“So you’re maybe one-third done, if you’re lucky.”
“I guess so.”
He leaned forward, taking another Oreo from the tower and tapping it at his temple. “I can feel something here. Now I know I might be imagining it but I don’t think I am. I think it’s here and it could start up any dme. I’d say I’m about ninety-nine percent done.” It felt rough to say that, much rougher than it had been to think it.
“That’s not true.” She was getting solemn. “It hits people in their forties, doesn’t it?”
“Mostly. But sometimes kids get it too.”
“Maybe so, but-”
“I’ll tell you something else.” He leaned in to her, taking the Oreo into his mouth and forcing her to wait. A moist glint in her large right eye caught his attention, a reflection of the silver window well.
She was a nice lady with only a little makeup, which he could forgive. He bet she didn’t need any at all, but women got suckered all the time by TV and those glossy magazines. “I think my…” His throat caught. “My mom? She doesn’t…”
He closed his eyes, squeezed out a tear, thought that the only one-then he had to do it again, his face taut in grimace. He held in the sobbing. That was for girls. He had broken down in front of Mom and Dad that one time, but no more. Crying was for in bed with your pillow. “She no longer… likes me.” He whispered it out and there was a choking, a clench and then gone, where the Oreo had been gulped down. His nose was watery.
“Oh now that’s enough of that.” He could tell she’d gone into big sister mode, but it didn’t bother him. “My mother, listen now, she treated me bad. But there was no question that she didn’t love me. I know Katt. She’s an ideal mom, kind, caring. She’s under a lot of stress now with what’s going on upstairs. But I know she loves you. You can tell by the way she talks about you.”
“No, there’s something else.”
“There’s nothing else.”
Grown-ups were always so quick to contradict you.
“I can feel-”
She put a hand on his knee. Felt weird. “Listen to me. She’s my friend. She loves you very much.” Yeah as if Sherry knew-as if anyone really knew- what love was.
“I suppose.”
“There’s no supposing necessary,” she said. “I know she loves you. Don’t go worrying over that. Your father is dying. She needs you near by and as strong as you can be. Not weirding out on her, okay?”
Nice lady, but she didn’t understand; she had no room for understanding. “I guess,” he said.
“That’s good.”
Sure it was. She went on like that some more, pretty and hunched toward him. He let her words roll through him like low thunder, just feeling the comfort and gentle calm her rich voice was wrapped in. After a while, she’d be on her way. But he felt no particular rush to see her go.
***
Katt couldn’t look at herself in the mirror. Sitting on the cold pastel lid of the commode, a shower curtain to her left and the sink unit to her right, she stared at the baby-blue throw rug, picking at her sleeves and trying not to let the thought through, not to let it cohere. But its insistence slithered past every barrier, every distraction she raised against it.
That look, that twist of the neck-it had been picked up from Marcus. She remembered it now as far back as that first day on the Pentacrest. Funny how glints of a moment rushed up after years of forgetting, him in longer hair on the grass, taking in something new about her, there in all their freshness, a head-turn as if his mind were a machine and some new fact clicked into an empty chamber. It was a positive gesture, one he’d lost-now that she focused upon it-when their marriage had gone flat. But Conner adopted a slew of his father’s mannerisms, the walk, the chinpull, this and that, around age five, most of them dropped after a month of toying with them, but some recurring since then at random moments.
People at HP, stopping into her cubicle, if they gave her photos a glance, more often than not told her (and she let their telling fall away like an unnoticed breeze) that Conner looked so much like his dad. You got close to your family, stayed close, and missed things that outsiders saw as obvious. He had that same dark hair, those same ocean-gray eyes, the start of Marcus’s stocky body type. Ah but the face, that face, as she now brought the two of them in her mind together and compared them, feature for feature-the flat fresh plane of Conner’s face would grow uncannily into a young Marcus, and then an older Marcus, taking upon itself surely her son’s life experience uniquely, but ever melded with the torment of her husband’s face, peering out at her at unexpected moments, piercing her to the soul and reminding her of what she’d done.
