Her lips moved again and—this time I had no question at all—she made a smile so lovely it soothed my heart for years. But she said again “No.” I remembered the question, Should Kennon live? No, twice No.
Simp and I looked at him.
We might have been air. Every lustrous hair on his head looked charged with newer force, and his wide dark eyes were fixed on her. Had they seen her the night she left home to find him? Had he repelled her and sent her out into freezing darkness? Or had she never reached him with her news of the child and perished, maybe lost and hunting the chance of safety at his crushing hands, wherever he lay—the father of what grew daily within her?
Now he laid a great broad hand on her mouth and pressed as though he’d press her through flooring, the ground, the mantling rock beneath our soil toward the world’s red core of burning rock.
I took a step back in fear and dread. Would she fight; would bile press out of her gorge? Would God the Judge appear among us and burn Kennon down, maybe ruining me and Simp in the blaze?
Simp actually seized Kennon’s bulky wrist and tried to tame it.
Kennon turned eyes on him that would swipe down a saint; and with one short swing of his weaker arm, he flung Simp off like water drops.
Simp landed by the settee and covered his head.
I crouched down by him in hopes of sparing myself worse damage.
When Kennon’s steps crossed the front porch and left, I started to count. I told myself “If I get to a hundred and he’s not back and fire hasn’t struck us, I’ll risk one more look out at the room.” I truly counted to one hundred slowly—pure silence, still air. I took the look round. The room as before, no sign of strangeness. Simp was rousing too, not visibly bleeding. I said “Is he gone?”
Simp said “Hub, he’s the least of our worries. He’s bound to be dead.” How Simp knew it, he didn’t say. I thought of myself as the better detective, but of course he was right that one bad time.
They found Kennon Walters that morning at ten as Mariana’s hearse drove up to her family plot with us all behind on ponies, in buggies. He had cut his throat and fallen in the hole that was meant for her grave.
I hadn’t asked Simp that night, or ever, what the worst of our worries might be or become—maybe a thoroughly raised Mariana, bent on vengeance or a still deeper taste of the love she lacked and truly craved.
That at least was what I’ve kept from the night, my ultimate lesson. Love—this force commended by God and Christ his Son as the height of virtue—will freeze one life and char the next; no way to predict who lives or dies. No lover thrives or ends with flesh and mind intact, uncharred and smiling. In the long years since, I’ve kept that lesson hid well within me, a guiding secret like no known light in the mounting hours of age and loss. And through this generous hapless republic—where, all the length of the twentieth century, the one word love has stoked life and commerce, disease and health, swans and owls, child-killers and dolphins—I’ve struggled by the instant to keep my own heart dry inside me, not launched on the pointed stakes of love.
I’m ninety-two years old, writing this line, a man at peace with what he’s done and what comes next. I leave this story, in both its parts, as my best gift to a world I’ve liked and thank, here now, but have never pressed for the black heart’s blood of actual love.
GOOD AND BAD DREAMS
1
A Sign of Blood
SHE WENT OUT at eight, leaving him asleep. So he let her believe. He was only waiting behind shut eyes to have the room still and empty at last, his for the day—his first free solitary day in months; years it felt, by the weight that dissolved with each breath now. As he flung back the covers and stood, he thought “Chance.” The word itself, clearly. Then, stripped and shuddering (she had not lit the heater), he smiled—chance for what? Well, nine free hours. The room his again. But warm first.
He scissored to the heater in three steps, squatted, inhaled, threw the gas jet. The breath was one that he always took—shallow and secret—before lighting the gas (fear of breathing fire; she had never noticed). But alone now, he also flinched at the puff. A minor luxury—with her he could not show a hint of fear.
Waiting in the warmth, he rocked farther forward to see the room upside down through his crotch. His dangling sex transfixed the unmade bed—stake in the heart of the vampire at the crossroads! He actually laughed, and caught the frail permanent scent of his groin—the room’s ground-bass. He made, for the first time since adolescence, the lunge to kiss his sex. It needed the notice. But he fell on his tail and lay in the laughter like warming water.
