by Unknown
"We're going to Joanne's apartment," I said. "We're going to settle this crazy thing once and for all."
He yanked me to a stop, but I held on to him. He glared at me, teeth chattering.
"It won't do any good. She's not there anymore."
"Sam, you may be my closest friend, but you're going to have to show me."
He didn't resist then as I led him down the stairs into the subway, steadying him. I dropped two tokens into the fare box and steered him out onto the empty platform. I was more scared than ever. The waiting was the terrible part. We were alone, with nowhere to go and nothing to do for I didn't know how long, and live rails just off the edge in either direction.
As long as I was moving, doing something, it didn't seem so bad, but waiting was another matter entirely.
We would find the truth. That was the plan. If Joanne was in her apartment, then I would have to direct Sam, gently or otherwise, into the care of a psychiatrist. If she wasn't, it was time to go to the police.
At last the train came. I sat Sam down between myself and the window. As we rattled through the darkness he just stared out at the concrete walls weaving past. Then, after a while, he began to speak, but to himself, not in conversation, but just babbling aloud.
"I couldn't sleep that night when I got home. After I did it…I felt like…like a murderer. I was waiting for everyone in the building to start pounding on the walls and on my door and shouting 'He's the one! There!' But I only lay still in the darkness, listening to the ticking of my alarm clock. It sounded like thunder. I listened to my own heartbeat too. I could hear it, as if my senses were all suddenly heightened, because…because I knew…like Roderick Usher. I looked at the clock once and it was half past twelve. Then I rolled over again and looked once more, and it was a quarter to four. I hadn't felt any interval in between. It was like that, like a whole part of my life, all the years of my marriage, had been ripped out, destroyed. Once I was twenty-four. Now I am thirty-six. And there's nothing in between. Nothing.
"After a while, there was another sound. There was someone in the kitchen. I heard a cabinet open. Pans clinked. I thought for a moment that it was burglars, that I would die the archetypal New Yorker's death, knifed in my own apartment just after I had…
"But it was someone fixing breakfast. I looked at the clock again. It was almost six.
"And I heard, quite distinctly, Joanne's voice. I knew I was not dreaming, even as I had been certain when I saw Grandpa that time. But it was not the way Joanne had sounded in years. She was almost a little girl again and was singing an old song she had been fond of. I used to ask her what it meant, but she never knew:
'How many miles to my love's grave?
Just three score and ten.
Can I get there by candlelight?
But never back again.
Never back again.'
"I slid out of bed as quietly as I could, wincing as the bedsprings or floorboards creaked. I didn't know what to believe then. I was past all believing.
"I rushed into the kitchen, but there was no one there. However, a frying pan was on the stove, and Joanne's blue bathrobe hung draped over a chair.
"Even that wasn't the end, Frank. No, it was just the beginning, the first onslaught. I went to work that day as if nothing had happened, but she was…everywhere. It's not that I actually saw her but…one of the girls at the agency suddenly decided to wear her hair exactly the way Joanne did. And another had a ring that wasn't like the one I had given Joanne on our first anniversary–it was that ring, even down to the scratch it got later. It was all I could do not to start screaming and yank it off her finger. But when she, that particular copywriter's assistant, turned to me, I saw something in her eyes—hazel, like Joanne's–that sent me back into my office without a word. That afternoon I found one of Joanne's old love notes in a file of photos. It was from before our marriage and it said simply, I'm yours. Now those photos were for a brand-new project for a brand-new client, so how do you suppose that note got there? How?"
The train came to a stop, then lurched into motion again. We were in the Fifties now. It wouldn't be long.
"I don't know, Sam. Really I don't."
"I'm being haunted by details, Frank. That's how it is. She comes back–in a sound, in a ring, in a note, little things. When I got back to my own apartment that night everything was arranged just a little differently. Some of the books on the shelves were not mine, but hers. That was when I knew that it would only get worse and worse, until…well, I couldn't just wait until the end, and so I thought of you, and I called you."
