When All Light Fails

by Randall Silvis

  He looked away. Nodded. Then withdrew his hand, glanced at her once more, almost furtively, said, “Welcome,” and turned and walked away. And ever since then she had been trapped in his field, unable to break free even if she wanted to, and she had never wanted to. Never would. She had never stopped holding his hand, not since that first awkward meeting.

  And now he lay there helpless and still, but his hand remained warm in hers, his breath still slipped like a whisper between his lips, his chest still rose and fell.

  She pushed forward in her chair, leaned over the mattress to kiss his cheek, which was feverish and scruffy. Placed her mouth to his ear, felt the plastic tubing cold against her neck. “Where are you, babe?” she whispered. “It’s time to come back to me now. You need to come back to me, Ryan. I know you hear me, baby. Please don’t leave me. Please, baby, you can’t. You just can’t.”

  Four

  The scent of something rotten

  Trooper Boyd stood just outside the hospital gazing up into the Clorox sky, breathing in through his mouth then pushing the air out through his nostrils in hopes of clearing the stink out, that antiseptic, soiled laundry, ammonia, hydrogen peroxide, sick people smell. He stood all but motionless with his hands clasped at parade rest behind his back and washed his eyes out too on the bleached hue of the sky, still cloudless in its October morning chill, empty but for a single buzzard cutting circles over the woods to the east. The bird should have migrated by now, should be cruising to Venezuela or some other sunny oasis with the rest of its ilk. This one must have a broken compass or be a real misanthrope, and now had gotten a whiff of something rotten, a body in decay, a tasty bit of carrion out there in that copse of mostly denuded trees.

  Boyd had paid little attention to buzzards before that moment but now he wondered what became of the roadkill and other abandoned dead through the late falls and winters when the buzzards were on vacation. During the sopping wet springs and unpredictable summers, he couldn’t drive a quarter mile without passing something dead along the road, everything from black snakes to squirrels to dogs and cats and whitetails, possums and raccoons and rabbits and a virtually infinite supply of chipmunks, nearly all of their smashed corpses attended by crows and sometimes buzzards squatting nearby. Twice in his life he had come across black bears that had been struck by speeding trucks, one small bear dead, splayed out across the gravel shoulder like a fly-infested rug, the other a full-grown animal dragging its guts toward the adjacent field. He had put that one out of its misery, and then, as he had done with the smaller one too, phoned the Game Commission to come and haul the carcass away. But now he wondered how many buzzards would be required to clean the landscape of such a large animal. And what became of the dead when the buzzards were sunning themselves in the tropics?

  Well, for one thing, he told himself, crows don’t migrate, do they? Or rodents either. Microbes and other scavengers. No matter the season, the dead always got chewed up bloody chunk by maggoty chunk and dragged away bone by splintered bone. Death never went out of style, a new feast every day. Enough, certainly, to keep this last buzzard hanging around, this straggler.

  The month of October was nearly dead itself, breathing its last. So leave, he beamed to the buzzard, which was now merely a short black line gliding across the sky, a frown. Go ahead and go. We don’t need you here. He had struck one once with his vehicle, had expected it to fly or waddle away from the squashed rabbit in the southbound lane but it only turned to look up at him a moment before he heard the thunk against his grill. Dumb, ugly, vomit-spewing bird. Served it right.

  Go on, scram, he thought now, but the single procrastinator in the distance ignored him, wheeled round and round in wide, lazy, offensive frowning circles like it had all the time in the world, like it could feast on Pennsylvania dead forever, no hurry, no rush, just hang out and wait for the nearly dead to drop. He wished he could shoot it right out of the sky.

  The cell phone vibrating in his pocket startled him. He jerked it out and looked at the screen. Dani. He tapped the phone icon and said, “Hey.”

  “What are you doing right now?” she asked. Her voice was small and hoarse, the voice of a little girl.

  He turned to face the hospital. Counted the windows up to the fifth floor. “Shooting a bird with my imaginary gun,” he answered.