A mirror. A long pierglass hung beside him. Flat on his back, he could not see himself—only windows opposite, still covered against light. So he stood, square before it, no longer smiling, chin firm and lifting, clenched hands at his sides—an archaic Apollo: You must change your life—even strode one solemn step forward toward his image. Unmoving, he studied his image by gaslight. The chest broad but flat (a pale hard tray); arms, legs thin and long, joint flowing easily into bone without display. “I am lovable,” he said and kissed on the mirror all the mirror would permit—his lips. They could use the greeting at least. Then he went to the window to open the curtains.
Light. His day. He could open them safely, naked as he was, since the room faced backward, the high thick garden, no other house there. Only at the sight did he think of the storm. In the night he had waked to hear wind and rain; she had spoken—what? a word about the roof; would it hold through this? he had said “Live in hope” and fallen off again.
The roof had clearly held. The yard showed torn limbs and leaves but no shingles. He could work on that awhile, clearing trash—the day was not bright but neither was it freezing. No, he would read, draw, listen to music. First, to bathe and dress. The garden could wait. Let the trash be compost.
But, turning from the window, his eye snagged at one dark spot in the ground—a cap? a glove? Something soaked and wadded on bare dirt by the door. Tan or gray? He strained to see which, and consciously wondered why?—why linger on this? He was twenty yards away and above it; and he stared till he knew it was tan—or a richer brown, russet. Fur. A drowned mole?—it was larger than a mouse. He could not find limbs or eyes in its mass. Whatever, it was still. Dead. More rubbish.
Yet when he had turned and moved toward the bath, he felt the day begin to leak from his grip, like all the others. He knew what sapped them, every day for years—his promise to her—but this threat was new, with a taste of its own, a dry density. Oh a nag, not a threat. He stopped by the bed, still yards from the bath, and smelled himself. He was clean enough.
He was back at the window. The small corpse was there, still resisting knowledge, crouched on its precious death. Or was it only a scrap of a corpse?—rabbit, squirrel fur? No sign of blood, not from here at least.
He dressed in two minutes, was down and standing directly above it, and still did not know. He knelt and bent till his face was no more than a foot away. Lice, in the fur. They had ridden out the storm and were still hustling blood that was jelly by now. Then he noticed wings—the hooked tips of leather wings intricately folded. A bat.
Of course he stood. He had never seen a bat. Maybe in a zoo or occasionally swooping round a distant street lamp. But never this close. Unprotected. He felt instantly stripped again and vulnerable, precisely in his eyes and throat. He blinked and stepped back but knew it was dead and forced his fear down. He must move it though. How? Nudge it along with his foot toward the trashpile. Rabies—no. There had been rabid bats—two, three summers ago. Children had been bit. These lice were alive and stuffed with its blood. He must bury it deeper than dogs could smell.
When he found the shovel, he returned and stood again. Its back seemed shrunk, as though essence were leeching into dirt already. It was toy-sized, a winged mouse whacked down by wind. He would bury it in soft ground beyond the garbage. He slid the spade toward it gently—a funeral!—neatly, respectfully under it.
>
It convulsed—flung itself to its back on the spade, stretched its wings full-out, bared baby-pink gums, white needle teeth and—surely—screamed.
He knew it would rush at his face—his eyes—and he dropped the shovel to run; ran three steps. Then he stopped to see, remembering her—as though she were there in the window above him, his panic slamming at her.
Already it was calming—had flopped again to its belly on the ground and was folding its joints slowly inward again.
He knew it was dying, maybe of rabies; and though he had read of explorers infected with rabies by drizzling bat piss in caves, he knew he was safe so far—his skin unbroken, dry. Let it die there in its own good time, where it chose to fall, arranged as it wished. Only the shovel, abandoned beside it, disordered the scene. That could also wait. He turned to the house again, his day recovered. It was only eight-thirty; only this square yard of ground was off-limits. The other world was his.