The subway had reached our stop. I helped Sam to his feet. He seemed weak, almost limp, but he wasn't drunk. I think it was despair. He was giving up.
"Come on, old buddy," I said, all but hoisting him outside and up the stairs.
When we reached Joanne's apartment building, he hung back, but I dragged him inside. We stood in that very lobby with the mailboxes. Joanne's sticker had indeed been peeled off.
Sam tried to be jovial again.
"Say, Frank, old chum, let's you and me just…forget the whole business. Whaddaya say? It's all been a big joke. A practical joke."
As usual, it didn't work. I knew he was trying to offer me, and himself, an escape. But it was long since too late for that.
"Come on," I said gently. "We have to go up."
There was an elevator, but, as he had two days previously, we climbed the stairs.
"You may be wondering," he said as we went, mean, there is an element of logic missing…so why didn't Grandpa come back and haunt us, like Joanne has? I think I know why. Because he wanted to go. It was his time to leave his body and become somebody else. He knew that. But I forced Joanne. It wasn't right, and I have to pay for what I have done."
We reached the fourth floor. I rang the bell of 4D and waited. I rang again, feeling some of what he must have felt, that first time, the desire to find some hasty reason to avoid going through with what we had come to do.
Maybe nobody is home.
That would have helped him a lot, two days previously, but now it would be no help at all, for either of us.
This was the totality of my plan, to ring the bell, to confront the truth, to find Joanne living there and discover that my friend had lost his mind, or even to find her corpse.
I was ready for that…and to admit that he was a murderer.
But I wasn't prepared for the one thing that did happen.
A stranger came to the door. She fit the description Sam had given, darker, with brown eyes and arched eyebrows. She was, I think, a little taller than Joanne, and her hair was longer, straighter.
When he saw her, Sam put his head on my shoulder and cried softly. The woman stared out at us through the partially opened door, nervous, ready to slam the door in our faces.
All I could say was, "Excuse me, Miss, but does Joanne Gilmore live here?"
She shook her head and closed the door part way. "I don't know no Joanne Gilmore."
"Well then, did she live here? You must have just moved in. Do you know the name of the previous tenant?" She glanced at me, then at Sam, then back at me. "I don't know nobody by that name. What do you want?"
"Let's get out of here, Frank," Sam said.
"Nothing," I said to the woman. "Sorry to have disturbed you."
Sam was pulling me toward the stairs.
III.
"So you see?" he said. We stood in the frigid air, huge flakes of slushy snow whirling around us.
"No, I don't see. Someone else lives there now, that's all. Where is Joanne?"
He turned to me, hurt, shocked. "You still don't believe me. I haven't been lying to you, Frank. It's all true. Everything I told you is true."
"Sam, I'd like to believe you. But you know I can't." He began to walk briskly toward the subway entrance. I ran after him.
"I want you to come to my place," he said, a trace of anger in his voice. "You'll believe me then."
That was the one ho
pe I had left to cling to, that Joanne had for some reason moved back in with Sam and was living with him now, in the other apartment in Brooklyn. Maybe she had done it out of pity, as she saw his mind crumbling, and he, in his madness, had developed this whole fantasy as a defense mechanism in the aftermath of their particularly messy divorce. It wasn't a comforting notion, that my best friend was having serious mental problems, but it made some sort of sense.
On the corner by the subway entrance was a newsstand. An old woman was buying a newspaper.
"There!" Sam shouted to me. "Look! There's proof!"
"What?"
Before I could react at all he had snatched the lady's change purse out of her hands and come back to me, breathless.
"Here. You see? It's another thing of hers. Joanne's. I gave her this purse once. See the initials–"
The initials were unquestionably J.G., as in Joanne Gilmore, but I didn't look very closely because the old woman was screaming and the man inside the newsstand had stepped out, an iron bar in his hand. I grabbed the change purse from Sam and threw it back to its owner.
Then I hurried Sam down the subway steps. The tunnel was like a maze. It seemed to go down and down forever. "There!" Sam screamed.
