I felt shock, embarrassment, and also relief to be outside. But my emotions soon drained to a peculiar, vacant residue. This was not related to the numbness that had claimed my arm. The numbness was gone. My right arm, my left arm—I could swing them both, wiggle my fingers.
I was basically fine, I convinced myself. I was experiencing a fairly understandable physiological state—I had plunged my head into the glass and through it, my entire body following. The transparent barrier had been sturdy. Give the designers of the glass credit. It was strong.
I turned to tell people that I was not usually so clumsy. And then I began to think a little more analytically. A door that could give way like that should be labeled more clearly, exit or entrance only. The restaurant was guilty of serious negligence. The public had been at risk. I had been at risk. Me. This human being.
I wasn’t embarrassed anymore. I was ready to take some legal steps, do the right thing for myself and for the people who were gathering, open-mouthed, giving me troubled looks, some of them stepping forward, involuntarily, instinctively helpful, some of them taking a step back.
The woman in the black jacket stepped carefully through the door, where shards still shark-toothed all the way around the frame. There was a pink carnation on her lapel, fastened there with a tiny brass safety pin.
“Don’t move,” she said.
The sphinx speaks! The secret is revealed! I could laugh! Human speech is uttered after an age of silence, and she talks like a movieland bad gal, an archetypal tough babe with everything but a gun.
Don’t move! Of course I would move. I’d move all around, arms, legs.
“We just called 911,” she said.
I made a little exhalation of breath, my lips puffing out, a dismissive moue. Who needed 911? Besides, the emergency service was overrated. I could cite case history. But it was nice of her. She was a civilized woman, a professional restaurateur. Her hair was tinted, too yellow. But a man could fall in love with a woman like this, her eyes so full of feeling.
People were gathering on the sidewalk, proverbial travelers, shocked at what they saw on the wayside. No, I wasn’t drunk. No, I had not been set upon by thieves. No, nothing in the kitchen had caused any of this.
Stella appeared, not nearly so pregnant-looking now that she was outside in the sunlight. She took slow steps. All that broken glass around her, she didn’t want to slip. “Be careful!” I said.
Or tried to. I could not utter a sound. I could only whisper. I tried again, and this time I sounded good. Maybe a little shaken, but audible. “Be careful, Stella.”
“Don’t just stand around like this,” said Stella to the group of ashen onlookers. She grabbed at a man’s trousers and I laughed, a gasping sound. What was she doing?
There may have been a siren, approaching from far off. Stella had a belt, tugging it through the loops, the owner of the belt helping her, releasing his length of black leather. Stella stooped, breathing hard. She worked the belt around my thigh and wound the leather around itself, tugging, twisting.
My suit was ruined. There was a gash in my trouser leg, and another on the other leg. And blood, blood all the way down inside my shoes, my sock sodden, blood squishing out every time I shifted my weight. And spurting, an art-school-pretty gout of it, syncopated, the sidewalk vermilion, glass and fluid so much slush underfoot.
I sat. The parking meter dug into my spine. It was uncomfortable, having nowhere to lie down. That was what I wanted suddenly. I needed rest.
“It’ll be alright, Richard,” Stella was saying, with something like anger. “Do you hear me? It’ll be alright.”
The pond expanded. Dust scummed the surface. It was what had been mine, and kept me alive, unthanked, unconsidered. So much scarlet.
My father did not come to see my mother die. He was in London, lingering there on purpose, afraid. I had slept in a chair in her room, the staff of Herrick allowing flowers, although the rules were against it. And it was like watching a person go to sleep, but a bad sleep, nothing pretty. Drowned-looking, at one point during the vigil she spoke. She looked up at me, possibly recognizing me, and asked, “Is it Easter?”
She was puzzled, I suppose, by all the flowers, the colors she could make out without her glasses on. And later I would tempt myself with the consolation that it was for her, the one, main holiday, the open door, the easement, the way out. From that moment I never respected my father as much as I had before.
Glass crunched under Stella’s feet. This was something I could not change, a page I could not turn. The people around me could not see what I did, looking up now at the sky. This pregnant woman I did not really know very well, despite our years of association, was calling to me to hang on, hauling at my jacket, trying to awaken me from what I knew was a kind of justice. Not punishment, but right.
“Be careful,” I said again.
I was echoing the last coherent words I had spoken, and having found them plausible enough when I could still think, I uttered them when I barely could open my eyes to look.
I would describe a last insight, a prayer, a loving memory. But there was in me an empty certitude. Everything solemn, everything profane, was gone. If there was a thought at all it was of Rebecca, not as a person—I could not form a clear memory any longer. Not even as a creature with a name.
But as a conviction—that she had gone ahead of me. Into this.
Part Two
14
I could move my tongue.
Just a little, pressing it against the ridges of my palate. My tongue had a life of its own, an inquisitive gastropod.
I was somewhere safe. Very safe. And very quiet. Every thought was heavy, and I let myself drift, encouraged that people would take care of me now.
I tried to remember the ambulance. I tried to invent the memory of a surgeon, intelligent, helpful men and women. This taste in my mouth must be anesthesia. I’ll open my eyes in just a few seconds. Just a few more—I’m gathering my strength.
