by Tad Williams
"Hey, man . . ." John's voice faltered. They were lurching across a line they had never crossed before.
"Look, I can't do it, right? I'm sorry, man, but I can't. So just stop bugging me."
"But what about the band, Thee? The guys are asking me when you're coming back." "Tell them as soon as my mother dies . . ." Even in his fury, he realized he was getting too loud — he was only assuming Anna was still asleep in the other room. "Tell them once this whole . . . inconvenience is over, I'll be back, cheerful and ready to play power-chord music with a bunch of twenty-year-olds. Yeah, with bells on. No need to worry about it."
"Theo . . ."
"I don't care. Tell them I quit. Now leave me alone."
Putting the phone down felt like slamming a door. He wanted to cry but he wouldn't let himself. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Catherine's call a day later was a different kind of misery. Someone had told her about what was happening — Theo had resisted the urge to phone her up himself a dozen times, resisted it like a drunk fighting a late-night run to the liquor store, but now there she was, that familiar voice. But there was something different in it, a careful distance as though she had scrubbed up like one of his mother's doctors before calling him, pulled on surgical gloves and a mask.
"I'm really, really sorry to hear about your mom, Theo."
"It's pretty tough. On her, I mean." Catherine asked how he was doing, listened while he talked a little about the icy horror of the daily routine, even made a little small talk of her own — a promotion at work, a movie she'd liked — but there was an unmistakable subtext to the entire conversation. This call is about loyalty and human decency, but nothing more than that. Don't get ideas.
No problem there. His ideas were gone. When the careful pas de deux with Catherine was over, he walked into the living room feeling entirely empty, as though something had eaten him away from the inside out, removing all the essential Theo-ness, leaving only the skin. He found his mother sitting on the couch, her head back but her eyes open. The television was off. She was so far gone most afternoons, wandering far off the map in the realms of her own pain, that she didn't even bother to turn it on anymore.
"I think it's time for me to go to the hospital," she said when she heard him.
"You had your appointment this morning, remember?" She shook her head, but just barely, as though if she turned it too far it might simply fall off. She was having a very bad day, he could tell. "No, I mean it's time for me to move into the hospital."
Something had a grip on his innards — something chilly that squeezed. "You don't need to do that, Mom. We're doing all right here, aren't we?" She closed her eyes. "You're doing fine, Theo. You're a good son. But the doctor thinks so too. I can't do it any longer."
"Do what?"
"Hold up my side of the bargain. I'm too tired. I hurt too much. I want to rest."
"But you can do that here . . ." She raised her fingers to quiet him. "I don't want you carrying me around, Theo. You've had to do that a few times already. And I don't want to have my own son wiping my bottom. I couldn't stand that. It's time."
"But . . . !"
"It's time."
————— And so the last, pitched phase of the descent began, a voyage into the depths as bad in its way as anything Dante had imagined. But there would be no beatific vision at the end, Theo felt blankly certain. No shining city. Only the endless white corridors of the hospital ward.
She was letting go, he could feel it, spinning away from him like a moon that had broken the tethers of its orbit and would soon disappear into the empty dark spaces. He spent part of every day at her side, trying to concentrate on books he had been planning to read for months or even years. There was no point being with her all the time, but what else was there to do? He was afraid to return to his job, as if somehow that would be tempting fate, would ensure the receipt of the dreaded phone call while he was away from her more surely than if he were simply sitting around the house. The boys in the band had taken him at his own grief-maddened word and had made the split official — John had left him a halting, apologetic message making it clear without ever quite saying it, and Theo had not bothered to call him back. A sympathy call from a friend of his and Cat's, really more acquaintance than friend, had also gifted him with the unwanted information that Catherine was dating someone. When he hung up, he put on an old Smiths record and walked through the house from room to room to room trying to remember what a person was supposed to feel like inside.