She turned the thought aside. No, not yet. Not ever in this life. The stress had been unrelenting and growing with each claustrophobic day, each sleepless night. Eight days had passed, little more than a week, since he’d taken ill, but it seemed like an eternity of waiting. She hated stress, had ordered her life to minimize it, buffered from customers at work, all domestic decisions anticipated well in advance, rehearsed, researched, and settled so that all went smoothly and without stress. She couldn’t think, she couldn’t feel her feelings, she didn’t know where she was, under intense pressure of any kind.
Marcus had repented.
He was sorry. He’d said so. He’d confessed, begging her forgiveness.
She could abandon this depraved course now, cure him, give him back his health. His brush with death had surely changed him. He’d be a new man. He’d give up his bimbos, fix his love entirely on her as he had at the start.
But no, it was too late. The other women weren’t the problem. They were a symptom of a rift that cut soul-deep and could never be healed. She had to kill him; there was no other way.
She had to, she had to.
The tufts of the bathroom throw rug stranded in wild frenzy, a riotous blue profusion that seemed as disarrayed as her life, destroying even at the fringes any attempt at order. What she had started had to be finished. But she realized now-yes, it was sneaking through this way-that the death of her husband wouldn’t finish it.
Please, no. It escaped from her lips, a weak plea to absent gods. She’d begun on Marcus because she knew for a fact that his death would free her, that his sacrifice was perhaps not a proud thing but that it was necessary and in her own mind at least justified, beyond all doubt. But if Conner survived…
She whimpered softly, again, again, tears not coming, not even close to coming. A soft clattering noise. She’d begun to rock herself, backward, forward, the toilet lid’s steel hinges shifting in rhythm behind her. There’d be no freedom, no complete easing of the stress, perhaps for all she knew no relenting of the stress at all. He’d be there beside her at the funeral, in the house, watching her, his Mar-cus-eyes on her in that judgmental adolescent way, ever his unexpected questions, that directness in him she loved put to whatever use his mind dictated. For five years, he would abide here, that beautiful baby boy she’d pushed out of herself, vemixed and bloody, in Iowa City, his infancy and toddlerhood so bright, his preteen years in their joy and goodness her sole consolation in her marriage. Conner looked at her with such a deceptive air of wisdom, it gave her pause-child, teen, adult, all confusedly mingled.
Obliquely in the mirror the top of Katt’s head arced. She couldn’t do that. Not in a million years could she do that. Did she excuse herself for Marcus’s undoing? If an idea, in pursuit, felt right-no matter how evil it seemed in the abstract-you went ahead and pursued it to its end, conventional mores be hanged. But there was no way anyone could ever justify the killing… yes, admit it, that’s what was seething in her mind and gripping tight the tense muscles of her stomach and making her shake all over as if fever had seized her.
He had it inside his brain too. She didn’t know that for sure. She’d never really gone in and checked. But if she did-why yes, she didn’t know how, feel for a fever or something and keep her hand there a little longer-then if he had it, lying there dormant, she could u
ndo it, it’d be like curing it in Marcus almost, it’d get her past it. No no no! Liar! She was lying to herself, she was monstrous and out of her mind.
Kill Marcus. Kill his offspring.
It had been hers to give him life; it belonged to her to take it back. A knot twisted inside her, near to where he’d gestated for nine months.
She went on rocking, rocking-turning over like a hot stone, then dropping, then retrieving again, the idea that fixed in her mind. Its surface was smooth and sensual and inviting, vile and soiled and infested. And by God it fit her hand, coming to rest there again and again, that plug-ugly stone, worry bead grown big. And her eyes fixed upon it and examined it and lived with it, as she hefted it and held it, tight, loose, in an unsteady grip.
***
Two nights later, Marcus awoke.
He’d grown used to drifting in and out of sleep. But suddenly he was entirely awake, the house so quiet he knew Katt and Conner must be asleep. He turned his head on the pillow. Flip-book. That’s how it had become. As if when his eyes moved, someone were thumbing too slowly through a kid’s magazine, line drawings breezing by in a slow-motion attempt at real-time animation.
