by Peter Straub
A stitch like a hot sword entered Tom’s side.
At the corner of Auer and Calle Burleigh he could have turned right or left and tried to escape by running up or down Calle Burleigh. Either way, he thought, the skinny boy would get him. The clattering footsteps were so close to him now that he was afraid to look back. When he reached the corner, he simply kept running straight ahead.
Tom flew off the curb and held out his arms as he plunged into the traffic. Horns instantly blew all about him, and a man yelled something incomprehensible. Tom thought that his pursuer, already almost at the curb, shouted too. He dodged around the rear tire of a high black bicycle, and was aware of a horse rearing somewhere off to his left. Another bicycle, virtually at his elbow, tilted over to one side like a trick in the circus, but did not right itself and continued tilting until, with unnatural slowness, its rider was two feet from the ground, then a foot. The rider’s grey hair flew back from his forehead, and his face expressed only the deep concentration of a man trying to think his way out of a particularly interesting puzzle, as his shoulder struck the ground. Then his bicycle slid straight out from beneath him. A horse the size of a mountain made of lather and hair appeared directly in front of Tom. He ducked to the left. The panicked horse bounded forward, and the wheels of its cab passed over the grey-haired man’s body. Tom heard the thump of collisions and the screech of metal all around him; then an empty illuminated space magically opened before him, and he sprang forward into this empty space. A horn blatted twice. Tom looked sideways and saw a pair of headlights coming toward him with the same dreamy slowness as the falling bicycle. He was entirely incapable of moving. Between the headlights he could see the mesh of a tall metal grille, and beneath the grille was a wide steel band that looked burnished. Above the bumper and the grille a face, indistinct behind the windshield, pointed toward him as intently as the muzzle of a bird dog.
Tom knew that the car was going to hit him, but he could not move. He could not even breathe. The headlights grew larger, the distance between himself and the car halved and the headlights again doubled in size. An electrical coldness of which he was only barely conscious spread over and through Tom’s body. He could do nothing but watch the car come closer and closer until it hit him.
Then at last it did hit him, and a series of irrevocable events began happening to Tom Pasmore. Searing pain enfolded and enveloped him as the impact snapped his right leg and crushed his pelvis and hip socket. His skull fractured against the grille, and blood began pouring from his eyes and nose. Almost instantly unconscious, Tom’s body hugged the grille for a moment, then began to slide down the front of the car. A black rubber ornament shaped like a football held him up for the following two or three minutes as the car swerved through the confusion of felled bicycles and rearing horses. His right shoulder snapped, and the broken femur of his right leg sliced through muscle and skin like a jagged knife. Fifty feet down the road the car finally jerked to a stop as the nearest horses either settled down or galloped away. Tom flipped off the bumper ornament and slammed down on the roadbed.
His bladder and his bowels emptied into his clothing.
The driver of the car opened his door and jumped out. At some point during the next few moments, while the driver moved reluctantly toward the front of his car, another event, even more irrevocable than everything else that had occurred in the past sixty seconds, happened to Tom Pasmore. The accumulation of shock and pain stopped his heart, and he died.
PART TWO
EARLY SORROWS
Tom was aware of a feeling of great lightness and harmony, then that he no longer felt any pain. Some heavy force had held him down, and this force was desperately trying to haul him back into an enclosure too small for him. His sense of lightness, of freedom from gravity gently but relentlessly pulled him upward. The hooks and eyes and sticky fingers that wished to hold him back popped free one by one, until the last of these stretched out like a filament, wanting him back. The filament grew taut, and he nearly feared its snapping—he felt an uncomplicated wave of love for everything that wanted him back. The membrane released him with a final, soft, nearly impalpable pop and his love for all earthly things doubled and overflowed, and he knew, having lost the earth, that love was identical to grief and loss.
His tears washed his eyes, and he saw.
Down there beneath him was a man, then almost immediately another and another, bending over the body that had been his. Radiating out from the circle made by the leaning men and the prostrate boy was an expanding circle of chaos. Crumpled bicycles sprawled on the road like swatted insects, and overturned carts lay beside torn sacks of seed and cement. A horse struggled to right itself in front of an enormous white fan of spilled flour; another horse plunged through the stalled traffic and into an open stretch of road. Cars with running boards and cars with ornamental spare tire covers atop their trunks, cars with exhaust vents and ribbed chrome tubes and chrome latches, cars with statuettes of women stretching tiptoe like dancers on their hoods, stood in a disarranged confusion, pointing every which way as their headlights picked out the new arrivals working their way toward the damaged body he had just left and the other body, that of the man killed beneath the cart.
The world yearned toward invisibility, Tom saw, invisibility was the final condition toward which everything aspired.
