Waking the Dead

by Scott Spencer

  “I don’t know how I did it,” she said, very softly.

  “Did what?” I asked.

  “I don’t know how I stayed away from you for so long.”

  And then, as if by inspiration, I took her hand and pressed it to my lips, her strong, cold hand, which still tasted of her glove and smelled of her own specific mortality. I held her hand and felt her fingers tightening around my hand, her grip going fierce. It confused me for a moment: there had always been an element of sheer strength in her most unguarded moments. When she loved you most deeply she didn’t melt in your arms but grabbed you so tightly your breath broke in half like an icy twig. And feeling those fingers pressing into me made me look into her eyes with a question in mine. Her eyes seemed not really to be looking at me, or at least not searching for anything in my face; they, instead, merely presented themselves and invited me to know them. And I did see what she wanted me to: she had changed. Suffering and secrecy, assignations, too many nights alone, missed meals, broken sleep, and the inevitable and irreversible lack of concern for her own self, her own privileges, her own comforts, all that excess baggage that had to be tossed over if the vessel was going to make it through the turbulent waters—good God, I suddenly felt unequal to the task of gazing so boldly upon her.

  “How did you get in here?” I asked.

  “It’s not as hard as they think it is. Anyhow, I’ve always looked like a secretary.”

  “You don’t look like a secretary,” I said.

  She pursed her lips, colored slightly. “Oh, I know what I look like,” she said. “There’s nothing to do about it.” She smiled. Her teeth; it was the graying, broken smile of a poor woman.

  We heard footsteps from the corridor and the cheerful tuneless whistle of an armed man, accompanied by the jingle of keys. Sarah put up her hand to silence me, as if I might do something stupid. This was between her and them and I was instantly reduced to a civilian observer. I indicated with my thumb that we ought to step away from the door and go into my private office further in. And the act of walking, the feel of the floor beneath my shoes, the sight of the suddenly familiar things, brought me closer to my everyday self so by the time we were in my office and I was leaning against my desk I could face her and say, “Did you have to do it this way?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes.” She had unbuttoned her black wool coat and beneath it she wore a slightly dingy white blouse with a high lacy collar, such as one of her sisters might wear. She was very thin now; she seemed to have no breasts at all.

  “Why? I think I deserved better than that. We were lovers.”

  “It wasn’t about you and it wasn’t about me, Fielding,” she said.

  “It could have been.” In all honesty, I don’t think even then I knew exactly what I meant by that, but saying it nonetheless ignited within me one of those wildfires that burn so deeply when we feel we have been wronged. My lips trembled and I wanted to turn away from her— yet I wanted, also, for her to have to witness my agony.

  “It seemed to me,” she said, in a perfectly level voice, a voice over which she had so much control that she could even shade in a touch of pity, “that we took it as far as we could.”

  “I don’t think that. I don’t think that at all. You tore my life in half.”

  “No, I didn’t. You’re just saying that because you think you have to. Look at you. Look what you’ve done with your life.”

  “You despise it.”

  “Of course I don’t. I’m so proud of you. You did what you set out to do. You know how rare that is? I didn’t tear your life in half, Fielding. Perhaps I tore mine, though.”

  “Then we’ll put it back together,” I said, turning on a dime from emptiness to utter hope, like a child can.

  She shook her head. “I threw the other half away,” she said.

  “I am the other half. I’m right here.”

  She smiled and put her hand on her chest, taking a deep breath, as if the force of my personality winded her, as if the demands of my heart were like a steep flight of stairs which she was required to scale while holding the unwieldy burden of her own life. She seemed at that moment an emotional coward.

  “Are you afraid of me?” I asked, and now I smiled because if that’s all it was then it could all be set straight.

  “No,” she said. “Not of you.”

  “How long can you stay? Here. Right now. With me.”

  “You’re in a position to do so much good now, Fielding.”

  “Is that why you’re here?”