He broke away from me again. We had come upon a bag lady, a thing of tatters and filth, like an animate heap of rags knee-deep in trash as she pawed through a half-empty trash can, stooping over, picking, eating. Sam lunged at her, wrestled her to the ground, screaming, "No! Not like this! No!"
I tried to pull him off but only succeeded in hauling both of them to their feet. The bag lady grunted like a pig, her mouth full of half-eaten garbage. She clawed at Sam's face, and for a horrible instant I believed the whole story and was certain his face would suddenly peel off.
Sam snatched a mother-of-pearl comb from the bag lady's matted hair and turned to me while the three of us wrestled. "It's hers. It's Joanne's."
The bag lady shrieked and began to vomit great gouts of filth.
"Sam! Stop it!" I hit him on the back of the neck as hard as I could. But for all he had been weak in his despair, he was now enormously strong in his frenzy. He flung me aside with one arm, so hard that I hit the opposite wall and fell down stunned.
When I looked up, he had the bag lady down on the ground. He was kneeling over her, gently peeling her face off. He held it up to me like a soiled rag. Then it was gone, and he was leaning low, speaking gently to the bag lady. All I could see of her face was a clean, pink mass.
She spoke back in a voice I almost knew, but faded into the whimperings of a frightened child, then into completely inarticulate mewlings.
Right there. Right there my own sanity snapped, my whole, lifelong conception of what is and isn't possible, what is real and unreal shattered completely. I couldn't judge my friend Sam anymore. I couldn't say he was crazy or not. These things were no longer sane or insane. They merely were.
Sam helped me to my feet. I looked over to where the bag lady lay still amid the spilled trash, but he turned me away.
"Joanne was there. I couldn't let her live like that, not even for a few seconds."
"I thought you hated her," I said.
"Come on. We have to go."
Now he was leading me. Now I pulled away from him and stood there shaking all over. I was afraid of him for the first time. The only thing I could think was that he would peel my face off. I only wanted to run away, to escape him forever.
But he asked me in an almost pathetically hopeful tone, "You will come along and help me now, Frank, won't you?"
"Yeah, old buddy," I said.
He went into another of his monologues on the ride to Brooklyn. I just sat there helplessly, gazing at one face after another as passengers got on and off. Nothing made sense anymore. I concluded, at last, that Sam wasn't crazy. No, he was the only one who was sane. He understood.
"I saw my grandfather one more time. Did I tell you about that? No, I didn't. It was when I was fifteen and I went to some sort of music festival in Washington Square. I don't remember why you weren't along. I don't remember what kind of music it was, either. That is not the point of this remembrance.
"An old man in a rumpled coat sat on a bench in the middle of the square. He hadn't come for the music. He was one of those people who roost there every day, like the pigeons. The scary part was that I knew him. He was a complete stranger, yet the way he moved his hands when he rolled a cigarette, and something about his posture and the angle of his hat–all these were a secret code, details of a message for me alone.
"I stood there for several minutes, gawking, and very, very slowly the face became more familiar, as if someone were surfacing from deep inside this man's body. Like the way your face slowly becomes visible if you press it against a plastic tent and stare through.
"And I wanted to scream again, just like when I was six. I bit my fist, hard, and the shock of recognition–recognition of the gesture–made it all the worse. Everything came flooding back. It was that dim morning nine years before all over again.
"Grandpa was there and everything, all the secret details and codes seemed to say, If only you'd called out. If only you'd cared–
"I tried to speak. I tried to explain it all to him, then and there, to make him understand at last that it wasn't my fault because I was so afraid. I wanted to ask his forgiveness, but the words wouldn't come. All I managed to do was step nearer and say,
"But the old man looked up sharply, scowled, and said an obscene word. Our eyes met. There was a flicker of something, but in an instant whatever I thought I saw was gone and there was just this utter stranger angry at this kid for intruding on his privacy.
"I didn't go to the music festival. I just ran and kept on running for blocks and blocks."
