Black Horizon

by Robert Masello

  Schmidt, Edward Schmidt. Jack had read it in the papers.

  “Though you don't look anything like him,” she said. “Lucky for you.”

  Jack didn't know what to think or feel anymore; he'd just discovered who his father was, after a lifetime of wondering, and then lost him again in the very same breath. It was as if he'd caught a puff of wind.

  “Did you love him?”

  She twisted her face, as if surprised at him. “Jack. . . and by the way, I'd never have named you that. . . he was just some guy who'd been nice to me. There was little enough of that around that house.”

  “Even from Mam?”

  “Mam wanted a good, sweet Catholic daughter,” she said, ruefully, “and instead of seeing me, and loving me, for who I really was, she spent all her time pretending I was that same little girl who'd taken communion at St. Ignatius. The strain on both of us,” she said, with a sad smile, “was pretty incredible.”

  “Clancy, I guess, was even worse.”

  She chuckled, softly. “You could say that. Though I'll say this much for Clancy; he knew who I was. . . You know what I used to call him? The Pope. It started out as Pop, of course, but then when I got to around fourteen or so, and he was always telling me what I could do and where I could go and when I had to be home, I started calling him Pope because of all the bull. Clancy didn't like it, but Mam,” she said, smiling mischievously, “she thought it was an absolute sacrilege.” Jack found himself smiling back, and feeling such a jumble of emotions, he could hardly make sense of anything. There was joy, the inde-scribable joy of finding his mother at last; there was relief, and sadness, excitement and curiosity -- and above all, a warm and growing sense of complicity. His mother's eyes were sparkling with laughter now, and Jack began to laugh too -- a giddy release of all the pent-up emotions inside. His mother leaned forward, across the table, laughing merrily, and that made Jack laugh even harder, more convulsively. Her expression urged him on, her fingers extending toward him. The bracelet! He saw it now, the blue stones and silver band, just peeking out from the sleeve of the jacket. He was so happy, so exhilarated -- everything was going to be all right now, all his questions were going to get answers, all his fears were going to be allayed! Even if he'd wanted to -- and he didn't -- he couldn't have stopped the laughter; it came over him in waves, shaking him, taking him over. And his mother, leaning ever closer, leaning so close he could see the moisture on her lips, the tip of her tongue, egged him on, laughing herself, nodding her head as if to say yes to all that he was wishing.

  Her hand came closer still, the fingers outstretched -- the fingers were white, dead-white, in the gloom of the train car. The nails were pale, and slightly pointed. He lifted his own hand onto the table, and slid it slowly toward his mother's. The touch of her skin was warm, and soft, and she gently covered his hand with hers.

  “Feels good, doesn't it?” she whispered.

  He nodded.

  “Feels right,” she said.

  He closed his eyes, in complete agreement, and felt her squeeze his hand more firmly. My God, she was there, in every way -- now he had even felt her flesh. He wanted to reach across the table and hug her, hold her face between his hands, feel her arms wrapped around him. It felt as if some sort of electricity were coursing up his arm. He caught his breath, hoarse from the laughter. Opening his eyes, he saw her face, framed by the upraised collar of the jacket. He was about to say, “It is right,” when he felt, beneath his feet, a slight but sudden tremor in the floor of the car. The shadows shifted over by the door. There was the squeak of rusted metal, and a long sinewy arm lashed out, gripping the hand-rail. A moment later, the waiter in the turban had hauled himself into the open doorway. Jack's mother didn't even turn around.

  “Don't move,” the waiter said. Nancy appeared behind him.

  His mother's fingernails dug into the back of his hand. She began, before his very eyes, to fade away.

  “Jack!” Nancy elbowed past the waiter, and hurried down the aisle. “Jack, please. . .”

  His mother's eyes were the last thing he saw, glittering like green coals in the dimness. . . Nancy knelt beside his seat, grabbing the hand his mother had just relinquished.

  “Thank God we found you -- when we got to the end of the tunnel, I thought it would be hopeless. But we heard you laughing, and Lionel saw you, sitting by yourself in the window of the train, and. . .”.

