Shatterday (30 page)

But when she looked at him with a gentle smile, he noticed for the first time that her eyes seemed to be getting gray and pale.

Then, not too soon after, she said she loved him, too.

But she could see mist through the flesh of his hands when he reached out to touch her face.

They walked with their arms around each other, having found each other. They said many times, and agreed it was so, that they were in love, and being together was the most important thing in that endless world of gray spaces, even if they never found their way back.

And they began to use their time together, setting small goals for each "day" upon awakening. We will walk that far; we will play word games in which you have to begin the name of a female movie star from the last letter of a male movie star's name that I have to begin off the last letter of a female movie star; we will exchange shirt and blouse and see how it feels for a while; we will sing every camp song we can remember. They began to enjoy their time together. They began to live.

And sometimes his voice faded out and she could see him moving his lips but there was no sound.

And sometimes when the mist cleared she was invisible from the ankles down and her body moved as through thick soup. And as they used their time, they became alien in that place where wasted time had gone to rest.

And they began to fade. As the world had leached out for Ian Ross in Scotland, and for Catherine Molnar in Wisconsin, they began to vanish from limbo. Matter could neither be created nor destroyed, but it could be disassembled and sent where it was needed for entropic balance.

He saw her pale skin become transparent.

She saw his hands as clear as glass.

And they thought:
too late. It comes too late
.

Invisible motes of their selves were drawn off and were sent away from that gray place. Were sent where needed to maintain balance. One and one and one, separated on the wind and blown to the farthest corners of the tapestry that was time and space. And could never be recalled. And could never be rejoined.

So they touched, there in that vast limbo of wasted time, for the last time, and shadows existed for an instant, and then were gone; he first, leaving her behind for the merest instant of terrible loneliness and loss, and then she, without shadow, pulled apart and scattered, followed. Separation without hope of return.

Great events hushed in mist swirled past. Ptolemy crowned king of Egypt, the Battle of the Teutoburger Forest, Jesus crucified, the founding of Constantinople, the Vandals plundering Rome, the massacre of the Omayyad family, the court of the Fujiwaras in Japan, Jerusalem falling to Saladin … and on and on … great events … empty time … and the timeless population trudged past endlessly … endlessly … unaware that finally, at last, hopelessly and too late … two of their nameless order had found the way out.

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When I was a very little boy in Painesville, Ohio, a woman who lived up the street had my dog, Puddles, picked up by the dogcatcher and gassed while I was away at summer camp. I've never forgotten her. I think I hate her as much today, forty years after the fact, as I did the day I came back from camp and my father took me in his arms and explained that Puddles was dead. That old woman is no doubt long gone, but the hate lives on.

Each of us moves through life shadowed by childhood memories. We never forget. We are bent and shaped and changed by those ancient fears and hatreds. They are the mortal dreads that in a million small ways block us off or drive us toward our destiny.

Is it impossible to realize that those memories are merely the dead, ineffectual past; that they need not chain us?

A fine writer named Meyer Levin once wrote, "Three evils plague the writer's world: suppression, plagiarism, and falsification."

The first two are obvious. They are monstrous and must be fought at whatever cost, wherever they surface.

The last is more insidious. It makes writers lie in their work. Not because they want to, but because the truth is so terribly clouded by insubstantial wraiths, personal traumas, the detritus of adolescent impressions. Who among us can deny that within every adult is caged a frightened child?

This is a horror story.

There are no ghosts or slimy monsters or antichrist omens. At least none that can physically reach out and muss the hair. The horrors are the ones we create for ourselves; and they are the ones we all share.

This is also a cautionary tale, intended to say
You are not alone.
We all carry the past with us like the chambered nautilus; and we all must find ways to exorcise it at peril of our destiny.

    The King grew vain;
Fought all his battles o'er again;
    And thrice he routed all his foes,
And thrice he slew the slain.

JOHN DRYDEN,
Alexander's Feast
, 1697

IN THE FOURTH YEAR of the war with the despicable personage that had come to live in my brain, the utterly vile tenant who called himself Jerry Olander, I was ordered to kill for the first time.

