Authors: Michael Cadnum
My skin was mottled with discoloration, the way the mattress of a chaise longue dapples, when it is left out for too many rainy nights. I was mildewed.
I could not answer the steely muttering of the telephone. My voice was too soft, too broken. And besides, I was paralyzed by a question I had to ask myself, one little point of order before we resumed after this recess.
How long had I been asleep?
I slipped the phone back into its cradle, and shut the drawer, carefully, quietly. I was eager to cross the floor, eager to be outside, and so I hurried unsteadily.
I reached for the frame of the glass door, and when I had a decent grip, I pushed. Nothing happened. I pushed again, my weight behind the effort, and the door was solid. I turned my head, listening.
Surely there was movement, back there, behind me. Someone used this desk, a caretaker. He heard me. Sounds echoed in this place, and I had not even tried to keep quiet. There were footsteps.
I turned to listen, and then with desperation, and revulsion, I pushed again, and this time I felt something surrendering inside the lock, a catch showing its age. I leaned heavily, something snapped, and I was out.
17
There was a troubling, purring, breathy sound from the expanse of neighborhoods, and it took me a moment to realize that this was the normal sound of streets, freeway, railway, late night traffic, all the way down to the bay. The night was starless, furred with cloud.
The cemetery sloped downhill. I followed the road past yews, eucalyptus, and pepper trees dwarfed by excessive trimming. The smokestack of the crematorium was sheltered behind a peaked roof, and water flowed into a pool beside the empty parking lot.
How could I be sure this was really happening?
I ran my fingers through the wet grass. I gripped the metal gate that blocked the parking lot. I believed it. It was real.
I laughed windily, and shook the post of a stop sign, hanging on to it for support, feeling like a drunk in a cartoon. The vacant asphalt was a plain of rich smells, oil, the flat scent of sand and the perfume of wet earth and weeds, sour grass and dandelions. Poppies were trembling along the sidewalk, the blossoms closed tightly. An empty carton of food lay, half unfolded on the curb, letting off a smell of corruption, beef and vinegary ketchup.
It was useless to look for a telephone with my voice the way it was, so I made my way up Colusa, away from the lights advertising a dry cleaner and a florist.
Crumpled foil reflected the night sky, the wrinkles limned by the residual neon that reached even this far from the florist's shop. The streets were relatively quiet here, only an occasional car turning a corner in the distance, turning into a far-off driveway. A few people were still coming home. It might be approaching midnight, I thought, or a little after. I had another, more troubling question.
I tried to put the question out of my mind. Shut up, I told myself. Don't think. Just keep walking.
I had assumed that my coma had lasted a matter of days. How long could a body linger, dehydrated, unnourished? I could not calculate my survival beyond a week or so.
But the scene around me was one of late winter, or early spring, the soft rainy season of the Bay Area evident in the moist manure spread among the naked stalks of roses, in the drying tendrils of twigs and trash in the grill over a gutter drain. A cherry tree was in full blossom, the invisible blush of fragrance all over the neighborhood.
My memory stopped on a day I could remember with some difficulty, like someone sitting down to a game after a long break, wiping dust off the checkerboard.
The evidence was there, in the birch trees' still-naked branches, in the puddle that ran along a seam in the street. I told myself not to think about it. I would have time to ask, time to fill in the calendar. I reasoned that I might have been hospitalized for several weeks, months, or even years, before I had been interred.
I had to stop and lean against a stone wall.
I held on to the wall for a moment, block upon block of cement chunks piled on top of each other. Were the cars around me the models I remembered, or had years of new design made them all strange?
I trudged on, trying to reassure myself. I passed a Honda, a Chevy pickup, a motorcycle on a driveway under a plastic tarp, the tarp held shut by a clothespin. This was the world I had left. Here was a cardboard box, sodden, and run over so many times the pulp was streaked up and down the street.
If a police car had passed I would have flagged it down, but as it was I had a long walk before I found my way home. I ran when I could, but my stride was strange, drunken, my ankles turning and nearly causing me to stumble.
