Black Horizon

by Robert Masello

  “Thirty seconds,” said the floor manager. One of the two cameras, large, black, and mounted on a rolling dolly, moved forward, focusing on Robb.

  ‘Twenty.”

  “Don't worry about looking at the cameras,” Robb said to the three of them, “we'll take care of that. Just keep your answers brief and to the point, and don't be afraid to show emotion.”

  What was that supposed to mean, Sprague wondered -- did she expect someone to cry?

  ‘Ten.” The rest of the overhead lights suddenly came on.

  Robb, however, remained unconcerned. She touched her blond hair to see that it was all in place, straightened up in her chair, balanced her small clipboard with its list of questions on her knee; she smiled, but not so brightly as to diminish the seriousness of the story she was about to introduce, and looked into the near camera.

  The floor manager held up one hand with the fingers spread, lowered his head in concentration, then pointed his index finger directly at Robb.

  ‘The word miracle is often overused,” she said, speaking straight into the camera lens; a tiny red light shone just above it. “We say it's a miracle if the train's on time, or the whites come clean in the wash. But real ones, real honest-to-God miracles, occur very rarely.” She left a beat, then said, “One occurred just three weeks ago, in the Broadway theater district -- where miracles are prayed for every night.”

  Mounted on a wall bracket off to his right, Sprague noticed a TV monitor, which suddenly cut from the head-shot of Bonnie Robb, to an exterior view of the Empire Theater, with its marquee advertising Steamroller. It was night, and a well-heeled crowd was leaving through the flung-open double-doors.

  “It was a little after eleven that night when Adolph Zakin, owner of the nation's third-largest theater chain, was leaving the opening-night performance of the new musical Steamroller. I myself was there to cover that premier performance.”

  Sprague suddenly sat up straighter in his chair. Did she have footage of the actual event? Why hadn't she told him if she did?

  The scene on the monitor cut abruptly from a long shot to a closeup of Bonnie Robb, standing in her coat in the middle of that opening-night throng. She was clearly setting up, saying something that had not been recorded, glancing behind her to see what the background would be.

  “We were preparing to shoot an introduction to my review of the show,” continued the voice-over, “when something went wrong.” On the monitor screen the look on her face changed to one of uncertainty, then concern; she was trying to see something off to her left, bobbing on her tiptoes to see over the crowd.

  “Adolph Zakin had stepped back to clear our camera shot, slipped off the curb, and fallen into the street -- and directly into the path of an oncoming limousine.” The monitor showed only random moments of the drama: the chauffeur gesticulating wildly, the spotlights turning on the flatbed truck across the street, and then, after the camera had apparently been lifted over the head of the man holding it, a wobbly shot of a young man in a long tweed coat, bent down over something in the street. Zakin. His wife was kneeling on the other side, pleading, frenzied. My God! Sprague thought -- they've actually got it. He glanced over at Jack, who was also riveted to the scene on the monitor. Had he known about this film? No, it wasn't possible -- not from the stupefied look on his face.

  Zakin was squinting at the monitor, as if unable to see it very clearly, as if unsure he wanted to see it at all.

  “At the time our camera recorded these brief glimpses -- and we apologize for the picture quality -- we didn't know we were possibly filming a miracle in progress.” The shot moved to the front of the limousine, the shining chrome and grille-work -- the camerman must not have known exactly what he was getting -- then back, in a sweeping motion, to Jack, who was now pounding Zakin's chest; Mrs. Zakin was trying to stop him. The picture stopped, then resumed, at a point possibly a minute or two later, with another overhead shot of Jack straddling Zakin's prone body, his chest pressed flat against the old man's, his hands clutching his shoulders.

  “Mr. Zakin had suffered a major cardiac arrest after being jolted by the limousine; the man seen here, attempting to revive him, is Jack Logan, a musician in the show.”

