Flesh and Blood

by Michael Cunningham

  There were no helicopters whirring in the sky, no sleek gray Coast Guard boats slicing through the water. He realized—how could he have forgotten?—that his grandfather didn't know how to sail. His grandfather had probably managed to right the boat but he wouldn't know how to get it moving. He'd be sitting there, helpless, calling Ben's name out over the water.

  Suddenly Ben wanted to return to the land and live there with his name. He wanted every humiliation, every regret, all of it. He wanted to swim back but he could see only water, and he'd lost track of the direction in which land lay. There, probably. Or maybe not. If he swam in that direction he might only be swimming farther out. To his right, in roughly the direction he thought of as landward, he saw two sails, pale as quarter moons. They were a long way off but he swam in their direction. He forced himself to swim hard. He swam until his arms and legs started to burn and his breathing grew shallow. His body demanded that he stop but he refused to stop. He needed to reach the boats just as urgently as he had needed to swim away from his name. He needed to be pulled out of the water by strangers' hands, and taken back. As he swam he realized he had started to shiver. It surprised him with its violence, and it seemed to have been going on for a while, though he could not remember when it had started. His teeth were clattering loudly. He told himself he had to reach the boats and he swam with a steady push of his will until suddenly his arms would not move. It had never happened to him before and he assumed it to be temporary. His arms always moved when he wanted them to. His legs could still kick and he continued kicking while he waited for his arms to return. His body refused to stop shivering. His arms hung heavily in the water and he made his legs kick. He looked for the boats. He couldn't see them. His head slipped underwater and briefly his arms returned, paddled him back up to the air. He looked for the boats. He told his body to swim and it did, jerkily, in froglike movements. Was he in trouble? Maybe. Maybe he was in trouble. He swam. He thought he would be all right. He was tired. Without having meant to, he slipped into a dream. In the dream he stood on a field of grass. Beyond the field there were hills, and in the hills was a town. He didn't go to the town, but he knew it was there. A bird flew over, and he returned. He fought his way back. There was something in the water, an immense, silent being. Gulls dipped down to the surface, skreaking, looking for fish, and he thought he couldn't be in serious trouble if there were birds present. He swam but he was shivering and his arms didn't work very well. He saw one of his hands floating by and for a moment he believed there was someone with him, swimming alongside. No, it was his own hand. He looked at his hand. He saw how it shook. He went into a dream again, and in this dream he was held like a baby. He was rocked, and he had his red car, the one he loved so much, with the cream-colored seats and the doors that opened. The dream ended but a part of him stayed inside it. He saw that there was a place inside the dream. He could let himself be rocked. He could hold the car, spin its wheels with his fingers. Or he could keep swimming. He knew he could find the ability to do so, but he knew he could also stop and if he stopped he would be here, in the silence, outside of time and his name. It struck him as a guilty pleasure, a marvelous and forbidden thing. He let out a voluptuous sigh. He had a song running through his head, something stupid he'd never meant to remember. He let himself dream about little rubber wheels and a wing and a tree. They were radiant. He was surprised to find that he was not dreaming of other people. He was dreaming of wheels and a wing. Green transparencies opened before him, a lush field scattered with stars. He saw himself going down into a cold granular darkness, though he seemed to bring a quantity of pale, unsteady light with him. He watched, fascinated. The water below looked dark but when he got to where it had been dark he found it to be light, faintly light, like the air of his bedroom at home when the light

  from the hall seeped in under the door. He spun the wheels of the car with his fingers. He looked up. The surface was far above him, illuminated like living glass. Surprising, how far away. He realized where he was, he realized what was happening, and with a spasm of terror his body bucked and he rose toward the surface. It grew closer, his arms and legs burned and his chest burned. He would be all right. The surface was far away and he had no sensation of reaching it but he must have reached it because his lungs filled with air, painfully. He looked around for the birds and the boats but saw only the grainy jade of the water. He saw light hanging in the water. He saw bubbles perfect as stars. It was then that he realized he could leave himself and breathe the water. He could go or he could stay. The water was spacious; it was he; it would hold him. He let himself breathe. The pain vanished. The coldness of the water came into him, an icy relief. He was rising and he left himself, he let the water have him. He let it have him.

