I’m Losing You (56 page)

Severin spied him at the end of the hall in a natty robe, sharing his super-complicated mania with the Vietnamese nurse. As the smiling old man got closer, he shrieked and toppled, eyes rolling back in his head. They were dragging him from a great pyramid; a stone had fallen and was lying on his chest. He surfaced on a bed. Perry held his hand and they had the old man's teeth out. He was crying. Doctors were everywhere and Zev shoved a needle in while Lavinia hooked him to a machine—the scanner!—wired into Voices of America like a switchboard Medusa. Why don't Molly ever come? What went so wrong with that girl? You wait and you wait and—
Can you hear me?
asked a smooth-faced Doogie. Someone kept lifting the stone and dropping it down, lifting and dropping, like him and Joey used to pin beetles with a rock on the thorax—
Can you hear me, Mr. Welch?
Tried to speak.
It's okay
, said Nurse Lavinia, the Kid nowhere in sight.
It's all right, you're going to be fine
…saw the Kid again, old man's vision suddenly lake-stream clear, bad Samaritan Perry just outside the door, helpless—he looked so pained and so lost, Severin wanted to talk to him, prop the Kid up and make nice, he felt bad, too much death in that extremely wealthy young man's life already, didn't want any part of that ghoulish diorama, he wished the Kid would just look away: hooked up now to his Radio Shack gills, American Voices filling him up: house of the rising souls—
Can you hear me, Mr. Welch?

There it was again, the idiot query. Dr. Bluhdorn leaning over, persistent, the mantric question again and again
Can you hear me?

CAN YOU HEAR

can you—
me?

hh

HEAR—

losing you

Mr. Welch!

The stab again, and stone settling down like a cold house. They worked like athletes, breaking ribs to rouse the heart: ringing, ringing, ringing—Mr. Welch would not pick up.

Rachel Krohn

After twenty-five years, Rachel stopped training for the unnamed, unannounced event. She left the track and stinging night air, cold turkey. Her mother once said she ran away from her life; Rachel thought that a lame analytical cliché. If anything, she'd been running toward it, trying to catch up.

“May I help you?”

“I work for Mr. Howe.”

While the saleswoman retrieved the linen, she browsed the pillow puffs encased in delicate brocade. She found sheets she liked, Egyptian cotton at twenty-two hundred a set. Rachel smiled: there was no end to luxury. She thought of the torn shroud—so pure—and realized that for the rest of her life some part of each day she'd spend washing and dressing and tucking the little girl away. Such was the
prayer now carried within, and Rachel finally understood. She would write to Birdie, thanking her for that mitzvah.

The saleswoman appeared with an elaborately gift-wrapped bag. Rachel hovered over the Egyptian bedsheets. “Aren't they extraordinary? Those are three-hundred-and-eighty-thread.”

“Yes,” she said, guiltily withdrawing her finger from the fabric folds. “A bit beyond my budget—I'd be too nervous to sleep.”

“Oh, I think you'd sleep fine.”

Rachel sat in the bath, scented candles burning. She'd told her boss the story behind giving away the watch—about the seder and the
chevra
and how she had bumped into the dead girl's mother in the mall. It moved him to share his own loss, something he had never done. He wished he'd known of the
taharah
“then,” he said. He would have washed Montgomery himself. They talked a long while, but Rachel came away feeling something between them had been torn that couldn't be mended. She'd stay on a few months before giving notice. She was tired of living in the city, anyway. It was time to leave—time to surprise herself. “We moved swiftly.” Wasn't that what the woman who killed the cougar said?

She felt flushed and, stepping out, turned on the light—the water was pink from her discharge. How wondrous, she thought, to be clean and unclean at once. That was her; that was Rachel Lynn Krohn, forever and ever. What were the laws regarding a woman who bled into purifying waters? Whatever they were, she would not abide.

She sank into bed, exhausted. She reached for the folded paper tucked under her alarm—the prayers said over the dead. She read aloud in slow, measured tones.

It was her father she was reading to, and she hoped he wasn't suffering. Everyone had suffered enough, hadn't they? So, good night, Father! she said. I wish you hadn't left so soon, I've missed you! Good night now…

All is forgiven.

