A Flash of Blue Sky

by Alon Preiss

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Just stand there, I suppose.”

  He listened to the music, watched Natalie staring down at her blank sketch tablet. “Naked?” he asked suddenly. “Do you want me naked?”

  She stopped breathing for a moment, then laughed.

  He reddened, apparently now unsure whether his offer to undress was as appropriate as he had assumed a moment earlier. “You’re an artist,” he said in a quietly shaking voice. “I don’t mind. I just thought it might help. I was just asking a simple question.

  She took another gulp of wine then looked him over. “OK,” she said. “Take off your clothes.”

  He didn’t say anything. She watched while he took off his sneakers and socks, then his sweater, unbuttoned his shirt and tossed it onto the couch next to her, unzipped his jeans and kicked them off, then dropped his shorts. He stood in front of her, shifting his weight from one bare foot to the other. She told him to lie on his side, and he stumbled to the cold floor. She turned on the track lighting. It gave him an ominous glow, which didn’t match the strange earnestness on his face. She told him to lie down on his back, with his feet toward her. The lighting gave his pale, slender body an almost ethereal quality. “Shut your eyes,” she said, and he followed her instructions. “Stretch,” she said, and he stretched, putting his upper body into a crucifix position.

  She lit a cigarette, took a drag, looked him over. She shook her head. “No.”

  She couldn’t resist touching him just once. She walked over, knelt down beside him and moved his arms above his head, letting the fingers of either hand barely touch; then she adjusted his legs, pushing them closer together. His skin was so smooth, so young, and it felt good to her touch. She backed away. His skin was almost white; her gaze rested for a moment on his smooth, motionless face. He seemed now entirely innocent. She went back to the couch. She tried to draw him ugly, but a half hour later the sketch looked almost saintly, the lines more delicate, less brash, than her usual work, despite her drunkenness. Her hands were covered with charcoal.

  “Is the picture done?”

  “Sure.” Natalie looked over her work. “Come and see.”

  She stabbed the cigarette into an ashtray; it sizzled, then was silent.

  He got up, walked over to the couch and sat down next to her. “You’ve made me very striking,” he said.

  Her voice was gentle. “That’s how you look.”

  He smiled. She ran a finger down his bare chest, and he leaned over and kissed her, and she kissed him back, pulling him on top of her. They rolled over, and he pulled her t-shirt off, ripping it a little, and kissed her again and again, clumsily, drunkenly.

  Much later, when they had both dressed and he was about to leave, he asked her, “Do you cheat on your husband a lot?” and she said, “Whenever I want to,” which was true.

  After he left, Natalie pulled out her sofa bed. Several hours later, when she finally put Tommy out of her mind and exhaustion overtook her, she called out softly to Daniel in her sleep.

  The next morning, Daniel awoke to find a message from Natalie on their answering machine. Things were happening, she insisted. She needed time. She loved him and missed him, and please don’t call the studio; she wouldn’t answer anyway, even if he did. Things were happening.

  10 am Thursday, and Natalie still had not returned from painting. He thought of calling, but realized that either she had disconnected the phone at her studio, or he would wake her up. Or she wasn’t in the studio at all, but somewhere else, and he would never really learn the truth.

  Daniel arrived at the psychic’s home five minutes late, a two-room apartment, muggy and old and desperate. The psychic, Morty Scolnic, actually bore a great resemblance to Jack Benny himself; he had the same deep, caring eyes and tight mouth, but he was fatter, and his voice was pure New York: harsh, grating and slightly effeminate. He seemed like a happy man, and why not? What could be better than communicating with the dead and bringing hope to the hopeless? A framed article from some newspaper tabloid hung in the living room. “The Ghost of Jack Benny Returns!” the headline screamed.

  Morty Scolnic explained to Daniel the origins of his gift. He used to work the night shift in a grocery store, all alone. One night, Jack Benny came to him, just like that, bathed in a brilliant blue mist, playing the violin, struggling through Love in Bloom. “Let’s save the world together,” he said to the startled grocer, holding out his arms. “You and me together, Morty.” Then he added, “Just cut me in for 15%, OK, Morty?”

