Among the Dead

by Michael Tolkin

  After the mayor spoke, the Marine band lifted their instruments. The moment of expectation. The inhalation. Lips to horns. Their conductor brought his baton down, to start the music. Frank strained to hear the brass. Nothing. And yet ... His frustration, his panic, were released, as though the music had actually touched him. It seemed to him as though this was what they had come to do, that their memorial to the dead would be just this, a respectful silence played on loud instruments. To be moved by silence, reminded of the silence of death by the silent breath of twenty men with horns. What better way to compel true grief than a pantomime of music? Reserve sound for joy! For the battlecry on the way to the fight. And nothing for the field when the combat has been settled.

  Then the Cardinal, and with a gesture that was understood to mean ‘rise’, everyone stood. People lowered their heads as he spoke. There were tears. A baby in a mother’s arms opened his or her mouth ... blue blanket ... his ... the baby opened his mouth, the agony was understood even without the sound.

  I could say something to my brother, thought Frank, or my mother. I could say I can’t hear. But would I hear myself saying this? What if I can’t hear myself speaking?

  He was afraid even to clear his throat. He swallowed hard. There was no sound, no liquid in his mouth trickling down. How did it normally sound? Did it make a sound? Maybe the body is silent to itself? No.

  He wanted to hum, but what if the sound was loud, what if he screamed just to hear a sound pierce the silence, and heard nothing himself, but was heard by everyone else? He would make a small sound first. He coughed.

  Nothing.

  He hummed, and felt the vibration between his lips and his teeth.

  The hell with it, with everything he could, he forced the air from his chest and his gut through a constricted throat, epiglottis engaged, and tried to make, without hearing it, the loudest scream he could.

  Before they were on him, holding him, trying to shut him up but at the same time trying not to strangle him, or rather, to strangle but not to hurt, only to silence, because the Cardinal was praying, Frank saw Lowell’s expression, the look to his mother that said, This is hopeless, this is worse than we thought (which meant they talked about his condition, and the shitting in his pants had not been moderately excused or forgotten by them, as if it could!), and then Lowell took him by the hand, and hugged him, but the hug was without love, without equality, there was a sense of family in it, but only as a collection of memories, not as something still alive. Frank knew that he was dead to his family.

  10

  Lonnie Walter

  They had taken him to the hospital, where he was quickly tested. Bettina Welch came by his bed in the emergency room, and Dennis Donoghue sent him flowers, with a card. His mother read the note aloud to everyone in the room, and then, since Frank could hear nothing, she gave it to him. The note was simple: We’re thinking of you. Frank couldn’t imagine the mayor of any city, even the mayor of the smallest, stupidest town, reading this aloud to anyone. But his father seemed to be impressed with this, and took the card and studied it. Lowell didn’t seem to care about it one way or another. Frank hated the note, because it wasn’t the right thing to say to a person in the hospital, even if everyone thinks I’m a psychotic. The note should have said, Get well soon, or something like that, to encourage his recovery, without, at the same time, and this makes the job tricky, losing the need to show respect to the necessity for condolence. But what did We’re thinking about you really mean, except to tell him that his existence entered into their strategies? Instead of comforting Frank, they were threatening him.

  And then the doctor handed him another note, on a prescription pad. The note read, How are you doing?

  Frank took the doctor’s pencil and wrote below the question, Not very well. This is all so embarrassing.

  The doctor wrote, I suppose it is. His name-tag: Ben Nelson, MD. He was young, perhaps thirty. He looked as though he enjoyed San Diego, he had a sun-tanned face, and the sort of happy age lines a man might get from squinting at the luff in a spinnaker.

  How long will this last? wrote Frank.

  I think you just need some sleep. You’re going back to the hotel. That’s my recommendation.

  I want to stay here, wrote Frank.

  His mother and father and brother crowded behind the doctor to look over his shoulder. At this last note they shook their heads, almost in unison.

  The doctor wrote, No.

  Why not? wrote Frank.

  Because there’s nothing wrong with you. Frank wanted to cry, but he couldn’t force any tears, and without hearing his voice, he worried that any sound he made would drive everyone away from him. He thought there was something monumentally cruel about the doctor, for releasing him without at least one night in the hospital, but perhaps the doctor, having consulted the hospital’s chief of staff, regarded this expulsion as the most efficient means to a cure. And Frank knew, regretfully, that the doctor was right, that there really wasn’t anything wrong with him. Still it seemed shocking that everyone would co-operate in this refusal to care for him. What kind of Jewish family would let a thirty-year-old Christian doctor release their son from the emergency room without a second opinion? He suspected a conspiracy. Where were the teams of psychiatrists in all of this? Or even one chubby social worker?

  The doctor took the pad away and walked out of the room. Lowell showed Frank his clothes and indicated that Frank should get dressed. Everyone left the room.

  They all must know, he thought, and if they don’t know for sure, they can guess. He put on the clothing, and went with them back to the hotel.