  The current carried Ben's body with a steady insistence south-west, back toward the shore. Minnows browsed over his face, and occasionally one darted halfway into his open mouth, hung there with its gills twitching, and sped away again. As Ben moved through the water the bottom rose, grew lighter and more distinct. Strips of watery sunlight played over him, caught the translucent shine of his eyes. Then the sunlight began to fade. His body didn't reach the beach at Shelter Island until after sundown, and by then the beach was empty. The waves kept pushing his body onto the sand, pushed it and pulled it back and pushed it that much farther forward again, until finally at high tide, just before midnight, a wave laid him on the sand and retreated and did not return. Ben's body lay face up on the sand, one arm flung back over his head and the other angled awkwardly over his chest in a contorted position particular to the dead. It was a clear night. The Crab and the Seven Sisters were out. Ben's body rested undisturbed on the beach for several hours, facing up. He was spangled, ominous, full of a dark and abandoned beauty. A sprinkling of small shells had caught in his hair and a circle of translucent white glass, worn smooth as an opal by the water, lay in his open mouth.

  1994/ If he'd come home earlier.

  If he'd visited Cassandra more.

  If he'd loved the way he should have.

  If he'd been less selfish.

  If he'd gone in the boat.

  If he hadn't said no.

  1994/ Susan thought she would steal him. She was awake. She hadn’t taken the pills. She lay in bed, thinking about what she’d do.

  She needed to see him. She’d had no time.

  She lay in bed thinking about where he was. The embalming would be finished by now and everyone would have gone home. He’d be there in the strange building with green imitation-leather chairs and white-wigged porcelain figures silently bowing in the curio cabinet.

  She knew what was coming tomorrow. The gifts of food, the friends with condolences. There would not be a second, not a second, for her to be alone with Ben. Even if she demanded privacy at the funeral parlor it would be a contained privacy, with friends and family on the other side of the door, waiting generously but with mounting impatience for her to finish up so they could all get on with the business at hand. And she’d have Todd to take care of. He lay in bed beside her, breathing under the sleeping pills she herself had only pretended to swallow. She didn’t want sleep, not now. She wanted every minute.

  It wouldn’t help her, a stolen hour at the funeral parlor with Ben lying quietly in his navy-blue suit while the wristwatches ticked down the hall. It wouldn’t help to sit with him in a room amid the hush of flowers, the shifting particulars of colored light.

  She wanted no one to know where they were, not even Todd. She wanted to carry him out onto the grass and sit with him while his body was still his body, before the changes started. She wanted to comb his hair and she wanted to sing the songs of his childhood into his cold, familiar ear. If she could do that, she might be ready to relinquish him to mourning, to the realm of the dead. If she could do that, she might continue to live as someone she recognized.

  She got quietly out of bed. Todd murmured, slept on. To avoid waking him, she didn’t get dressed. She went downstairs in her nightgown,
took a coat from the hall closet. She walked barefoot out onto the cold stones of the porch.

  She drove to the mortuary and parked behind the building, in a space reserved for staff. She turned off the ignition, turned off the headlights. She sat in her car watching the clapboard wall, the single window in which a potted geranium bloomed. She wasn’t sure why she’d come. She hadn’t meant to break into the mortuary, not really, although the thought had been somewhere in her head. Even if she got in, if she broke a window, what would she do? Would she search among the caskets for Ben’s body? Would she drag his body out and put it in the car? She wasn’t crazy, not crazy like that. But she needed to be here. She imagined taking Ben in her arms, the supple chill of his body. She saw her fingers raking through his hair. She sang, softly, under her breath. She sat in her car for several hours, keeping watch, sometimes singing and sometimes only sitting. Shortly before the sun rose she fired the ignition and turned on the headlights, which cast a watery, lunar light on the brightening clapboard wall of the mortuary. She drove home again. She hung her coat in the closet, walked carefully upstairs, and got back into bed without awakening Todd. She waited for the alarm to ring.

