Blaze

by Richard Bachman

  My shirt was off. My right arm ended three and a half inches below the shoulder. I twitched it at her — a twitch was the best I could do with the muscle that was left. “This is me,” I said, “giving you the finger. Get out of here if that’s how you feel. Get out, you quitting birch.”

  The first tears had started rolling down her face, but she tried to smile. “Bitch, Edgar,” she said. “You mean bitch.”

  “The word is what I say it is,” I said, and began to do crunches again. It’s harder than hell to do them with an arm gone; your body wants to pull and corkscrew to that side. “I wouldn’t have left you, that’s the point. I wouldn’t have left you. I would have gone on through the mud and the blood and the piss and the spilled beer.”

  “It’s different,” she said. She made no effort to wipe her face. “It’s different and you know it. I couldn’t break you in two if I got into a rage.”

  “I’d have a hell of a job breaking you in two with only one amp,” I said, doing crunches faster.

  “You stuck me with a knife.” As if that were the point.

  “A plastic fife is all it was, I was half out of my mind, and it’ll be your last words on your fucking beth-dead, ‘Eddie staffed me with a plastic fife, goodbye cruel world.’”

  “You choked me,” she said in a voice I could barely hear.

  I stopped doing crunches and gaped at her. “I choked you? I never choked you!”

  “I know you don’t remember, but you did.”

  “Shut up,” I said. “You want a divorce, you can have a divorce. Only go do the alligator somewhere else. Get out of here.”

  She went up the stairs and closed the door without looking back. And it wasn’t until she was gone that I realized what I’d meant to say: crocodile tears. Go cry your crocodile tears somewhere else.

  Oh, well. Close enough for rock and roll. That’s what Kamen says. And I was the one who ended up getting out.

  Except for the former Pamela Gustafson, I never had a partner in my other life. I did have an accountant I trusted, however, and it was Tom Riley who helped me move the few things I needed from the house in Mendota Heights to the smaller place we kept on Lake Phalen, twenty miles away. Tom, who had been divorced twice, worried at me all the way out. “You don’t give up the house in a situation like this,” he said. “Not unless the judge kicks you out. It’s like giving up home field advantage in a playoff game.”

  Kathi Green the Rehab Queen only had one divorce under her belt, but she and Tom were on the same wavelength. She thought I was crazy to move out. She sat cross-legged on the lakeporch in her leotard, holding my feet and looking at me with grim outrage.

  “What, because you poked her with a plastic hospital knife when you could barely remember your own name? Mood-swings and short-term memory loss following accident trauma are common. You suffered three subdural hematomas, for God’s sake!”

  “Are you sure that’s not hematomae?” I asked her.

  “Blow me,” she said. “And if you’ve got a good lawyer, you can make her pay for being such a wimp.” Some hair had escaped from her Rehab Gestapo ponytail and she blew it back from her forehead. “She ought to pay for it. Read my lips, Edgar, none of this is your fault.”

  “She says I tried to choke her.”

  “And if so, being choked by a one-armed invalid must have been very upsetting. Come on, Eddie, make her pay. I’m sure I’m stepping way out of my place, but I don’t care. She should not be doing what she’s doing. Make her pay.”

  Not long after I relocated to the place on Lake Phalen, the girls came to see me — the young women. They brought a picnic hamper and we sat on the piney-smelling lakeporch and looked out at the water and nibbled at the sandwiches. It was past Labor Day by then, most of the floating toys put away for another year. There was also a bottle of wine in the hamper, but I only drank a little. On top of the pain medication, alcohol hit me hard; a single glass could turn me into a slurring drunk. The girls — the young women — finished the rest between them, and it loosened them up. Melissa, back from France for the second time since my unfortunate argument with the crane and not happy about it, asked me if all adults in their fifties had these unpleasant regressive interludes, did she have that to look forward to. Ilse, the younger, began to cry, leaned against me, and asked why it couldn’t be like it was, why couldn’t we — meaning her mother and me — be like we were.