  “Can’t we just talk?” she asked. “You don’t have to question me.” She took off her coat and then looked around for a place to lay it down. There was only my desk and the chair behind it, but she didn’t want to walk past me so she turned and laid the coat down in a bare corner. She was on her haunches, folding the coat carefully over itself, as if she were packing it away and didn’t want it to wrinkle. She was wearing a gray skirt and a broad, shiny black belt. The tail of her blouse came out of her skirt and a patch of bumpy spine showed. She was wearing black boots with worn heels; the backs of her boots were streaked with mud, pale spidery lines, as faint as fossils. It was odd to see her taking such care with her coat. I had been remembering her as someone who just let her things fly, content every week or two to rake them into a pile and sort through. But that was life in the material world, then. She now thought of her coat as something that would have to last her forever.

  “I think you know a lot more about me than I do about you right now,” I said.

  “I don’t know that there’s anything really worth knowing about me you can find out by asking a lot of questions,” she said.

  “That sounds very, very wise,” I said, letting a little of the acid out.

  “Sorry. Occupational hazard.”

  “Are you here now? Here for good?” I asked, putting up my hands to indicate that I accepted in general the idea of no questions, but that I would just have to ask a couple of quick ones.

  “No.”

  “You are with someone, aren’t you.”

  “Fielding.”

  “I’ve been with someone. Isaac Green has a niece. I’ve been living with her.”

  “It’s not a chess game, Fielding. I’m not going to match moves with you.”

  “I’m not matching moves. I’m asking you a question. My God, how can you not answer me?”

  “Because every answer will only confuse things. There’s nothing I can say one way or the other that can make much sense.”

  “Great.Then what should we do? Just stare at each other and communicate telepathically?”

  “You have to stop asking around about me, Fielding,” she said. “I beg you.”

  “What was I supposed to do? I didn’t know where you were. I didn’t even know if you were.”

  “It’s not secure. You understand. If you create a lot of curiosity it could make it very hard.”

  “Who knows about this? I know Mileski does. Who else?”

  “Please don’t ask any more questions,” she said, flushing with frustration. She closed her hands tightly.

  And I thought to myself: Is this what you wanted her back for? To accuse and torment her? Where you really belong is on your knees. I stepped toward her and took her hands again and brought them both to my lips and then she slipped one of them out of my grip and reached around and softly touched my nape, brushing the hair away and touching the warm neglected skin, and I looked into her eyes and felt a thud inside, a solid, harmonious sensation, as if I were an arrow that had at long last hit its mark.

  “Are you all right, Sarah?” I asked her, almost in a whisper.

  “I’m good, Fielding. I really am.”

  “You know,” I said. “I think I probably read about you in the newspapers, without knowing it’s you. Those people who are bringing in Latin Americans and hiding them in churches, giving them sanctuary.”

  She looked at me, not saying anything.The dark pupils of her eyes expanded and contracted,
as if keeping pace with the beating of her heart.

  “It’s a good thing you’re doing, Sarah.”

  “There’s so much that needs to be done,” she said.

  “Is it easier for you? I mean … now.”

  “It’s never easy,” she said.

  “I miss you, Sarah.”

  “I miss you, too,” she said. “I miss us.” Her mouth looked very stern, almost angry, and she lowered her face. Tears tipped out of her eyes, but her cry was so silent I wasn’t aware of it until she raised her chin and I saw the streaks on her face.

  “We’re going to work something out,” I said.

  “What I’m doing is very wrong,” she said. “I shouldn’t be here. I’m being irresponsible. I made my decision and I kept to it. It was never easy but knowing it was the right thing made it … possible. And I thought that wanting you would simply go away. I did think that. And others said it would.” She took a deep breath and tried to smile. “They gave me a money-back guarantee that in six months I would stop thinking about you.” She raised one finger but then her attempt at joking herself out of her feelings collapsed and she looked exhausted, devastated.