  It looked like a still-life, Jack simply pressing himself, rigidly, against the inert body beneath him. But then, something stirred -- one of Zakin's hands, resting on the pavement. The fingers twitched, spasmodically. Jack, the tails of his overcoat flung wide, slowly rolled to one side, his eyes closed, his breath clouding in the air. Zakin shivered, from head to toe, then rose up on one elbow, looking totally disoriented. His wife instantly gathered him into her arms; someone in the crowd moved and blocked the camera. The monitor Sprague was watching suddenly switched to Bonnie Robb, live in the studio again.

  “A minute later, an ambulance arrived and took Adolph Zakin to St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital. Today” -- a shot of Zakin on the monitor now -- “he is our guest. Mr. Zakin -- you said then, and you have repeated since, that you died that night, and were brought back to life. How do you know you weren't simply resuscitated by one of the more orthodox measures Jack Logan took, such as pounding your chest?”

  “Because. . . because I wasn't.” He looked as if he hadn't fully recovered from what he'd just seen on the monitor. “I didn't know that film existed.”

  “We didn't either,” she assured him, “until we took a quick look through the archives just before the show.”

  Now that was bullshit, Sprague thought.

  “But tell us what you experienced that night, after you were struck by the car.”

  “Nothing,” Zakin said, “at first. Blackness. . . I died.”

  The camera, Sprague noted, was staying close in on him.

  He went on to describe what were, to Sprague, the already familiar details -- the sensation of traveling toward a bright, hot light, the searing intensity of it, the weightlessness, the sense of release. “And then, just as I was about to pass straight into that light -- it was changing shape all the time, by the way, you could almost say beating -- this man sitting next to me now” -- and he banged one hand on the arm of Jack's chair -- “came up out of nowhere, from somewhere behind me, and put his hands on my shoulders.”

  Sprague perked up in his chair.

  “What did he do then?” Robb asked.

  “I don't remember all this very clearly,” Zakin said, “but I do remember turning, to face him. It was good not to be looking at that light for a second. He put one hand over my eyes, and it felt terrifically hot, almost electric. I told my wife later that I felt like I'd been soldered back together again, body and soul.”

  The camera had cut to Jack now, sitting very still in his chair. “Jack Logan, Broadway musician,” Bonnie Robb said, with great intensity, "did you bring a dead man back to life?”

  The camera held on Jack's face as be tried to find an answer.

  “What happened that night?” she prompted him again, urging him with a flip of her hand to answer quickly.

  “I think Mr. Zakin knows as much about it as I do. . .” he said, hesitantly. “I saw him slip off the curb, and the limo pull in. . .”

  But this wasn't what Robb wanted to hear. “Yes, we know -- we saw -- all that,” she interrupted. “But, in your own words, tell us what you did, once you got down on the street with Adolph Zakin. . .”

  Jack appeared uncertain of what to say, what he could add to Zakin's account, that would also satisfy Robb. He looked across to Sprague, as if for help, and Sprague leaped in.

  “It's a difficult experience for Mr. Logan to recount,” Sprague said. “He appears to go into --”

  “Let me introduce you to our viewers,” Robb interjected.

  She gave his name and credentials. “Now, what were you saying he goes into?”

  “A sort of trance state,” Sprague said, happy to have heard his own billing. You never knew who watched these shows, and what kind of grants they had it in their power to dispense. “What he does -- the powers he is ab
le to employ -- are difficult to describe, much less to verify.”

  “But would these powers include the ability to bring someone back to life?” She was determined to get an affirmative answer to that, on the record, and from someone other than Zakin.

  Sprague, after a moment's thought, decided to give it to her. “Yes. . . they would.”

  Robb sat back in her chair, having cleared at least that one obstacle. “What proof do you have, other than what happened to Mr. Zakin?” Now she could show her investigative skills.

  “I have personally witnessed the case of a suicide, a man who had ingested a lethal dose of Pavulon, who was resuscitated with no other intervention than what Jack Logan was able to do, with his bare hands.”

  “Is that what we're talking about then,” Robb said, to both Sprague and Jack, “the laying on of hands, what the faith healers have been claiming to do all along?”

