“And anything was better than to see him slowly die before me, of not knowing. Anything was better than that strangled pain. I’m only a man, I’m not a thing of stone. ‘In three weeks from now,’ I said. ‘On the seam between the fourteenth and the fifteenth of June. At midnight on the stroke.”
“He had one word left, that he could use. ‘How?’ he asked.
“‘You will meet your death at the jaws of a lion.’”
And suddenly it was so quiet in that room, where there had been such a clamor of our voices only a few moments ago. It was as though a blanket had suddenly dropped over it, deadening everything.
The silence went on and on, until I thought it would never end. Then a small voice, so weak, so faint, so thin, that I didn’t know where it came from, yet it couldn’t have come from him, for I didn’t see his lips move, whimpered, “No.” And waited. Then, “No” again. And waited. Then, “No” a third time. Then there was silence again.
I was seated now. He must have guided me to a chair. His hands were lingering at my shoulders, seeking some way in which to aid me. They were clumsy, lumpy hands; they couldn’t find a way. I wouldn’t have been able to show them one, myself, had I wanted to. They fell away finally.
“You shouldn’t have come. You shouldn’t have asked.”
I looked at him without seeing, and I heard him without hearing. Vaguely, as if in dim recollection of present surroundings, I thought, What am I doing here? Why do I sit here, why do I stay on here?
I rose to my feet, clinging to the chair back, and I turned blindly, this way and that, looking for the way out that was there around me somewhere, I knew.
“He’s waiting for me downstairs,” I mumbled. “I’d better go back to him. He’s alone.”
“We’re all alone,” he answered softly. “Every one of us.”
He helped me to the door, his hand again unobtrusively hovering at my shoulders. I couldn’t feel it actually touch me, so it must have been held off from me, in readiness lest I sway and stumble.
Then he opened the door, and I moved on through the space it presented, and his enfolding hand was left empty, poised in midair at the height my shoulders had been before they drew away.
It seemed to me that it was dark, but whether it was my own darkness brimming outward or an outer darkness bearing inward, I couldn’t tell. I moved through it slowly, paying out the wall lengths at my side with my two hands, one over the other, like a sideward swimmer on a slanted sea.
“Can you see your way down?”
“No,” I said softly. “But I don’t know what my way is, so it doesn’t matter.”
Then presently, from farther back, he spoke again.
“Don’t fight, poor heart. There isn’t anything that can be changed.”
I heard his voice behind me, but it was dark. Dark before, and dark behind, and dark on every side.
One of us moved after a while, in the car. I forget which one.
But it was I who spoke. I looked about me dully, as if my eyes had been closed until then, and I said, “Have we been sitting here long?”
“I don’t know, Jean,” he said.
I looked up, overhead, and I winced. “It’s still night,” I said. “The stars—I can tell it’s still night. Is it the same night we came here?”
“I don’t know, Jean,” he said, with a strange new docility that was in his answers now; as of a small boy, who is on his best behavior, who speaks only when spoken to, and waits for his elders’ guidance in all the things he cannot understand.
“I feel so lightheaded,” I said. “They swim around, when you look up at them, and blend into streaked circles, like the jeweled movements of a watch, and your head swims with them.”
I could feel my upturned chin describing a little oval in time with those flashing, whirring, interlocked wheels I thought I saw, and I quickly dropped my head again, and let it dangle inert, looking downward where they weren’t.
“I think we’d better go home, to our house,” he said. “I don’t feel anything, but I think we’d better go home. People come along and stop a minute and look at us so funny. I don’t like them to do that.”
“I don’t either,” I said, without moving my averted head.
“I think we’d better go home, to our house.”
“It’s so far away from here, from where we are now.”
“But we have to go back there, we live there.”
“I don’t think I can remember the way right now. I can’t think very clearly.”
“Can you drive?” he asked, looking helplessly at the dashboard.
“I don’t think so. I’ll try, if you want me to, but I don’t think I can.”
“People keep looking at us so funny,” he whimpered. “Look, how they stand and look at us, and won’t move on.”
“They think we’re drunk,” I said. “We’re so huddled together.”
I tried to take the wheel rim with one hand. I tried to turn the key in the ignition with the other. The key fell out, and down to the floor. My hand fell off the wheel rim. I couldn’t get it to stay on there, it wouldn’t close right.
“I can’t,” I whispered to him. “I can’t. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. Just let me think quietly for a minute. I’ll try again.”
“I’ll help you,” he said. He put his own hand on the wheel rim. I brought mine back to it. Then we added our other two. We were gripping it with four hands now, two on each side. We tried to shake it a little, between us. Then we both slumped back from it, frustrated, and let it be.
“We’d better get into a taxi and leave the car here.”
“Can you get out and get one?”
Then I stopped him quickly. “No, I don’t want you to. I’m afraid you won’t come back. Ask that man looking at us.”
“Mister,” he said in a feeble voice, “will you get us a taxi? Will you bring one back here to us?”
“What’s the matter, can’t you get one for yourselves?” the man jeered.
Nobody can help you when you’re dying, I thought resignedly.
