Authors: Michael Cadnum
It was a pleasant roomâfloral print drapes, a gray carpet. A slapdash, colorful watercolor decorated one side of the room, a sailboat in a sunsetâor sunrise. With difficulty I managed to make out the signature,
SO
, like a mild challenge.
An Eisenstaedt portrait of Robert Frost commanded one wall, with that airless, preserved quality of certain photographs, the living moment turned to silver. Directly across from Frost hung a wood-framed, full-length mirror.
I could not help looking, once more. Perhaps, I told myself, this mirror will be different. Surely it would. All I had to do was take one more look.
I could see the entire room, if I shifted from angle to angle. But I could not see myself.
21
Was Dr. Opal on the telephone? Was he faxing word about me to people I did not know and could not trust? I crept to the door, but all I could hear was Dr. Opal's restless quiet, the slap of his slippers as he tossed them on the floor, the tinkle of liquor into a glass.
Dr. Opal stopped pacing his bedroom. He was listening.
Don't worry. It's nothing. Only the house settling
. Or
that neighbor's tom cat again, such a devilish creature
.
I turned the doorknob and pushed. The chair creaked, the joints straining. I visualized the chair, the glue, the legs, all of it fighting my weight. A chair leg snapped.
I was in the hall. Time was not fluid. It jumped, like a badly mended movie. One instant I stood on the stairs. And then I was outside, just beyond the sliding glass door.
Upstairs I could hear Dr. Opal wandering again, opening drawers and shutting them, unable to lie down and unable to sit still, taking reassurance by moving things from place to place. Springs whispered. I could almost see him, lying down, hands over his eyes, not sleeping so much as waiting for day.
I would go for a walk.
The sight of my own footsteps stirred something in me. I was here. I was real. On my way to the house, what seemed like hours ago, I had left footprints in the field.
Suddenly I was sprawled beneath a tree.
I rolled onto my back and gazed upward at the towering eucalyptus, scales of bark dangling from its branches. Bits of twigs and tangles of leaves rained after me, and gradually slackened, until a last leaf spun down and brushed my cheek.
I blinked, and my vision remained clear. I will get up, I told myself, and everything will make sense. I could breathe freely, and I filled my lungs and exhaled several times, the air cool and flavored with eucalyptus and wet earth. A wadded com chips bag lay nearby.
I had the impression that I had just fallen, hard, from a great height. I couldn't recall in any detail the events leading up to this moment.
Don't think about it. Don't ask yourself how you got here.
I listened hard to the noises of a less sedate, more work-worn part of town. I pulled myself to my feet. As I had walked to Dr. Opal's house my joints had creaked and strained, but now they were supple. I flexed the long tendons of my legs, stretched my arms. Each step crushed the bell-shaped eucalyptus seeds, and I groped my way through fallen twigs, down a slope, toward a creek. Flattened cardboard boxes had been used as sleds on the bare dirt, tearing paths in the weeds.
A drainpipe emptied into the creek, horsetail reeds growing around the steady trickle. The vague, reflected light off the clouds swam in the current at my feet. A metal shopping cart leaned in the current, bearded with scum.
Children murmured in their sleep. A car gleamed faintly in the creek bed, windows smashed, the doors missing. The seats were gone, the hulk abandoned, blistered with rust. I sat behind the steering wheel, my weight on the bare, crumbling springs. The chassis settled, groaning. This was where I could spend the rest of the night, I told myself, like a boy in his dad's car.
I had never felt so free of care. The weariness and the chill were gone from my body. The stream flowed into the car, eddying, and my feet splashed as I pretended to drive, stepping on the accelerator, a metal knob. To my surprise, when I turned the steering wheel the front end shifted, the bare wheel grinding on the stones.
I
was
a boy. I had that feeling I'd had when reading alone, finding an amusing passage, laughing out loud, and feeling the Tightness, solitude blessed. I felt a thrill. I was a child again, but with a man's knowledge. I had mourned, I had worked hard, I had seen thirty-eight summers fade. And now this legacy was mine. I had the powerful feeling that, if I willed it, the car would lurch out of the creek bed, and hurtle through the air, wherever I willed it to go.