  “No, that's not what I do,” Jack said, roused now to his own defense. “I'm not a faith healer. I never claimed to be. I can't cure people.” He stopped short, about to go on, but not sure if he should; his own vehemence had surprised him.

  Robb, of course, was delighted; she'd finally gotten a rise out of the star witness, and she wasn't about to let it subside. “What are you then? What can you do? According to Dr. Sprague here, you've -- for want of a better word -- resurrected one man who'd killed himself, and saved another who'd died of a massive heart attack.”

  “But that's not curing people, that's not healing them. That's what I wanted to say on this show. That's why I agreed, finally, to come on.” He stopped again, bent forward in his chair, looking so earnestly into Bonnie Robb's face that her prosecutorial zeal was nearly quashed.

  “Go on then,” she said, “say what you came on to say.”

  Jack's head was lowered; he didn't even dare look over at Sprague, for fear he'd disapprove of what he was about to say.

  And ever since the weekend, when he'd decided he would need Sprague's help from here on in, he'd tried to do nothing to displease him. “I came on,” Jack said, suddenly realizing he had better look up for the camera, “because I didn't want people watching the show to get the wrong impression. . . I didn't want them to think some guy was posing as some sort of. . .” He searched for some way to end the sentence, some way not to say the word he had in mind.

  “Some sort of what?” Bonnie asked.

  “Some sort of, well, like a. . . Messiah.”

  Oh, that was good, Robb thought.

  Jack hastened to explain himself, to put that unfortunate word choice behind him; even saying it, he felt, was somehow wrong, and he was afraid it would be all people would remember of the interview. “In Mr. Zakin's case, or the other one that Dr. Sprague mentioned, I was able to do something -- I think -- to help them. I'm not being evasive when I have a hard time explaining it. I don't honestly know yet what I do, or how I do it; that's why I'm at the institute, under Dr. Sprague's supervision -- to find out. But in the meantime -- and this is what I really wanted to say -- people who are ill, or desperate, or who just lost someone, they shouldn't think that there's some miraculous answer out there, some cure-all. Already some people have called the institute and asked for help, and I need to say to those people, I'm sorry, but I can't help you. Not yet. Not now. Not while --”

  “You mean you might be able to -- or willing to -- in the future?” Robb interjected.

  She'd broken Jack's stream of thought, his concentration. “I'm not saying I wouldn't, if I could, but --”

  “When do you think you will be ready?”

  “It's not a question of being ready, it's a question of. . . of understanding first, exactly what's going on, and not offering people in need of help some kind of hope that isn't there.”

  Off camera, the floor manager was signaling the remaining time. Thirty seconds? Fifteen? Jack wondered if he'd made his point sufficiently, if he should try to clarify it one more time.

  But Robb didn't let him. She turned to Sprague and said, “Do you think he's ready, right now, to start saving lives, to bring people back to the world of the living?”

  Sprague was caught a bit off-guard; he'd been so intent on what Jack was saying. “I believe,” he said, “that Jack Logan has some extraordinary powers, and that, if the institute can find enough time and money” -- no use missing the opportunity -- “to develop them, they will prove to be an enormous boon to all mankind. I also --”

  “Pardon me, but we've only got a few seconds left, and I want to ask that same question of Adolph Zakin.”

  “Yes?” He looked confused.

  “Do you think Jack Logan is ready to start bringing people back from the dead?” she repeated, anxiously.

  Zakin glanced over at Jack, as if not sure what he could say now without appearing disloyal. “I only know what he did for me.”

  “And what he did for you -- you've already said it -- was bring you back to life. Right?”

  He looked back at Robb.

  “Right?”

  That man with the headset was making some other time signal with his hands. Zakin held Robb's gaze, and said, simply, “Yes.” He was not about to deny the greatest gift he'd ever been given. “Yes.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  IT WAS HARD to tell if Jack was awake or asleep. The only light in the room came from the illuminated face of the clock, and the flashing red light on the answering machine. At midnight, the last call had come in -- from an elderly man, with some sort of kidney disease in a hospital bed in Westchester. He'd still been talking when the machine cut him off.

