The Judas Glass

by Michael Cadnum

  I recognized that new quality in his stare, that tremor in his hands.

  “If I were you I wouldn’t laugh. It destroys the illusion that you’re human.” He considered for a moment, his eyes cutting down to the gun on the desk. “They’ll study you for years to come, little bits of you on microscope slides.”

  His tone disturbed me. He was afraid, but he was determined, or putting on a good act. “You sound so confident.” I was suddenly weak. My mouth was dry.

  “Maybe you can alter my mood, Richard. Is that what you’re doing? Playing with my mind?”

  These hands, these arms. While we sleep, the chain saws, men in protective suits, oxygen masks, visors. Cutting through my ribs. Gouging out this rhythmic champion, this heart.

  “You have children,” I said.

  He hesitated before answering. “Two daughters, both married.”

  “You see the world as a place to protect. You want to keep it safe. For your children, your grandchildren. And other people’s children. You’re still paying off the mortgage on your house.”

  “If nothing else works we’ll burn you. The army still stocks flame throwers, napalm.”

  “But you won’t hurt Rebecca, will you?”

  His fingers twitched, one of those unconscious gestures that show how unhappy a person is, No, I’m not really saying this. “Both of you,” he said.

  The air was maple sugar, dissolving on my tongue, painfully sweet.

  Cars had streaked the yellow acacia pollen across the parking lot. Like chalk dust, there was so much of it, ordinary life in such abundant promise. A stepping-stone was stained with the crisscross of leaves, leaf-dye remaining long after the twigs were swept away.

  I waited for a car to pass, headlights and brakelights and a booming radio. I jogged across the highway, into the trees.

  The generator started up. The machine rumbled, and I kept well away from the noise, bounding up a trail to the place where she waited, a pale smudge high above the road.

  “They don’t know about the mirror,” I said. We can go back and find it. And keep it for ourselves.

  She could look at me and tell. I shrugged and laughed, the bon vivant back from a party, that pleasant champagne glow down to my fingertips.

  Her voice was low. “Tell me you didn’t.”

  A plaster deer stood beside a birdbath, almost the exact size of a real doe. A stone fawn waited beneath a tree, a nick of paint missing from one of its eyes.

  “Tell me you didn’t touch him!”

  I took her hand, ready to lie. Words don’t have to reflect reality. Only the mirror, in its straightforward deception, is perpetually truthful. No, of course I didn’t.

  But I did not speak.

  “Richard, you’re frightening me.”

  Let me show you what we can do.

  She wanted to hurry back to the motel. I took both of her hands. “I promise you I didn’t touch him.”

  She put her head against my chest. “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “Let me show you,” I said, “where we belong.”

  51

  Perhaps when we keep a journal we are claiming a future, pretending it already exists, the smoggy summer day, the bright late winter morning, our children grown. We let the fiction carry us forward, tomorrow, a causeway across what we know is true, the floodplain of hope, the days that have not yet happened.

  Early the next evening we reached Carmel, following the highway at times, and then following the coastline, the ragged margin of white sand. My mother had loved this town, and we had once owned a cottage here, a peak-roofed hideaway with a climbing rose and a huge blue-stone fireplace.

  The sand was so fine it squeaked under our shoes. Rebecca hesitated on the beach, but I led her along, and we walked hand in hand up Ocean Avenue. The look of pleasure in her eyes warmed me. There was a quality of “let’s pretend” about our stroll up the street. We acted like ordinary people, ordinary in the way love affairs are ordinary, life in flower, but normal, rooted life.

  “We shouldn’t do this,” she said.

  “This is where we should have come,” I laughed, “all this time.”

  We could both smell them, taste them in the air, so many lives. She said, “But they can all look at us and tell.”

  Restaurant doors swung open, and inside were dozens of faces, the voices lifted in laughter, lowered in conversation. Even a gas station was a marvel, a man rubbing a spot on the windshield of a Jaguar, first with a squeegee, then with a paper towel, then with his forefinger and spit. In a candle shop a woman used a long brass implement to snuff out candles one by one, and the scent of bees’ wax reached us between the glass, honey and paraffin.