He made to grab the bedcovers. His fingers closed on air, firefly flits where they pinched nothing, here, here, here. Damned body felt like it belonged to somebody else.
By a miracle, they found the fold of blanketed sheet, angled it back. Everything constantly multiplied. Rising sheet was a billow of sheets, arrayed one behind the next, blowing in windless nightwind, long endless ranks of them. His bare torso fell away like hangings of slaughtered pig, serried on hooks, back, back, back into an elusive channel with seemingly no end, lest it be the mattress that nearly but never quite held still.
A fan of windows drew him. The room kaleido-scoped as he rose. Did he rise? Did it rise? He had to trust each move, yet no move could be trusted. Nighttime, locked in a department store: the carpet swept past in an arc, like rug samples chained through a punched hole. The wall, dim with paint, likewise angled and rainbowed-inviting him to choose and buy. The side of their dresser, another hidden cardsharp, fanned open wide veneers. Everywhere his eyes tried to light, another flurry of stuff blocked him, thick with toomuchness, jittering, jerkily flowing, never coming to rest.
To his amazement, his hands gripped the sashes of the window, the night scene manifold but, in its distance, not cloying. Air felt good. Cool. Not cold. He took a deep breath. Spicules of darkness spangled in. Like shavings of ice or snowflakes so thin they melt on the skin without leaving moisture, they touched his lungs.
The moon arced like white footballs down the black of the sky. Again, again. A switching yard of bikepaths lay below, almost inundated by a surround of duck ponds. Were it not for the screen, Marcus thought he might fall. Into the night he was drawn: Trees sparse in number and fields without end stretched into infinity, a wide oblivion where soon enough he’d blend and melt and dissolve.
His son was a comfort.
His wife-yes, he’d called her “wife”-was a comfort.
But they were easier comforts when they were here, in their is-ness a blessing repeatedly bestowed. In thought, they scattered, bloomed incomplete, like Escher’s ribboned man. He was empty here. Then he wondered where his royal subjects were. They wriggled up from water, from earth, a multitude of the penitent, in the thousands, the millions. Peasant garb. But he couldn’t fix on faces, couldn’t hear individual voices or even the crowd’s one voipe. Yet they came to praise and worship, ceaselessly waving, of that he had no doubt. And then their hands lowered, and they sank into the shifting landmass.
Again, he was empty here.
No peasantry. He wasn’t a king. It was one of those Huntington’s delusions he’d read of, collapsing now into a soft sad empty glimpse of reality.
Then his bent perceptions raddled in a new direction.
Behind him the room sundered. He swiveled carefully, his spine finding the sill. A carousel of beds jangled by in silent calliope music. Swoops of hall light knifed in. On them, she rode in, clone upon clone. The light folded, thin blades thinner, gold batons twirling into toothpicks, then gone. She filled his vision. Sounds. Touch. Guide of her hands.
Marcus said something. He knew it came out nonsense, knew she made sense. What that sense was he couldn’t say. She enclosed him like an exoskeleton, made mad meaning out of the swirling room. Cover-hug, a warmth he hadn’t known he needed. Katt was her name, a sharp array of names held by a circus performer in sequins.
Katt.
Katt.
Katt.
He’d always craved many lovers. She was many lovers, all good, pure goodness. She touched his senses, gave him heaven here on this bed. It was enough to bless his eyes, to hear that voice soothing him, to feel her hands resdng on his face, touching his brow.
He wanted more, a universe of love from her forever.
When she left-knives of light retwirling, growing to planes, then knives, then nothing-he felt like nothing so much as a flurry of aches and emptiness.
5
RELEASE AND A SHORT-LIVED RELIEF
The bedroom smelled sick to her. Sleeping beside him had become unbearable and she’d taken to the daybed in the guest room upstairs.