  “Mr. Benny,” Morty asked, “you need money up there?”

  “I told God,” Jack Benny replied, “if I can’t take it with me, I’m not going.”

  The two of them shared a quiet laugh.

  To this day, Morty explained to an increasingly dubious Daniel, he did not know why he had been chosen. Dead vaudeville comics move in mysterious ways. He considered himself blessed, and he asked no questions.

  Sitting opposite each other at Marty’s coffee table.

  Morty put himself into a trance, emerged a moment later as the famous comedian, announcing his transformation with a cheery “Jello again!” For the next hour, Morty performed a third-rate Benny impression, to which Daniel responded with increasing sarcasm, until, exactly an hour later, Morty froze, then slapped his forehead, his eyes bobbing about. Finally he spoke, in a conspicuously less mellifluous tone: “Jesus, Daniel. Jack took off in a hurry. You got him really pissed. I can feel the residue of hostility stuck to the back of my head.”

  “Yeah,” Daniel muttered. “I hate that.” Then: “Anyway, he got me pissed.”

  Morty got up from his chair and walked into the next room.

  “Tell me about it,” he shouted, “while you write out a check.”

  “You know all about it,” Daniel called after him angrily.

  Morty came back into the room, sipping ice-water. “I wasn’t here, Daniel. You know that.”

  “For God’s sake, Morty, getting down on one knee doesn’t make me AI Jolson.” Daniel shook his head, took a check out of his wallet and began to fill it out. “Why is it, anyway, that a spirit would stop possessing you exactly when the hour is up? Why would the spirit care about billables? I guess if anyone were really psychic he’d go out and play the lottery every time there was a big jackpot and never have to work again. A paradox, right Morty? The existence of people who call themselves psychics rules out the possibility that psychics really exist.”

  Morty and Daniel locked gazes for a moment.

  “I have lots of satisfied customers,” Morty said.

  “I am sure you do,” Daniel said. “There’s a sucker born, as the fellow said, you know.”

  Morty took Daniel’s check.

  “I wish it were true,” Daniel said.

  If it were true, where would Jack Benny go when he wasn’t inhabiting the body of Morty Scolnic? Probably off to some Palm Springs soiree in the sky to sip cocktails and reminisce about the past with the likes of Joe E. Brown and Jim Jordan, to splash in the pool with Gracie and chuckle over the latest Lum and Abner routine. It sounded nice. Daniel did indeed wish that it were true.

  Daniel hopped in a cab that sped to midtown just in time for his three o’clock appointment at the much more respectable offices of Dr. Ariella Fittipaldi, a well-groomed, immaculately dressed psychotherapist of indeterminate age and origin. She led him through an apartment of fully stocked bookshelves and seemingly untouched, carefully maintained antique furniture, into a large, spare office.

  “Please lie down,” Dr. Fittipaldi said, gesturing toward the couch. Her voice had just the trace of an accent, her face, just the trace of a smile. She was carefully pleasant. Daniel instantly liked her, and he craved her approval.

  She asked him about himself, about what had brought him here, and she seemed satisfied with the superficial story Daniel had to offer: close friend died, Daniel wondered what life was all about after all, heard stories about people tapping into their past lives through h
ypnosis, thought why not after all? and took the afternoon off. Dr. Fittipaldi explained that he should not feel nervous about this, that she was a fully trained and licensed doctor, that she had received her Ph.D. from Harvard, that she had studied under an extremely distinguished psychologist with a long, foreign and, to Daniel, unfamiliar name. She was not one of those eccentrics who lacked the proper level of skepticism or, worse, charlatans with an agenda who might plant ideas in their patients’ minds.

  But did Daniel realize, she asked without a pause for reflection, that in Latin America there were villages populated entirely by witches? Daniel had no opportunity to answer. “They are extremely peculiar women,” Dr. Fittipaldi added, “but if you stop and listen to them, you will find that they have remarkable wisdom to impart.” About strange and dead religions, cultures and languages, lost for millennia.

  Daniel nodded. He had nothing to say, but he spoke anyway. “I should go sometime, then,” he murmured. “For a visit. For an afternoon, maybe ....”

