Living Dead Girl

by Tod Goldberg

  He lifted her into his arms, and I slouched back another ten yards into the forest.

  “I love you,” he said.

  Twenty yards.

  “I’ll do anything to keep you,” he said. “You know that.”

  Thirty yards.

  “I want him gone,” he said. “I want you to cut him out forever.”

  Fifty yards, and I’m sprinting away from this vision, away from this truth, jagged branches stabbing at my face, my ears, my arms, and I’m running for my life, and I’m running with Katrina again, back through the woods, back through time, back to where this all started. I’m holding Katrina in my arms and Sheriff Drew is behind me.

  “It’s gonna be all right, Paul,” he said. “You couldn’t save her.”

  “I have time,” I said. “I can put her back.”

  “She was sick,” he said. “I’m real sorry, son, but she’s dead. She’s dead and you can’t bring her back.”

  “What do you know about what I can do?”

  “You’re not thinking right,” he said. “Your daughter should have been in the hospital. I know that. I know that. Now c’mon, stop running. I’m an old man.”

  Sheriff Drew was smiling, I remember him smiling, trying to calm me down. I remember looking down at Katrina and thinking that I was a murderer, that she could have been saved, and I deserved to die.

  Jumping over fallen trees, stumbling over rocks, heading for the water, for right here, circling back around Sheriff Drew. “Don’t,” he shouted. Diving into the water with Katrina in my arms, going back to where it all started, back to the bottom of the lake, back to the beginning, giving myself back to earth, starting again, all over, never thinking about life without her and Molly, knowing we’d all be together this way forever, for a life without words, and illness, and abortions and tumors. Together.

  BRUCE DUPER STEPS onto the dock and I am reminded that it took us millions of years to learn how to lie, that words have come a long way from the caves of Taung, the deep fissures of Sterkfontein, and the open plateaus of Tanzania.

  “You took my boat,” he says.

  “I’m sorry about that,” I say. “I needed to come back.”

  Bruce sniffles once and then stretches his arms out, like we are meeting casually on a city street after a long day of work. “I called the sheriff,” he says.

  “Good,” I say.

  “How do these things happen?” he asks. “How do people forget what they’ve done?”

  “It’s an illness,” I say. “Did Molly tell you about it?”

  “I read some of your letters.” Bruce says. “I won’t lie. She filled me in on the important things, matters of safety and such.”

  The real danger now is fear. I believe in science, in formulas, in the delineation of man and beast. I understand the process by which I was created, by which man went from a single cell to this creature I see reflected back to me from the water beside me. I have lived my life with the understanding that it was the only life I would get. Now, today, this very moment, I think about my children, about my wife, about my mom and dad, and I think about Ginny and Leo, and about Bruce Duper standing in front of me here—the people who have loved me, have known parts of me intimately—and I think it is plausible that all my science is wrong. I’ve made a tragic mistake believing I was put on this earth to understand man.

  I’ve never believed in the Bible or in the Koran or the Torah, but I still think that I can be saved. There is a power in me that says I am my own god, my own dominion, and that only I can determine what comes after all of this has turned to vapor.

  “You were there,” I say. “I saw you holding her.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “And then,” I begin to say, but there is nothing, no words, only a sense of motion: running through the woods, away from the house and then, somehow, back in Los Angeles, in my apartment, grading papers, calling Ginny, living, breathing, taking a phone call that says my wife is missing, a blank spot in time.

  “I found your footprints in the dirt,” Bruce says.

  “I’d been there,” I say. “For the anniversary. I’d come up to commemorate Katrina. You showed up drunk and I left.”

  “I didn’t see you,” he says.

  No, I think, you couldn’t have. I’ve been invisible my entire life. A siren rings out and both of us turn to look. Cutting across the water is a boat with a twirling blue light. It is more than half a mile away, near the center of the lake, and though I can’t see any people aboard, I know who is coming. I look up into the sky and mark the time. It is not yet noon.

  “I was hiding,” I say.

  The siren grows louder. I break it down by pitch, by tone, until it is nothing but a buzz, a jumble of consonants, and I think that everything falls apart for a reason. There is no final conclusion to life, nothing to sum up the quality of existence. I wondered for a long time after Katrina died if I would ever see the world as my father once had, rife with chance and hope. I would never get used to parting with things, never get used to saying that I once had a daughter, never get used to feeling like my head was full of soot and that everything had burned around me. In parts of my mind it is obvious to me that the world has never changed, that things have stayed the same, frozen in place for me, frozen in this kind of madness that makes me believe I am a monster, and have done things normal people would shudder at.

  The lives that were extinguished around me did not just peter out as one might expect. They smoldered inside me, flared up time and again, searing the terrain.

  My body feels tight, like I’ve been squeezed into a tiny box, and that my ribs will splinter from my chest if I breathe too deeply. I close my eyes and concentrate on being small, on shrinking down to the head of a pin, on making this entire world a white dot.

  “Paul,” Bruce says, “I want you to calm down.”