  Jack was lying very still now, one arm draped across Nancy's bare abdomen. She wanted to get up and go to the bathroom, but if he was asleep, she didn't want to disturb him. She turned her head on the pillow and looked at him; his eyes were closed. Gently, she lifted his arm away from her damp skin and rolled to the side of the bed. When she stood up, she felt her skirt and stockings, all knotted up, on the floor beneath her feet. So much for the stockings, she thought.

  In the bathroom, she waited till she'd closed the door before turning on the light. It was so harsh and bright she had to close her eyes for a second to shut out the glare. Well, she thought, waiting for her eyes to adjust, she'd done it now -- and squinted at herself in the mirror above the sink. There were smudges under her eyes where the makeup had run, and several stray hairs were pasted to her cheek. Her bra, still strung on one shoulder, trailed down her back; in their haste, they'd never even gotten it completely off. Now she removed it and tucked it over the towel rack. She rinsed her face and wondered if Jack would mind if she used his toothbrush -- and figured that, after all that had already gone on between them, it couldn't really matter.

  But then -- what did? Did what they'd just done matter?

  For once in her life, she knew, without a doubt, that it had. She didn't have to convince herself. She knew.

  After the TV show, which she'd watched on a portable TV at the institute, she'd met him at the Olympia. He was still all keyed up about it, relieved that it was over -- and that he'd fulfilled his obligation to Sprague -- but worried that it hadn't gone the way he'd hoped. “I said what I'd set out to say, or at least most of it, but I don't think that's what people will have heard -- I think they'll have heard Zakin saying. ‘Yes, he brought me back from the dead.’ That's all I think they'll have come away with.” Nancy didn't know what to say to that -- because, basically, she thought he was right, that his high-minded appeal for forebearance and understanding had fallen on deaf ears. Zakin's testimony was what they would remember of that show -- and the flurry of phone messages on his machine that night had borne her out.

  At his apartment, after, there'd been no talking, no delay; he'd flipped the lock on the door, turned to her, and kissed her. They'd fallen back onto the bed, still kissing feverishly, groping at each other's clothes. She turned her head now and in the mirror she could see a slight purplish mark on her neck; she had felt his teeth there when he'd come. Her sister, s
he knew, would spot it on her at fifty paces.

  But what time was it now, she wondered? The clock had been turned away from her, and her watch was somewhere on the bed or the floor, in that tangled heap of clothes. Her ear-rings were missing too -- when had she taken them off?

  When she turned off the light and went back to the bed, Jack said, “Hi.”

  She laughed, softly. “Hi,” she replied, and laid down beside him, on her stomach. She propped her elbows on the bed.

  “You know it's ten after two.”

  “I was just wondering that.”

  “Isn't your family going to be frantic?” His hand lightly rested on the small of her back.

  “I already took care of that.”

  “How?”

  She hadn't intended to tell him this, and she still wasn't sure it was such a good idea. But she'd already started, so she finished. “I called them when the show was over and told them I'd be working late at the institute, and might just stay the night there instead of going home and then back again first thing in the morning.”

  “And they bought it?” He stroked her back gently.

  “Of course they bought it. They trust me.”

  With his fingers, he traced a small circle at the base of her spine. “So do I,” he said.

  The circling motion made her skin tingle.

  “I mean that,” he said. “I swore, after breaking up with my last girlfriend -- “

  “Stephanie?”

  “Yes... How'd you remember that?”

  “Women remember such things.”

  “I'll keep that in mind... Anyway, the point is, I swore to myself I'd never trust anybody again. I'd never leave myself open to that kind of hurt again. And now, here I am, with you.” He shook his head on the pillow. “When you came back with me from the Underground, and I showed you those clippings, and explained to you about my mother... I knew how crazy it all sounded, but I knew I had to tell you; I knew that I could tell you.”