When All Light Fails

by Randall Silvis

  But no, the man coming toward him was a shadow against the sky, arms low at his sides, both hands empty. A silhouette of a man taking long, easy strides. The sun rising above the roof of the building surrounded the man with a brilliant nimbus of golden light so that bit by bit his features came into view, the clean-shaven smiling face and the neatly combed blond hair, the clean firm lines of his face and limbs and the easy, rhythmic gait of his stride. He was a tall man, slender but not thin, dressed in a pair of faded blue jeans, a crisp white shirt untucked, a pair of white Chuck Taylor high-tops. The sudden clarity and keenness of his vision surprised DeMarco. And although he had never before looked at a man and considered him beautiful, he did so now, the most beautiful man he had ever seen.

  And that was when DeMarco recognized the man and realized that he had been waiting for him a long time, had been searching for him as a boy escaping into the safety of the woods, and in every grain of Iraqi sand and in the flames and screams in Panama. And here he was now, unbidden. Not some comic book character. Not some actor in costume and makeup. He was the real thing. The bona fide. Imagine that, DeMarco thought.

  The man strode up to him, stopped just short of DeMarco’s feet, and smiled down.

  Only seconds earlier DeMarco had thought his last breath gone, but he found himself breathing easier now, the air warmer, his body relaxing in the stillness of the new day. To the man smiling down at him, DeMarco said, “You don’t look the way I expected.”

  “I am sorry to disappoint you.”

  “No apology necessary,” DeMarco said, and found that he could now push himself up on one elbow and return the man’s smile.

  The man held his smile as he turned slowly to the side and lifted his gaze to the whitening blue of the sky. “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it, Ryan?”

  “Every day is beautiful,” DeMarco said, and knew that as the truest sentence he had ever spoken.

  The man nodded. Then he looked down at DeMarco once more, the beautiful smile widening as he extended his hand. “And now, my friend,” the man told him as their hands came together palm to palm, “I have many things to show you.”

  Part I

  Perhaps the deepest reason why we are afraid of death is because we do not know who we are.

  One

  The heart’s elusive knowledge

  At about the same time DeMarco was speeding toward the old mill, frantic to beat Khatri’s deadline, Daniella Flores had been dreaming about a dirty old woman, small and brown and wrinkled, barefooted and mean-looking, with red and brown mud streaked over her cheeks and caked in her graying, braided hair, more mud dried on her feet and legs and hands. The woman stood there beside Flores’s bed, staring hard, arms crossed over her chest. Flores in her bed in the apartment above the hardware store was surrounded by darkness but every detail of the woman was plainly visible though Flores could identify no source of light. She studied the woman from several feet away, Flores just lying there in her dream in the middle of a deep, soft darkness and waiting to see what the strange woman would do. Then her cell phone rang with its Space Funk ringtone. Flores looked away from the woman and into the darkness from which the ringing emanated.

  “Don’t get that,” the old woman told her. Flores looked at her again but the ringing was growing more adamant and spidery white cracks were forming in the blackness all around her, so Flores turned toward the phone again and the woman said sharply, “I said don’t get that!”

  But Flores was coming awake now and shook herself out of her dream, rolled onto her side and made a grab for her cell phone on the bed table and read the name on the screen as she was bringing the phone to her mouth.

  “Captain Bowen,” she said, still seeing a fading image of the old woman, Flores’s heart hammering because the room was barely gray with morning light and her heart seemed to know something ominous that her mind did not.

  “Get out to the old mill right now!” Bowen told her, speaking too loud and a mile a minute, so fast that she could comprehend his words only after a moment or two of groggy recollection, as if the words were reeling past her on a ticker tape and her recognition was racing along several words behind Bowen’s voice. “DeMarco might be in trouble. Boyd and I are on our way too but you’re a lot closer.”

  She was on her feet then and though feeling drunk or hungover stepped to the doorway and smacked her hand against the light switch as she said, “What’s the situation?”