  “Anybody I know?”

  “You doing okay?”

  “I’m really scared.”

  He was already taking long strides toward the hospital. “I’ll be right up.”

  Five

  A strange place this

  For DeMarco, there had been absolute blackness for a while, not long, but he wasn’t afraid because he knew the man was still with him, could feel his presence in the darkness, the handsome man who had come for him as he lay bleeding on the dirty asphalt, a hole in his chest.

  Then the feeling of being watched disappeared and he knew he was alone, abandoned without a word. Just as panic began to rise in him, the blackness flicked out, and though a light returned it was smoky and uneven and he found himself looking down on the remains of an obliterated city. Far, far below, the city spread out in all directions in a bleak and blackened devastation, whether from war or fire or some other carnage, he could not tell. He was standing high up on a parapet of some kind, splintered beams and shattered windows, crags of broken concrete walls, gaping holes and eviscerated buildings everywhere he looked. Not a single light burning anywhere. Odd-looking plants with thick, oily, muscular tendrils weaving in and out of the broken buildings. And the stench in his nostrils was sickening, ashes and smoke, the decay of all things.

  Something moved through the wreckage below but he could not identify it, something dark and sluglike, not a thing he had ever seen before or had a name for, as big as a manatee, apparently headless but with a long serpentine tail dragging behind it. “What the hell?” he muttered. And there, a few blocks over, another of the creatures. And another farther out, each laying down a narrow shimmer beneath their ponderous hulks, some kind of slime, he thought. Almost pretty as it glinted in the meager light, yet disgusting.

  Otherwise there was no movement to be seen, only the things below and himself. Even the sky felt foreign to him, gray and soundless and dead. He asked aloud, “What is this place? Where am I?”

  This is you, he heard in a male voice that sounded familiar but unattached to any name.

  “Bullshit,” DeMarco said. “I am me.”

  The I you call you is the tiniest part of you. All below is the greater part.

  “Not true!” DeMarco said, and then cried it again, though with all resolve fading. And then he dropped to his knees, too weak to stand, and he screamed into the bleakness, expelled his griefs and guilts and terrors in a bellowing plea for insentience.

  A loud cracking sound brought his gaze down. The floor split open and fell away beneath him. The sudden drop was startling, a submersion into something fluid but thick enough to slow his drop, something even darker than the sky and city had been but streaked with milky swirls. He could see no bottom, no end to his slow-motion fall.

  There was no telling how long he drifted down, but, strangely, it did not matter to him, it was what it was. Even the sensation of falling ceased to exist. Maybe he was holding still and the fluid was moving upward over him. No difference. He recognized his mother, his father, his uncle Nip and grandparents, each of them one of the swirls of milky movement. He passed through them or they through him, it made no difference which.

  When he passed through or was passed through by the swirl that was his father, he sensed without seeing the bloom of red on the man’s chest, the rosy stain blooming, a stain not much different from the one that had blossomed on his own chest when he had lain on the asphalt however long ago that had been. His mother passed through him too and he sensed the oddly satisfying feeling as her wrists spilled red ribbons into the darkness, her red smile smiling, eyes
full of love and regret. He was not only seeing all of this but experiencing it too, his and everybody else’s feelings all at the same time yet each one distinct from the others, not as mere images but as sensations experienced throughout his entire being. Fondness. Love. Remorse. A melancholy longing. Soldiers he had known and not known drifted through him. Skulls half blown away. Skin charred, blackened bubbles. Horrific images seen without seeing but he could not flinch because he had no eyes, could not avoid them because he was a milky swirl too, just like the rest of them, absorbing it all. They were all separate and distinct from him at the same time that they were him and he was them. He was everything and knew everything and there was nothing he did not know and nothing he was not…

  Six

  Choose your disguise

  And then DeMarco was out of the milky water that was not water but was everything. Standing in the body of DeMarco again in a soft whiteness that was total and all-enveloping but did not limit his vision in any way, standing there perfectly dry as the knowledge of everything trickled and dripped away from him.