Perry Needham Howe

Perry navigated through the river of static. He knew Tovah was thanking him for the sheets, but she was hard to hear.
Can't wait
, she said—something about—oh: can't wait to give them a trial run.

She was breaking up and there wasn't a sunspot, canyon or high-tension pole in sight.

Tovah had a place near Beverly High, on Moreno. It was the first time he'd been over and that excited him. The two-bedroom was smallish, immaculate and bright. The decor was flowery, with a touch of Judaica; he would have thought a middle-aged woman lived there. She showed him the Pratesi duvet and he kissed her, parting the robe to touch her bush. Tovah smiled, then modestly covered herself, retreating to the bathroom while Perry undressed.

“I have some meetings set,” she said.

“I haven't even mentioned it to Jersey.”

“Oh. Do you think she'll have a problem?”

“I don't know. She shouldn't. But I've been thinking…why don't we aim our sights a little higher?”

“Meaning—”

“Why don't we do it as a feature, with an A-list director—a Barry Levinson or a Jonathan Demme.”

Tovah came back in and sat on the bed, hair spilling down around shoulders. “We can
absolutely
do that. You know who would really spark to this? Penny.”

He nodded approvingly. “Or—I don't know. Maybe someone like Jane Campion. Do you think she'd be interested?”

“I
love
Jane—we represent her. She's shooting, but we can get it to her in a second.” She put her hand around his neck. “Perry, that's a
wonderful
idea.”

“I just want to get the best people. Or at least see if the best people might want to be involved.”

They pitched the story of Montgomery's life and death over the next few months. Nothing in Hollywood was a slam dunk, especially the story of a nine-year-old boy who, upon prognosis of death, became a most peculiar savant.

He noticed his son's abilities one day when Jersey called out from the hall to ask the time. Montgomery responded to the second, from a feverish sleep. He had become a living chronograph, a perpetual calendar, a minute repeater—the boy with a caged tourbillon heart and titanium soul. The passage of hours suddenly had color and music and texture so that time was jazz and symphony, algorithm and blues, a drum and a psalm, a hootenanny that began in his forehead, washing over enamel of skin, his very joints the jeweled movement, head a cabochon crown, eyes the sapphire glass that read the jumping hours, organs the
ébauche
: the very expression of his being the grandest of complications. This child, who knew nothing of calendar arithmetic, gave the name of the week to dates ten thousand years in the past or thirty thousand in the future for each and every day of every year man had breathed or would give breath still: knew the sundial length and breadth of those days, and all the sidereal noons and midnights—and more, had perceived the very moment of his death. Seven months and a handful of days before it arrived, Montgomery wrote it down in cool, untrammeled hand and laid it in a drawer.

Perry sat in the library. Jersey slept. Perhaps it was time to end his affair; he hated having used the cancer as an excuse to betray her. So graceless. He knew now that he was getting well.

A special two-hour block of
Streets
was on. He watched it in
MUTE
, sipping his gin. Tonight, the cops were in Venice chasing a creep who'd killed his girlfriend's kid. Christ, he looked like a kid himself. They brought him back to the house so she could ID him. The
girlfriend peered through squad car glass, but the perp stared down till they forcibly raised his head. “That's Taj,” said the woman, dead-eyed. Just then, the paramedics wheeled out the victim and loaded her into the ambulance, with the mom climbing in. Good show—you couldn't beat closure like that. Emmy time.

He slit the envelope and removed the card. There it was, in his son's sinistral scrawl:
March 7, 1989, 4:07:20
A.M.
He weighed the paper in his hand like a collector's curio—a watch that would remain unwound. It was heavier than anything Henri might have strapped to his wrist. The Monsieur said
chronograph
was Greek for “I write the time.”

Perry stuck his finger in the gin and dripped a bead down. It bubbled over the ink. He rubbed until the numbers ran, smearing to illegibility. He smiled shakily, lower lip jigged by unseen leprechauns, holy creatures of time and space.

March 7, 1989, 4:07:20
A.M.
—Montie's death, on the nose.

How's that for closure?