  Bowen’s words were a blur, a jumble, a shifting cloud of words in her ear but she picked out Khatri and feels like an ambush and then she stopped listening and lowered the phone as she plunged her right foot and then left onto a pair of yellow flip-flops, and with one flimsy shoe turned sideways on her foot she yanked open the top drawer of her dresser and grabbed the service pistol in her right hand and the car keys in the phone hand. Four strides later she used two knuckles to twist the dead bolt on her door and then burst out into the dark corridor with no hand free to yank the door shut behind her.

  She was on the road in less than a minute, in only her flip-flops and a short pair of rayon shorts the color of red wine with black leaves and closed white petals, a black T-shirt and no bra, driving left-handed as she pulled away from the curb and yanked and clicked her seat belt into place. With headlights blazing and four-ways flashing she overtook and passed a slow-moving pickup truck just outside of town. She knew she would be the first on the scene if she and Bowen and Boyd had all left within a minute or two of each other, but she had no idea what she would find there and kept up a low muttering prayer to keep him safe, keep him safe, while glancing at her dashboard clock again and again and feeling the blue minutes slipping past like flies—one blue flickering fly after another too quick for her to grab and shake in her fist. DeMarco in trouble kept pounding in her ear while keep him safe, keep him safe echoed in a little girl’s voice in the pitch-black prayer nook of her mind.

  The old mill was patrolled every Friday and Saturday night and she had rousted more than one drunken kid from there, had tapped her flashlight against more than one tinted window while the couple inside scurried to pull on their clothes, so she knew the way and only wanted more speed. But the sun was rising off to her right and throwing a harsh hot glare into her right eye. She drove leaning over the steering wheel as if that would make her way clearer, the seat belt harness pulling against her shoulder and biting into her waist. She could have slapped down the visor or grabbed her sunglasses out of the console but her fingers were too tight around the steering wheel to let go for even a moment.

  Then finally there was the turnoff up ahead, the opening in the brush, the yellow diamond-shaped Hidden Drive sign. She slowed only a little as she made the hard right turn and felt her rear wheels sliding in the gravel. In the direct glare it was hard to see anything at all except for the upper half of the old sandstone building itself like a black backlit wall some fifty yards ahead. But then out of the brush on her left a vehicle came diving onto the narrow lane and turned toward her, a black compact sedan with the dark shapes of two figures in the front seat. She tapped the brakes and edged her vehicle to the right and heard the brush whipping and scratching against the side of her car as she ducked and bobbed her head for a clearer view into the oncoming car.

  Later she would say that something happened to her vision at that moment, that it suddenly went telescopic as if she were looking at Khatri in the passenger seat from only a few feet away, his thin lips grimly set and his dark eyes wide. She saw him place both thin brown hands against the edge of the dashboard and lean toward her and in that same instant she knew that if the vehicle blew past she would lose him. They would lose him again. DeMarco would not allow that to happen and neither would she. So she slammed on the brakes and spun the wheel to the left and turned broadside in front of the other vehicle.

  Later she would remember the shock and explosion of impact and the sound of the airbag popping and the chalky s
mell as it smacked into her face. There was a brief sensation of rolling in slow motion followed by a crunching, cracking sound. Then there was the pain that bit like a rattlesnake into her leg and sent its hot poison coursing up into her skull.

  Two

  Three men, two women, same nightmare

  Captain Bowen had raced out of the house leaving the back door open. He knew before even peeling out of the driveway that his wife would be lashing her robe tight around her waist as she followed his path to the door, already praying just under her breath as she locked the door and yanked the knob to be sure. Then she would go to each of the children’s rooms and reassure herself they were all right.

  He had made an instantaneous decision to skip the 911 dispatcher and save precious seconds by calling Flores instead. She lived on Route 19 and had the straightest shot to interdiction. Now, demolishing the posted speed limit through his subdivision, he called Trooper Boyd and informed him in as few words as possible of the situation. “DeMarco at old mill…confronting Khatri…Flores en route…make the calls.”