“We’re not well. We can’t get out of this car.”
It was there only waiting to be seen, and once it had been pointed out to him, instantly he could see it himself. His face changed to contrition. “Oh, sure I will. Excuse me.”
He turned and went down the corner, and around it, and we couldn’t see him any more. But distantly we heard his abortive hail on the night air once or twice, and then finally a shrill lip-formed whistle, as piercing as a metallic one.
“She looks all white,” a woman standing by said. And then coming in closer, she spoke to us directly. “What’s the matter, did you have an accident?”
They were dotted here and there, not many of them, three or four, for it was late and it was dark, and there was nothing to see, only the fact that one or two others had stopped and were looking at the nothing there was to see.
“Let them alone,” a man standing a few paces off said in gruff pity.
I looked up into her face. “Yes, let us alone, please,” I begged abjectly.
She withdrew to where she had been before, unresentful.
A taxi came up on the outside and stopped even with us. The man who’d found it had coasted back on the running board, one leg trailing off in air. He dropped down and helped us by opening the two doors, the cab door and our own. They almost met, and formed a little sealed-off causeway for us to step down from one and up again into the other. He helped us with that too, helping me first by the arm, and then the two of us, he and I, helped my father, this time by both arms, he from the ground, and I from within the cab.
Then I had him beside me on the seat, and the driver thrust his arm back and closed the door for us.
We stood a moment longer, and I wondered why we didn’t go. Then I remembered I hadn’t told the driver where. I leaned forward, and when he heard me fumble with the glass slide behind his back, he turned and opened that for me, and I told him where our home was.
He
hadn’t been struck down as we had; he could still drive. We glided off and left that place behind where our car was and where we’d sat so long.
You couldn’t see the stars now any more. The cab ceiling was over us, and if you stayed close in toward the middle of the seat, you couldn’t even see them out at the sides, the buildings running along beside us blocked them out.
Once we stopped and stood for a minute, and I said, “Do you want a drink—on the way, until we get home? There’s a bar over there. The driver can bring it over to us.”
“No, I’m afraid to—now. It was different the first time, when it was just a little thing. I thought it would help then. But I’m afraid to—now.”
I was holding him to me, with both my arms in a tight circle about his curved form, and his head was under mine, hanging downward over my lap.
“Is it wrong to be so afraid, Jean?” he murmured.
I don’t know what my lips said, but my heart said to him, It’s human not to be able to bear knowing when you are to die.
The cab stopped, and curved away again behind us, and we stood there alone in the dark, out in the countryside now.
We felt our way forward, toward the lighted windows we saw ahead. “Lean on me a little,” I said. “These are just our own steps.”
We finished them at last, and stood before the door. They beat upon our backs from up above, they pelted us like silver rain, and we were afraid to turn and look, but in a moment we’d have the door open, we’d be in where they couldn’t follow, couldn’t see us. And as we stood there close together, summoning the last remaining strength that it took to lift an arm and knock, he breathed, “We got home, Jean.”
“We got home, Father.”
3
End of the Telling:
Beginning of the Wait
IT WAS LIGHT NOW OUTSIDE the little restaurant, and the night was over, and the stars were gone. And inside, Shawn noticed that the lights on the walls had waged a losing battle against the brightening day. They dulled to globes of muddy yellow, self-contained, without any outward radiation. When they went out at last, all at one time, touched off by some master switch, the difference was unnoticeable.
The light outside kept getting stronger. The blue started to seep out of it, and more and more white to ooze in. Then the white began turning a warm yellow, and that was daytime on, full strength. The occasional figures passing by outside the window cases became more numerous and more distinctly outlined. From blurred, anonymous silhouettes, they changed to three-dimensional pedestrians, complete and rounded, with separate shadows of their own that glided across the glass after them. Even the reversed lettering on the glass had a shadow of its own now, far behind it on the floor inside: CAFÉ.
A bus meshed gears, and the sound traveled into the stillness inside. A moment later you could hear the clang of its register as a coin was slotted in. Then it glided by with a whir and disappeared. The waiter was outside sweeping the street, and you could hear the scratchy hiss of his broom against the sidewalk, heavy on the outstroke, lifted clear on the instroke. Someone disengaged an awning over a stall or shop window, and it came down with a rubbery thud.
The unappreciated, disregarded miracle had happened once more; it was day again.
Unappreciated, except by one out of all those hundreds and thousands of beneficiaries.
They were both motionless. The man, the girl. It was as though they’d both fallen asleep there at the table, but he sitting upright at it, she slumped over on it, head down.
His eyes were open, though. Hers couldn’t be seen; they were hidden behind her enfolding arm, that curled around her head like a rampart.
They were both motionless. The only thing that moved at all, at that little table where so much had been said, where so little had been solved, was not animate, it was a substance. Smoke from a cigarette put down long before by one of them, by him probably, stubbornly continued to baste the air with zigzag white stitches that ran up into nothingness.
That moved, and nothing else.
He kept looking at her. Her hair was so young, even fear couldn’t dull it or mar its soft smoothness. The part was so straight, so white; so clear and decisive; seeming to run up perpendicularly, from where he sat.
