Soul/Mate

by Joyce Carol Oates

  From time to time during that long hallucinatory day and the next, Dorothea was uneasily aware of Colin Asch regarding her in silence; she perceived, with a despondent heart, that he was contemplating her death. Hers, and perhaps his own: murder and suicide. Was that not romantic? Was that not the logical end to their story? As if merely conversationally, Colin Asch said, “My book here—I’m going to be writing in it soon. I have to think what I mean to say ’cause there isn’t a lot of time, you know? You could write in it too, if you wanted. I mean at the end. The last pages.”

  “Is it a journal?” Dorothea asked.

  “It’s my life. In words.”

  The notebook was oversized and substantial, with badly worn blue-gray covers: a kind of account book, or ledger. Colin was not precisely offering it to Dorothea (who did not in any case want to touch it), but he leafed through it in such a way that she could see some of the pages: tight, condensed passages of script, lines that were presumably poetry, sections meticulously crossed out in bands of black ink. Stroking the pale stubble on his jaws he said dreamily, “What I want to do is bring it up to date. Up to the present hour. From a perspective, you know, of great distance. Like God looking down.” Dorothea murmured a vague soft assent but drew no nearer. “You couldn’t read it, actually, most of the pages,” Colin said apologetically. “It’s in code.”

  “Ah, yes, I see—code,” Dorothea said.

  “To keep the fuckers from sticking their noses in my business,” Colin said, smiling bitterly. “After my death.”

  The interior of the lodge was furnished in a spare yet slapdash manner, the large main room in particular: there were dusty old woven “Navajo” rugs laid upon the floor, and mismatched stained furniture, and lamps with torn shades, but, here and there, substantial and attractive items like the Shaker-style rocking chair in which Dorothea sat and the long narrow churchly-looking table at which Colin Asch sat for hours, writing in his notebook, alternately rapidly, as if he were inspired, and then very slowly. For long dreamy periods he simply gazed out the window (he was seated in such a position as to have a clear view of the lane, and the lake) or in Dorothea’s direction. We are a grotesque parody of domesticity, Dorothea thought, but of what sort of domesticity is the parody?

  She seemed to know that, if she survived, she would remember this interlude for the remainder of her life: not the episodes of confusing action and violence (for she understood that violence was unavoidable) but this protracted and seemingly idyllic scene in which, only a few yards away, her young blond captor Colin Asch sat brooding over his notebook like an unusually intense schoolboy immersed in his lesson. Outside the day was slowly warming; the air smelled wetly of spring and of plenitude. In the Scotch pines that ringed the house, jays called to one another in urgent, throaty, liquid notes, a spring song that, to Dorothea’s ear, had always the sound of bubbles musically ascending.

  Colin Asch read to Dorothea Deverell a stanza of a poem of Shelley’s he had transcribed, he said, eleven years before, “Never guessing how I’d be reading it to you, today!” It was not a stanza Dorothea immediately recognized, nor could she in all honesty have attributed it to Shelley, for she had neither read nor thought of Shelley’s poetry in months.

  “‘The everlasting universe of things

  Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,

  Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting

  gloom—

  Now lending splendor, where from secret springs

  The source of human thought its tribute brings—’”

  Colin Asch’s voice trailed off as if this were not in fact the end of the stanza but a weariness had passed over him suddenly, touching Dorothea Deverell as well. And outside, in the pines, the jays continued to sing.

  In all there would be four days of captivity; it would end, and end abruptly, in the late afternoon of May 11. But almost immediately Dorothea Deverell began to lose her sense of time and of spatial distance, as one whose proprioceptive instinct is dislodged loses all sense of the body’s unique and indefinable territoriality. Or as the web of memory itself is altered by the mildest of brain lesions.

  It seemed to her in her weakened emotional state that Charles Carpenter’s love should have had a greater power to protect her. But it was distant, and its force hourly ebbing. She thought, I am alone.

  Except for my captor.