  “I’m fine,” I say, because I can now remember waking up in my car, my body cramped with hunger and thirst, only to find myself beneath a tree in a gas station parking lot in Sacramento, hundreds of miles away from Granite Lake.

  Think, Molly says in my mind. Remember.

  Sweet angel, I think. What have I done to you?

  I am right here, she says. I have always been right here.

  I am a meticulous man. I am bound by theories, by carbon, by givens and proofs. Molly still exists for me, though, today, in a form other than the physical. It is almost everything I need, this sense that she is beside me here on the dock, guiding me through the morass of my memory, stepping me over the land mines.

  I walked in a fugue, the world clicking past me. I stepped into the gas station’s restroom and found myself face to face with a monster; I was cut just below my left eye, a deep gash that spilled blood down the length of my cheek and then down my neck before finally drying along the line of my clavicle. My thumbnails were ripped down to the very quick in jagged cords, as if they’d been pried out of something solid, something moving, something resisting. My shirt was ripped along the chest and arms.

  I’d never believed myself to be a violent person, had never thought that I was more than just a curse to the people who’d loved me, had never stared at myself in a mirror and wondered whose blood laved me.

  I cleaned myself off in the bathroom, wadded up and threw away my bloodied shirt and then went back to my car and tried to piece together where I’d been and what I’d done. I listened to the messages on my cell phone and heard only Ginny’s voice, telling me to hurry up with my papers so that we could go out and live a little.

  It was a weekend. A Sunday. Yes. Why wasn’t I in Los Angeles? A rational person would have known that first thing, but I wasn’t rational, never had been. An accident? A fight? I concentrated on the pain in my body, tried to localize the suffering, tried to recall the exact events of the previous evening, but there was nothing, only spots of blackness and the stickiness on my hands.

  “I remember now,” I say.

  Bruce shakes his head once
and then breathes in deeply. “Paul,” he says, “Molly never said anything about you coming up to visit her that weekend. Did she know you were coming?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Of course she did. It was important!”

  “Had you come up before?”

  Yes, I think. Every year. “I don’t know.”

  Sheriff Drew’s boat is getting closer and I can make out three figures on board. Poor Ginny, I think. She never had a chance.

  “I want you to think real hard about what might have happened,” Bruce says. “I was with Molly on the anniversary. I spent the night and went back across in the morning. She was alive when I left, Paul.”

  “This can’t be happening,” I say, but I know that indeed it can, that I am capable of things.

  I walk the length of the dock and try to reconcile myself with a memory that refuses to exist. Yes, I must have hurt her. I tell myself that I must have driven up through California, Oregon, Washington, as I had so many times before, in a sleepless drip of space. I must have watched her from my perch in the woods as she walked through the house in cut-off jeans and a tank top. Must have seen her dusting the living room, pausing over pictures of Katrina, holding the picture to her lips, kissing it. I must have seen her speaking to the picture, telling Katrina how much she missed her, how one day they’d be together again. She must have stood in the kitchen and boiled water for tea, hummed a song just beneath her breath, and dabbed at her eyes. It had been three years since our daughter had passed, an anniversary of despair. I must have circled the house, feeling bolder than I ever had, feeling like today of all days I had to be near the only person who mattered to me. Yes, I tell myself. Yes, this is exactly what happened. I must have stood in the shadows and watched Bruce stumble down the dock, the stench of alcohol slipping from his pores, from the air he exhaled when he crossed right beside me, never feeling my presence because I was no longer opaque, had transformed into another kind of beast altogether.

  “I saw you walking down the dock,” I say. “You were drunk and you could hardly walk. You were wearing a baseball cap. I remember that. You and Molly argued.”

  “That’s right,” he says. “We were fighting about you.”

  I try to imagine what Molly’s life might have been like with Bruce Duper. I imagine them speaking, holding each other, making plans. It would have been good for Molly to live with him. He would have made her happy, I think, and she deserved that.

  I must have listened to Bruce and Molly argue at the door, must have seen how they loved each other, knew that time and consequence had finally converged, that there were no more words to describe suffering in my lexicon, no more symbols or formulas to delineate guilt and innocence in matters of the heart. Katrina was gone. Molly was lost to me forever. Another person had claimed her, made her his, had experienced emotions that belonged to me alone. I must have heard Molly invite Bruce in, listened as she quietly closed and latched the door, waited until the lights were turned off in the bedroom before I slid in the backdoor and through the rooms of my former life, pausing to smell the wood floors, touching the walls, letting the house melt into me, trusting my habitat. I would have closed my eyes in the darkness of the living room and heard Molly and Bruce sleeping, living. I would have known there were no more chances in this world. While I was an animal capable of great care and concern, I’d reached a terminal point.

  “I watched you sleep,” I say. I pace back to the end of the dock and stand beside Bruce. “I snuck in the house and watched you and Molly in bed.”

  Sheriff Drew’s voice radiates across the water from a bullhorn on his boat. “Stay right there! Bruce, keep him right there!”

  Yes, I think, I must have walked into Molly’s bedroom and seen her in bed with Bruce Duper, must have looked at her sleeping body like a preying mantis looks at its mate after sex. I must have wanted to devour her, to make her part of me forever.