  Lissa’s temper and Ilse’s tears weren’t exactly pleasant, but at least they were honest, and I recognized both reactions from all the years the girls had spent growing up in the house where I lived with them; those responses were as familiar to me as the mole on Ilse’s chin or the faint vertical frown-line, which in time would deepen into a groove like her mother’s, between Lissa’s eyes.

  Lissa wanted to know what I was going to do. I told her I didn’t know, and in a way that was true. I’d come a long distance toward deciding to end my own life, but I knew that if I did it, it must absolutely look like an accident. I would not leave these two, just starting out in their lives with nothing but fresh tickets on their belts, carrying the residual guilt of their father’s suicide. Nor would I leave a load of guilt behind for the woman with whom I had once shared a milkshake in bed, both of us naked and laughing and listening to the Plastic Ono Band on the stereo.

  After they’d had a chance to vent — after a full and complete exchange of feelings, in Kamen-speak — things calmed down, and my memory is that we actually had a pleasant afternoon, looking at old photo albums Ilse found in a drawer and reminiscing about the past. I think we even laughed a time or two, but not all memories of my other life are to be trusted. Kamen says when it comes to the past, we all stack the deck.

  Maybe sí, maybe no.

  Speaking of Kamen, he was my next visitor at Casa Phalen. Three days later, this would have been. Or maybe six. Like many other aspects of my memory during those post-accident months, my time-sense was pretty much hors de fucky. I didn’t invite him; I had my rehabilitation dominatrix to thank for that.

  Although surely no more than forty, Xander Kamen walked like a much older man and wheezed even when he sat, peering at the world through thick glasses and over an enormous pear of a belly. He was very tall and very Afro-American, with features carved so large they seemed unreal. Those great staring eyeballs, that ship’s figurehead of a nose, and those totemic lips were awe-inspiring. Kamen looked like a minor god in a suit from Men’s Wearhouse. He also looked like a prime candidate for a fatal heart attack or stroke before his fiftieth birthday.

  He refused my offer of coffee or a Coke, said he couldn’t stay, then put his briefcase aside on the couch as if to contradict that. He sat sunk full fathom five beside the couch’s armrest (and going deeper all the time — I feared for the thing’s springs), looking at me and wheezing benignly.

  “What brings you out this way?” I asked him.

  “Oh, Kathi tells me you’re planning to off yourself,” he said. It was the tone he might have used to say Kathi tells me you’re having a lawn party and there are fresh Krispy Kremes on offer. “Any truth to that?”

  I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Once, when I was ten and growing up in Eau Claire, I took a comic book from a drugstore spin-around, put it down the front of my jeans, then dropped my tee-shirt over it. As I was strolling out the door, feeling clever, a clerk grabbed me by the arm. She lifted my shirt with her other hand and exposed my ill-gotten treasure. “How did that get there?” she asked me. Not in the forty years since had I been so completely stuck for an answer to a simple question.

  Finally — long after such a response could have any weight — I said, “That’s ridiculous. I don’t know where she could have gotten such an idea.”

  “No?”

  “No. Sure you don’t want a Coke?”

  “Thanks, but I’ll pass.”

  I got up and got a Coke from the kitchen fridge. I tucked the bottle firmly between my stump and my chest-wall — possible but painful, I don’
t know what you may have seen in the movies, but broken ribs hurt for a long time — and spun off the cap with my left hand. I’m a southpaw. Caught a break there, muchacho, as Kamen says.

  “I’m surprised you’d take her seriously in any case,” I said as I came back in. “Kathi’s a hell of a physical therapist, but a headshrinker she’s not.” I paused before sitting down. “Neither are you, actually. In the technical sense.”

  Kamen cupped one hand behind an ear that looked roughly the size of a desk drawer. “Do I hear — a ratcheting noise? I believe I do!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s the charmingly medieval sound a person’s defenses make when they go up.” He tried an ironic wink, but the size of the man’s face made irony impossible; he could only manage burlesque. Still, I took the point. “As for Kathi Green, you’re right, what does she know? All she does is work with paraplegics, quadriplegics, accident-related amps like you, and people recovering from traumatic head injuries — again, like you. For fifteen years Kathi Green’s done this work, she’s had the opportunity to watch a thousand maimed patients reflect on how not even a single second of time can ever be called back, so how could she possibly recognize the signs of pre-suicidal depression?”