  She was sick: wrapped in her frowsy blanket though it was midday and May. From childhood she’d had respiratory illnesses of varying degrees of severity, and certain symptoms frightened her, for they might signal a headlong plunge into fevers, wracking chills, convulsive coughing spells. Her lungs were congesting, and her chest felt as if an invisible band were slowly tightening around it. Her eyes watered with tears of hurt and indignation.

  But she was watching (and could not help but admire) Colin Asch on the floor in front of the fireplace doing push-ups—how rapidly!—how like a slightly frenzied machine!—as the little blue vein defined itself ever more palpably in his forehead and his face grew visibly hotter, ruddier. He counted ninety before stopping. And then he did sit-ups: fingers linked at the nape of his neck, elbows expertly swung around to touch his knees in an alternating pattern. And then—as if his mad energy could in no other way be contained—he jumped up and, panting, glistening with sweat, chinned himself on the doorframe. Though he was so thin that his ribs showed through his damp T-shirt, the muscles of his shoulders, arms, and back appeared hard and prominent. “… twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty!”

  Performing for Dorothea Deverell but never so much as casting a single glance in her direction.

  In plain view, atop the table, lay the long-barreled revolver.

  Dorothea, eyeing it, thought, I must make the effort. She calculated there were six feet separating her and the gun; and that, when Colin was distracted, she need only throw off the blanket, lunge forward, snatch it up in both hands.… She would turn it against her captor and stammer out an entreaty, or a threat: I will pull the trigger if you don’t obey me! But hallucinatory images assailed her of Colin Asch simply wrenching the gun from her grasp or, worse yet, the gun firing by accident, a bullet tearing through Colin Asch’s chest or face.

  “You could have taken the gun any time you wanted, Dorothea,” Colin Asch said, as, at dusk, they ate one of their crudely improvised meals. “But you didn’t. You could have shot me down dead and you’d never have been charged for a thing, and that means you don’t want to go back any more than I do.”

  Dorothea said quietly, “That isn’t true.”

  Colin said. “Yeah, it’s true.”

  Dorothea said, “Colin, you must know—it isn’t true.”

  “It is.”

  So with the stubborn purposelessness of true intimacy, they quarreled; until finally Dorothea turned away, choking with indignation, hurt, dismay. She seemed to recall how, in childhood too, the salt taste of tears was the very taste of humiliation.

  “If you’re wondering, the way I did it was I got her drunker than she was, and fed her some Valium from her medicine cabinet, and held her head under the water till she stopped breathing. She didn’t feel a thing!—just like I promised her. Not like that son of a bitch Krauss,” Colin Asch said with a spitting gesture. “I wanted him to feel it all the way, and he did.”

  It must have been very late. Dorothea’s watch had stopped running. Colin Asch was feeding, page by single page, the book he called his “blue ledger” into the fire. Dorothea did not want to ask why.

  “It’s a weird thing,” he said almost conversationally, ignoring the look of revulsion on Dorothea’s face, “how good you feel doing something you know is right. Like, after all, there’re so few times in your life you really know you’re standing in exactly the right place at the right time. Like you’re not even yourself any longer but an agent of history. Of Death.”

  Dorothea shuddered, and said, “I should think it would be better to be an agent of life.”

  “When I kill som
eone I am the agent of Death,” Colin Asch said slowly. He was detaching pages from the front of the notebook, ripping them carefully from the binding: he’d rekindled the fire, and it burned with a disconcerting Currier & Ives cheeriness. The lighted warmth, cast upward on Colin Asch’s angular, pale face, gave his cheeks a look of boyish ruddy health. “When it’s done it’s done forever. And no one can controvert it. Think of that! Try to realize that, Dorothea! When you put something in the world, or love something in the world, or, say, you yourself are in the world, it’s all fucking vulnerable—it can end at any minute. But the agent of Death—that’s different.” His voice rose tremulously. He grinned into the firelight. “Yeah. That’s different.”

  “You’re talking simply about destroying things, taking life away—”

  “You don’t know what I’m talking about, Dorothea,” Colin Asch said, “’cause you’ve never done what I have done. And if you had, you’d know.”

  “But—”

  “If you had, you’d know.”