The flow of the creek was strong, parting around me as I left the car and waded upward, passing willows trees and mossy rocks. I dug my fingers into the bank and hauled myself up. I swung over a fence. A house ahead of me was pink halfway up, where the paint must have run out. The rest of the stucco was weathered and gray, iron grillwork over the windows. A clothesline dangled a few bone-white clothespins, and a bicycle frozen with corrosion lay abandoned behind an assembly of scrap wood, two-by-fours and warped plywood.
I treasured each detail, the two ancient tennis shoes left on the back step. On the other side of the fence, a dog put its snout to a knot hole, sniffed, and stole away into the dark, whining.
I passed through a gate and stood in the middle of a street, beside a manhole cover. There was a billboard ahead, huge, colorful, laughing people. I took a deep breath. The air tasted of mildewed porch sofas, dry rot in floorboards, new green, sour grass, rye. And dogsâthere were dogs everywhere, unable to bark, nosing the air, skulking at their chains.
A bird woke and scratched for a firmer grip on its perch in an eave. All of it asleep, but a sleep so restless, so close to waking. I could hear the whispered questions, men and women talking in their sleep, a jet aircraft far above, the freight of so many lives. All of it so rich to me that I could name each man, each woman, know the nightmare as it stirred, and stretch a hand to still it. I hushed the unseen children, the infants around me. Could I really do this? Calm the psychic seas for many city blocks around me, with a raised hand, without a word. With a thought?
There was bass-note snap under my feet, in the earth. Creatures stirred at my passing, gophers beneath all of this, the ivy, the early spring blackberries, living barbed wire.
People. I wanted to see people, to hear them talk, to show myself to them. I knew it was reckless, but I couldn't keep myself from brimming over with the news.
Besides, I wanted to know the answer to a few riddles, just one or two, like a man needing a dictionary even as he speaks, with delightful fluency, a new and very foreign tongue.
In what seemed like a matter of moments I was in another part of town, among expensive houses again, sports cars in driveways under tight-fitting canvas covers.
Sensations, not thoughts. I laughed, my head thrown back. I could sense people around me awaken at the sound. Traffic grumbled down in the flat of the city. Perhaps there was more freeway noise than there had been earlier. There was so much restlessness, activity mistaken for power.
How many hours had I wasted, sitting in the law library, driving alone across the Bay Bridge? I had not enjoyed the fellowship of people nearly as much as I could now. I saw how important it was, that warm country, friendship. I had wasted so much time!
I had overlooked so much during my years as a waking, working human being. If a garden hose is left long enough on the grass, it leaves a yellow shadow, a photograph of itself. The newspaper tossed on the crabgrass, the empty, scummy wading pool among the succulentsâthey all leave an image of themselves when we move them at last, a place where the sun has failed.
I let myself into Steve Fayette's front garden, the black iron gate closing quietly. The house had a porch light styled after an antique lantern, and a big red front door. I turned the doorknob, pushed, and the chain broke.
I remembered where he kept the key to his burglar alarm, under the asparagus fern. I had thirty seconds before the police were automatically alerted. I turned off the blinking red light. Steve had been pensive about his money, not always sure what to do with it. A gigantic television screen graced one wall, and a telescope, the lens carefully capped, aimed at a corner of the ceiling. Everything was custom designed, the fat leather furniture, the huge glass coffee table.
A sculpture hulked like a meteorite beside one of the bookshelves. Few books occupied the space. Instead there were photographs, graduation pictures, wedding portraits, nieces and nephews. And a photo of Steve beside one of his race horses, the thoroughbred turning one dark eye toward the camera.
A bowl of fruit was star of the show on the big, shiny dining room table, bananas still green at the tips, a decorator's idea of how fruit should look, crown jewels. The house was earthquake-proof, according to the designer, and that meant that the floors were thin, and trembled with the slam of a door, expensive paintings hanging crooked on the walls.
I slipped into the master bedroom, and I was not surprised to see her there, my wifeâmy widow. So this was the next chapter in her life.
I understood. Steve was pleasant company, and nothing solves cash-flow problems quite like cash. Steve did not look healthy in his sleep, shadows in his cheeks, his jaw slack. But Connie slept with an ironically virginal air. She looked not quite innocent, but vacant.
To look at them like this was pleasure. Poised over them, I was capable of the common misdemeanors of an ordinary man, burglary, voyeurism. But this was all I wanted, I told myself. Just a look, just a sip of their presence.
