.
So he’s excluded from normal life forever?
You could say that, yes. His future is the psychopathology ward. Or the jail cell. Some scars never heal. And he sounds like he has a lot of them.
But Christ had scars too, even on His risen Body. Wounds in this life become glory in the next.
Have you ever considered that you might have an unhealthy fascination with sickness and pain? No man like that is going to be able to save you. He can’t even save himself.
She lifted her head, closing her eyes against further tears and resolving. I believe in him. He always comes for me when I’m in trouble. And I know he will come again.
She turned half-towards the shadow. You hate men, don’t you, serpent? Perhaps you’ve never met a truly good man. But I know that a good man, particularly one who has suffered, can change the world.
You’re in the realm of fairy tales again.
Or in the land that is really real.
Or just mired in the irrational hopes of the feminine imagination.
Rose had to smile. Yes, perhaps some of those too.
20
…The story of the beautiful sleeping “Briar-Rose” went about the country, and spread abroad.
HIS
Midterms were happening, and both Fish and the Mercy College students were affected. A mixture of busyness and discouragement meant they dropped communication for a time.
Fish was struggling with another persistent headache and a paper on Postmodernism when he got a phone call from Kateri.
“We’re going to do something,” she said importantly.
“About what?”
“About Robert Graves Memorial Hospital. And the homeless man.”
“Who?”
“You didn’t hear about this? I keep forgetting you’re not on our campus. His name’s Milton Brown. He was hit by a truck three weeks ago, and he’s been in a coma in the hospital eve
r since. A hospital volunteer who’s a nursing student told the pro-lifers in this area that she thinks he’s being neglected. He didn’t even have a nametag or a chart for a long time, until the volunteer complained. The media don’t want to do anything about it—they say the case is too vague. So we’re going to do something.”
“Such as?” he asked, rubbing his neck muscles.
“We’re having a sit-in. Saturday. Do you want to join us?”
“I don’t think I can,” Fish said, ruminating. “You’re probably going to get arrested, aren’t you?”
“Probably.”
“I don’t think I should. My police record is a bit shaky, and I’m not sure I would do much good to your cause if I were involved.”
“That’s fine. I understand. Anyhow, I’m trying to recruit some of the others. We’re going into the hospital to his room and we’re going to chain ourselves to the bedrail.”
“And so draw attention to his case.”
“Yes. And to draw attention to Robert Graves Memorial’s deplorable record on human rights.”
“Are you still set on going after Dr. Prosser?” he asked.
“In my mind, she’s still guilty until proven utterly innocent.”
“A bit extreme, isn’t that?” he asked wearily. “You Catholics tend to look at everything in these Thomistic categories. If so-and-so doesn’t believe that human life is sacred, ergo, that person would push Rose off a hayloft to her grave injury. Real life just isn’t like that. Most people aren’t intellectuals—they don’t make a strong connection between what they believe and how they act. That’s why we have so many religious hypocrites today—and thankfully, most people with insane, destructive ideas never act on them.”
“You’re forgetting something else, Fish. Not all Catholics are Thomists.”
“You’ve lost me,” Fish said.
“We don’t all think in these types of categories. Also, we’re dealing with something a bit more concrete here. Dr. Prosser doesn’t simply believe that human life is just a commodity—she and her staff actually treat life as a commodity, doing abortions, euthanasia, whatever they can get away with. So there’s no dysfunction between her beliefs and her actions. She thinks and lives in harmony. A rare person in our times.”