  “It’s dangerous,” she said, but there was no conviction in her voice.

  We could not help window shopping, knowing all the while that the glass we gazed into did not reflect our images. We pretended it was otherwise, arm in arm, nodding mock-approval at the window displays, expensive leather suitcases, gold-edged china. A display of bridal accessories stopped us, the mannequin’s face behind the stiff fireworks of lace.

  It was true that a man walking a dog stopped in mid-crosswalk to watch us, ignoring the understated beeping of horns. And sometimes someone across the street took a long look, not sure what he was seeing. A newspaper vending machine caught my eye with its black headlines. A photograph was half lost beneath the fold, but I could make out the top of my head, my eyes.

  I could imagine Connie. or even Matilda, complying happily, sure I have a photo. Take your pick. I had never liked the black-and-white glossy that had been selected, hating the close-cropped haircut, the let’s party! grin on my face.

  I drew her along, past floral displays and a real esate office. “I didn’t know hats looked like that,” she said. “Those floppy ones—”

  “Berets,” I suggested. “Cashmere.”

  The berets were displayed on Styrofoam heads, featureless, each egg-like head with a dainty prominence and a faint suggestion in place of nose and eyebrows. “I didn’t know hats came in so many colors—”

  She protested, but I tugged her arm. Once inside a clerk put his head around a curtain and said, “I’m sorry—”

  We’re closed he meant to say. The door had been locked, and I had forced it. I apologized for our mistake, but led Rebecca to a counter of scarfs, berets, gloves, so many colors. And purses, a scarlet patent leather clutch so vivid it hurt to look at it.

  Drawers were pulled, and samples of silks and fine wool were poured out on the glass counter, the man eager now, delighted that we could stop in. “This one will look wonderful on you,” said the clerk, the owner, I realized, hungry, tired, forgetting everything but the two of us. “Take a look,” he said, tilting a mirror on the counter in Rebecca’s direction.

  I was surprised at Rebecca’s presence of mind. She pretended, artfully, giving her empty reflection her best fashion model pout. The she turned the mirror aside. “Lovely,” she said. I could hear how she felt, what a painful, pointless charade this suddenly was.

  “We’ll take it,” I said with a smile.

  “No,” she said.

  All of this is yours.

  She gave me a steady look. “No, thank you,” she said.

  Outside again, we enjoyed this game, this opportunity to imagine what it would be like to be another couple, that man and women speaking German, or this man in the tweed jacket, leather patches on the elbows, waiting for his bride—surely they were on a honeymoon—to adjust the strap on one of her shoes.

  Although Rebecca’s gown looked strictly formal, there was nothing about her that looked dampened or faded by the punishment of the passing months. She had the highlights and coloring only the finest cinematography could offer, and anyone who saw her took in both the readily apparent, her eyes, her smile, and something else. The eye believed in her.

  A man and a woman outside a restaurant paused to let us pass, and I could feel their mood change. The woman laughed, and the man looked
up from the car he was unlocking.

  Rebecca could not stop herself. “I want you to be careful,” she said, taking the woman’s hand.

  “Whatever of,” said the woman, surprised but not taking any offense at this caution from a stranger.

  “He’s not what you think,” said Rebecca. “He’s full of stories, but you know better.”

  “He’s been lying to me,” the woman said, her tone surprised but not shocked.

  “About everything,” said Rebecca.

  “What’s going on?” said the man, his smile fading. He looked at me as people did when they were not quite persuaded, when they sensed something wrong. For an instant it was a struggle to deceive him.

  “What was that about?” I said with a laugh.

  “That man she was with. He’s married, or cheating his business partners. Something. She should stay away from him.” She put her hand out to a shop window. Behind the glass a marzipan alligator looked out at the passing street.

  “You’re tired,” I said, not asking.