  Boyd was awake and fully dressed when he received the call. Joe Boxer lounge pants, gray Dickie socks and a gray T-shirt. He was halfway through his twenty-minute qigong exercises, warming and stretching for the free weights to follow, when his screen lit up, the phone vibrated, and the “Wasted” intro ringtone jarred him out of his meditative “embrace the tiger, return to the mountain” movements. He said only three words throughout the entire conversation. “Captain?” and “Roger that.” He was out the door in under forty seconds, and, six minutes later, caught up with Bowen’s Ford Edge just beyond the I-80 overpass. He glanced down at the speedometer: 93 miles per hour. Thank God there’s no traffic.

  Boyd backed off an extra car length when the Ford’s right taillight started blinking. Six seconds later, on the road to the mill, he spotted the wrecked vehicles ahead. Flores’s red Crosstrek on its hood, a black sedan upright but with a body sprawled across the buckled hood. Then Captain Bowen’s arm coming out the window, his vehicle swerving past the Crosstrek, left hand gesturing for Boyd to stop there while he, Bowen, steered around the black coupe slantwise in the road, Khatri a bloody mess halfway out the smashed windshield, his driver motionless behind the wheel with the steering column rammed into his chest, no sign of airbags. Then Bowen sped up again to reach DeMarco’s vehicle and the body lying faceup on the cracked blacktop.

  Tires screeching, his car bucked to a stop. He grabbed his phone and leapt out. Good God no, a sucking chest wound. Bowen slapped a hand over the hole, slippery with blood. Scanned the area. Nobody in sight, truck engine growling somewhere off to the left. Sirens in the distance. “Keep breathing, you son of a gun!” Too much blood. Hypoxia? Nonresponsive.

  On his knees, using his left hand to try to roll DeMarco onto his side. Had to let go with his right hand momentarily, heaved with all of his might. Slapped a hand over the wound again. Sirens louder, closer. “Hurry up, damn it! Hurry the hell up!”

  In the meantime, Boyd’s Jeep slid to a halt beside the Subaru. He was out the door the instant the vehicle stopped moving. Down on his knees, his face close to the ground. Flores lay pressed against the broken window, her shoulder to the pavement, face twisted in pain, eyes wild with fear. His first thought, after seeing Flores’s face and torso intact, was God bless airbags. But then he’d winced to behold the condition of her left leg, imprisoned as it was below the dashboard but conspicuously oozing blood. He crawled headfirst in through the broken driver’s window but couldn’t get a close look at the damage from that angle, so he scraped back out and then in through the passenger window. He touched her face, felt warmth, angled her head so that her mouth was not pressed against the still bloated airbag, then felt his way down to her leg and found it hot with blood and crushed hard against twisted metal just below the knee. “Aw, fuck,” he’d said, only his second ever use of that expletive, and fought the urge to weep. He crawled out long enough to summon ambulances while also glancing up ahead to where Captain Bowen was bent over DeMarco’s motionless body.

  DeMarco was barely breathing. Bowen probed the blood-soaked sweatshirt and found the entrance wound just below the left nipple, heard the faint sucking sound it made and immediately flattened his left hand atop it. The fingertips of his right hand scraped up and down DeMarco’s back, searching for an exit wound, and found none. Thank God for little favors, he thought, just one of several people that morning who would thank God in earnest or sardonically. DeMarco’s pulse was weak and irregular, his breath feathery.

  With his left hand Bowen fished his wallet from his pocket, flipped it open and dug into the little leather pocket in which a teenage boy might keep a condom. Bowen, like many troopers and other cops, kept a rectangle of folded duct tape in his. He laid the tape within reach, yanked up DeMarco’s sweatshirt and quickly used a dry patch of the hem to clean the bullet wound as best he could, then immediately slapped his right hand down atop the wound again. Using his teeth and left hand he exposed a sufficient length of tape, tore it off, leaned close to listen to DeMarco’s breath until he heard an exhalation, then flattened the piece of tape atop the wound and felt the next inhalation draw the tape tight.