He saw two teenage boys standing half-hidden in the crowd on the sidewalk. Running from them, he had felt mortal fear—how odd it was to remember that! They were not evil, not yet. Tom could not read their minds, but he saw that these two boys of fourteen, Nappy and Robbie, one so blubbery he had breasts and the other lean as a starved hound, lived at the periphery of a great cloud of error and confusion; and that they daily moved deeper into the cloud, and then he saw that they had made this cloud, produced it out of the choices they made, as a squid produces ink.…
If they had caught him, they would have pressed their knives against his chest, his throat; they would have enjoyed his terror but somewhere—even now—been shamed by it, and this shame would have formed another layer among a thousand layers that formed the inky cloud … and then Tom sensed or saw such ugliness that he turned away—
and saw that someone had covered him to the chest with an old green army blanket, and several of the men turned their heads to look out for the approach of an ambulance, which would be driven, Tom saw, by a chain-smoking elderly man named Esmond Walker. The ambulance was two-and-a-half miles away on Calle Bavaria, racing through the traffic with its siren whooping, and Tom heard the siren and knew that the sound would come to the waiting men in another eight minutes—
eight minutes
Tom looked down at the person he had been with some surprise, as well as with love and pity. His earthly self had been so new, so unformed and innocent. He had worked hard at his life with intent, innocent concentration, and his family would mourn him, his friends would miss him, there would for a time be a hole in the world that he had filled.
But the sense of lightness and harmony lifted him farther from the scene, and the patterns became clearer. At the epicenter of the confusion were two bodies, his own and that of the crushed man. Policemen in cars and policemen on bicycles had begun to arrive. Leading out from this crowded and unhappy scene with its flashing lights and calls for people to Step back! Let him breathe! was a gossamer trail only Tom could see.
This was the trail of what he would have done, where he would have gone, if he had lived. This trail of possibility was disappearing from the visible world, and what Tom saw was its disappearance.
He sees himself dodging through the traffic in a blare of horns and lights, sees himself running east, safe, on the other side of Calle Burleigh. Tom sees himself coming home to his enraged parents … and there his trail goes, glistening as it fades, from the steps of Miss Ellinghausen’s Academy of Dance where an older Tom stands beside a pretty girl named Sarah Spence and looks up, his face transfixed by a fleeting apprehension—that older Tom Pasmore looks
up, his face almost melting with feelings he cannot understand, moves down the hard white steps outside Miss Ellinghausen’s Academy and vanishes long before he reaches the sidewalk. In a shabby room in the St. Alwyn Hotel, an even older Tom is reading a book called The Temptations of Invisibility, funny title, but he is not in the house on Eastern Shore Road, why is he in the St. Alwyn Hotel? Pain from an unlived future—what is that?
It had been three minutes since his death: the length of one of the songs on the radio to which his mother would listen with her head tilted, eyes half-closed, cigarette smoke curling up past her hair.
On Calle Burleigh a larger crowd packed the sidewalks, talking in a confused, ignorant way about what had caused all the trouble. A bike flipped right over, I saw it happen right there—one a’ them horses just got it into his head to go nuts, plain and simple—a boy ran out—somebody pushed a boy.
No, Tom protested, none of that was exactly right, you’re all wrong, it didn’t happen like that.
Music had begun playing some time ago, but Tom became aware of it only now: some song, he didn’t know what, saxophones and trumpets, and pretty soon the singer would rush on stage fiddling with his bow tie and plant himself before the mike and explain everything.…
In the end, music did explain everything.
The front doors of the houses on Calle Burleigh hung open, and the residents watched from their front stoops or their cement walkways or stood on the crowded sidewalk talking to each other. A big woman in a blue housedress caught his eye by jabbing her finger toward her side lawn as she said, Cornerboy, always trouble, I sent him back scared, made him run, those boys over there, who knows about them?
She pointed between the buildings toward 44th Street and carried Tom’s eye with her. On 44th Street no front doors stood open, and the only visible human being was a drunken fat man who sat smoking on the stoop of a brown and yellow duplex, wondering what he was going to do next.
Esmond Walker’s ambulance had turned off Calle Bavaria at the north end of Goethe Park and was beginning to move slowly through the stalled carts and leaning bicycles at the perimeter of the circle of disorder caused by Tom’s accident. Mr. Walker edged past a wagon piled with tanned hides, gave a nudge to a delivery van from Ostend’s Market that pulled up far enough to let him in, and changed the frequency of his siren from an ongoing whooping wail to a steady, more peremptory bip-bip-bip. He moved around two bicyclists who stared into the cab as if blaming him for the delay, tossed away his cigarette, and kept moving steadily through the crowd of vehicles slowly parting to let him through.
From his perch above the dissolving chaos, Tom heard the change in the siren’s signal, and the change of tone seemed to nudge him as certainly as the Ostend’s van, for the music began spreading out through the air around him, trumpets called, and the complicated scene beneath Tom darkened and fell away.
So that’s how it happens, he thought, and then he was moving fast down a dark tunnel toward a warm bright light. He was not moving his arms and legs, but neither was he being carried in any way. He seemed almost to be flying, but upright, as though supported by an invisible walkway. The music he had heard surrounded him like the sound of humming, or bird song almost too soft to be audible, and the air carried him and the music toward the distant light.
The tunnel had imperceptibly widened, and he was moving through a gathering of shadowy figures who radiated welcome and protection—Tom knew that he had seen these people before, that every one of them had been known to him in his earthly life, and that even though he could not identify them right now, he was deeply relieved to see them again.
