The Judas Glass

by Michael Cadnum

  I treasured each detail, the two ancient tennis shoes left on the back step. On the other side of the fence, a dog put its snout to a knot hole, sniffed, and stole away into the dark, whining.

  I passed through a gate and stood in the middle of a street, beside a manhole cover. There was a billboard ahead, huge, colorful, laughing people. I took a deep breath. The air tasted of mildewed porch sofas, dry rot in floorboards, new green, sour grass, rye. And dogs—there were dogs everywhere, unable to bark, nosing the air, skulking at their chains.

  A bird woke and scratched for a firmer grip on its perch in an eave. All of it asleep, but a sleep so restless, so close to waking. I could hear the whispered questions, men and women talking in their sleep, a jet aircraft far above, the freight of so many lives. All of it so rich to me that I could name each man, each woman, know the nightmare as it stirred, and stretch a hand to still it. I hushed the unseen children, the infants around me. Could I really do this? Calm the psychic seas for many city blocks around me, with a raised hand, without a word. With a thought?

  There was bass-note snap under my feet, in the earth. Creatures stirred at my passing, gophers beneath all of this, the ivy, the early spring blackberries, living barbed wire.

  People. I wanted to see people, to hear them talk, to show myself to them. I knew it was reckless, but I couldn’t keep myself from brimming over with the news.

  Besides, I wanted to know the answer to a few riddles, just one or two, like a man needing a dictionary even as he speaks, with delightful fluency, a new and very foreign tongue.

  In what seemed like a matter of moments I was in another part of town, among expensive houses again, sports cars in driveways under tight-fitting canvas covers.

  Sensations, not thoughts. I laughed, my head thrown back. I could sense people around me awaken at the sound. Traffic grumbled down in the flat of the city. Perhaps there was more freeway noise than there had been earlier. There was so much restlessness, activity mistaken for power.

  How many hours had I wasted, sitting in the law library, driving alone across the Bay Bridge? I had not enjoyed the fellowship of people nearly as much as I could now. I saw how important it was, that warm country, friendship. I had wasted so much time!

  I had overlooked so much during my years as a waking, working human being. If a garden hose is left long enough on the grass, it leaves a yellow shadow, a photograph of itself. The newspaper tossed on the crabgrass, the empty, scummy wading pool among the succulents—they all leave an image of themselves when we move them at last, a place where the sun has failed.

  I let myself into Steve Fayette’s front garden, the black iron gate closing quietly. The house had a porch light styled after an antique lantern, and a big red front door. I turned the doorknob, pushed, and the chain broke.

  I remembered where he kept the key to his burglar alarm, under the asparagus fern. I had thirty seconds before the police were automatically alerted. I turned off the blinking red light. Steve had been pensive about his money, not always sure what to do with it. A gigantic television screen graced one wall, and a telescope, the lens carefully capped, aimed at a corner of the ceiling. Everything was custom designed, the fat leather furniture, the huge glass coffee table.

  A sculpture hulked like a meteorite beside one of the bookshelves. Few books occupied the space. Instead there were photographs, graduation pictures, wedding portraits, nieces and nephews. And a photo of Steve beside one of his race horses, the thoroughbred turning one dark eye toward the camera.

  A bowl of fruit was star of the show on the big, shiny dining room table, bananas still green at the tips, a decorator’s idea of how fruit should look, crown jewels. The house was earthquake-proof, according to the designer, and that meant that the floors were thin, and trembled with the slam of a door, expensive paintings hanging crooked on the walls.

  I slipped into the master bedroom, and I was not surprised to see her there, my wife—my widow. So this was the next chapter in her life.

  I understood. Steve was pleasant company, and nothing solves cash-flow problems quite like cash. Steve did not look healthy in his sleep, shadows in his cheeks, his jaw slack. But Connie slept with an ironically virginal air. She looked not quite innocent, but vacant.

  To look at them like this was pleasure. Poised over them, I was capable of the common misdemeanors of an ordinary man, burglary, voyeurism. But this was all I wanted, I told myself. Just a look, just a sip of their presence.