  I put my hand on her face and kept it there and when she didn’t move back or shake her head I came slowly toward her, slowly, and kissed her carefully on her lips. She allowed herself to be kissed and I kissed her more, hoping that something would happen and she would respond, but all she did was not prevent it and finally I pulled away. I stood there looking at her and my heart seemed to have gotten awfully large because not only could I feel it beating in my throat but in my legs, too. I wasn’t angry about her lack of response. I wasn’t even disappointed. Two months ago, could I have imagined having what I had right now? The terrible curtain of grief that had separated us for those years had been torn down and nothing—no separation, no conceivable kind of separation—could put it up again.

  As I stepped back I seemed to draw her toward me. She reached out and grabbed me with a terrible strength. Her face suddenly loomed next to mine like a moon in a dream, a moon lured back to the warm miseries of the planet from which it had eons ago escaped. And now her lips were crushed against mine in a powerful, open kiss and I kissed her back the best I could, though I felt suddenly fragile and out of my element and her kiss continued and it continued until it was not really a kiss at all but some desperate stab at merging us, at putting my breath in her lungs and hers in mine: to turn us into twins joined at the soul, true lovers, sweet ineffable monsters.

  When at last she stepped away from me, I couldn’t help asking: “When you leave here, am I ever going to see you again?”

  “I don’t know, Fielding.” She held onto my hand and pulled at me, leading me toward the window. It was dark; the lamplight in my office illuminated the raindrops as they hit against the glass. Sarah found the cord to the Venetian blinds and lowered them. They said shhhhh as they fell.Then she went to the lamp on my desk and switched it off.The entire room tipped into darkness and I blinked, fighting for a glimpse of her.

  “Sarah?” I said, almost expecting her not to be there any longer.

  She took my hand again and drew herself into me. I could feel the bones of her chest against mine. The pointed bone of her hip grazed against my cock and then she kissed me so furiously on the throat it was difficult not to start, not to push her away. I remember it passing through my mind that she had come all this way to kill me.

  “I couldn’t help myself,” she said, laying her head against my chest, wrapping her arms around me. “You are my lover. So I got your phone number and then once I had it I had to call you. Sometimes when I thought of you living your life without me it would be like a knife in my belly turning around and around.”

  “You knew I was alive,” I said into the darkness.

  “Does that make it easy?” she asked.

  I waited before answering. “No,” I said finally. “Nothing makes it easy.”

  She was running her hand up and down my back and now my chest, my ribs, as if she wanted to make certain everything was where she had left it. She was on my stomach now and she grabbed the flesh and I was just holding on to her until she linked her fingers into my belt loops and then let them drop and squeezed my erection. Was I waiting for permission? I don’t know. But as soon as she touched me sexually my passion, which until then had been distant, merely possible, was livid, almost insane, and I began to kiss her on the forehead, the eyes, the cheeks, the throat, her breasts and as I sank down I pulled her with me. I was just able to make out her outlines in the darkness but now that we were sinking to the floor she was lost in the blackness again. Yet I could surely feel her and hear her ragged, quick breaths, and feel them on my face, and taste them.

  “I get so tired, Fielding,” she whispered, and I knew that was all I would ever hear about the difficulty of the path she had chosen.

  “Are we going to make love?” I said.

  She was silent for a long while. I held on to her. Her ribs expanded and contracted as she breathed. “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “OK,” I said. “Oh God, Sarah. Are you really here?”

  “I think I’d get pregnant if we made love. It feels like all the planets are aligned and that would definitely happen.”

  “I remember once we almost tried to make a child,” I said. “But then we stopped. Just at the moment. Or right before. We got so close. I surprise myself by how often I think of it.”

  “I think of it, too. You were already in me. All you had to do was arch your back and then come forward again. You know, just a little friction, a little movement of skin, and there would be another entire human being on earth right now.”

  “I’m glad you think of it,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I do.”

  “But why do you?”