It sometimes seemed to Theo that he was letting go too, cutting all ties, following his mother on his own journey into the void. Only the knowledge that she had no one else kept him connected to the Earth. Uncle Harold had come to visit once, in the early days, but he was even less gifted with sickbed chat than Johnny Battistini, and Theo knew they would not see him again.
There were still a few good days, though, days when the pain was not too bad, her mind not too fogged by painkillers. He wished he had more news of his own to offer her as distraction, but he was as barren as a stone. It didn't seem to matter, though: when she felt well enough to focus, she talked. It was as though during its destructive course the cancer had also eaten away a wall inside her, the partition that had kept in all the normal chitchat and reminiscence, so that he had only realized when she became sick what a stranger she was to him. She talked about Theo himself at first, about his childhood, his school days, his inordinate love of Hallowe'en and the work of trying to make the costumes he wanted, but then, increasingly, she began to talk about her girlhood in Chicago. She told him stories he had never heard about the large Irish family of which she was the youngest child, of all those aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, and sisters from whom she had become estranged when her mother did the unforgivable — in a Catholic family, anyway — and divorced Anna's abusive, drunkard father. Theo knew little of this history, but it explained why he had met almost none of his relatives on his mother's side of the family, and it also explained why Theo's Grandma Dowd, a woman with seven children in Illinois, should have wound up living with her youngest out in California.
Hearing his mother talk now, he missed his maternal grandmother all over again. Grandma Dowd had been much more loving than her daughter, so much so that Theo had sometimes felt that he and his grandmother had a sort of secret treaty. Most of the childhood things he remembered fondly had her in them somewhere — trips to the drugstore that stretched to the candy counter as well, little gifts of money when his parents weren't looking, and of course all her wonderful, quirky Old Country stories about fairies and giants that made his mother roll her eyes and actively irritated his aerospace technician father, who thought his mother-in-law was filling the boy with what he called "simpleminded nonsense."
Grandma Dowd had died when Theo was twelve. At the time he had thought it didn't bother him much, had been surprised and impressed at his own sangfroid. He realized he had simply been too young to know how much it truly hurt.
And now, as though in dying her daughter was somehow assuming her essence, he almost felt he was at his grandmother's bedside, something he had been denied the first time as she lay dying from pneumonia, since his parents had thought it would give him nightmares.
This is my whole family, he thought, staring down at his mother's wasted, sleeping form. My whole family is dying. I'm the last one left.
—————
"I want to tell you something," his mother said. Theo sat up in the chair, startled out of a half-sleep and another of those persistent, disturbingly vivid dreams in which he was looking out through fogged glass as though he were a shut-in or a captive animal in a terrarium. He had definitely felt himself to be someone else this time — not Theo, not Theo at all, but instead something old and cold and amused. It had been terrifying, and his heart was still hammering.
At first, before he saw his mother's open eyes, he thought the whisper might have been part of the dream. She slept so much now — sometimes through the whole of his morning or afte
rnoon visits. He had almost begun to think of her as something motionless, as an effigy, although there were also the times she moaned in pain, even after the nurse had come to give her more medication, and he found himself wishing frantically for the return of that absent, dismal quietude.
And there were still moments of lucidity, as this seemed to be. "What is it, Mom? Do you need more meds?" "No." It was a sound made only by the least amount of air, a sip. Deep breath pained her, made smaller the space in which the cancer grew like a dark conqueror. "I want to tell you something."
He pulled his chair over close to the bed, took her dry cold hand in his. "I'm listening."
"I'm . . . I'm sorry."
"For what?" "That I didn't . . . didn't love you like I should have, Theo." Through the haze she was trying to see him properly; her eyes rolled a little, trying to focus. "It wasn't your fault."