I tried to believe that I grew stronger as I walked, more sure of my stride. As I hurried I tried to think of ways to tell my wife that I was here again, that I was alive, and that everything was going to be fine. I also had time to explore how I felt about Connie. I wanted to give her the good news, and see my house, familiar furniture, friendly walls.
Farther away, across town was the house where Rebecca lived. She was the sole human being I really needed to see. But first I would go home. I needed clothes, and I needed to orient myself just a little more firmly in place and time. I knew that Connie was not the person I most wanted to see, but I accepted her as a part of a homing instinct that led me forward.
I remembered the route as I traveled it. I had a wonderful secret, but I also realized that the shock would be greatâmaybe too much. I tried one fantasy after another, the rung doorbell, the whispered announcement of who I was as Rebecca unfastened the chain. But it wouldn't be Rebecca, it would be Connie. I didn't want to hurt Connie. I considered a trip to a police station so I could scrawl a note and have them make a call first, before I drove up in the backseat, grinning officers slapping my back all the way up the front steps.
I stood on the front lawn of my house.
The walk that ascended to the front steps was cracked, and in the cracks were the spurts of new grass. The grass here, and the lawn on all sides, had been mowed recently, within the last day or so.
I climbed the front steps, and then I hesitated. I was so close, but I could not bring myself to press the doorbell. There was a new anxiety.
What if Connie had moved? What if this house was inhabited by strangers? The new inhabitants would waken, someone fumbling down the stairs. The porch light would flood the steps, and a stranger would stand there, blinking, suspicious, telling his dog to stop barking.
I tried to prepare some remarks that would explain my presence, like a fatigued salesman pulling together his spiel. It was amusing, in a way, but I could think of nothing that I could deliver that would do anything but cause confusion, or even alarm.
I was wearing black shoes, and a black suit I did not recognize. My tie was probably silk, a solid color, black or navy blueâI didn't recognize it, either, and I found myself wondering who had picked it out.
There would be time for doctors to marvel at my recovery. I could visualize the photocopied documents, surprise tempered with explanation. I would enjoy that, reading how they would attempt to explain away the most egregious medical blunder of their careers.
I found my way to the back fence, and the gate creaked, dragging slightly as I opened it, scraping over a length of garden hose. I closed the gate behind me, and stepped over a large plastic bag of Vitagrow mulch, unopened. A rake lay beside it, tines turned upward. It wasn't safe to leave a garden implement like that.
I leaned the rake against the wall. How foreign such things can lookâa pair of gardening gloves on a back step, a steel claw, used for scratching weeds, a box of snail poison, with a drawing of a snail, horned and muscular, printed on the side.
The back door was locked. I should have expected this. I twisted the knob, and my hand slipped off. I had trouble getting a grip. I jiggled the door, considered knocking, and told myself that this was an even worse plan than ringing the front doorbell.
I was glancing around, telling myself not to make noise, telling myself not to lose my temper, telling myself that this was only a minor setback, when I gave the knob another determined turn, and the door popped open.
It hadn't been locked after all, only warped in its frame. This could mean that the house was abandoned, neglected for months, the doorjambs swelling with the wet weather.
I called her name, a scratchy whisper. The kitchen was warm, a compost of coffee grounds and lettuce leaves somewhere under the sink. There was a cup in the dish rack, and a kitchen towel neatly folded. I searched eagerly.
Here was her leather appointment diary. Here was her address book, her favorite gold ball-point pen, with a matching refillable gold pencil she never used. Here was the mail, the bills to be paid in the pigeonhole of the downstairs desk.
There was a set of handle bars, a large front wheel, a wrench gleaming on the carpet. She had been setting up an exercise bike. And here on the coffee table was a plate of smoked almonds, with a space in the salted nuts where someone had pawed a handful. There was a paper napkin, folded once.
The magazines were on the side table, photos of smiling, evidently newsworthy faces I didn't take the time to recognize. I was trailing one hand along the banister, making my way up the stairs. Her name was on my lips, my tongue, my vocal chords ready to call, as best I could, in whatever stage whisper I could manage, when I stopped outside the bathroom.