  I sat down in the lumpy easy chair across from the couch, listing to the left as I did it to favor my bad hip, and stared at him sullenly. Here was trouble. No matter how carefully I crafted my suicide, here was trouble. And Kathi Green was more.

  He leaned forward — but, given his girth, a few inches was all he could manage. “You have to wait,” he said.

  I gaped at him. It was the last thing I had expected.

  He nodded. “You’re surprised. Yes. But I’m not a Christian, let alone a Catholic, and on the subject of suicide my mind is quite open. Yet I’m a believer in responsibilities, and I tell you this: if you kill yourself now — or even six months from now — your wife and daughters will know. No matter how cleverly you do it, they’ll know.”

  “I don’t—”

  “And the company that insures your life — for a very large sum, I have no doubt — they’ll know, too. They may not be able to prove it — but they will try very, very hard. The rumors they start will hurt your children, no matter how well-armored against such things you may think they are.”

  Melissa was well-armored. Ilse, however, was a different story.

  “And in the end, they may prove it.” He shrugged his enormous shoulders. “How much of a death-duty that would mean I wouldn’t venture to guess, but I know it might erase a great deal of your life’s treasure.”

  I wasn’t even thinking about the money. I was thinking about a team of insurance investigators sniffing around whatever I set up, trying to overturn it. And all at once I began to laugh.

  Kamen sat with his huge dark hands on his doorstop knees, looking at me with his little I’ve-seen-everything smile. Except on his face nothing was little. He let my laughter run its course and when it had, he asked me what was so funny.

  “You’re telling me I’m too rich to kill myself,” I said.

  “I’m telling you to give it time. I have a very strong intuition in your case — the same sort of intuition that caused me to give you the doll you named — what did you name her?”

  For a second I couldn’t remember. Then I thought, It was RED!, and told him what I had named my fluffy blond anger-doll.

  He nodded. “Yes. The same sort of intuition that caused me to give you Reba. My intuition is that in your case, time may soothe you. Time and memory.”

  I didn’t tell him I remembered everything I wanted to. He knew my position on that. “How much time are we talking about, Kamen?”

  He sighed as a man does before saying something he may regret. “At least a year.” He studied my face. “It seems a very long time to you. The way you are now.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Time’s different for me now.”

  “Of course it is,” he said. “Pain-time is different. Alone-time is different. Put them together and you have something very different. So pretend you’re an alcoholic and do it as they do.”

  “A day at a time.”

  He nodded. “A day at a time.”

  “Kamen, you are so full of bullshit.”

  He looked at me from the depths of the old couch, not smiling. He’d never get out of there without help.

  “Maybe sí, maybe no,” he said. “In the meantime — Edgar, does anything make you happy?”

  “I don’t know — I used to sketch.”

  “When?”

  I realized I hadn’t done more than doodle while taking telephone calls since an art class for extra credit in high school. I considered lying about this — I was ashamed to seem like such a fixated drudge — and then told the truth. One-armed men should tell the truth whenever possible. Kamen doesn’t say that; I do.

  “Take it up again,” Kamen said. “You need hedges.”

  “Hedges,” I said, bemused.

  “Yes, Edgar.” He looked surprised and a little disappointed, as if I had failed to understand a very simple concept. “Hedges against the night.”

  It might have been a week after Kamen’s visit that Tom Riley came to see me. The leaves had started to turn color, and I remember the clerks putting up Halloween posters in the Wal-Mart where I bought sketchpads and various drawing implements a few days before my former accountant’s visit; that’s the best I can do.

  What I remember most clearly about that visit is how embarrassed and ill-at-ease Tom seemed. He was on an errand he didn’t want to run.

  I offered him a Coke and he took me up on it. When I came back from the kitchen, he was looking at a pen-and-ink I’d done — three palm trees silhouetted against an expanse of water, a bit of tiled roof jutting into the left foreground. “This is pretty good,” he said. “You do this?”

  “Nah, the elves,” I said. “They come in the night. Cobble my shoes and draw the occasional picture.”

