The Open Curtain (13 page)

The whole of his life began to resemble a hallucination, dark and folded inward as if assembled from his mind. There was a falsity to it, as if he were acting, and often he found himself having to hold himself back from laughter because everything seemed contrived. All that really mattered were the blotted hours, but they were the only things he had no access to. He borrowed a video camera, tried turning it on when he sensed a blackout coming, but when he came conscious again the cassette was removed, the tape spooled out into a loopy, shiny pile. On the wall was written a note in pencil, but again it was nothing he could make out. Perhaps it wasn’t letters at all but some other system of symbols. From a certain angle, if he looked at the marks for only an instant, they resembled the sacred marks on his mother’s temple garments, and once the idea was in his head he started to see the marks everywhere, on every surface, God’s claim to all. He could do without sleep, he knew; all he had to do was close his eyes and he could rest, but he would go on thinking the whole time his eyes were closed, his eyes still closed but seeing the marks on the wall in his memory. Then, just as suddenly, the feeling left him and he was holding his pencil, trying to erase God’s marks from everything, then knowing he had to get out. He was out in the hall and past his mother without speaking to her and down the hall and out the door. The whole world was running all awash with noise, too much noise for him to sort anything out. A voice was speaking, but it was not his voice, and how it had come to be in his head he didn’t know. It was not to be believed. He was fine, healthy, the world had always been speaking to him, only he had never been able to hear it until now. Soon he would not only hear it but comprehend it, and then he would know what was expected of him, what he should do next.

“Rudd?” a voice was saying, “Rudd?” It took him a moment to realize the voice was not inside him but somewhere before him. A dark face, Elling. Only not Elling. A woman. Mrs. Madison.

“Is anything wrong, Rudd?” she asked.

He knew the right answer. He started to raise his hand, then realized it was not the sort of answer you raised your hand to give. “No,” he said. “I’m fine.” It was the truth, in a sense, and if it wasn’t true exactly it was certainly necessary. One lived by necessary things and necessity—

“You’re certain?”

Had the first answer been wrong? Was it the wrong voice he was listening to, or if not the wrong voice maybe he was mishearing the right one? He looked up and into her face again, saw her features shadowing, her voice growing dim.

“To tell the truth, I haven’t been sleeping well lately,” he mumbled, his vision dimming, blackout, blackout, blackout.

And then, just as Rudd had shown up at Lael’s door for the first time, unannounced, in midafternoon, several years before, there was Lael, this time at Rudd’s door.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“What?” asked Lael. “You asked me to come.”

“I asked you?”

“Today’s the day, May seventeenth, remember?”

He did not know what to say. “How did you get here?” he asked.

Lael looked at him, lips closed, head tilted slightly. “You loaned me your scooter.”

“Oh,” said Rudd. “Yes.”

“Is anything wrong?”

“No,” said Rudd, already seeing the patches starting to spread across Lael’s face, the dark mask overlapping it. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

And then it was as if he blinked his eyes to find himself riding not on the back of the scooter this time but on the front, Lael hanging on to him from behind. He swerved a little, slowed down, realized he didn’t even know where he was going. He kept going straight. It was the middle of the day, perhaps the same day, perhaps another day, and they were driving through fields on back roads, farms all around them, the mountains looming before them, rocky and scrub-covered and awkward. The scooter was whining and his hands tingled from the vibration as if coming asunder, and he realized he was holding the grips too tightly. He could see in the back of each of his hands the shadow of Elling’s face, and had difficulty paying attention to the road. He kept looking at the faces on his hands and then glancing at the mirror, trying to catch Lael’s reflection to compare, though he could see nothing of
Lael, felt only his chin pressing into Lael’s back—or rather Lael’s chin pressed into
his
back, Lael’s head hidden behind his own body. Yet it was as if it were
Lael’s
back and
his
chin because before it had always been that way; he felt for a moment that he had exchanged bodies with Lael. As he let the idea fill his head it was almost as if he couldn’t see to drive because his face was pressed to his own back. He was trying to raise his head, but when he finally did, he was not on the scooter at all and Lael was not in front of him but beside him and they were both of them marching not along a road but up the slope of a hill. He felt himself growing dizzy, so to distract himself he tried to keep his eyes on Lael instead of the slope. He went stumbling upward, listening to a ragged wind that he came to realize was his own mutilated breathing. Or his own mixed with Lael’s who, he now perceived, had in his hand a glinting object that he made out to be a knife.

“Why do you have your knife out?” he managed to ask.

Neither of them stopped climbing, though Lael leaned slightly toward him. “For the same reason yours is out,” said Lael, and Rudd caught between steps the flash of the blade in his own hand. He wanted to close the knife and put it away but did not, nor could he think of a reason he should be holding it; indeed, all he could consider was his sheer stumbling dizziness. He reached out to steady himself on Lael and realized that his knife had torn through his half-brother’s shirtsleeve, jabbing into his arm.