Four days had passed since Sherry’s first visit, once more dropping by on Thursday to deliver a casserole, speak with Conner downstairs in the rec room, and go. It seemed to Katt, however, like an eternity in hell. There he lay, her victim, emaciated, jittery with brain disease whenever he made the slightest move, or feint at one, and on top of that, shivering sporadically, violently from the pneumonia he’d contracted and could no longer fight off. He ate and drank when she brought mugs or small portions to his lips, but it was impossible to tell if he did so with awareness. She spoke with him, soothed him, shutting out that she had herself been the cause of his steep decline, speaking from the love she felt for him still. Let others scoff-if all this ever came out-at the contradiction; logically, there was a disjointure between love and taking his life, but no such problem could she find emotionally. It was seamless, an inevitability, inside her. And so it had been from the outset, from that initial impulse in Lyra’s cabin.
Sitting here now beside him on the bed, observing the unceasing ripples of motion pass over him like stray winds on water, she recalled her first two years out of college, a time spent testing herself, testing her limits, free and on her own at last, learning about life firsthand without the confines of family or school. She’d moved to New York City, just to be there, to see what a huge city felt like, to know that the Statue of Liberty and the United Nations, even though she never visited either, were right nearby if she ever decided to take them in. One winter’s day, alone and newly split from a fiery boyfriend who’d dumped her on (to her) bewildering grounds, she’d cut a large patch from a lemon blouse and sewn it inside the right flap of a fur-lined winter coat. Went to a stuffed, funky bookstore she was fond of rummaging through. She’d practiced at home, a kneeling to scan the lower shelves, palming two paperbacks and smoothly slipping one of them inside the cobbled pouch she had made, then pretending casual interest in the other and putting it back. But when it came time to actually do it, to steal a book, even though she knew they’d never see it, even though she knew she’d glide right past the sullen clerk who never looked up from his desk for anything but a purchase, she simply couldn’t. Stealing was not something she could manage.
But now here she sat, having brought her mate to this pass, not proud of it, not even idly proud- but not shamed by it either. She could have blamed his deceptions, could have called him a philanderer deserving of death, but that she knew would have been a lie. He didn’t deserve this in the least, and yet it felt right-as right as anything she had ever done. For all the suffering they’d endured, this short concentrated decline had a closure to it that needed to happen. He was pale, his skin blanched nearly from the color of almond rind to the white nutmeat inside. A sheen of sweat bathed his face, dark wet drops
having fallen and blotched the pillowcase that cradled his head.
Conner was again ensconced in the rec room. He’d not disturb them. Since his talks with Sherry, he had started hanging around more, being there for his mother. He’d eased into her hugs. She could tell he was making a conscious effort to support her, and it was touching. Her agitation toward him, while still active, had lessened a little since she’d committed to the course she had to take.
And now “It’s time,” she said. She eased back folds of blanket and bedclothes. His hands tried to grab after them but she brushed his attempts aside. He wore no top, his hairy chest matted with moisture above where his ribs fell prominently outlined in gaunt flesh. She placed her palms to either side, slick on the scumbles of sweat that coated him. She closed her eyes and felt deep inside his blocked lungs, the alveoli walls swollen or destroyed, an ingress of plasma and blood cells inside the air sacs. A slow pass all about revealed where the healthy ones were, and one by one she burst the walls, let blood through, an idle making of wine, invisible invasive footstomp through her husband’s chest cavity, making solid and useless more and more of his lungs until, beneath her hands, all wrack of motion lost its tension and arced up and ceased, death thick on the air at his last caught gasp of breath. Then came surcease, relaxation, his life lifting free.
Katt opened her eyes. A thrill coursed through her, so slight it seemed like static uncertainly felt. Moving one hand down from his chest to recapture the fallen fold of sheet and blanket, Katt rested the other lightly above his stopped heart, feeling the fire go out. His head was angled back, his neck seeming suddenly too thick and bold where his chin abruptly rose and his mouth fell open.
She covered him. Thought to pull the cover over his head, felt foolish about it, then felt it was ritualistic and right.
Walking Wounded Page 10