"I don't know what you mean, Mom." He inched closer so he could hear her better. "You did fine . . ." "No. I didn't do what I should have. It was just . . . something happened. When you were a little baby, practically a newborn. I suppose it was that, what do they call it . . . ?" She paused to get her breath, laboring in a way that made his stomach lurch. "Post-natal depression? I don't know. We didn't know about those things, really. But it just happened one day. I went to your bassinet — you were crying and crying and you wouldn't stop. Gas, maybe." She showed the ghost of a smile. "But I suddenly just felt like I didn't care, that you weren't really my baby." She frowned and closed her eyes, trying to summon the right words. "No, it must have been different than that. I didn't even understand what a baby was anymore. Just a little screaming thing. Not a part of me." She screwed her eyes more tightly shut against a wave of pain. "Not a part of me."
"You can't beat yourself up about things like that, Mom." "I should have got help. I tried to tell your father. He didn't understand — told me I just needed more rest. But I didn't love you the way I should have. I never did. I'm so sorry, Theo."
He felt his eyes sting. "You did all right. You did your best." "That's a terrible thing, isn't it?" Now her eyes came open, fully open, and for the first time in days he thought she really saw him, complete and true, with a terrible clarity that would make normal, everyday life a nightmare. He tried hard to hold that awful stare.
"What is, Mom? What's a terrible thing?" "When you die, and the only thing anyone can say about you is, 'She did her best.' " She took a shaky breath, then waited so long to take another one that his heart began to race again. When she finally spoke, it was in a whispery quaver like a frightened child. "Could you sing me a song, Theo?"
"A song?"
"I haven't heard you sing . . . in so long. You always had such a nice voice."
"What would you like to hear, Mom?"
But she only closed her eyes and gave a little wave of her hand. He recalled the day he had found out about her illness, when they had gone out to hear the band play. An old one, then, an old Irish tune. She liked those.
"I wish I was in Carrickfergus,"
he began quietly, "Only for nights in Ballygrand. I would swim over the deepest ocean, The deepest ocean, my love to find."
She smiled a bit so he kept going. A nurse stuck her head in the room, curious about the sound, but then backed out again, staying near the doorway to listen but trying not to intrude. Theo ignored her, struggling to remember the words, the tale of some nameless poet's regret.
"But the sea is wide and I can't swim over And neither have I the wings to fly. If I could find me a handsome boatman To ferry me over, my love and I."
"My childhood days bring back sweet reflections, The happy times I spent so long ago.
My boyhood friends and kind relations
Have all passed on now like melting snow."
The words were coming back to him, which was a relief, since he didn't want to break the spell: this felt more like being called upon to perform a ritual than just singing an old song. He sang it as simply as he could, avoiding the reflexive mannerisms of pop music. Only as he finished the last verse and began the final chorus did he remember what it was really about, the poet's regrets in the face of imminent death. He faltered for a moment but saw that his mother was asleep, the smile still on her lips, faint as starlight on a still lake.
". . . For I'm drunk today and I'm rarely sober, A handsome rover from town to town.
Ah, but I am sick now, and my days are numbered; So come all ye young men and lay me down."
He left her there sleeping. The nurse, a young Asian woman, smiled and started to say something to him as he came out of the room, but saw the look on his face and decided not to speak.
————— In the end, Anna Vilmos did not get even half a year. She died in the middle of the night, August 8th. It seemed to be a good death, given the circumstances. A nurse saw that she didn't appear to be breathing, took her pulse, then began the list of procedures that would ultimately free up the bed for another patient. Someone from the hospital called Theo at home and, after giving him the news, told him there was no point in coming in before the morning, but he roused himself anyway and got into his mother's old car, feeling that it would be safer to drive in his somnambulant condition than to ride his motorcycle. They had drawn the curtain around the bed, covered her face with a sheet. He pulled it back, his thoughts fractured into such tiny, whirling pieces he felt like a snow globe, felt he had been shaken and shaken and then set down.
She did not look peaceful, particularly. She didn't look like anything.
She looks like where someone used to be, but isn't anymore.
He kissed her cold cheek, then went to find the night administrator to make arrangements.