It came as no surprise. It had taken Jerry Olander four years, plus or minus a couple of months, to get sufficient control over my motor responses. He had been working toward just such a program of monstrous actions, and though I never knew till the moment he ordered the hit that the form of his evil was to be murder, that was one of the few possibilities. Even though I wasn't surprised, I was sickened, and refused. It didn't do me any good, of course. Jerry was strong enough after four years of constant warfare within my brain; I was just weak enough, weary enough, just enough filled with battle fatigue, to put up a losing argument.

The target was to be my mother's older brother, my Uncle Carl. Had Jerry Olander suggested the Pope, or the President of the United States, or some notorious public figure, I might have grasped a thin edge of rationality in the order. But Uncle Carl? A man in his late sixties, a retired jeweler whose wife had died of cancer fifteen years earlier, who lived quietly and inoffensively in a suburb of Chicago. Carl? Why should the unwanted roommate of my brain want to see old Uncle Carl dead?

"Don't
you
want to see him dead?" Jerry replied, when I put the question to him.

"Who, Carl?" I didn't mean to sound stupid; but I was nonplused; and sounded stupid.

Jerry, laughed. I had come to know that miserable sound. In the dead of night, when I was hovering on the lip between wakefulness and whatever was strobing across the face of my bedside television set, and the abyss of thankful sleep, he would begin laughing. It was the sound I'm certain was made when the broken-handled claw hammer wrenched out the rusty spikes from Jesus's crucified wrists.

He laughed that rusty laugh and mimicked me. "Who, Carl? Yes, Carl. Old Uncle Carl, who killed your father's dreams. Don't begin to tell me, don't even
begin
to tell me that you've forgotten all that, chum."

"Don't call me chum."

"Well, then, using the short form: yes, Uncle Carl."

"You're crazy. I can't do it …
won't
do it!"

"Oh, you'll do it, all right. We have no problem on that score. As for my being crazy, I won't argue the point. One would have to be a bit crazy to share a mind with you."

"Carl never did anything to my father," I said.

"Think about it," Jerry said. I hated his smugness.

But I thought about it. And from the quicklime pit of forgotten memories something dead but still moving rose from corruption and dragged itself into my consciousness. A zombie recollection, a foulness from childhood, half-understood, miserable, something that intellectually I knew was a lie, yet a thing I believed true with that trapped child's refusal to abandon the terrors of the past.

Jerry laughed. "Yeah, that's it, chum. Remember now?"

"That isn't true. I know it isn't. I only thought that was the way it was … because I was a kid. I didn't know any better."

"Nobody's evil, right? No black and white. Just a shitload world of grays. Right? Then how come you still believe it?" He was really gnawing at me now. I tried to send that shambling awfulness back to its quicklime grave, but it stalked through my mind, led forward by Jerry's voice. "Look at it, chum. Consider Uncle Carl and what he did to your old man."

The memory grew larger in my mind, I found myself unable to turn away from its rotted flesh and stinking breath, the dead eyes covered with a gray film. I found myself remembering my father …

He had managed Carl's jewelry store during the war, when Carl had gone off to the navy. My father had been too old, had had a heart condition; so he had worked in the store instead of serving. Carl had pulled strings and wound up on the West Coast, at one of the supply terminals. And my father had worked twelve, fifteen, eighteen hours a day building up the clientele. He had always wanted his own store, to be in business for himself, to go to Tucson or San Francisco, a warm and wonderful place away from the snow and the biting Lake Michigan winds. But my mother had insisted that family was more important than self-realization. "Stay with family," she had said. "Carl told you he'd make you a partner. The family always keeps its promises."

So my father had let his dreams fade, and had stayed on with the store.

When the war was over, and Carl came home, and my father finally summoned up the courage to call in the promise, Carl had thrown him out of the store.

I never knew why, really. I was a child. Children are never told the whys of family disasters. They just happen. You wouldn't understand, children are told; and then, in the next breath, they are told, You mustn't hate your Uncle Carl for this, he has his reasons.