  Dorothea began sobbing, and the sobbing turned into a spasm of coughing that left her throat raw. Earlier that day Colin had expressed concern for her and murmured something vague about taking her to a doctor or to an emergency room. “Or maybe I could go by myself to some drugstore and get you penicillin.” In a nervous reflexive gesture he’d checked the pistol another time for bullets, swinging the cartridge holder out. Dorothea had wondered how he’d known her bronchial condition required penicillin but she said nothing about it, and in any case Colin seemed to have forgotten within the hour.

  Now he said, as if talking to himself, “You don’t want to go back any more than I do. I know. It’s a matter of honor and integrity—think of Christopher Columbus carried back to Spain in chains! The fuckers! What they want is to make people like us grovel, beg for mercy. But why the fuck should we? It’s a question of freedom. It’s power—doing things the way you want them done, becoming the agent of your own life. And death.”

  Dorothea made an effort to control herself. “But I don’t want to die,” she said.

  “When I was twelve, and my parents died, there was this weird force drawing us off the bridge and through the railing—into the water—I could feel it, almost,” Colin said, beginning to speak in an agitated voice, “but I thought—you know how you do at that age—I thought I could fight it, controvert it! There I was, diving into the water, swimming down, trying to get the car doors open, trying to pull them out—my mother, my father, first the one then the other then first one again then the other—like there was some kind of crazy thing in me too so that after a while I wasn’t even thinking, didn’t have any volition, or will; it wasn’t Colin Asch but just my body, my muscles. But the fact was I failed. The lesson I was meant to learn was—I failed. Life goes in one direction only, like a river flowing or like gravity—you can’t controvert it.”

  Deeply moved, having dreaded another sort of narration entirely, Dorothea said, “But you were very brave, Colin! And so young.…”

  Colin shook his head violently. “There was nothing brave about it; I don’t know what ‘brave’ is. It was just this asshole kid trying to do something he wasn’t meant to do so a lesson could be taught about it. Life goes in one direction only.”

  “Ah, Colin, surely not!”

  He tore off another page and dropped it into the fire. Dorothea had a glimpse of a surface of neat block letters in a variety of shades of ink; there were tiny drawings too, or doodlings, in the margin; she would have liked, in that instant, to snatch the page out of the fire and save it. But it burst into flame and vanished.

  “Did that happen anywhere near here?” Dorothea asked. “Your parents’ accident?”

  “No. Nowhere near here,” Colin Asch said. “Hundreds of miles to the south.”

  Dorothea Deverell did not believe she was asleep but there, unaccountably, was her mother … her young mother with loose flying hair and dark smooth golden skin … striding through a meadow of tall grass, shading her eyes and calling Dorothea! Dorothea! A scattering of tiny yellow butterflies surrounded her. The game was that Dorothea’s mother could not detect the giggling little girl crouched hiding in the grass so Dorothea leaped up to surprise her, feeling a wave of joy so intense it turned to pain in her throat … and then she was coughing violently, and awake, returned confusedly to herself, sitting in a patch of wan sunlight in an opened doorway strange to her in a place strange to her and someone was approaching, speaking to her in a peremptory, suspicious voice: “Hey, what the hell are you doing here, lady?”

  A burly old man in soiled overalls and a railway worker’s cap, with a flushed bewhiskered face and small narrowed eyes: the caretaker for Glace Lake?

  And some thirty feet away, behind him, beside a pickup truck parked in the lane, stood a teen-aged boy with what appeared to be a rifle slung loosely in the crook of his arm.

  Dorothea waved at the old man to come no nearer, trying to warn him, her voice raw, cracked. “Get away! Don’t speak to me! There’s danger!”

  But the old man took no heed; excitable and emboldened, having sized up Dorothea Deverell as no one he need fear, he said loudly, belligerently, “Just what the bejesus are you doing here, lady? This is private property—don’t you know?”