Yet an hour later—fed, bathed, shaved, dressed again—he could do nothing more than stand at the window and watch the bat. It was still condensed too tautly for death. However it perceived its struggle, it struggled. “So would any virus”—he mocked his own thoughts as the bat threw them up. Why is a bat, the size of your hand, a source of terror when a horse, say, is not or even a frog? Childhood icons?—Halloween, vampires? Or older even, archetypal?—built into our genes since cave men fought them back with brands? A brush of wet fur across the lips in sleep, leather-coated struts of bone clasped to baby’s throat?
When he’d dealt with all the clichés, he was left with its win. It had hogged his day—or two hours of his morning. If for no older reasons, then, an enemy. Kill and bury it. Broadside with the shovel. It must anyhow be gone when she returned.
Why? Why could she not be trusted, at her age, with the entire equipment of the created world? Why fence off this or that? Let her grow her own rind or shrink from sight. God knew he’d grown his.
So he went for himself. Slowly, sanely down again. “My race has agreed to hold bats repulsive. I’m man enough then to object to a sick bat dying in the yard.” That served as reason through the quick kill and burying. It had been nearly gone—no more Dracula feints, just a quick relaxing as the spade slapped once. It had even had the grace not to bleed a drop. A tidy bat.
He buried it whole, on its belly as it chose—like everything dead, two sizes smaller; ludicrously defused—and not till he’d climbed to the room again, lighter, having won, and had bent to make their bed (the sheets as unused as invalids’) did he know why the thing had destroyed his day and demanded brutality and—four ounces of leather, lice, fur—would change his life (something he and Apollo had never managed). It was messenger, sign.
No. Absurd. From whom? And how cheap—the celestial joker’s usual taste.
She will kill herself.
2
Rapid Eye Movements
BUT WHO believes signs? Who can know what he knows till his knowledge is useless, beached by event? In a day, he’d forgot his sense of omen; and the afternoon of the second day (a Sunday, both at home), he was on her again, employing her facilities—or the single one he needed, in the late clear light.
She permitted him. He also knew that, but would not think of it—that she endured his poking in silent still puzzlement, as though he belonged to another species with analogous parts but incomprehensible needs or as though she were a faith (and the faith’s central shrine) and he were the priest of a heresy who entered to perform his rite on her altar—in her presence and hearing but in language and gesture and, finally, reward that were sealed from her.
He’d have thought it out in some such language—and been eased by the image—if she’d given him time. But once he’d finished and paused for breath, he started again, entirely for her, slow deep strokes to offer her the coup.
She did not say Yes or No, her hands still lay—neither urgent nor repelled—in the small of his back. She only breathed deeply at the pit of each stroke—her breaths rock-steady, no quickening.
He slowed and raised to see her face.
Her eyes were shut; the muscles of her mouth and throat were still. She was nearly asleep.
“Later?” he asked. He thought she nodded; her chin dipped once. He rolled gently off her. Her body adhered for a half-turn toward him; so he lay and watched her slide into sleep, intending to think his way out now, her sighing head an aid to contemplation.
She gave him ten seconds to think of her warmth—in the room where he was rapidly cooling, she sent a firm heat across the gap between them (they were not touching, ten inches apart)—then her eyes began to move. Behind the thin lids, a quick frail jittering at first.
Rapid Eye Movements. The sign of a dream. He moved his own face closer to hers, slowly, not to wake her; and strained to see the story she saw. Soon the random movements slowed a little and settled into steadier horizontal sweeps—the balls of both eyes rolling left and then right, as though following a lazy tennis game. Then the slow sweeps would be broken by lurches—upwards or sideways. Then tennis again.
Or her battling parents. Yes. She had told him an hour before—the first time—of a night in her childhood out of Dickens or Zola—her father drunk and beating her mother. Her mother would run to a corner, crouch for more; her father would follow; and she, age five, had waked and come and flown between them, a shuttlecock, screaming for quiet. Surely that was what her shut eyes saw now. And would see till he stopped her. The circular past, she its willing victim. He called her name twice.