But my father had to start all over again. At the age of fifty. He rented a small apartment on the second floor in a business district close to the Loop, and he opened a jewelry shop. It was two long flights up, one steep set of stairs, a landing, and a switchback flight half as long but just as steep. And the drive from Evanston, back and forth, each day. Working far into the evening to catch the late foot traffic; on the phone with customers, trying to bustle an extra sale, even at night when he was home and should have been relaxing. A grinding, terrible schedule without break or release, to keep my mother and myself fed and clothed, not to lose the house.

One year. He lasted one year, almost to the week of opening the new store. And on a Sunday morning, sitting in his big chair by the old Philco radio, he had a sudden smash of a coronary thrombosis and he died. In a moment, as I watched, he went pale and his eyes popped open so I could see how blue they were, and his mouth drooped at one side, and he died. He had no last words.

The zombie memory would not free me. I saw things I never could have imagined as a child. My father's blue eyes, with the realization in them that all the dreams had been stolen from him, that he had lived his life and it had come to nothing, that he was dead and had never made his mark, had been here and was gone, and no one would remember or care. I saw, I remembered, I cared.

My child's memories were of hatred, and revenge. Carl.

"My father did it to himself," I said, walking upstairs. "He allowed his dreams to die. If he'd really had the courage to break loose and go to the Coast he would have done it," I said entering my bedroom and going to the closet. "Carl had nothing to do with it. If it hadn't been Carl, it would have been someone else in whom my father placed his trust. I can't hate a man for not keeping a promise twenty-five years ago," I said, pulling down my overnight case. "This is crazy. You can't get me to do this." I began packing for the flight to Chicago. I heard the sound of spikes being twisted out of wormwood.

•

It took Carl a long time to answer the door. He had a serious arthritic condition, and it was late. Highland Park was silent and sleeping. I stood under the porch light and saw Carl's pale, tired eyes peering at me through the open-weave curtain behind the door's glass panes. He blinked many times, and finally seemed to recognize me. He opened the door.

"You didn't tell me you were coming," he said. I put my hand against the half-opened door and pushed it slowly inward. Carl moved back and I walked in. My overnight case was still lying on the back seat of the rental compact at the curb. "Why didn't you call me and tell me you were coming? How's your mother?"

"Mom died three years ago."

He blinked again. His liver-spotted forehead drew down and he thought about it. "Yes. I'd forgotten. Why didn't you call me up on the phone and tell me you were coming?"

He closed and locked the door behind me. I walked into the darkened living room, only faintly outlined by the hall light. He followed me. He was wearing something I had only seen in period movies, a long nightgown that reached to his thin calves, white with blue veins prominent. The fabric was rough cotton, and like his calves was veined with blue pinstriping. I turned around to look at him. In my head I said, "This is crazy. Look at him. He's an old man. He won't even remember. What's the point of this?"

And Jerry Olander said, "It doesn't matter if
he
doesn't remember. You remember. But if it makes you feel any better, tell him why you've come to kill him."

"What are you doing here in the dead of night, I wish you'd called me up on the phone and told me," Carl said.

I couldn't see his face. He was standing with the hall light behind him. It was a black circle without feature. I said to him, "Do you remember a night a long time ago, in the red brick house you had on Maple Street, when Lillian was alive?"

"I remember the house. It was a small house. We had much bigger houses. Maybe you called and I was asleep."

I moved toward him till he could see
my
face, lit along the sharp planes of checks and nose by the light over his shoulder. "I see it all now the way a little boy would see it, Uncle Carl. I'm looking out from under a dining room table, through the legs and cross-braces of chairs, watching you and my father on the screened back porch. You're arguing. It was the first time I ever heard my father swear or raise his voice. I remember it very clearly, even if it isn't true, because he was such a quiet person. You know that. He never raised his voice or got angry. He should have. He might not have died when he did, or died so miserably, if he'd raised his voice a few times."