  The viewing room slightly resembled the house she grew up in. It had that air of carefully assembled normality. There were armchairs upholstered in imitation leather and love seats done in a fabric meant to resemble embroidery. There were glass-topped oval tables and brass lamps with stiffly pleated shades and a spotless fireplace with three birch logs stacked on the grate. Ben’s casket lay like a piece of furniture before a mute gathering of bronze-toned metal chairs with white cushions, on an expanse of deep-pile carpeting the color of limes coated with dust.

  Susan had insisted on keeping the casket closed. She now regretted that decision. She found that she wanted to break the glassy spirit of the room, its lime-and-brass insistence on domestic order. She thought of telling the director to raise the lid but she worried that her son’s body, his rouged face and still hands, would too closely match the room’s other furnishings. The lid remained closed. She spoke to visitors as they entered, and thought only once or twice during the afternoon of how a room like this, all cleanliness and chemical hush, was the true representation of grieving. As children we imagine tilted stones, a shifting darkness, clouds cutting across the moon, and think we’re entertaining our deepest fears. We are wrong. The true horror that waits, she believed, are these Scotchgarded love seats printed with pale green and blue needlepoint, these shelves with their porcelain figures. This well-kept, empty room. The dead disappear into it.

  Susan acted like a woman at the funeral of her only son. She couldn’t break through it, not quite. She couldn’t not perform. There were so many people who needed her courage. She told herself, as the time passed in front of her, that she was glad to have these limits. She thought it probably saved her to hold Todd as he shuddered dryly, racked by a grief that took him beyond tears, and it saved her to comfort her mother and Will and Todd’s parents, to cry with them and hold them reassuringly. It saved her to be kind to Jamal, who stood blank and frozen in a corner.

  “Hi,” she said, bending slightly into him and speaking distinctly, as if in his silence he had lost a measure of hearing and sight.

  He smiled weakly at her.

  “I’m glad you came,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “Do you want anything?” she asked. “A glass of water?”

  uNo, thank you.”

  She straightened herself, withdrew from him. Maybe he needed to be left alone, this strange boy. Maybe something showed on her face, however polite she made herself. She tried not to think about it: He was still alive. This boy who was not a bad boy but was not remarkable in any way was alive, and her son had died.

  “There are more comfortable chairs over there,” she said, “if you feel like sitting down.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “All right,” she said, and left him.

  Her father sat in the first row of seats, with Magda beside him. He had been weeping, though he was not weeping now. He sat bent over, with his elbows planted on his knees and his hands covering his nose and mouth, as if he feared what he might smell or what he might say.

  Susan sat on the empty chair to his right. She nodded to Magda, who returned her nod with an expression that might have been grief and might have been impatience with the whole stately business of mourning. Susan thought she would put her arm over her father’s shoulders, but she hesitated and then folded her hands in her lap.

  “Susie,” her father said. His voice was clotted and indistinct.

  “Yes, Dad?”

  She could not seem to lose this sense of herself as a hostess. She sat erect on the metal chair. Her father breathed wetly beside her and in front of her her son lay inside a casket. She saw, suddenly, how much the casket she had chosen for him resembled the stereo cabinet in the house her parents had bought and furnished when she was thirteen. It had the same chestnut luster; it had the same curved bevel along the lid. When she and Todd had had to make the selection, she’d gone immediately to this one without quite knowing why.

  “Susie,” her father said. He reached for her. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and drew her close. She could smell his familiar cologne, the old musk of his skin. She felt herself being taken by him. She knew what he needed from her, how much love and forgiveness.