  “No, I feel perfectly alright,” she insisted, leaning against me.

  “Too much excitement,” I said.

  We both pretended that was the problem.

  We turned at last to enjoy the view. The main street sloped down to the Pacific, and the ocean loomed up, almost at an angle, an optical illusion that made the shops and the Monterey pines look festive and temporary, a town set out for a holiday, not made to last. Only the trees were permanent, fissured bark, roots buckling the sidewalk, bursting the stone planters.

  A police car rolled down the other side of the street. Rebecca fell into a park bench. She said she was dizzy, and gave a little laugh of apology.

  It would be dangerous to leave her here like this. Her hand was over her eyes, and I could see the heat fade from her. She shivered.

  “It can happen suddenly,” I said. “The sounds go dim. You can hardly feel your hands, or your feet. You have to drag in each breath, like towing something heavy through water.”

  “I’ll be okay,” she said. “Don’t leave me, Richard. Please stay—”

  “You’d expect us to be able to keep thinking,” I said. “But that dies, too. You don’t know who you are, or what you’re doing. Forgetting is almost a pleasure, isn’t it?”

  “Please don’t go anywhere,” she said. I knew what she really meant.

  But I had no choice.

  52

  I returned to the park bench, and broke open a vein between my ulna and my radius, and she drank. When we sat together on the park bench afterward we must have looked like two lovers, secluded by the shrubs of the park.

  I was glad she did not ask. I could not have explained the scene I had just interrupted, a man and woman like objects in a still life, lovemaking just completed, a sheen of boredom already accumulating in each psyche. How their lust had apparently been stimulated by what played on the television screen, a woman in vocal but artificial throes, an orchestrated orgy I silenced with one touch of a button. Leaving the two blissful, each one a heartbeat away from never waking.

  We found a house in the southern part of Carmel, not far from the Carmel Mission and the river, one light on in the den as proof that there was no one home, a desk light on a timer. I nearly turned the light off reflexively, but Rebecca stopped me. I recognized the dwelling as the product of architectural vision, a house all views and spacious, uncozy rooms.

  “You think we can live here,” she said in a guarded tone. “No one will notice.” It was charming, the way she said live. Steve Fayette would like this house, I thought. Space and angles. I tugged a curtain shut, wondering vaguely why it had been left open, and how long.

  An assortment of mail was fanned out on the dining room table. I touched my fingers to the table and came up with faint dust. “They’ve been gone awhile.” Getting letters had always been a pleasure I had taken for granted. And magazines. Even the catalogs, slick pages of products, smiling men and women, all of it empty, promises no one really believed, some of the models hating what they wore, tired, one or two of them already dying, AIDS, drugs.

  “Then they’ll be coming back soon,” Rebecca said.

  For two nights it succeeded. We wanted to act out a miniseries, a honeymoon taking place entirely at night, but sexless, all normal desire having left both of us, but loving in a darkly fraternal way. Rebecca drinking from my wrist gave me a pleasure more bitter-sweet than sex, taking its place.

  I lied to her. The lies were easy to utter, and afterward easy to forget, for a night or two. I told her I’d found a hospital in Monterey, drank my fill of whole blood, and returned. She liked this story—outsmarting an institution, making it a kind of hide-and-seek we were playing, a game we both could win.

  We tried on clothes, the man’s leather jackets and cowboy boots all too big and not a style I particularly liked. Rebecca had better luck, trying on skirts, pleated knee-lengths, plaid woolens, and one daring black leather miniskirt.

  “I understand this marriage,” said Rebecca. “It works because the man likes to pretend he’s a cowboy, and the woman dresses like a librarian. He’s a businessman, practical and calm—a horse would make him nervous. He bought her the miniskirt, and they both liked it, but somehow it doesn’t work into any of her ensembles, only in the bedroom. She pretends to be sensible, he pretends to be strong.”

  “A perfect marriage,” I said.