  At this point two events happened with near-simultaneity: the boy by the pickup truck shouted out something to the old man Dorothea could not quite hear (except for the word “Grandpa,” which she would retain for a long time), and, easing up noiselessly behind her, as if, these many hours in “Land’s End,” he had primed himself for this very moment, Colin Asch gracefully leaned over Dorothea’s head in the doorway, and aimed the pistol at the old man’s chest, and fired. Dorothea screamed as the old man spun partway around and fell; Colin leaped to the walk crying “Fucker! That’ll teach you! I’ll kill you all!” He sighted the boy in the lane but the boy turned to run; Colin pursued him and fired a single shot but almost immediately returned, cursing, infuriated, as Dorothea knelt beside the dying old man whose chest was already soaked in blood and whose face had gone, with terrifying swiftness, a sickly ashen gray. “A doctor—call a doctor! Oh, Colin—an ambulance!” Dorothea said.

  Colin Asch stood over his victim and almost idly aimed the pistol again, at the old man’s forehead.

  “Here’s your doctor, you old fart. Didn’t I warn you all!”

  And then it was the end, or nearly.

  Dorothea found herself cringing in a corner of the kitchen, then in the tiny lavatory adjacent to the kitchen, sobbing hysterically, as Colin Asch, enraged, incredulous, stomped from room to room, from window to window, shoving furniture into place to establish what reports of the siege would subsequently call a “barricade,” cursing, talking loudly to himself and to Dorothea, whom he berated for having been discovered and for having forced him to shoot the old man without adequate preparation. First, Colin had had the idea that they must flee, in the car, but he’d immediately changed his mind, reasoning that “they” would be waiting for him since the road led in only one fucking direction thus they’d have him trapped like a sitting duck; they’d set up a roadblock or wait in ambush; the only strategy was to stay where they were and see how long they could hold out—“Fucking Christ I’ve already wasted three bullets!”

  Banging on the lavatory door with such violence that the feeble lock sprang open he shouted at Dorothea, “It’s all happening too fucking fast! I’m not ready! You’re not ready!”

  And indeed from this hour everything happened with dreamlike rapidity and logic, as if the unnatural stasis of many hours were breaking, pent up and malevolent, about their heads. There came to Dorothea’s ears, within minutes it seemed, the sound of a police or ambulance siren, and a second siren, and a man’s voice, garishly amplified through a bullhorn, shouting instructions to “you!—inside that house!”; the sound of other voices; and Colin Asch’s at first unrecognizable shouting (so raw, so despairing and young) from one of the barricaded windows—he was armed, he s
aid, and he had a hostage. And there was the deafening sound of gunfire, and breaking cascading glass. The image of Charles Carpenter’s face passed swiftly through Dorothea’s vision, but it was a face of studied calm, remoteness. He knows nothing of me, she thought. It was all a dream.

  For the duration of the siege—three and a half hours in all, though most of that time was spent in shouted instructions, commands, repartee of a kind—Dorothea Deverell remained where she had crawled to hide, shivering with a hot rank animal fear and gradually passing beyond panic and into a stage very like catatonic bliss: as if, in this nearly sculptural mimicry of death, she might magically be spared death.

  Yet even then, amid the chaos of men’s voices, random and seemingly theatrical displays of gunfire, and the outraged heavy footsteps of her abductor as he charged past her hiding place to commandeer one or another window (it would have been held grievously against him by the county sheriff and his deputies, had he survived, that Colin Asch had given them so pointlessly difficult a time in “rescuing” the fallen old man whom they could not have known with certainty was dead)—even then, in the very cynosure of madness, Dorothea Deverell would have found it exceedingly difficult to believe that Colin Asch who so admired her and was her friend truly wished her harm.

  “He would not—would he?”

  But at last Colin Asch came for her, and presented her briefly at a window, to prove, since proof had been demanded, that his “hostage” still lived; then he walked briskly away into a room at the rear of the lodge, presumably the safest, most barricaded of the rooms, a bedroom with a fieldstone fireplace in which, so very unexpectedly, a fire was burning—for Colin was occupied in tearing pages from his mysterious blue notebook and feeding them to the fire, and in this he wanted Dorothea’s help. Repeatedly he said, with jaw-gripping fury, that he wasn’t ready! wasn’t ready!

  Finally he threw what remained of the notebook into the flames and watched it ride their crest for a long moment, and that was that.