  Out of the whiteness, a smudge appeared. As it grew closer and larger, it separated into two figures not one. One taller, one half as large. A man and a boy. DeMarco raised his hand to wave. The boy returned the wave. DeMarco strode toward them.

  He knew them before their faces came into view. Knew them without recognizing either. So familiar, so different. My son! he said without speaking. And Thomas! And the distance between them disappeared. They stood an arm’s length apart. The man said, Hello, my friend.

  The boy at five. Ache, ache, a hard white brilliant ache of love.

  DeMarco went to his knees. Staggered by love and gratitude, he reached for the boy. But after only a moment of embrace, a moment of warmth and solidity, the boy became fog, dissolved and floated away. The pain that seized DeMarco then! The cold. The fear. He wheeled toward Thomas Huston to ask why, what had happened, but his old friend was fog now too, a last wisp of smile twisting into the air.

  DeMarco cried out, the pain too much to bear.

  And then there was another man a couple of yards away, slender, brown-skinned, completely naked, shivering with cold. He was startled to see DeMarco there, was frightened, confused, and took a step back. What happened? What are we doing here?

  DeMarco rose to his feet. Smiled. So what do you know? You too?

  Khatri’s eyes were bright with panic, his thin body wracked by shivers.

  Truce, brother, DeMarco said.

  And with the next blink he was standing alone in a field of tall grass, DeMarco alone, warm bright sunlight but no sun to be seen, unblemished blue sky, tall green grass as high as his knees, yellow buds of goldenrod dabbing and dusting his trousers, the fulsome scent of spring, growth, a rampant fecundity. The field went on forever in all directions. And in the air…music.

  What was that music? A single sustained note from an organ, then a piano joining in, a sweet slow melody, a guitar echoing, then a clear male voice singing. And with the voice, DeMarco recognized the singer and the song, Mark Knopfler, “Our Shangri-La.” And DeMarco chuckled, said out loud, “Ha ha. Very funny.” But where was the music coming from? What was the meaning of all this?

  The male voice again, the one he had heard in the blackened city. You have a choice to make.

  “What choice?” he asked. “A choice of what?”

  Scegli il tuo travestimento. It is for you to decide. Either way is fine.

  For only a moment he did not understand the Italian, did not speak it, only a few random phrases not including the one he had heard. Scegli il tuo travestimento. But then yes he did know it, yet the meaning was not clear. Choose my disguise? What disguise? And a word flowed through his mind like a banner hauled across the sky behind a silent invisible jet. Jayme. And oh, oh yes. Oh yes! Oh my god yes! Now he remembered.

  Seven

  Blue morphos tumbling to the rain forest floor

  “In all likelihood, the orthosis will be required permanently.”

  “The what?” Flores asked. She squinted to read his name badge. DR. KEVIN WEBB, DO, ORTHOPEDICS. Had she spoken with him before? His face had a vagueness to it, the room too, the words on his name badge, her brain slowed by morphine, every breath of the hospital-scented air like swallowing a scream.

  He held the leg brace up above the side of her bed. “Do you want me to show you again how it works?”

  No, she remembered it now. It had slipped away for only a few seconds. Maybe a few days, what difference did it make? Black pads with black Velcro straps that would fit around the thigh, above the knee, around the calf, above the ankle, black hinges, metal buckles and flattened rods. Despicable. Humiliating. Shattering.

  “Hyperextension,” the doctor said. He used too many words, she caught only a few of them, a rush of clumsy blue butterflies of words fluttering from his mouth, tumbling away. “Stabilization…extensive nerve damage…moderation of pain.”

  She felt sick to her stomach, wanted to vomit. “Pan,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Bedpa—” she said, then lurched forward leaning to the opposite side and sprayed the floor with her vomit, would have fallen off the bed and into the mess had the doctor not seized her by an arm, held her awkwardly in place as she vomited again and he called toward the door, holding his breath against the stink, “Nurse! Nurse! We need assistance in here!”