  And then I stopped myself. I wanted to be a secret, it was true, but didn’t I want something more? What was I, a salesman, pressing a pamphlet under the doormat? And not even a calling card—I would leave soon and they would never know I’d been here. I wanted them to know. I wanted them to ask each other if they had heard something in the night.

  I had never noticed it before, how the pulse thrums in the tissues of the neck. And in the blue veins of the temple, and in the sheath of bone and fibers, the wrist. If the blood Dr. Opal had given me, lifeless, refrigerated broth, had given me such vigor, imagine, I thought. Imagine what this could do, this oxygen that was even now nourishing the dreams, supplying memory with its color.

  I heard something.

  It was a sound that chilled me. A sound that Connie heard, too, throwing her arm out and lifting her head from a pillow, only to let it fall back. She said something, a sleepy, non-word. It was in answer to this metallic, wheedling noise outside, beyond the walls. This agonized, insistent declamation, full-stereo, now, everywhere.

  Birds. That’s all it was. Finches, sparrows, robins, juncos, towhees—ordinary birds. That was all.

  I was out of the house. I could not run in a straight line. I staggered. I was weak again. Dr. Opal’s house was not far away, not far at all. But where?

  It was going to be too far for me, as the coast is too far for that passenger who cannot swim when he struggles, the luxury liner so many pinholes of light.

  I was running like the last, bedraggled participant in a marathon, a man so late the spectators and the judges have long since gone, nothing remaining but the route, the route that is always there, whether the race is run or not, the sidewalk with a yellow plastic tricycle left out overnight, the glowing blush of a windshield in the coming dawn.

  22

  I fell into a field, clods and furrows. An armored beast, many-legged and encased in a segmented shell, tumbled onto my thumb as my fingers dug into the earth. It worried at the knuckle before it, uncuriously wondering if it should continue its march.

  Thoughtless, it was living enough to roll into a ball as I nudged it gently with my other hand. I pulled myself to my feet, one foot dragging. I flailed my way ahead, hating my body, a stunt-clown, corporeal joke.

  At the last moment I tripped on a hoop of wire on the lawn. I tumbled, and rolled onto my back. I would get up soon. Very soon. As soon as I could move again.

  A face. It was the face of a referee, peering down, inquisitive, urgent, even a little annoyed.

  “Richard—where did you go?”

  I tried to tell him to get me out of the sunlight, and all I could do was hang on to him, dragging at his bathrobe, that luxurious robe, a gift, I was sure, from Susan. Susan, who must have admired these pajamas. Oh, wear the nice shiny blue ones, Samuel. Or perhaps the pajamas, too, were a gift. I had slept through a Christmas, and a New Year’s Day. And who knows what wars and what discoveries, strikes, political pronouncements, distant coups, civil wars.

  “Richard, where were you?”

  “Help me,” I heard myself croak.

  I was desperate in my idiocy, a man rising at life’s banquet needing the Heimlich maneuver, demanding CPR, no one understanding.

  So if this is how I die again, I thought, I will have this absurd last moment, one foot stuck though the loop of a croquet game, and the other digging spasmodically, excavating a divot.

  Until I climbed to my feet again. With Dr. Opal kneeling on the lawn calling after me, I ran toward the house, hard, straight for
the wall, the solid stone and mortar. But I knew where I was going. I saw the pane of glass behind the pruned stalks of poinsettia.

  I dived through a window. I scrambled down inside the cellar, into the odor of damp and mildew aged to a kind of soil. The hot water heater, the shiny Sherman tank of the furnace, all of it in darkness. I tore at the old asphalt tiles, pea green floor covering, the ancient tar brittle, the flooring peeling away.

  I dug with my hands, a diver desperate for air. But I was not climbing upward. What I wanted was not oxygen.

  It was this hiding place, among the roots of the foundation, among the gravel and the dirt, and deeper, as far as I could go.