Kept looking at her. One arm lay out along the table, toward him, almost as if unconsciously reaching out to him in plea for help, though it had fallen that way inadvertently. The fingers were but an inch or two short of touching him, as if she could reach only so far and no farther, and the help she sought to attain must come toward her the rest of the way of its own impetus. Fingers that were so smooth, so unknotted; so fragile-looking and so helpless to fight against menace. They looked as if he could have snapped off each one short, simply by bending it acutely enough in one hand of his own. No dye on the nails, just the rosy coral of nature, polished by a buffer and carefully shaped, their perfect edges unbroken for years past, probably since she’d stopped childhood play. And they had to fight for a life! Two lives.
Kept looking. Down by the floor, and a little out to one side of the table, her two feet were side by side, toes pointed backward to even the bodily balance as her head and shoulders went forward on the tabletop. So small, so seeming unsubstantial to trust support to. With heels like the spikes driven into a railroad-track crosstie. How could they carry her forward against the buffetings of doom?
The clenched fingers of her hand, on the arm coiled tight around her head, loosened a little, then contracted again. He could see her side, where her figure was bent over the table edge, rise and fall a little with each deep, hidden breath.
His eyes were narrow with a stern, dour pity as they coursed over her. Sternness for the cause, pity for the result. There was hatred latent in them too, but hatred of a helpless sort, without anything to focus on that he could see. There was bafflement, bewilderment, an honest striving to understand that missed its footing and slipped back again each time, and shot out little furrows in all directions. And there was one more thing, too, above and over all the rest. A thin, cold glaze of horror, as when one has been the unwilling witness to a mutilation.
He reached out and he touched her. Lightly on the hand, first, the one that was close before him.
“It’s light,” he said softly. “They’ve gone now. Look. They aren’t out there any more.”
She didn’t move. He touched her higher on the arm, on the bulge before the elbow, and left his hand there for a moment, in gentle insistence.
“Lift your head. Look up. They’re gone. Don’t you believe me? Don’t you trust me?”
She didn’t seem to hear. He gave up waiting, he didn’t think she was going to move any more. He took his hand away at last.
There was a wait. Then slowly her head came up, from behind the protective rampart. Her face revealed itself to him, feature by feature, in slow ascension. The white forehead, with so much pain packed in it. Then the brows, unridged, even, straight-lined with patient endurance. And then the eyes.
She was speaking now, without a sound. It was the first time he’d seen her eyes in the daylight. They almost made him wince as they first revealed themselves to him. God, he thought, those eyes! Can’t I help them? How can anyone stand it, reading what they’re trying to say?
She turned her head and looked wonderingly around her. Out that way, up that way, more than any other. Where the danger lay, and where her fears came from.
He put his hand back on her arm, reassuringly.
“It’s the sun. That’s all it is. See it? It’s even coming in on the carpet. Over there, in a yellow puddle, as if they spilled something. See it? Spreading, spreading—”
She seemed dazed.
“Is this the place we first came in so long ago?”
“A few hours,” he said.
She passed her hand before her eyes. “I lived it all over again.”
“I know. I’m sorry. That was the only way.”
“Did it do any good to tell you?”
“If
I have my way—”
She shook her head. “The night’ll come back again, and where will you be?”
He looked down and didn’t answer.
“You can’t stop it from coming back again. It’s on its way even now. It goes around on a curve. The farther it gets, the nearer it gets. It’ll come back. And you’ll be gone. I’ll be alone in the middle of it again.”
“What can I promise you?” he said almost inaudibly, drawing in his underlip shiveringly.
She clasped her hands together on the table, and then did nothing more, sat there looking down at them.
“Won’t you let me take you home now? Don’t you want me to go with you and see that you—”
“Home?” Her hands flew open again. “Death is waiting there. Death that hasn’t died yet, and that death is the worst of all. Death is in bed there, in the room that used to belong to my father, with the covers up to its chin. And it hasn’t moved all night, but still it hasn’t slept, it’s lain there awake, staring out before it. I know. I go in that room every morning. It’ll turn that helpless look, those eyes, my way when I go in the door, saying, Help me, help me. I saw your face just now when you saw my eyes. You didn’t think I did, but it was so clear to read. Such pain, such pity. And you’re just a stranger I met last night. Then how do you think I feel, seeing those other eyes?”
“Do you want to leave him alone now, stay away? You know that isn’t it.”
“I tried in my own way. And you wouldn’t let me. Now we’re past that point.”
“Well, then—?”
“You go. You don’t have to sit here. You shouldn’t. You have your own life, your own job. You’ve given me a night.”
He shook his head. Slowly, but for a long time. “I’m not going to leave you. I mean, I’m not going to leave this thing that’s happening to you, ever again. I’m in it now. You caught it from him, and now I’ve caught it from you. I’d never be able to sleep very well again. A year or two from now I’d still be waking up at times saying, What was it? What was that, anyway? Why did I leave her and go on about my business? Why didn’t I wait to find out? It would do that to me, I know it. I’m that way.”
Night Has a Thousand Eyes Page 15