Tom’s entire body felt full of light and the same feelings that had swept over him when he had jumped down from the milk cart. A delicious feeling of absolute rightness, of all worry having been thrown off, never again to be met, spread through him as he traveled through the protective crowd toward the light. Had he not always known these feelings? In some form? He thought they had been the deepest portion of his life, the most powerful but the least visible, the least known or understood, at once the most trusted and least dependable. They were the feelings caused by the sense of a real radiance existing at the center of life—now he knew that the radiance was real, for he was traveling toward it amidst people who loved him and wished him comfort and peace in his new condition, a condition he hungered for and needed more intensely with every inch of ground he flew over on his way to the light. For every inch meant an increase in clarity and certainty of understanding, and he felt like a starving man rushing toward a banquet.
Then a long filament attaching him to his old life caught him like a thrown hook, and he abruptly ceased to move forward. Another filament caught him. The people attending and welcoming him began to recede. Tom felt himself slipping away from the banquet of sense and understanding that had awaited him. He was being pulled back down the tunnel like a resistant dog, and the light shrank as it sailed away from him.
Then, for one shocking moment as he fell past his former perch in the air, Tom saw a black man in a white uniform sliding a stretcher into the back of an ambulance. Most of the chaos on the road had cleared, and horses and bicycles swerved around the awkward length of the ambulance to continue west toward Elm Cove. A dense knot of people remained on the sidewalk.
The hooks and eyes and filaments wrenched Tom back into his body so forcefully he could not breathe. He felt as if he had been slammed down hard on a concrete surface. Everything that had happened to him since he jumped off a milk cart erased itself from his mind. For a moment he thought he heard humming music; a light in the roof of the ambulance shone cruelly into his eyes.
Tom lost consciousness against a wave of pain.
He woke up in a white room and looked through a confusion of wires and tubes at drawn faces. His parents gazed down at him as if they did not know him. A strange acrid smell hung over him; every bit of him seemed to hurt. He fled again into unconsciousness.
The next time he woke up, the pain in the middle of his body took a moment to arrive, then hit him like a blow. Everything at the joining of his upper and lower body felt destroyed. His right leg screamed, and his right arm and shoulder uttered a shrill but softer complaint. He was looking up at an unfamiliar ceiling through a confusion of tubes and cables, thinking vaguely that he had been going somewhere—hadn’t he?—when another, deeper wave of pain struck the center of his body. He heard someone groan. He had nearly found the place, and all this pain could not be his. With a kind of passionate horror Tom realized how injured you would have to be to feel so much pain, and then with a sickening lurch of recognition knew that some horrible unknown thing had happened to him. He saw his body dismembered on the street, and blackness came rushing out at him from a deep inner cave. He tried to raise his head. Blackness surged over him for a moment; but his eyes opened to the same white ceiling and loops of plastic tubing. This time Tom lowered his eyes and looked down his body.
A long white object extended down the bed. Horror seized him again. His body had been cut away from him and replaced by this foreign object. At last he saw his own real left leg protruding from the object. Beside it lay a smooth white mound, a cast, that flowed up to the middle of his chest. He was in a hospital. A terrible premonition came to him, and he tried to touch his genitals with his right hand.
The motion caused by his panicky grab for his crotch scorched his shoulder and set the middle of his body aflame. His right hand, encased in another cast, was suspended above his chest. He began to cry. As if by itself, his left hand, which was miraculously not encased in plaster, slid up onto the cool white crust over his body and felt between his legs. He touched only a smooth hairless surface like a doll’s groin. A tube ran from a hole in the plaster, which was otherwise featureless. He had been castrated. The comfort he had felt a moment before at being in a hospital disappeared into irony—he was in a hospital because that was the only place someone like him was acceptable; he would be in the hospital forever.
Beneath the flaring pain in his hips, groin, and right leg there moved another level of pain like a shark waiting to strike. This pain would obliterate the world. When he had experienced it he would never again be the person he had been. He would be set apart from himself and everything he had known. Tom expected this deep lurking pain to move upward and seize him, but it continued to circle inside his body, as lazily powerful as a threat.
Tom turned his head to look sideways, and caused only a minor flare from his right shoulder. As he did so, he unconsciously rubbed his left hand over the smooth rounded curve of his groin where his penis should have been—something down there was peeing, he could not imagine what, could not think about it or begin to picture it. Just past his head on the far end of the sheet stood three curved tubular guard rails that marked the edge of his bed, and past the bed was a white table with a glass holding water and a funny-looking straw. His mother’s straw bag lay on a chair. A door stood open on a white corridor. Two doctors walked past. I’m here, he wanted to shout, I’m alive! His throat refused to make any sound at all. The doctors continued past the door, and Tom realized that he had seen a glass of water. His eyes came back to the glass on the bedside table. Water! He reached for the glass with his left hand. In the instant his hand touched the table Tom heard his mother’s voice coming in through the open door.
“STOP IT!” she yelled. “I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE!”
His hand jerked by itself and knocked the glass into a stack of books. Water sheeted out over the table and fell to the floor like a solid pane of silver.