  23

  An engine puttered somewhere at the edge of the world. People spoke, their voices strained by the stone and clay. It was all so far away, and I was so deeply asleep. Iron drilled the earth. Roots were thrust into place, tamped down with boots. What we mean when we say we had a dream is: something real that didn’t happen. If this was a dream, then it was one that had a life of its own. When I half-woke it continued, an interruption of the silence.

  I tried to roll over, to cry out, and I was made of dirt.

  The water heater whispered, a ring of blue flame illuminating the cellar. I was standing unsteadily. I didn’t go anywhere, looking down at my shoes, dark, dress oxfords.

  How many times had I hiked a hill, and found a hole, dirt flung wide, and wondered what creature had excavated such a hiding place, and how it knew, in the busy hive of its genes, how to mine such a sanctuary.

  A phone rang. I put my hands to my ears. I was in a hallway, in a familiar house.

  When I put one hand out to support myself I left a dirty handprint. Someone answered the phone. It was Dr. Opal’s voice. I could not make out the words. I was leaving footprints, faint, dark tracks across the brightly lit kitchen, into a room lined with bookshelves.

  Dr. Opal’s library was crowded with volumes, hundreds of books. I bumped into a dictionary stand and the thing fell over, the unabridged dictionary landing heavily.

  “Let me call you back,” said Dr. Opal, somewhere in another part of the house.

  I righted the lectern, and put the book back where it belonged, having a little trouble with it, the book falling open, almost too heavy for me. Beyond the curtained windows it was evening.

  “I was worried,” said Dr. Opal from the doorway. “I spent the whole day convinced that you’d never wake again.”

  I wondered if this was something Dr. Opal wished for, in one corner of his mind. I found a box of tissues and tugged until one tore free from the box. It startled me, the way another sheet sprang halfway from the slot, like an eager thing. I blew my nose, and was troubled by what I saw in the tissue.

  He asked, “How are you feeling?”

  This was not simple social courtesy. The question had profound medical implications. I dropped into a leather chair, a soft trap I would have trouble escaping. Dr. Opal turned on a lamp beside me, lifted one of my eyelids. I stuck my tongue out as a dim joke, the eager, cooperative patient. But he examined my tongue briefly, smelling of liquor and looking defeated.

  “I want to know how this happened,” he said.

  Yes, I thought—so would I.

  One of his shirt cuffs was unbuttoned, and it flapped as he ran his hand over his hair. “Don’t you wonder how you happen to be here?”

  He seemed to want me to say something. I did not feel quite able to respond.

  He took a swallow from a brandy snifter. “Where did you go last night?”

  It was time to talk again. I coughed, took a breath, gave it a try. “I went for a walk,” I said. I sounded pretty good, a man needing that first cup of coffee.

  He sat down across from me, sinking into an overstuffed chair of his own, the leather old and wrinkled, flakes of it peeling at the seams. “Where did you go?”

  “Not far.” I didn’t like lying to him. “How far do you think I could go, in my condition?”

  He gave a skeptical smile. “I have some … sustenance for you. I think you need it.”

  “I can wait.” My voice sounded flat, my tone too even, the voice of a man weary or depressed to the core.

  “I’m surprised you aren’t asking more questions. Of course, that was always my own personal game. I saw life as a list of questions in one column, followed by spaces in which we are supposed to pencil in the answers. You must be curious. You must want to know the etiology of this—”

  The legal phrase was proximate cause. “I never knew you drank heavily,” I said.

  “I don’t.” He lifted his hand, the sleeve flowing around his gesture: usually.

  “I know this is a terrible strain. And an interruption.”

  As though I had just given him permission he drained the rest of his brandy. “I have a series of lectures starting this week at Stanford. ‘The Function of Intuition in Diagnosis.’ I cancelled my first lecture. I said I had the flu.”

  “Please don’t do that sort of thing. Come and go as you normally would.”

  “You are already in the news,” he said.

  I gave him a questioning glance.