And then I stopped myself. I wanted to be a secret, it was true, but didn't I want something more? What was I, a salesman, pressing a pamphlet under the doormat? And not even a calling cardâI would leave soon and they would never know I'd been here. I wanted them to know. I wanted them to ask each other if they had heard something in the night.
I had never noticed it before, how the pulse thrums in the tissues of the neck. And in the blue veins of the temple, and in the sheath of bone and fibers, the wrist. If the blood Dr. Opal had given me, lifeless, refrigerated broth, had given me such vigor, imagine, I thought. Imagine what this could do,
this
oxygen that was even now nourishing the dreams, supplying memory with its color.
I heard something.
It was a sound that chilled me. A sound that Connie heard, too, throwing her arm out and lifting her head from a pillow, only to let it fall back. She said something, a sleepy, non-word. It was in answer to this metallic, wheedling noise outside, beyond the walls. This agonized, insistent declamation, full-stereo, now, everywhere.
Birds. That's all it was. Finches, sparrows, robins, juncos, towheesâordinary birds. That was all.
I was out of the house. I could not run in a straight line. I staggered. I was weak again. Dr. Opal's house was not far away, not far at all. But where?
It was going to be too far for me, as the coast is too far for that passenger who cannot swim when he struggles, the luxury liner so many pinholes of light.
I was running like the last, bedraggled participant in a marathon, a man so late the spectators and the judges have long since gone, nothing remaining but the route, the route that is always there, whether the race is run or not, the sidewalk with a yellow plastic tricycle left out overnight, the glowing blush of a windshield in the coming dawn.
22
I fell into a field, clods and furrows. An armored beast, many-legged and encased in a segmented shell, tumbled onto my thumb as my fingers dug into the earth. It worried at the knuckle before it, uncuriously wondering if it should continue its march.
Thoughtless, it was living enough to roll into a ball as I nudged it gently with my other hand. I pulled myself to my feet, one foot dragging. I flailed my way ahead, hating my body, a stunt-clown, corporeal joke.
At the last moment I tripped on a hoop of wire on the lawn. I tumbled, and rolled onto my back. I would get up soon. Very soon. As soon as I could move again.
A face. It was the face of a referee, peering down, inquisitive, urgent, even a little annoyed.
“Richardâwhere did you go?”
I tried to tell him to get me out of the sunlight, and all I could do was hang on to him, dragging at his bathrobe, that luxurious robe, a gift, I was sure, from Susan. Susan, who must have admired these pajamas.
Oh, wear the nice shiny blue ones, Samuel
. Or perhaps the pajamas, too, were a gift. I had slept through a Christmas, and a New Year's Day. And who knows what wars and what discoveries, strikes, political pronouncements, distant coups, civil wars.
“Richard, where were you?”
“Help me,” I heard myself croak.
I was desperate in my idiocy, a man rising at life's banquet needing the Heimlich maneuver, demanding CPR, no one understanding.
So if this is how I die again, I thought, I will have this absurd last moment, one foot stuck though the loop of a croquet game, and the other digging spasmodically, excavating a divot.
Until I climbed to my feet again. With Dr. Opal kneeling on the lawn calling after me, I ran toward the house, hard, straight for the wall, the solid stone and mortar. But I knew where I was going. I saw the pane of glass behind the pruned stalks of poinsettia.
I dived through a window. I scrambled down inside the cellar, into the odor of damp and mildew aged to a kind of soil. The hot water heater, the shiny Sherman tank of the furnace, all of it in darkness. I tore at the old asphalt tiles, pea green floor covering, the ancient tar brittle, the flooring peeling away.
I dug with my hands, a diver desperate for air. But I was not climbing upward. What I wanted was not oxygen.
It was this hiding place, among the roots of the foundation, among the gravel and the dirt, and deeper, as far as I could go.
23
An engine puttered somewhere at the edge of the world. People spoke, their voices strained by the stone and clay. It was all so far away, and I was so deeply asleep. Iron drilled the earth. Roots were thrust into place, tamped down with boots. What we mean when we say we had a dream is: something real that didn't happen. If this was a dream, then it was one that had a life of its own. When I half-woke it continued, an interruption of the silence.