  “Get your hands off me,” she said. She had not meant to say anything. She had not meant to speak as loudly as she did.

  Her father clasped her more closely. Her lips touched the grainy slope of his cheek and she believed she could taste him, a combination of lint and age and rank, perfumed sex.

  “Shh,” he said. “Shush, now.”

  She pulled out of his embrace and said, more loudly, “Get your hands off me.”

  She stood up. A part of her acted and a part of her watched herself act. Her father raised his hands to his chest, palms out, as if to protect himself. Magda looked at Susan with an expression of pity more dreadful than any rage.

  “Susie,” her father said.

  “I don’t want you here,” she said. She was aware of her voice, how loud it was among the love seats and the dusted shelves.

  “Susan. Honey. Please.”

  “Get out,” she said. “You’ve paid your respects, you’ve seen what you came to see. Now go. I can’t look at you anymore, I don’t want you touching me.”

  She could feel the silence around her, all the stunned horror. Unthinkingly, she smoothed her hair with her fingertips.

  Her father glanced at the back of the room, searching for help. Magda stood up and walked toward Susan. She said, “Sit down, dear, you don’t know what you’re saying.”

  Susan stepped backward. “I do know,” she said. “I know exactly what I’m saying. Magda, I want you to take him home. I want you to get him out of here. Do it and I’ll never ask you for anything again.”

  A hand touched her shoulder. It was Billy.

  “It’s okay,” he said, close to her ear.

  “No it isn’t,” she told him.

  “Let’s go for a walk. Just leave him here and come for a walk with me, will you do that?”

  “No,” she said. “I can’t leave.”

  “We’ll come back. Come on, now.”

  He took her hand and she found that she followed him. She hadn’t meant to. They walked together down the aisle that had been left between the rows of chairs. Todd came to her, tried to speak. Billy waved him away.

  “She and I need to be alone together,” he said. “I’ll bring her right back.”

  “Susan?” Todd said.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I want to go with Billy.”

  They left the mortuary and walked along the flagstone path to the sidewalk. The mortuary stood in a neighborhood of prosperous old houses, on a street lined with trees that had begun, tentatively, to go yellow. Billy held her hand and led her up the sidewalk, which was honeycombed with cracks in
which emerald veins of moss fatly grew.

  She found that she could be with her brother. Of all people, she could stand to be with him. She could let him hold her hand. She could walk beside him.

  “You really let the bastard have it,” Billy said.

  “I can’t talk.”

  “You don’t have to. I just want you to walk with me until you feel calm enough to get through the service. It would be better to get through the service, if you think you can do that.”

  “I’m not sure,” she said.

  “Wait and see. Just walk a little, and see what happens.”

  She walked with her brother. There was nothing else for her to do. She let him hold her hand and lead her past the houses with their lawns and porches, their flower beds. After a while she said, “I can’t stand having him there.”

  “You’ll kill him if you make him leave,” Billy said. “He already feels so guilty.”

  “He’s never felt guilty about anything in his life.”

  “He feels guilty about this. Believe me.”

  “You don’t know. You have no idea.”

  “I was the one who used to want to kill him,” he said. “You used to defend him to me.”

  “We were children then.”

  They walked for a while in silence. Susan was filled with a white-hot, dispassionate fury unlike anything she had known. She wished ruin on the people who owned these comfortable houses, the people who tended these yards or who paid others to tend them. She wished bankruptcy on these people, disease, unspeakable losses. She touched the trunk of a tree and thought of floodwaters roiling down this innocent street, a wall of churning mud that would break through the doors of the houses and carry off their clocks and books and chairs. She wanted to race the flood back to the mortuary, throw herself on her son’s casket and ride with it as the water swept it out into the ruined world. She imagined the living drowned and the dead floated up out of their graves, a battalion of coffins racing past the mute, shattered faces of houses and stores.