  “The next morning,” I say, “I heard you tell Molly to get rid of me. You were holding papers in your hand. Do you remember that?”

  “I do,” Bruce says sadly. “They were court papers. She’d filed for divorce but had never mailed them to you. She thought they’d put you over the edge.”

  “They would have,” I say. They have. They are.

  “Do you know where she is, Paul?”

  “I couldn’t hurt her,” I say. “Could I?”

  I can’t imagine what I must have done to her. There is not a way for me to quantify what I know must have occurred. I have seen rage throughout the annals of history, yet have no concept how it would manifest itself in me.

  The truth, however, is that man has a rich history of brutalizing the ones he loves.

  I must have spent that night in the woods planning, thinking, devising. I must have waited until he’d left, reasoned that my anger was not at Bruce but with Molly. The biggest mistake Bruce had made was loving a woman he couldn’t completely have. He had started to drink because of it. I had forgotten how decent he was, how honestly he’d lived, how perfect and amiable his existence was without her.

  Maybe I walked back inside and smelled him in the folds of the drapes, in the hemlock cones and the cedar leaves and had gone into the kind of rage only a man like myself can: a blind destruction that empties the very corridors that I’m only now able to see.

  As I stand beside Bruce Duper’s bearlike frame, I admire him, his courage to take a chance with Molly, no matter the consequence. Even if the truth were that she’d never know him as perfectly as she knew me, he was willing. He was willing to do anything to satisfy his desire.

  “I’m proud that you loved my wife,” I say.

  “Where is she?” Bruce says, grabbing me now by the arms. I can smell his anger, can taste it in the back of my throat. “Where did you put her?”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  The human brain decides so much for you: it can black out entire childhoods; it can swallow years of adulthood. Perhaps my brain has done what it has always done: turned the traumatic into silken strips of memory. Love and anger, like science and religion—or even illness—are often guided by arbitrary factors. In the end nothing is fixed, every known variable can have a separate unknown. Once you step outside your own life and examine the world, everything seems like a paralyzing addition and subtraction that never quite computes.

  Chapter 18

  I can’t be sure what I believed after I came back to LA three weeks ago, because it is still lost to me. Perhaps Ginny knows. Perhaps she can tell me what to believe about myself, because I remember being happy to see her. I remember thinking that I was on a path toward life on a grander scale, that I’d actually become happy, had finally become something other than what I am. Perhaps for the briefest of times I was beautiful: a complete human who could go on living his life, could keep up the pretenses that days, weeks, years of his life hadn’t completely dissipated.

  “Is she in the woods?” Bruce asks. “You buried her, didn’t you?”

  “Keep him still,” Sheriff Drew shouts. I turn and see him there in his boat and I think that my endings and my beginnings are all the same: that they are ripples in the fabric of my life that crash again and again on the same shore. “Be a gentleman now, Paul. Everything is going to be fine. We’re going to get this all settled.”

  His words are like sediment in my mind. Sheriff Drew runs after me in the forest, back down this very dock. Molly shouts for me just to stop, please stop. And here I come with my girl in my arms, sprinting past where I stand now and diving into the water, my body twisting, turning, sinking to the bottom.

  “No,” I say to Bruce. “I did not bury her. I know exactly where she is.” Bruce’s eyes widen and I feel his grip on my arm tighten. “She has always been right here.”

  Sheriff Drew steps off his boat followed by Ginny and Leo. I hear Ginny’s voice, but I cannot make out her words for the roaring in my ears. At some point Ginny will understand that I was incapable of being more than who I am. Maybe, at that point, sh
e’ll forgive me for what I’ve taken from her.

  The truth is, I’m saved.

  Sheriff Drew walks toward me with his palms up. “Just stay right there. Everything is going to be fine. Just stay where you are.”

  The truth is that I never was meant to live.

  I must have hurt her. I must have brought her back here, to this dock. I must have done for her as I tried to do for Katrina. I must have tried to bring her back.

  “I hurt my wife,” I say.

  “We know, Paul,” Sheriff Drew says. I take a step backward and the sheriff moves his hand toward his gun. “Easy there. Easy.”

  “I know where she is,” I say.

  “Hold him, Bruce,” Sheriff Drew says.

  I tilt my head back and feel the breeze off the lake and think that this is the moment I’ve waited for my entire life.

  “Baby,” Ginny says. “Stop moving, please!”

  I turn and look at Bruce to let him know that it’s okay, that I’ve found the love of his life as well, that we all can be put to rest, but his face is somehow gone—blank—missing even the smallest hint of humanity

  I take another step and Bruce releases me. I’m floating in the air, surrounded by glory, and I’m no longer afraid, no longer confused. For the first time in my entire life, I know who I am, know where I’m going, and maybe I’ll come back one day or maybe I’ll drift into the ether. Maybe I’ll be born into another life in another time.

  The water rushes up around me as I sink. Yes, I think, this is what I have always deserved; I am going back to the water, back to knowing peace. I open my eyes to see it, to see everything I’ve done wrong, to understand that death is but a necessary step.

  And I find her.