And for the first time I began to be afraid of myself. Not of any situation I found myself in, not of any lingering health problem I might suffer. I loathed myself for hesitating. I meant that one part of my mind admitted the irrational possibility.
I didn't need to drop by the bathroom, with its sink and its tub and its toilet. I found myself reasoning, like a traveler in an airport, asking himself if he should empty his bladder now or wait until later, on the plane. I was stalling, afraid of waking Connie.
I needed time, I told myself. I was blundering ahead, sure that I just needed a few minutes to understand what was happening to me.
I was afraid to go into the bathroom. I was afraid of something very specific, something that waited alongside toothpaste and deodorant soap.
But as soon as I let myself realize how frightened I was, I knew how badly I needed to talk with someone. I strode down the hall, put my hand on the bedroom door, and let the door swing inward.
I couldn't even see the bed for a moment. The headboard belonged over against the north wall, and here it was, in a completely different part of the room. And it wasn't the same bed. Our bed had been simple, maple, box springs, a mattress: a place to sleep and make love.
This bed was grand, with bedposts and a carved fleur-de-lis in the headboard, dark wood, and old. The bed was empty. I found myself gazing down at the hotel-room neat sheets and pillows. There was no one in the house.
I remembered now what had happened. It was one of those moments when the speaker loses his place, the speech vanishes. He looks down at his notes, mentally groping. And it all comes back.
I knew it all, every wrought-iron detail. My marriage with Connie was finished. Rebecca was gone. I would never see her again.
This nightstand was new, but the dresser was one she had brought from her family home when we were first married. Here was a burn along the front edge from one of her father's menthol cigarettes, from the days before his heart trouble. A hand mirror, face up, reflected the vague light. Another, full-length mirror, hung on the back of the door, angling from where I stood.
I turned on a switch with some difficulty. It was one of those mock-antique kerosene lamps, the switch a knob made to look like it had something to do with advancing the wick. I closed my eyes against the sudden light. I was sickened. Usually when a light passes though our eyelids we see a shade of red, small blood vessels, skin. The light through my eyelids was gray. I fumbled, and snapped off the light.
It took awhile for my eyes to adjust. She had added to her collection of hurricane lamps, the genuine article, pale wicks curling in vinegar-yellow kerosene. A row of them gleamed on a high shelf.
I didn't recognize any of her clothes in the closet. Some of the dresses were gradually familiar as I hunted, sweeping them aside, the metal hooks scraping along the rod. But she had new clothes, dozens of suits and skirts I did not recognize.
None of my clothes remained. Not one hiking boot, not one necktie. Nothing.
A rush of light swept the room, and tires crackled in the street, a car turning, tires squealing against the curb. I recognized the way she drove, a deft u-turn the street almost could not accommodate, and the way she parked abruptly, the car always either too far out, or jammed against the curb.
When I imagined what I had to ask her I could not picture the conversation. There was too many questions, one on top of the other, and too many answers I did not really want to hear.
Footsteps on the front steps. A lurch as she tugged the front door, worked the key again, and got it open. She was in the house. She snapped on lights downstairs. She kicked off her shoes, one of them skidding, thudding against a wall.
While she was in the downstairs bathroom I crept down the stairway, and out the front door, feeling myself abandon every false hope. And what did that leave? I asked myself.
What friend did I have?
18
Walking uphill was difficult.
The winding streets and the steep sidewalks presented a challenge. I was in the Berkeley Hills, quiet residences and a drowsy sense of up-market college town security making me feel naked, out of place. I had the sense that if I thought too intently on what I was doing, or where I was going, I would rupture something in myself, or in my consciousness, my sense of reality. It was best to keep walking.
The brick wall was covered with ivy, a mature plant, not yet in leaf, the muscular vine spread wide. Cracks marred the wall, the breaks following the outline of the bricks, zigzagging downward. I climbed the ivy. My awkwardness surprised me, my body almost refusing to cooperate. I swung myself over the fence.