  “Take off your watch,” she said, “and put it on the coffee table.”

  Daniel complied.

  “Some people would insist that you are already hypnotized, although in the weakest stage.”

  And she went on for a while, magnetizing his hands, dulling his mind, darkening his consciousness, trapping his body in motionlessness. She told him that he would remember everything that transpired this day. “We are going to take you back through your life, then deep into the past, back centuries ....” The room was dark and hazy now, the doctor’s voice a dim drumbeat in the back of his mind. His eyes drooped shut, and he could not reopen them. Scenes appeared before him, which he dutifully described. Just the day before, drinking vodka in front of the television set, passing out. Before that, turning up at Natalie’s studio and asking for another chance, complimenting her on her exploding cities. Natalie replying, That’s a nice new haircut, with a little smile. (She doesn’t really mean it, does she?; she hates the new haircut.) Daniel and Sandra in his apartment, locked in a cold, naked embrace; sweat covering his body, the fear the young woman must have seen in his eyes. Daniel and Susan at a bar in New York, falling asleep with all their clothes on in her big apartment on the Upper West Side. Daniel stuffing his tie into his pocket the next morning and rushing out of the apartment. Daniel at the age of 21 one chilly October day, heckling his professor, a man in an ill-fitting polyester suit, an easy target who died some years later in a mental hospital. Daniel the child, shuffling past his parents’ closed coffins, his aunt clutching his hand far too tightly. Not mourning his parents, just thinking about the pain in his hand, his aunt’s razor sharp fingernails. His cousin Charlie; their eyes meeting, and Charlie laughing – why? Daniel looking away. Train crash ... his parents dead in a train crash, tangled, mangled machinery, scattering to a heavy, rainy wind somewhere between New York and Kansas. The young, small Daniel, shivering and dancing timidly on a stage, now weeping before an ocean of silently reproachful Baptists. An even smaller Daniel, holding his mother’s hand and his father’s hand on a sidewalk in New York city; his parents swinging Daniel between them. Their lost laugh, lost smile, what might have been, the little boy who might otherwise be lying on this couch. Baby Daniel, staring up at gigantic, looming, smiling parents. Then for just a split-second, Susan, her smile, her wide eyes, filling up his entire world, a strong comforting presence, a split second, just a flash, really, that felt as though it would last forever. Then just as suddenly the light went out, and Daniel was paralyzed in a coldness of which he would be cognizant only in retrospect, hours later. Daniel’s thoughts slowed to a halt, frozen in this searing darkness. He was utterly mindless, unaware of his breathing, his magnetized hands, the voice of his hypnotist, his name, his existence. Suspended in a one-dimensional ocean of nothingness, he drifted slowly away from being.

  Daniel wrote out a check to Dr. Fittipaldi, who seemed flustered and chilled by the temporary annihilation of her patient, but who nevertheless tried to lighten the blow. “I’ve read that occasionally a patient learns nothing at all the very first time,” she said, forcing calm.

  “I did learn something,” Daniel said. “I learned what oblivion is like. It is nothingness. Not just nothingness. Nothing. And I confirmed that I don’t care for the idea of eternal nothing. But I cannot change that, can I? If this is all there is, then I really don’t have any say in the matter, no matter how many hypnotists I go to see, do I?”

  “You have to feel more comfortable with your therapist, with the idea of hypnosis. It can take a lot of work. I wouldn’t let this stop you.” She stood up and followed him to the door. “Do not give up! If you really want to learn about yourself, every journey of self-exploration begins with one thought.”

  Daniel looked back at the earnest doctor, so ardent, so warm, so misguided. Why was he here in her office when he should have been at work, drafting an appeal for a client who, most likely, had left an impatient message with his secretary while he’d been unconscious? What had he been thinking? I defend polluters against lawsuits, against EPA claims, whatever they want. When I die, I will be gone. In a hundred years, I will be forgotten. I don’t need to worry about whether my work hastens the demise of the planet. Why does it matter whether Mother Earth dies in a billion years, or 1.2 billion years? My friend Henry is cold in the grave. He doesn’t have to worry about whether or not he’s on partnership track, or about melanoma from those tanning machines. I could spend the next few decades building up an elaborate system of self-deception, just to see it vanish forever into the mists of darkness when I am making love to my mistress at the age of sixty-two, or when I’m driving on the interstate and get stung by a bee. “No,” Daniel said. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I have the time. I work fourteen hours a day. I have so many things to do, so many ....” His voice trailed off, and Daniel smiled weakly. “I don’t think I’m really worth all that examination and thought, after all. There’s not much more than meets the eye, really.”