  By ten o’clock he was back in his room. Lowell wrote him a note. We’ll be down the hall. Dial Mom and Dad’s room if you need us. Let it ring twice, and hang up. We’ll be here.

  What’s next? wrote Frank. He wanted to write a long essay, complaining about the danger in this plan. What if he fell and hurt himself, and couldn’t dial the phone? What if there was a fire in his room and he couldn’t scream for help?

  We’re going back to Los Angeles in the morning.

  Frank wrote, How?

  Lowell wrote back, Driving.

  Frank wrote, Thanx. He wanted Lowell to smile, and Lowell did, but the little grin betrayed the weight of the days since the crash. And Frank was sure that Lowell didn’t like him any more.

  Frank grabbed the paper and wrote this: Publicist? Lawyer?

  Lowell drew a circle around each word, and a line from the circle to a dependent note. For publicist he wrote: Handle this in LA. Attached to lawyer was this: Berberian, probably.

  Lowell turned, and again Frank needed to say something. He wrote, I think I should have stayed at the hospital.

  Don’t be silly, his brother wrote. Then he took the pen and paper, and he too left the room.

  Frank had a dream. In the dream he could hear things. The dream, the images, were unimportant, and even in the dream he could feel their insignificance; the dreaming part of his brain threw them up only for show. Trees, sky, faces, rain, a factory, dogs, scary monsters. And for each image, a different sound. The wind in the trees. A jet across the sky, distant, trailing a sound that summons regret for all the lost opportunities for something real to regret, for loves that were never there to be lost. The rain on a tin roof. A bottling plant, something like a factory he had visited on a school trip, glass bottles rattling down an assembly line. Three black dogs fighting with each other. He woke up from the scary monsters, shrimp-eared Africans begging on the sidewalks of London, and he heard himself shout.

  He rubbed his head against the pillow and wanted to write a poem about the sound of skin on cotton – or was the pillowcase a blend of cotton and polyester? Well, that should be in the poem too. What a miracle he would make of the absolutely ordinary. Now that I’m a writer, he thought, I can exploit all of my perceptions. This is so liberating. A poem about the sound of the sheet against the ear, and not some fruity ode to cotton, no! Fuck the natural, I’ll in
clude the synthetic in the experience, I won’t revile the polyester! I’ll be a poet of sounds! And so my interest in music will not be wasted.

  He got out of the bed and looked through his bag for the brown notebook. He reached into the place where he kept his pen, but it wasn’t there. He searched the room, but there was nothing to write with. It wasn’t yet 1 in the morning. He could call Lowell, or his mother, but they were asleep. He would speak to them in the morning, to tell them he was fine. Of course they think I’m already fine, that nothing is wrong with me. If they thought something was wrong with me, they would have left me in a hospital, or my mother would have stayed in the room with me, or Lowell would have. If they loved me I would be in the hospital. But I’m not sick. So he was angry with them, even while he knew they were right.

  A pen. To find one.

  He got dressed and went into the hall, and to the elevator, and took it downstairs.

  In the lobby he asked the clerk at the front desk for a pen. He thought she might have been a man whose sex had been changed. There was something about the size of her hands, a little too large for a woman, too wide, and there was an added pleasure she took in the humiliation of the job, a delight in how busy it kept her, that suggested to Frank that she might have once been a man whose fantasy was just this, to wear a woman’s uniform, and serve. Or not, and she was just a woman with large hands, and Frank was a ridiculous man.

  She gave him a cheap ballpoint imprinted with the hotel’s name, the kind of pen that drags on paper, that forces the writer to use a strong hand, leaving a deep groove, a trace of the hand more definite than the faint colour in the ink. He asked if the bar was still open, and it was. He wanted a beer. Then he thought that if he drank, he would forget his poem, and then he thought about all the poets who drank and for a moment considered something to loosen himself up, but he decided not to drink, that he had to follow his own muse, this proudly sober muse. After all, he had been sober when he wrote the letter to Anna, the letter, that first entry in his collected works.

  Bettina Welch was in the far corner of the dining room, her back to the door. She was sitting at a table, and the others with her, Piet Bernays and the two women who were always in the crisis centre, were laughing. He had already forgotten their names. Frank saw that he could sneak close to their table without being recognized if he stayed on the other side of a divider between the dining room and the bar.

  He felt silly crouching low to avoid being seen, but it worked. When he was about ten feet from them, he could hear them clearly. They were making fun of the families. Why am I here? he asked himself. I should be in my room, writing a poem about a pillow.

  They were making fun of red-haired Brenda. ‘My baby, you killed my baby!’

  And then Piet Bernays said, ‘Frank, let me take care of this.’ And then he did the next voice, ‘Whatever you say, Lowell, whatever you say!’

  ‘Whatever you say, Lowell, whatever you say!’ said Bettina, imitating the imitation.

  ‘Who’s this?’ said one of the women, and she closed her mouth and made the sounds of someone without a tongue trying to speak through lips sewn together. ‘Nnnngggg. Mnnnnggg.’