  Jack could still feel the scratches that his mother had left. Nancy was still talking, talking the way Jack had been laughing, just to release all the tension and the fear. The waiter, his turban askew, was leaning against the wall, exhausted, and staring at them both as if they'd just escaped from a mental ward. Jack felt increasingly cold, and lonely.

  And he missed his mother now, more than he ever had in his life.

  Chapter Twenty

  “THIS IS WHAT we call the ‘green room,’ even though it's brown. Help yourself to the refreshments.” She waved one hand at the coffee urn and the sticky pastries wrapped in cellophane. “I believe you've already met Mr. and Mrs. Zakin.”

  “No, but we've spoken on the phone,” Sprague said, striding over to the low sofa they were sitting on. “I'm Dr. Orson Sprague!” He shook Adolph Zakin's hand. “And this,” he said, turning toward Jack, “is Jack Logan.”

  “Yes. We know,” said Mrs. Zakin.

  “Of course you do,” Sprague said, laughing and hitting himself on the forehead with the heel of his hand. “Of course.” He was a lot more nervous than he'd expected; he'd have to calm down, or he'd say something equally stupid on the air.

  Jack, meanwhile, had stopped dead in the doorway. He and Adolph Zakin were exchanging a long, and no doubt meaningful, look. Sprague would have to ask Jack later if he'd been able to read Zakin's thoughts, or if he'd felt anything special. Jack told him everything now, and complied with all his wishes.

  “Listen,” Bonnie Robb said, having performed the introductions, “I've got another segment to do first. So please, make yourselves comfortable, and if there's anything you need, just ask Ellie.” Ellie was a shy, skinny teenager who was probably working as some sort of intern.

  Jack came into the room, nodded to Mrs. Zakin, shook hands with her husband. “It's good to see you looking so well.”

  Zakin held on to his hand. “It's good to feel so well,” he said, a slight tremble in his voice. “It's good to be alive.” He squeezed Jack's hand between both of his own. Sprague made a mental note of it: “Ask Jack if physical

  contact with Zakin excited any peculiar recollections of the previous experience.” He was going to have so much to ask Jack after this show was over, and so much more to do, what with the other interview requests, the random calls, the inquiries from -- “Uh, excuse me,” said Ellie, hovering at his side. “Would you like to go into makeup now?”

  "Makeup?”

  “Yes, well, most of our guests get a little makeup, for the camera --otherwise they kind of shine.”

  Was he perspiring, and more than the others? “If you think

  so. . .”

  “It's just down the hall -- we've already done Mr. Zakin.”

  Well, that was a relief.

  “And we'll do Mr. Logan next.” She smiled, sheepishly, at Jack. Did this guy always get a reaction like that, Sprague thought?

  “Just follow me.” Ellie led the way to a tiny room with a barber chair, where the makeup person -- watching the show on a portable TV -- asked Sprague to take off his glasses. Sprague hated having his glasses off, even for a second; he was so blind without them, he felt unprotected and vulnerable. Nonetheless, he surrendered them, and took a seat in the chair. She tucked a large, paper bib into his shirt collar and over his shoulders. He could hardly make out his own features in the mirror that faced him.

  “My name's Antoinette.”

  “Dr. Orson Sprague.”

  “What kind of doctor?” She was dabbing at something in her hand. “Close your eyes.”

  “Doctor of psychoneurology
.” Something touched his face -- something damp and cool -- and he jumped.

  “Ooh, sorry -- I didn't know you were so touchy. It's just a little base.” She touched him again, under the eyes, with what he now knew was a damp sponge. The TV on the countertop was burbling something about a traffic tie-up on the FDR.

  “What are you doing on the show?”

  Sprague didn't know quite how to take this -- was she questioning his right to appear, or in what capacity he was appearing? He said he'd be discussing his work at the Institute of Abnormal Psychology.