“Jesus!” said Lael, and stopped to examine his arm and shirt. Rudd could see a certain panic to him, perhaps even fear.

“Sorry,” said Rudd. “I mean, I didn’t—”

“I’ve trusted you,” said Lael. “I’ve gone along with you in all of this. Was I wrong to do so?”

“In all of what?” asked Rudd.

Lael shook his head and continued climbing, muttering under his breath. Rudd took a step forward, the ground rolling under his feet, and collapsed.

Then just as quickly he was crouching on a hillock over a nearly deserted camping area, a green ranger’s box at the end of a paved road, rutted dirt roads leading back to campsites. It was near sunset. Lael was holding onto his shoulder. The ground was steady for a moment though slowly starting to tilt and buckle again. He got down on his hands and knees and, as it grew worse, onto his belly.

“There,” said Lael. Rudd blinked, tried to focus his eyes, saw only trees, grass, dirt, the scars of fire pits.

“What?” he asked. “Where?”

Lael pointed and Rudd tried to follow his finger out. There was something below them, through the trees, a car of some sort, a station wagon, and around it bustling shapes.

“That’s it,” said Lael. “They’re the ones.”

Rudd lowered his head, smelled the ground against his face. Then Lael pulled him up to his feet and they were off and stumbling, Lael still holding him and helping him stay upright. They skidded down a scattered flow of shale, crouched behind some old, withered sage, the slight smell of it clearing his head. There they were, a family, about a hundred yards distant, three of them in all, a tent set up, an unlit lantern standing on the table.

“What do we do now?” Rudd asked.

Lael half-turned. “We wait for dark,” he said. He turned his knife around, beginning to strop it first against the side of his shoe then against a half-buried stone. Rudd didn’t know the family at all. They were tossing a frisbee, two of them anyway, a man and a young girl. A woman watched from beside a fire pit, poking the fire with sticks.

The ground wasn’t sloshing so much, and he thought at first it was because they had descended slightly and the ground had begun to level out. Then he realized it was because he was beginning to feel isolated, insulated, buried deeper inside his body. He was no longer so close to the outside. Even looking through his eyes it was as if he were looking from deeper within his head, his vision of the outside framed, a large darkness encroaching.

“What do we do?” he heard himself ask again.

“Be patient,” said Lael. “Night is coming.”

He took a deep breath, felt his vision grow dim. He felt himself slowly crowded out of his senses and into oblivion.

T
hey showed up at her door to warn her, but it was too late, it was already on the news, the hiker having called the press before the police. She was sprawled on the couch, idly watching TV while working through her algebra homework:
four bodies, not yet identified, a campsite, vicious slaying, three long and careful cuts across throat, breast, hips. Each body arranged on the ground to form a pattern: a V, a right angle, each next to each. And then, a little downslope, midway between the V’d body and the right-angled body, a corpse spread straight with hands to sides, a horizontal line; and another body, beneath the right angle but farther down the mountainside, spread straight as well:
so that from the air (according to the artist’s graphic representation) it looked like:

Suspiciously resembling,
the reporter went on to say,
if you cared for an instant to block out the river disrupting the pattern, the distinctive markings of the Mormon temple garment.

Weird, she thought, and turned the channel. But the story was on the next channel as well. When she switched again she saw neither mountainside nor reporters but an old picture of her father. It was as if something were wrong with the television. It took a moment for her to understand, switching back to where she had started and seeing the picture there too. It was her father’s photograph, her mother’s face beside. Two men wearing
plastic gloves, zipping a body into a bag, the photographs of her parents again, the name of her sister as well, spelled incorrectly, no photograph.
We confirm, then, the names,
and a shot again of the reporter, shaking her head,
a tragedy, horrendous, no leads to speak of
—
one survivor.
The doorbell was ringing, had been ringing for some time she realized suddenly, and she was walking toward the door with the remote still in her hand,
once again we confirm the,
and then she was opening the door: two men dressed in street clothes brandishing badges that flashed with light. Behind them, along the property line, a cluster of reporters beginning to shout the moment she opened the door. The plainsclothesmen, badges still out, moving their lips without her hearing a word. Or hearing, rather, but unable to string meaning through their words.
I know,
she heard herself saying, the remote clattering from her hand,
I’ve just been watching.
She turned and took two steps back toward the couch, found instead her cheek pressed against the floor.

They wrapped her in a blanket, kept asking her how she felt. A man holding a camera high above his head shoved his way toward her, flash fluttering, and was pushed back.

“Is she all right?” they wanted to know. “Is she ready to talk?”

Four bodies,
she thought she heard, low and behind her.
A ritual of some kind.
They were forcing a cup of something into her hands, but she couldn’t unknot her hands from the blanket. Fluorescent lights, buzzing slightly. A desk, bare except for a pencil, another desk beside it, another desk beyond that.

“Perhaps we should take her to the hospital?”

“Linda, are you all right?”

“Is that her name?”

“Hell, I think so. Who’s got the file?”