  She was on her back and I was above her. She was using my forearm as a pillow and I tried to keep it there as I lay on the cool floor next to her. “See?” I said. “Now you’re asking questions.”

  “I wish you had a condom or something,” she said.

  “I don’t have anything.”

  “Well, I didn’t come very prepared.”

  “Maybe we could risk it.”

  “No.The forces are at work. Can’t you feel them?”

  “Well, then maybe God wants us to have a child,” I said.

  “God wants all sorts of things. He’s totally indiscriminate in the things he asks for. It’s up to us to negotiate intelligently.”

  We lay in silence. She must have felt my arm falling asleep because she lifted her head and then rested it higher, on my biceps, and then from there she moved still closer, until her cheek was just below my shoulder. She draped her leg over mine and sniffed. “It’s you,” she said.

  “You don’t have to leave me, you know,” I said. “Anyhow, I won’t let you.”

  “Before we were just sketches,” she said, “and we could still imagine we could fit together. But now we’ve been painted in so deeply, you know all the lines are so dark. It seems wrong to think we belong together.”

  “But I think it.”

  “I guess I do, too. But I think I know why.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s what we want.”

  “You see?”

  “Yes. But let’s not forget how few people get what they want. And those who do—well, they’re not really the lucky ones, are they?”

  “They aren’t? Then who are?”

  “I don’t know. The ones who do what they are meant to. Can we not talk for a minute? I would feel so happy if all you did was hold me. If you could just hold me and let me pretend that this is what our life is, that this is perfectly natural and no big deal at all. And then I can close my eyes and let everything else fall away.”

  “It’s very hard, what you’re doing, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. It’s very hard. But the people we’re trying to help—it’s much harder for them. But please. Can’t you just
hold me?”

  And so I just held her. I listened to her breathing and felt her growing heavier on me as she relaxed. I kissed the top of her head, stroked the side of her face, at first so I could feel her skin and then very lightly so that her down whispered against my fingertips. The feeling of peace, a deep serious peace, came over me again, just as it had when I first saw her an hour before. Sexual desire retreated, like a bear returning to its cave after having been woken by a false sign of spring.

  And so I slept and when I woke a moment later, or an hour later, she was still next to me and we were still on the floor of that office, holding each other. And I drifted off to sleep again and woke some time later and still she was next to me, though now her leg was no longer touching mine and her breathing was quieter, slower, and the great bear of desire was stirring within me again, but I closed my eyes because it would have been awful to disturb her and I went back to sleep. My body was already starting to ache from the hardness of the floor, but I wouldn’t allow myself to take the discomfort very seriously because she seemed to feel none of it. I imagined the hectic nights she must have spent in the years that separated us: asleep in the backs of vans, in church basements, in all the secret places she knew. She was a soldier and she was sleeping beside me and so I lowered myself into sleep, too, because that was where she was and I wanted to be with her. I slept deeply this time and I slept long. And when I opened my eyes again there was weak rainy light coming in through the window and I was alone.

  I lay there, thinking she had just got up for a moment, perhaps to use the little bathroom around the corner. But it was too quiet. I was on my back and I raised myself up on my elbows and looked around. The coat she had folded so neatly in the corner was gone and at that point I was no longer merely alone. At that point she was gone. I stayed in that position for a few moments, looking around, waiting— thinking, I suppose, that if I stopped then time would, too. But it was so quiet. I let my head loll back and I squeezed my eyes shut, saying to myself: Get up, get up.

  “Sarah?” I said, getting to my feet. I felt exhausted; my bladder was heavy. “Sarah?” I said again, and my voice died a few inches away from me, as if I were in a soundproofed room. It seemed foolish calling her name; she was so clearly not here. Nevertheless, I looked for her. What else could I do? And when I had looked around the office—for her, for any sign of her—I opened the door. It was unlocked. I looked down the corridor. It appeared cold and empty, uninhabitable.