  Antoinette went on swabbing his face with the sponge; it was a very peculiar, and unpleasant, sensation. “Oh, now I've got it -- it's about that story I read in the Post. That old man -- he was in here ten minutes ago -- who came back from the dead. Wooh” -- she did a little shudder -- “that stuff scares the pants off me. . . But where's the guy who actually did it, the one who brought him back?”

  “He's in the green room.”

  “I can't wait to see him. Last week I did Don Johnson, and this one's got me even more rattled than that. . . Was what he did just a fluke, or can he do it all the time?”

  “That's what we're trying to determine.” Now she was coating his neck with the same disgusting stuff. “Please be careful of the tie.” It was a Liberty of London, thirty-five dollars, and he'd bought it expressly for this show. She said nothing, but ceased work on his neck.

  “Now don't jump, I'm just gonna put a little liner around your eyes. Otherwise, they won't even show behind the glasses.”

  He endured this too, thinking about other things to distract himself -- the newspaper clippings, for one. On Monday morning, Jack had barged into his office, without even calling ahead, and tossed them onto his desk. “Your birth certificate?” Sprague had asked, and Jack had said, “These are even better.” He'd been right. Sprague had wanted the certificate so that he could identify the attending physician and see if there had been anything unusual about the birth -- these articles had answered that question right off the bat. . . and at length. They even named the physicians in charge, a Dr. Prescott and a Dr. Mehta. Sprague had pored over the stories, while Jack sat slumped in a chair. When he'd finished, he'd had so many questions, so many fresh leads to pursue, he didn't know where to start. But he did know he was on to something: what had puzzled him all along was that there seemed to be nothing in Jack's past to account for his possessing any unusual powers, nothing in his medical history or family background -- unless it had something to do with that anonymous father -- to suggest an origin for his death-defying feats. Now there was.

  Nothing explicit, nothing crystal clear, but something. “Tilt your head up, please. Keep your eyes closed.” She was dusting his face with some sort of powder -- he had to stifle the urge to sneeze -- then running her ringer along the inside of his collar to release the paper bib. The TV anchor was listing what was coming up in the next half hour -- a movie review, the weather update, a look at far-out ski fashions for the winter seaspn, and an exclusive interview with “a young man with some extraordinary lifesaving powers -- and a theater celebrity whose life he saved. Stay with us.” Theater celebrity, Sprague figured, was their way of implying a Broadway star would be coming up, and not some rich old man known only to the producers and other theater owners.

  Nor did he fail to note that he himself had been left out of the equation altogether.

  “That's all,” Antoinette chirped. She patted the front of his new paisley necktie. “And the tie's as good as new.”

  “My glasses?”

  “Oh.” She reached around to the counter and handed them . to him. He slipped them on and regarded himself in the mirror: he looked like he'd just spent a week in the Caribbean.

  That, or his ancestors had been Cherokee.

  “Where do I go now?”

  “Just back to the green room. You can tell Ellie I'm ready for the miracle man now.”

  That would be the last thing he'd say.

  In the green room, Jack was leaning forward in his chair, talking to the Zakins. It all looked very cozy. Ellie said,

  “You'll be on in about ten minutes,” to Sprague, then told

  Jack it was his turn for makeup. Looking no more pleased than Sprague had been at the prospect, Jack dutifully followed her out of the room.

  “So,” Sprague said, rubbing his hands together nervously, “you've made a full recovery then, have you?” There was another TV in this room, also tuned to the show in progress. “We believe so,” Mrs. Zakin replied.

  “Your doctor?” Sprague asked, though he had no knowledge of New York's cardiac specialists.

  “Dr. Levy, Abraham Levy.”

  He nodded, sagely.

  “At Doctors Hospital,” Mrs. Zakin added.

  He nodded again, as if to confirm that too. A silence fell upon the room, and Sprague busied himself at the coffee urn. The weatherman was predicting snow.

  “I don't know why they bother,” Zakin said. “They have no idea what the weather's going to be. Totally unscientific.”

  Sprague turned toward the set.

  “I hope your work is more reliable.”

  Sprague felt himself challenged. “I take every precaution,” he said, “to make sure my experiments, and results, are sound.”