I let myself drowse.
The first time I looked through a microscope was on a summer afternoon, using the big olive-green Bausch & Lomb scope my father kept under a cloth on his desk. My father had been a distant man, but kind, in an impersonal way, as though trusting that something in my chromosomes would guide me where I had to go. He was, however, visibly pleased that hot day when I asked him to show me something under the microscope, and he came back into the study smelling like someone who had been making sandwiches—there was a smell of onions about him, which was explained when I saw the membrane of onion skin on the microscope slide.
He touched the transparent skin with iodine, and the entire membrane was transfused. He rotated the lenses to get the power he wanted, and then turned to me and said, “There you go.”
It took a moment to see into the tube, and not at its side, or at the obscuring filter of my own eyelashes. At last the disk of light was clear, and even more distinctively patterned when I touched the focus dial.
I saw a city. The buildings, seen from above, were rectangles, worn, or crafted, into modestly irregular patterns, like pueblos, or drawings of biblical towns. There was no single identical geometry to the long, corral-like shapes of this village, and yet there was a general similarity, so that after even a moment or two one could sketch a typical structure, locate its purple-stained center, and describe the thickness of the walls.
We were made of these little prisons, flush to each other, wall to wall. Life consisted of confines. It was constructed of prisons, tiny castles. What could not define itself was so much fluid. To live was to be a fortress.
I felt my teeth with my tongue.
It had its own life, this searching morsel, probing. Soon I would open my eyes. Soon I would make a sound.
15
It was better not to wake. Waking was a room just to my left, beyond, and I knew as soon as I was aware of waking, saw it as a threshold I could cross, that it was too late. I could not go back.
I wanted to stay as
I was—as I had been. There was, however, no slipping back into full unconsciousness. There was a sensation that time had passed. There was no particular event, or series of changes, that made me believe this, and I was aware that this sensation impressed me as unlikely. But even doubt is an event, an experience.
There was an interlude, a long period of almost sinking back again. I was aware, but did not attach myself to this awareness, out of focus, dazed into a near-slumber that I knew I had just ascended from.
Something was wrong. Something in me would not be still. This urging was a cricket, ceaseless. I could not silence this nagging, bright inner-voice.
Not yet, I longed to convince myself. I could wait a little while longer. But I was forced to begin to wonder how badly I was hurt. It was not that I remembered an injury, no accident, no fall, no stunning impact. But I knew that I had been unconscious, and some instinct made me try out the word hurt.
I slept again, but it did not last.
My awareness returned. I was hurt. I was hurt badly. There was no pain, but there was a sensation of water in my lungs, of cold and a heavy weight on me, in me. I tried to breathe, and I could not. I could not take a breath.
And then I was afraid. I could not block the fear: I was in pieces, dismembered, scattered. There was no reason for this fear except that I knew, deep beyond hope, that I was mortally injured.
I tried to call out, and I made no sound. I could not so much as whisper. I had felt cold before this moment, but now I felt the chill throughout my body, and I tried to move.
I tried to move.
There was no life in my arms and in my legs, no power in me to twitch a finger, stretch the tendons of my legs. I knew I must be paralyzed, willing to address the horror intellectually, in a fragmented way, to fend off the full realization of my condition. I opened my eyes.
It was not a darkness like any I had ever seen. I thought my eyes were gone, the nerves surgically severed. I thought some sickening dislocation had ruptured my body, an explosion or the impact of a car.
I wondered, with an odd lucidity, whether I would die soon, if this shard of consciousness was what my nervous system seized on, a benign separation from the trauma, the sort of addled bliss one hears that people enduring great cold experience.
I had to do something to break my silence. I needed help. I tried to calm myself, but it was futile. I tried again to breathe and the full horror of what was happening pressed down on me. I had not been dying. The dying was before me, yet to take place, and it was going to be agony. It was beginning now.
At that moment, I could move.
One hand, my right, shifted upward though the dark. I felt a tingling numbness, as though the circulation in the limb was poor. I drew my hand up my chest, a cuff whispering over a shirt front. The fingers continued over a cold surface, buttons, a jacket’s lapel. I touched my face, and there was no feeling.
And then there began to be feeling, in my fingertips, in my lips. It was the inactivity, I thought, the disuse of my nervous system that made me so numb. The engine of my body was just beginning to turn.
My eyes hurt. My fingers found my eyelids. There was a hard plastic lens on each eye. I pried each seal free and blinked. The plastic disks shifted, falling away on either side of my face.
Now I could see. But there was nothing. Only dark.
Okay, I told myself. I’m blind. That was bad. That was very bad, but not the worst thing that could happen. I stretched my hand out and up. It did not travel far. At first it was a welcome sensation. I was feeling something with my outstretched hand.
I pressed my hand flat against the fabric surface that was not far from my face. For a moment it was a relief to be able to feel something so exterior to myself, and a source of hope that I was at last able to use my senses. I patted the satiny surface, trying to imagine its nature, and guessing. And rejecting the guess as impossible.