  Flores remained hovering over the side of the bed, could feel his hand around her bicep gripping tight, could feel his weight pressing down on the bed, her body twisted and shivering as her stomach heaved again but her face blazing hot, throat burning, her body scalding hot in every laceration and wound, every splintered bone. Yet a violent shiver raked up and down her spine and there was nothing in her mind but a swarm of curses and muffled screams as she gazed down at the vomit, the puddle and smears of ugliest color, no butterflies here, no fucking butterflies here.

  Eight

  Not all is unremembered

  In another room on another floor DeMarco coughed softly, but he had coughed before, so Jayme was not startled. But then he sniffed, and then his nose wrinkled, and a long, low moan issued from him as he tried to sit up, tried to work his eyes open. She was out of her chair in an instant, thrust upward by the leaping of her heart, leaning over him. “Baby, baby, lie still. I’m here. I’m here with you.”

  He settled back into the pillow. Pushed his eyelids halfway open and squinted, drew back from the light. “It’s awful,” he muttered, his voice weak and raspy, and coughed again, harder this time, then sucked air in through his mouth.

  She had to keep herself from falling onto him, crushing the tubes against him. “What is, baby? The light? Do you want me to turn off the light?”

  “That stink,” he said. “What is it? It’s awful.”

  “You’re in a hospital,” she told him, laughing and crying as she spoke. “There’s an oxygen tube under your nose. You’re in a hospital bed.”

  He blinked. Squinted. Breathed warily through his nose. Jerked a little from the mechanical scent of the air. “How long?” he asked.

  “This is the fifth day. You’ve been out since they brought you in.” She pressed a hand to his cheek. Leaned closer to kiss his forehead, his nose.

  “I smell you,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, baby, I haven’t been back home much—”

  “Good,” he told her. “You smell good.”

  And she broke down sobbing then, her cheek bucking against his, her face in the pillow that smelled like his hair.

  And for a while she did not speak, nor did he try to. He tried only to lie still, to hold the pain in one place like a brick of pain shifting atop his chest with every breath. No, more like a cinder block with one corner dug in deep. A cinder block of throbbing, stabbing pain.

  Then he said, and moved his head slowly away from hers, tried
to turn his head without pain to look at her, his voice soft with surprise, with finality, “He’s dead.”

  She drew back a few inches, uncertain. “Who is, baby?”

  “How did they get him?”

  She drew back a little farther. “How could you know that?” she asked. “How could you even know that?”

  Nine

  With a bellyful of dirt and nowhere to go

  Prior to that morning at the old mill with Flores and DeMarco, Boyd had never before been so close to a life-threatening injury to a brother or sister in uniform. Thirteen years of service, thirty-three years old, and no fallen comrades in Troop D. The morning lived in his memory now like some kind of fever dream or searing hallucination. For a while he could think of little else, only of how close to death his friends had come, and how close, by proximity, he was throughout the course of every day and night on duty. And for what—$65K a year? The lowest paid NFL quarterback hauled in nearly three times as much for every single game. The highest paid, two million every game. Two million dollars per game! That broke down to $500,000 per hour, and at least half of that time was spent standing on the sidelines. Compared to that, Boyd earned peanuts plus change for every day on duty, for every day he risked his life, while grown men made a fortune for playing a game that was essentially about knocking each other down.

  He was thinking these thoughts while sucking on a mocha shake in Arby’s. That night’s dinner, a King’s Hawaiian roast beef with onion rings, had gone down without making a strong impression on his taste buds and now lay in his stomach like a clod of wet earth. Seated in the booths and tables around his two-chair high-top were five senior citizens, six teenagers crowded into one booth, and a family of four at a table, both children under three. They all have lives, he told himself, and not without some bitterness. He was the only person seated alone. The only person in uniform. There is probably some correlation in those two facts. Probably some cause-effect relationship.