  “Not easy,” Zakin said, bluntly, “considering what you're experimenting with. . . How do you get a fix, in some institute, on life after death, on a person's soul? What do you study?” Perhaps realizing his tone had been more pugnacious than he'd intended, he said, “Seriously, what have you been looking at? I don't know how you'd get a handle on this. Seems so. . . ephemeral.”

  “In some ways it is,” Sprague said, warming to the topic, now that he felt his authority was no longer being questioned, “and in others, not at all. True, we have yet to pull up an image of the human soul, much less follow it in transit between this world and the next -- should there prove to be a next -- but there are always quantifiable factors we can identify in the laboratory setting.” He began to outline some of the experiments he'd done with Jack, and hint at some of the findings, when Bonnie Robb popped in the door, listened for a second, then said, “Whoa! Save all that for when we're on the air! I want you to be fresh. Where's Jack?”

  “In makeup,” Ellie said.

  “Okay, you bring him into the studio when he's ready.”

  Then, to Sprague and Adolph Zakin, she said, “Ready when you are. We might as well get you two seated on camera.”

  Sprague felt his heart race in his chest, now that the moment had come. Mrs. Zakin patted the back of her husband's hand as he got up. “Break a leg,” she said, and he smiled.

  Robb led them down the hall and around the corner. She stopped at a swinging door with a lighted ON AIR sign above it; when the light went off, she took them through, and into the studio itself. They had to circumvent the backdrop of some set, and step over several thick black wires coiled across the floor. She walked them up to a raised wooden platform, carpeted in blue, on which four swivel chairs were arranged in a semicircle; the backdrop here was a stylized skyline of New York. A scruffy guy wearing a headset and consulting a clip-board said, “Sprague?”

  “Yes?”

  “You're there,” and he pointed to the chair on the end.

  “Logan?”

  “He's coming,” Bonnie said.

  “Then you're Zakin,” he said to Adolph. “Please take the second chair from the right.”

  When they were seated, the scruffy man came around behind them and attached lavalier microphones to their neckties; Sprague watched with dismay as the little teeth of the microphone clamp bit into the raw silk. “Hide as much of the cord as you can under your jacket,” the man said, and Sprague tucked the black wire under his suit coat.

  Sprague had never been in a TV studio before, and he was amazed to see how tacky it all looked up close. He'd seen this program on television and never thought twice about it; the set looked fine, even rather sleek. But sitting there, unde
r the banks of overhead lights (only a few of which, he was thankful, were turned on -- it was already quite warm underneath them) everything seemed bleached out, stark, vacant. The blue carpeting, particularly near the edge of the platform, where presumably the camera wouldn't pick it up, was frayed and worn; the backdrop of New York was just a thin scrim, and, toward the bottom, again where the camera wouldn't intrude, it ended abruptly in a rumpled heap. The stems of several of the flowers in the bowl that rested on the glass coffee table were held erect by twisted strands of wire.

  When Jack was brought in, he was seated in the chair next to the one Bonnie Robb was going to occupy. He was wearing blue jeans, neatly pressed, a black blazer, and a white shirt, without a tie. Sprague had hoped he would be better dressed. The floor manager, as Sprague now took him to be, attached i the microphone to Jack's lapel, then asked each of them, starting with Sprague at the far end, to count to five. Apparently, he was testing their audio levels. He listened carefully, then mumbled something into the little microphone that was positioned in front of his mouth and connected to his headset. He nodded, moved the microphone on Zakin's tie a little higher up, then asked him to count again.

  “Okay?” he asked whomever he was talking to in the control room. “Okay.” He turned to Bonnie, conferring with one of the cameramen, and said, “We're one minute away.”

  Sprague felt his heart do another leap in his chest -- one minute away! -- but Robb acted as if she had all the time in the world. She finished whatever she was saying to the cameraman, laughed, strolled up onto the platform. Her own microphone was draped across the arm of her chair. She fastened it to a flounce on the bodice of her dress, crossed her legs, and leaned back as though she were waiting for nothing more than a manicure.