4 THE HUNGRY THING
The warehouse district sweltered in heat unusual even for the season. A work gang of nixies, lounging on a break in the shade of one of the tall old buildings, were reluctant to move back out of the black coach's path until one of them recognized the flower-glyph on the license plate. A name passed between the lean, hard-muscled creatures, a murmur like the sea that was denied to them until their indenture had been paid, and they quickly flattened themselves against the wall to let the limousine past.
The nixies talked of it that evening in the tavern called Tide's End, but not much, and only in nervous, rippling whispers. The coach pulled to a silent stop in front of the last building in the row, a large, windowless, ramshackle structure perched at the end of the wharf like an ancient animal sleeping in the sun. The coach shimmered in the heat-haze; when the first two figures got out the distortion made them seem even more monstrous than they were. Both wore long black overcoats which did little to hide the immensity underneath. The pair stood for long moments, motionless except for eyes constantly moving in the shadows of their wide-brimmed hats. Then, at some unspoken signal, one of them leaned and opened the coach door.
Three more figures stepped out, all in fine suits of dark, understated weave. The tallest of these newcomers looked up and down the nowabandoned wharfside road — the nixies had ended their break early and made themselves extremely scarce — then turned and led the rest into the building, pausing only to allow one of the gigantic bodyguards to pass through the door first.
The inside of the building was quite different than the rust-flecked, peeling exterior suggested. The five visitors made their way down a long hallway, through pools of light angling down from what seemed to be ragged holes in the high ceiling but on closer inspection proved to be oddly shaped skylights, each one carefully fitted. The hall itself was featureless, the walls painted a uniform smooth black, the floor carpeted in some dark, velvety material that suggested its owner had no need to be warned by the sound of approaching footsteps, no fear of anyone piercing his sanctum without him knowing about it long before they reached the door at the end of the hall.
The door had a brass plate, but the plate was blank. One of the bodyguards reached for the handle, but the tallest of the well-dressed figures shook his head. He pushed it o
pen himself and led his two slightly smaller companions inside, leaving the bodyguards to shuffle their feet nervously, making sparks crackle in the velvety corridor.
The huge room inside was lit by more of the high, strange sky-windows, so that the distant ceiling seemed to be held up by columns of angled light. The air was hot and close and the smells that mingled there would have been unpleasant to a mortal, perhaps even maddening. The newcomers, despite superior senses, did not seem taken aback by the odor of the place, but as their catlike eyes became accustomed to the strange striping of light and dark the tall man's two companions slowed and then stopped, seemingly astonished by the jumble that surrounded them.
The vast space was a warehouse of sorts, but even in this most ancient and mysterious of cities it was unlikely there were any other warehouses like this. Although the down-stabbing light from the ceiling picked out much, it illuminated little, but what could be seen was very strange: manlike shapes, statues perhaps, frozen in a thousand different attitudes, filled the room like a crowd of silent watchers, most standing but many tumbled onto their sides, arms that once reached toward some heavenly object now seeming to grapple at the legs of their upright fellows. The silent figures were only part of the room's catalog, and many other objects were less immediately familiar: fantastic animals stuffed or reduced to rolled skins and piled bones; open crates overflowing with rusting weapons or lengths of fabric whose colors seemed inconstant; urns; caskets; and overturned cases that had spilled a wild variety of trinkets, from silver and gold jewelry to things that looked like children's toys formed from purest black carbon. Raw gems were even scattered carelessly about the floor like wildflower seeds. Shelf after shelf along the walls held jars in which things floated that did not encourage close study, things with eyes and even facial expressions, although in no other way manlike. Other jars were opaque, many extensively and carefully sealed, but some with the lids propped against the containers as though whatever was inside had been sampled in haste (or had perhaps escaped on its own). None of these containers appeared to be labeled, and even the small traces of powder sprinkled on the shelving around them in what were obviously careful patterns gave no clue as to what the contents might be.