  “There was a tiny little article among the washing machine ads. Something about vandalism in Fairmount Cemetery. One or two markers defaced, and a body possibly stolen. Possibly. They are investigating. The article makes it sound like a juvenile prank. Doesn’t mention you by name.”

  “So much else happens in the world.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I want you to find the location of something important,” I said. “Will you be able to remember what I’m telling you?”

  “You don’t suppose I have practiced medicine for so many years without developing a certain talent?”

  “You’ve had quite a bit to drink. You really ought to take care of yourself.”

  “I feel pretty good, but entirely too sober.”

  “I want you to find a mirror.”

  “I have mirrors, Richard. Although to be honest, I am a little surprised you would find them useful.”

  “Do you remember that cut in my finger?”

  “I remember.”

  I examined what remained of it, a fine line in my finger, like the mouth of a lizard. “I want you to find the location of the mirror that arrived the day before my accident at the restaurant.” I could see him weighing the word. Accident. The unexplainable—birth defects, plane crashes, my presence there in his study.

  “Connie knows where it is,” I said. “Ask her.”

  “You think she’ll tell me, without wondering?”

  “Tell her you want to buy it.”

  “Maybe she’s forgotten about it,” he said. “Months have gone by—”

  “She doesn’t forget that sort of thing. Also, I want to know what is happening in the investigation. Rebecca’s murder.”

  “Actually, I think I’ve heard about the investigation recently. The police haven’t forgotten about it, far from it. Rebecca Pennant, wasn’t that her name?”

  I must have nodded.

  “She was one of those people who matter to a community, especially when they are gone. There was a scholarship set up in her name by her parents.”

  My memories of Rebecca kept me silent.

  “What else do you need?” he asked gently.

  I needed more than I could say, and we both knew it. “Clothes.”

  “Of course.”

  “George Good’s on Bancroft Avenue carries my size, jacket size forty-three; my waist is thirty-four, inseam thirty.”

  “Very good, sir,” said Dr. Opal, doing a very decent English valet, Jeeves on too many tranquilizers.

  “I think I owe you something,” I said. “For all your help.”

  “You don’t owe me anything.”

  “I feel deeply indebted to you.”

  “You would do the same for me. If I—”

  “Somehow it’s hard to imagine you … doing what I did. Coming back.”

  He gave a short laugh.
He was coherent, but much more intoxicated than I had thought. “You think I lack the persistence.”

  “No, it seems characteristic of me, somehow. The kind of thing that was always going to happen.”

  I meant this as little more than an unfunny joke, but Dr. Opal looked thoughtful. He said, “You have a theory.”

  “Theory is too elaborate a word. I want to understand what happened.”

  “So do I. And you think it had to do with the mirror?”

  “I’d rather not speculate,” I said.

  “Secrets within secrets.” He smiled sadly. “Do you know who really grieved for you, Richard? Connie was very badly shaken, of course. We all were. But the woman I thought would have to be sedated was the attorney, the pretty one—”

  “Stella Cameron.”

  “She was stricken.”

  “I need a good attorney. We have a lawsuit against the mortuary. We have a suit against the restaurant. And I want to know what happened to my estate.”

  “You left a will?”

  “I never got around to writing a will. Committing one to paper, I mean.”

  Dr. Opal cocked his head. “You should have seen a lawyer.”

  “I want to know if Connie is going to sell the house. She has her sights on better places. And we had some investments. Not as many as people might think. Connie’s porfolio was all in Polynesian war clubs, and I tended to have clients who weren’t exactly rich.”

  “What bothers me, Richard.…” He paused. “Is that you’re envisioning returning to a normal life.”

  “If the Farmer’s Life Insurance policy paid off I suppose I owe them a lot of money. Or Connie does. That brings me to the subject of divorce, I owe Connie at least some sort of reasonable settlement.”

  “Richard, I think you misunderstand your situation.”

  “I’m just reviewing some areas of concern.”

  “I don’t think it’s going to be that easy,” said Dr. Opal.