When we stood on the sidewalk outside Sam Gilmore's apartment, the lights were on. It sounded like a party. There was music playing, the sort of sixties folk music Joanne had always liked but Sam had never cared for. I couldn't make it out clearly, but close to the window someone was singing along:
"How many miles to Babylon? Just three score and ten.
Can I get there by candlelight? Aye, and back again.
Aye, and back again."
Sam turned to me, and once more it was he who was trembling and afraid, and I was the one who had to be strong. "Will you help me?"
"Yes," I said.
We went up. The door was unlocked. The apartment was not as I had seen it the last time I had visited Sam. Joanne's things were everywhere, the posters, the furniture, the bookcases, the paintings on the walls.
There were four women waiting for us in the living room. One of them was black. I had never seen any of them before, but all were about Joanne's age, all attractive in one way or another, all of them wearing what I recognized as Joanne's clothing.
Sam sank down into a chair. I just stood there. The record finished, but no one went to lift the arm. The needle went on scratching.
"I'm here," one of the women said. Her voice was distinctly Joanne's voice now. There could be no mistaking it. "I've been thinking about us a lot," said another, the voice seeming to travel from one mouth to another, as if the speaker were running down a corridor, shouting out a series of windows. "I'm lost," said the third, "but if I try," said the fourth, "sometimes I can find my way part of the way back, for a little while." The first sighed and said, "Sometimes I wake up in another place and I don't know who I am or how I got there, and then I begin to remember, and sometimes I want to kill you. But sometimes I remember how it was for us in the beginning. Things were good once. I can remember that."
Sam was crying like a baby now, clawing at his forehead and cheeks.
"Please," I said. "Sam, don't."
But he wasn't talking to me.
"Jo—tell me what to do. Please tell me."
She didn't answer. She was gone. I began to understand then, that somehow her soul swam up from some unimaginable abyss toward the light, and for a few moments she could look out of
a stranger's eyes. Then she would sink down again. It must have taken all her strength to bring these four women, these four strange bodies together—four because she didn't have enough control to focus on just one—and hold them there until Sam and I arrived. But that was all she could do, for just a few minutes, and as I watched every trace of whatever had been Joanne Gilmore faded from those four faces. I was even less certain that the four women were wearing Joanne's clothes. All of them stared around the room, as if awakening from a trance. They filed out of the apartment like sleepwalkers. I was sure that very soon there would be four puzzled ladies outside, wondering how they had gotten to Brooklyn on this bitter night at such an extreme hour.
Joanne was like a stone in a pond, trying to swim. She had barely rippled the surface, but that was miracle enough.
Sam turned to me, his cheeks streaked with tears.
"Will you help me, Frank, for friendship's sake?"
"You know I will," I said.
"I'm…I'm not as brave as my grandfather. I can't do it myself."
I reached out toward him with both hands. He nodded slowly.
And I stood over him and I slid my fingers into his cheeks, into the scalding wetness beneath his skin.
Later, after he had gone into the darkness in search of Joanne, and a complete stranger sat with me in the silent apartment, I understood one final thing, that Sam Gilmore was a pathetic liar, that his whole story had been a fabrication to the core, an excuse, a feeble Band-Aid over a terrible and mysterious wound.
He had been lying, even to himself.
He had never, never hated Joanne. I was sure that he would realize that someday, in some strange place, when he finally found her again.
THE RAW AND THE COOKED
Michael Green
One of the really wonderful things about editing an anthology is the occasional chance to make a “discovery,” to peel back the wrappings on fresh talent and know you’re one of the first people to realize this new writer has got what it takes. Michael Green’s story came out of a pile of unsolicited manuscripts that totaled more than a thousand. A complete unknown. His chances were literally one out of a thousand. But his story was so striking, and so incisive, I knew it was something I wanted for Borderlands. I kind of see it as a stinging allegory that examines what the fast-food industry is doing to our children, but it is also a gut-churning good read, and that’s what it’s all about, right.