  He laughed too hard and set the picture back down on the desk. “Don’t look much like Minnesota, dere,” he said, doing a Swedish accent.

  “I copied it out of a book,” I said. “What can I do for you, Tom? If it’s about the business—”

  “Actually, Pam asked me to come out.” He ducked his head. “I didn’t much want to, but I didn’t feel I could say no.”

  “Tom,” I said, “go on and spit it out. I’m not going to bite you.”

  “She’s got herself a lawyer. She’s going ahead with this divorce business.”

  “I never thought she wouldn’t.” It was the truth. I still didn’t remember choking her, but I remembered the look in her eyes when she told me I had. I remembered telling her she was a quitting birch and feeling that if she dropped dead at that moment, right there at the foot of the cellar stairs, that would be all right with me. Fine, in fact. And setting aside how I’d felt then, once Pam started down a road, she rarely turned around.

  “She wants to know if you’re going to be using Bozie.”

  I had to smile at that. William Bozeman III was the wheel-dog of the Minneapolis law-firm the company used, and if he knew Tom and I had been calling him Bozie for the last twenty years, he would probably have a hemorrhage.

  “I hadn’t thought about it. What’s the deal, Tom? What exactly does she want?”

  He drank off half his Coke, put the glass on a bookshelf beside my half-assed sketch, and looked at his shoes. “She said she hopes it doesn’t have to be mean. She said, ‘I don’t want to be rich, and I don’t want a fight. I just want him to be fair to me and the girls, the way he always was, will you tell him that?’ So I am.” He shrugged, still looking down at his shoes.

  I got up, went to the big window between the living room and the porch, and looked out at the lake. When I turned back, Tom Riley didn’t look himself at all. At first I thought he was sick to his stomach. Then I realized he was struggling not to cry.

  “Tom, what’s the matter?” I asked.

  H
e shook his head, tried to speak, and produced only a watery croak. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Boss, I can’t get used to seeing you with just the one arm. I’m so sorry.”

  It was artless, unrehearsed, and sweet. A straight shot to the heart, in other words. I think there was a moment when we were both close to bawling, like a couple of Sensitive Guys on The Oprah Winfrey Show. All we needed was Dr. Phil, nodding avuncular approval.

  “I’m sorry, too,” I said, “but I’m getting along. Really. And I’m going to give you an offer to take back to her. If she likes the shape of it, we can hammer out the details. No lawyers needed. Do-it-yourself deal.”

  “Are you serious, Eddie?”

  “I am. You do a comprehensive accounting so we have a bottom-line figure to work with. Nothing hidden. Then we divide the swag into four shares. She takes three — seventy-five per cent — for her and the girls. I take the rest. The divorce itself — hey, Minnesota’s a no-fault state, she and I can go to lunch and then buy Divorce for Dummies at Borders.”

  He looked dazed. “Is there such a book?”

  “I haven’t researched it, but if there isn’t, I’ll eat your shirts.”

  “I think the saying’s ‘eat my shorts.’”

  “Isn’t that what I said?”

  “Never mind. Eddie, that kind of deal is going to trash the estate.”

  “Ask me if I give a shit. Or a shirt, for that matter. All I’m proposing is that we dispense with the ego that usually allows the lawyers to swallow the cream. There’s plenty for all of us, if we’re reasonable.”

  He drank some of his Coke, never taking his eyes off me. “Sometimes I wonder if you’re the same man I used to work for,” he said.

  “That man died in his pickup truck,” I said.

  If you’ve been picturing my convalescent retreat as a lakeside cottage standing in splendid isolation at the end of a lonely dirt road in the north woods, you better think again — this is suburban St. Paul we’re talking about. Our place by the lake stands at the end of Aster Lane, a paved street running from East Hoyt Avenue to the water. In the middle of October I finally took Kathi Green’s advice and began walking. They were only short outings up to East Hoyt Avenue, but I always came back with my bad hip crying for mercy and often with tears standing in my eyes. Yet I also almost always came back feeling like a conquering hero — I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit it. I was returning from one of these walks when Mrs. Fevereau hit Gandalf, the pleasant Jack Russell terrier who belonged to the little girl next door.