  It was difficult to watch television. Something about my optic nerve made the stuttering images look fake and flat, the voices like the sound of antique telephones. Rebecca listened to the music she loved, but the sound of the music sounded labored in my ears. One or two of the musicians, I knew, were no longer living. The conductor himself had tottered into the early stages of senility. I could hear it in the silence between notes. I could hear the way the recording failed to keep anything alive but the dictates of a composer long ago decayed.

  Rebecca kept the music quiet to spare me, and her ability to listen to such music proved something to me: that I was the more foreign, less human creature. Rebecca was still like a living woman in her quick pleasure in candlelight, her love of picture books, a child’s atlas of the world, dinosaurs. I found any form of reproduced sound or image a bitter caricature, unmistakably counterfeit.

  But we were joyful for two nights, believing that we could borrow other people’s lives like this, from house to house, indefinitely. We had discovered a form of security, a future. We could play house like this forever, we found ourselves thinking. From town to town, city to city—there was no end.

  And then, on the third night, a car pulled into the driveway. The engine switched off, and doors slammed and footsteps approached, all the signs of company arriving. The front door was unlocked, pushed open, and we had visitors.

  “The owners?” asked Rebecca. She looked crestfallen. I wondered how much of this looked like home to her now, the unread, neatly folded Wall Street Journals beside a display of dried grasses, wheat and pussy willows.

  Our intruders entered gossiping. “Someone so needful,” said the young woman, “I get a bad feeling right here when I hear her voice on the phone.”

  Rebecca began to hurry from the room, but I caught her. I knew how to hide.

  “Needful people are what you have to avoid,” the young woman continued. “She tells me I won’t cooperate. Cooperate in what?”

  “With what,” suggested the young man.

  “Exactly,” she said. The couple turned on all the lights in the living room. They turned on the television. They went from one room to another, snapping on pole lamps, desk lamps, ceiling lights. “I can’t believe she’s my sister,” said the young woman. “It’s not genetically possible.”

  The young man hooted, “Look at all the wine!”

  “We can’t touch it.”

  “You can’t tell me they’ll miss a bottle of—what’s this, Montrachet,” he said, pronouncing it with an over-fastidious roll of the r. “You can’t tell me they counted every
bottle.”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  His voice came from the bathroom. “Okay, guess what’s wrong with them.”

  “You aren’t supposed to go through the medicine cabinet,” she said.

  “Evelyn,” he said. “Guess the prescriptions.”

  Rebecca and I stayed just beyond, passing from one room to another to avoid them. “They took the pills they needed with them,” said Evelyn without much interest. She buttoned her sweater. She went to the thermostat on the wall, turned the dial. Somewhere under our feet a furnace thundered softly.

  “It’s a game,” he called, and I was starting to like him. “Guess.”

  “Okay, he likes to eat, he takes some kind of antacid. Maalox.” She paused at the drapes, parted them, peered out. She looked back at the spider plants. She did not like this. She knew something was wrong.

  “Correct” came the voice from the bathroom. “But too easy.”

  “Did you move these letters around? Bruce, did you touch these letters?”

  “I steamed them all open,” said Bruce.

  “Bruce, stop fooling around,” she called.

  The heater was on, hot air forced through vents in the floor. “It is cold in here,” he said. He flung himself into a chair, eyeing the liquor cabinet. “They have that tequila with a worm in it. Those guys are serious drinkers,” he said.

  “I don’t like it here.”

  “Is the heater supposed to make that noise?” he asked.

  She passed by him and he snagged her, pulling her down into his lap. “I don’t feel right,” she said.

  He didn’t either. “They don’t mind. We aren’t doing anything any normal person wouldn’t do, looking around at stuff.”

  They both stopped, listening.

  Then, to hear himself talk, Bruce continued, “It’s like when you send a postcard. You don’t mind if people read it, because that’s what a postcard is—semi-private. When people pay you to housesit they expect you might have a friend come by and do normal stuff like watch television, maybe sit in the hot tub—”