  And just like that a terrible silence engulfed Bowen. But it was more than silence, was a synesthetic knowledge that his friend and mentor was gone. No breath, no heartbeat, no sensation of life beneath his hands.

  Bowen broke the silence with a shrill moan, and immediately thrust himself forward over DeMarco and began CPR. A siren whined in the distance, and Bowen went to work on the man he loved like an older brother and who, until recently, had always intimidated him.

  Twenty minutes earlier that morning, Jayme had been awakened by Hero’s chilly nose against her cheek, saw the leash still dangling from his collar, and felt her body go cold. She raced downstairs to find the kitchen empty, DeMarco’s phone on the counter, Khatri’s letter on the floor, Hero now looking up at her with wide, wondering eyes. She ran throughout the house from basement to upstairs calling Ryan! Ryan! Baby, are you here? while also calling Captain Bowen on DeMarco’s phone. She arrived on the scene moments after Bowen and Boyd—soon enough to spell Bowen with the CPR until an ambulance pulled close and a pair of EMTs rushed the scene. Then she staggered, collapsed onto her hands and knees. Lowered her forehead to the dirty asphalt and howled with pain. Bowen knelt beside her, an arm around her waist. Soon he too lost the strength to hold himself steady, laid his forehead against her shoulder and wept his own violent tears, their bodies bucking against each other like lovers in a last embrace.

  The next twelve hours were hellish for everyone who knew DeMarco. Sympathies and concern extended to Flores too, though she was not known as well, and her injuries were less critical. People came and went, several staying to huddle together in the waiting rooms as they held their collective breath in anticipation of the doctors’ verdicts. Prayer chains were alerted, vigils held, routine duties neglected.

  In the meantime, Flores swam through one morphine dream after another, some of them pleasantly unfamiliar, some horrifically sketched from her youth, the best involving a hundred shaggy brown bison that came lumbering down a hillside to nuzzle and warm her with their earthy scent and breath.

  Three

  Of waves through a vacuum at the speed of light

  Six hours after the shooting. Jayme dozing uneasily in the chair beside DeMarco’s bed, him still comatose. She had dragged her chair close so that she could hold his hand without straining her arm. In sleep her hand would slip from his so she took it again each time she woke because just to hold it was reassuring, just to feel it still warm, his pulse discernible against her palm. She had learned to disbelieve in the veracity of machines and therefore never looked at the heart monitor but relied on his touch instead, relied on the sibilance issuing from between his lips, relied on the rise and fall of the thin blanket atop his chest.

  He held such power over
her. He could simply lie there with eyes closed yet shorten her own breath, grip her lungs and squeeze her heart so that every beat resounded with an ache of fear. It had always been that way with them, ever since the beginning, his very presence reaching out to seize and command her attention. Other people’s electromagnetic fields extended only a few feet from their bodies but his had rushed out to envelop her from some fifteen feet away that first time, and it had never once relented, never loosened its grip on her but instead had ensconced and merged with her own so that she no longer knew where hers ended and his began, or which was the magnetism and which the electricity, which the electron and which the grappling force of gravity.

  She had been fresh from the academy when they first met, green but cocky, feeling damn good about herself, easy around the rest of the men, enjoying their appraising glances, their aggressive self-introductions. Then he had entered the building. Truth is, he didn’t look all that sharp. A bit haggard around the eyes. He had walked straight to the coffeepot, not a word or glance to anybody. Poured a cup black, stood there greedily drinking it while staring at the wall behind the pot. She couldn’t take her eyes off him, her heart racing just a little, her mouth going dry, his energy seizing her in its force field, doing all manner of rippling, agitating things with its radiation even from fifteen feet away.

  She had watched him that morning, spellbound, as he finished the first cup and poured another. Took a couple of sips. Then he turned finally and surveyed the room. Caught her eyes and looked away. Stood there for a moment as if wrestling with a decision. Then turned abruptly and strode up to her and stuck out his hand. “DeMarco,” he said.

  She took his hand. A staggering jolt of electricity widened her eyes. She did her best to suppress the tremble. “So I’ve heard.”