I began to cry out, virtually soundless screams, breathy, empty cries. I couldn’t open my jaw. I pounded on the soft cloth surface with my fist. I hammered against a surface that made almost no sound, my blows muffled by the fabric and the feeling of a great weight beyond the barrier of wood and cloth.
I rolled myself to one side, and then to another, shifting my weight, pushing against the side of what I sensed to be an adult-sized crib, trying to reassure myself that surely I was in some ambulance, or in a medical facility where the attendants had momentarily left me in a chamber used for CAT scans, or perhaps I was in one of those grim fixtures, an iron lung.
I knew I wasn’t blind. I was seeing what was really here. There was no light, an absence of even the hint of variation in the flat perfect darkness. Above the top of my head, below my feet, around me in all directions, was a box, a padded container.
I squirmed, then bunched my body, spasming, every muscle straining, I tried to call out, feeling my way around this prison. My nose was clogged with wadding. I dug the cotton free with my fingers. I forced my jaw apart, struggling, pulling out what felt like thread. With a strange absence of pain I pulled a needle from my gums, and another.
I tried to sit up and struck my forehead. I kicked, ripping at the cloth above me, clawing at the hard, slick-varnished surface before my face, suffocating as I fought the dark.
And then, at last, my lungs dragged in a breath of air. The right lung filled slowly, and I could feel the spongy airsack inflate and falter, sodden and disused. I coughed. I took in another breath and both lungs unfolded, breath growling in and out as I coughed, hacking, spitting, and half-swallowing cold sputum.
I gasped, my mind swimming, as I wondered if I had been stricken with pneumonia. But I was breathing. I cried out. My voice was a churn of phlegm and air, an animal bawl more than a yell. I took in another breath. I released it in a cry so loud it hurt my vocal chords and made my ears ring. Again and again I called, until my voice was ripped, strained soundless.
But they had heard me. They were hurrying to where I lay, reassuring smiles on their lips. Here they were, surely, the sounds of my fellows.
It was going to be all right. People are kind to the injured, and make provisions for them. I was misunderstanding the nature of my confinement. Light would break into my world, light and a caring face. I readied something to whisper, a message of gratitude that I could express with what was left of my voice.
I would apologize. How silly of me. What a mistake I had made. I would have to put it into words for them. I would laugh as I said it, laugh until my guardians were laughing too, at the outrageousness of it, the mad, hilarious blunder I had made.
I would tell them what I had thought had happened to me, and I would hear them repeat it to each other, to the others who ran up to help, to see what had happened, to join in my reunion with reassurance.
But there was no light. There were no voices, no smiles. What had sounded like hurrying steps was only the sound of my own heart, startled into contraction, stumbling into a pace that matched my feelings. The air tasted mineral and dank, and it was scented, too, with the essence of the box that held me, cabinetmaker’s wood stain and furniture wax flavoring each breath.
16
The cloth ripped, and my fingernails tore at the surface of the wood, dug into it, my blows and kicks altering the pressure of the air.
The shallow walls of the place were ruffled, a quality of wedding gown finery about the drapery around me and the pillow beneath my skull. I felt my hands grow powdery with residue, damp dusting my flesh. I lay still.
There was a stony quality to the damp that held me, a smell of wet earth. That was exactly what it was, I told myself. I was buried in the ground. I had a sketchy but emotionally vivid sense of what such internment entailed. There was, of course, a wooden box and its contents. Then I imagined a concrete vault, a box of man-made rock. And then I imagined the proverbial six feet of earth, clay, sand, roots, sod, and living grass all topped off with a headstone.
I tried to imagine that I was having one of those nightmares that
involve a dream of waking. You dream that you are awake, but the nightmare has merely reached a new chapter. Dreams end eventually. Actual consciousness would break, and I would be in a bed, among the living.
I tried to deceive myself, but it did not work. I argued with myself, picking apart my despair. I could not remember my life very clearly. If I could reason, then, I could think of a way out. Panic would confuse me further, and might use up the oxygen in the small space.
I recalled funerals I had attended, sunlight, date palms and a gray hearse rolling slowly ahead of black limos. I recalled Easter Sunday afternoons, florist’s paper crackling around wet stems. I recalled bank upon bank of marble plates, with names chiseled into the stone.
As a child I had wandered through the place, looking upward at stained-glass windows and feeling the sense of awe one might discover in a vast library, but this was not a library. I tried to take some solace in the belief that I must be close to the remains of my father, my mother, but the thought gave me no comfort.
When I cried out there was only a loud whisper, a sound like someone learning to whistle. Beating against the lid of the casket was futile. I was too close to the lid to be able to strike a resounding blow. All I could do was squirm and kick. It was more satisfying to kick against the foot of the casket. I could hunch myself, like a woman in labor, and then kick hard with my heels at the butt of the coffin. That made noise, a thudding, cloth-muffled bumping.
I had an urgent, nearly surreal fantasy of what I hoped would happen. A caretaker or a family of mourners would pass by and hear what had to be the sounds of someone trapped. An ear would be pressed, and others called to listen to the commotion behind this brand-new marble plaque. I imagined the disagreement, the disbelief, the scurrying to get help, the consternation.
The Judas Glass Page 8