  He knew that Dr. Fittipaldi was about to give him the expected reassuring lecture, but he turned his back abruptly, walked out of the office, through the apartment, into the hallway, down the stairs, onto the street and out of Dr. Fittipaldi’s life and practice forever.

  Out on the sidewalk, Daniel called up Natalie at her studio, listened to her affectedly artistic answering machine message. “I've never felt so embarrassed,” he said after the beep. “What got into me? Who knows? Anyway, you’ve got your atheist back. I resolutely believe in nothing at all. I love you, darling.” And he meant it, too.

  Friday morning, the day after he went to see the spirit of Jack Benny and drift gently through the dark eternity of his own extinction, Daniel appeared at his office looking slightly worse for wear.

  Yes! he told everyone who asked, he’d been struck down by a terrible flu! Yeah, by that awful thing that was going around!

  He settled down behind his desk, flipped through his phone messages, and glanced, once again, at the Edward Bear documents, the piles of records that consumed one wall of his office. He would make his decision today. Xerox dust drifted off the pages, into the air, clogging his lungs. One hour passed, then two. He fielded phone calls, listened to partners’ complaints, made a few apologies for his recent absence. Still, he could think of nothing but the incriminating document in his desk drawer, the document that – if its existence ever became known to the Environmental Protection Agency – would mean the end of the Edward Bear litigation and his chance to distinguish himself from the pack. There wasn’t really much to debate, was there? Daniel was the only person who knew that he had seen this memo. He had lied before, he would lie again, and he could certainly lie about this.

  And so at two in the morning, he opened his desk drawer and slipped the memo into a manila folder. He walked across the hallway into a deserted alcove that housed one large Xerox machine and one small but effective shredder, pulled the memo from the folder and let it fall from his fingertips. The machine whirred sligh
tly as the memo slipped through it, obliterating all memory of this long-ago argument between Cliff Patrickson, wherever he had gone, and the long dead president of Edward Bear. The memo, in thousands of pieces, emerged from the other end of the shredder and dropped quietly into the wastepaper basket. For the better part of ten minutes, Daniel just stood and stared, still and silent.

  Earlier that evening, Susan, another lost soul, found herself wandering through a chilly, wet night as the eternal lights of Manhattan beckoned from muddy puddles on the sidewalk: Best Coffee! the neon screamed, Best Pizza! World Champion Papaya! All of it lies.

  A skinny Santa Claus waved from across the street, pleading with her for some money.

  Susan walked under a sign advertising some boxing match at Madison Square Garden, through the doors of Penn Station, past men and women slumped in the corner, staring out from under blankets with dead eyes. An old? young? man-woman started to sing, nothing but gibberish, tuneless, cracking gibberish, but from under blankets other sexless, tuneless voices joined in, until the entire station echoed.

  Susan spotted Track 19 and got on the last car waiting on the tracks. She had no money on her, but she trusted Joren that no one would ask for her ticket. The only other passenger in the car was a thin old man in a dark suit. He was asleep in the back of the train, smiling.

  The doors slammed shut, the engine hissed, and the train shot out into a night as black as space.

  She read a newspaper that someone had left on a seat a few rows in front of her. The American President had invaded a small Central American country to depose a dictator installed by the United States years earlier. The army had sent an air strike over a ghetto in the capital city, killing 2000 Latino civilians in a matter of minutes. Dozens of American soldiers lay dead. “Worth it,” said the President, trying to make his voice tremble with emotion. Widespread looting in the capital, stores destroyed, family businesses ruined. “A burr under our saddle gone, finally,” said a State Department source. “Democracy for Christmas.” Susan tossed the newspaper to one side and fell asleep pondering the old man’s contented face.