She shook; her eyes opened. She did not smile. “I was dreaming,” she said.
“I know,” he said and laid a hand on her, below her right breast.
What he does not know, what she will not tell him, is that her dream was not of her parents but plainly of themselves, not past but future—her need to stop their life. Need and plan. To wake her is not to end it.
3
Twice
SHE IS still right-handed. She holds the razor-blade—new, firm, single-edged—with that calm hand and extends the left arm.
The white, blue-strung antecubital space; the bend of that arm. She cuts with the chicken-flesh grain at the bend, three-quarters of an inch deep, two inches long. Her hand has not paused, the line is straight. The brachial artery and vein lurch, astonished; then pump on, but now in the air of the room. The arm clasps to her side. She has planned in advance to rush her death by assisting the artery—clenching and opening her left hand in rhythm. What she has not known is that, choosing this spot, she has cut (no choice) the median nerve. Her left hand and wrist are paralyzed. Useless, though wet. Her left thigh and calf, left foot, are wet; the white tile cubes of the floor are wet over eighty square inches.
Yet she still feels herself. She is still herself—what she’s been all her life, less this much blood. Continuity.
She cuts again, as slowly and deeply, an inch above the previous cut, in clear flesh. The line is straight again. She severs the same vein, artery, nerve and tendons a second time. There is still pain enough to shake a house. “Supererogation”—she thinks that and smiles.
4
Washed Feet
HE HAS slept this soundly since four in the morning because when he came back, his mind was clear. It knew only one thing—the doctor’s words on leaving her ward, “She can live if she wants; we’ve done that much.” (They had, the doctor and his nameless team, had worked four hours repairing her try, patiently ligating all she’d severed—the brachial artery and vein—anastomosing tendons, pumping in the mandatory blood that would be at least no stranger to her than the pints she’d carefully drained tonight; then had wheeled her still unconscious to a lighted ward and watched her like a bomb.) The words had instantly swelled in his head, a polished plug molded to crowd his skull and exclude all else, every atom of air. And had perfectly succeeded. He had come here—a half-hour walk, a taxi—had lit the gas-fire (no other light), then stripped and slept. No question of why or who was at fault—�
�The woman with whom I have lived six years has tried to kill herself. A serious try—no skittish theatrics. I found her; they saved her; she can live if she wants.” No question of how.
Two hours of dreamless sleep. It is six, but still winter dark; only the low red burn of the gas—he is sleeping his own way, in warmth.
This happens. A man is in the room, standing darkly in a corner. In his sleep, he sees the man and does not feel fear or curiosity; only watches till he knows what’s required of him—that he thrust with his bare feet till they’ve cleared sheets and blankets and lie exposed. That is the necessary sign. The man moves forward to the end of the bed; stands waiting, still dark. No question of seeing his face or dress. He is dark. No need to know—only lie there flat on your back and wait. Now the man is looking round the room—he is needing something. Lie still, he will find it. And the man goes on looking, even moves a few steps in various directions. Is his face distraught?—lie still, don’t wonder, he can fill his own needs. In calm desperation, the man returns to his place at the end of the bed; kneels suddenly. He silently spits in the palms of both hands and washes the bare feet propped before him. The gestures are gentle but the palms are rough.
He is scrubbed awake. He lies on his back, his feet are uncovered, they sweat though the room is hardly warm. He raises his head to see the room. Empty of all but red gas light and the customary stuffing, their stifling freight. He knows he was dreaming. No man is here. No one but himself.
Yet he also knows (he falls back for this) another new thing, more filling than the last—that from now (this night, this momentary dream) he must walk in his life as though a man had been here—one who had come precisely here by choice and, desperate to forgive, had searched for water, then knelt and washed his feet (till then unjudged) with the agent available—His spit, that wishes to clean but scalds.
Collected Stories of Reynolds Price Page 10