  ‘Frank Gale this afternoon,’ said Piet. ‘Give me someone harder to do. Give me someone else.’

  ‘Give me anyone else,’ said Bettina.

  ‘And his brother,’ said one of the women.

  ‘At least you can talk to him,’ said Bernays.

  ‘There’s this guy on the phone, yesterday, and today,’ said one of the women, finding a new target. ‘It’s like, “I want to speak to the man in charge, I want to speak to the man in charge.” And I’m like, “Sir, we understand how you must feel now, and we’ll do everything we can to help you, in any way that we can.”’

  ‘So what did you do?’ asked Bernays.

  ‘I gave him to Dockery.’

  ‘And Dockery pretended to be Donoghue?’

  ‘Dockery tried to let him think that he was the man in charge, and the guy spilled out his whole story, and then he found out that Dockery didn’t have the power to hear his story and do anything about it, that he’d have to get to Donoghue and tell the story all over again, so he said he’d sue Dockery for something or other.’

  Bettina said she’d heard that the survivors were split pretty evenly between Berberian and Dessick.

  Bernays lit a cigarette and said, ‘This is a real mess. It’s going to take a long time. If I were one of the survivors, I don’t know who I’d go with. They’re both good.’

  One of the women said she favoured Berberian, the other said she trusted Dessick. Bettina said she was glad she didn’t have to have an opinion. She asked Bernays whom he would go with if he had to make a choice.

  He thought for a moment. ‘I don’t know.’ He said this with deep awe for his confusion, and his ignorance gained such a degree of power that the choices the women at the table made seemed immediately stupid, that having made a choice, having seen a distinction, far from granting the choosers a degree of authority, made them look immeasurably dumb.

  The table was quiet. Frank hoped that some backwash of guilt had swept over them, that the sewers of their emotions could not contain all of their cruelty. They sat in silence and sipped their drinks in reveries of a nostalgia stolen from a cultural idea of boozy meditation.

  This is how the silence was broken: ‘Nnnngggg. Mnnnnggg.’ It was Bettina Welch this time, and her version of Frank’s paralysis was better than the other woman’s. They all laughed, each in turn, and made the sound, cracking each other up.

  ‘What can you do?’ she said. ‘You have to laugh.’

  Frank thought. Why won’t they let me hate them? Why am I so weak that I can’t hate them?

  He crawled back along the wall, in the shadows of the room. He stood up and turned around, and when Piet Bernays saw him, Frank was sure that it looked as though he had just come into the room. He stood there, watching the table. No one said anything. Bettina and Bernays looked at each other, that secret exchange, but this time Frank would not let their knowledge of what he had done get in the way. He would confound them now.

  ‘Hello,’ said Frank.

  Of course they couldn’t talk; he was the ghost, he was Christ risen.

  ‘Yes, my voice. It came back to me. The doctor said I just needed some rest. He was right.’

  ‘Well, that’s wonderful,’ said Bernays. ‘We were all thinking about you.’

  ‘Thinking what?’ asked Frank.

  ‘Hoping that you would get better, of course.’

  ‘Thinking or hoping?’

  ‘Thinking hoping,’ said Bernays. He wouldn’t be trapped, even with a few drinks inside him.

  ‘May I join you?’ asked Frank.

  ‘Of course,’ said Bettina. Her training battled with whatever she’d been drinking, but she could not hide her impatience with him, and she knew it and tried to fight it, she tried to be nicer to him, which only made her that much more false.

  ‘We were just ...’ said Bernays, unable to complete the sentence, lost, guilty, because he suspected that Frank had listened to all their impersonations.

  ‘We were just having a drink,’ said Bettina. ‘But if you need anything, anything at all, I’m here for you.’ She was back on track.

  ‘Do you want a drink?’ asked one of the women. What were their names? It was making him desperate, that he had forgotten their names. Well, they had only been introduced once. Why weren’t they wearing some name-tags? But Frank had to answer her, name or not.

  Frank, very quietly, to sound ruminative and deferential, said, ‘Nnnngggg. Mnnnnggg.’ He hoped it was the kind of ‘no’ that comes under the breath, full of exhaustion and shame.

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked one of the women.

  No one acknowledged his parody of their parody. But if they had, what would have been the appropriate reaction? A sudden shower of blood from every pore? Or a ghastly release of crap in their pants? Frank imagined the four of them sitting t
here, and then, in shame and fear, discovering how little control they really had over their intestines clogged with rotten meat, their fetid colons.

  ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘It’s been a hard day.’

  ‘A drink might be good for you,’ said Bernays, and Frank was sure he wanted to slit his own throat for having given him the chance to accept, that his good breeding, his manners, had for a second overcome his cunning. Frank considered accepting the drink, just to sit at the table with them. If he did, he would say nothing, he would answer their questions as briefly as possible, or not answer at all, no, answer briefly, and let them try to talk to each other without including him in the conversation. If Bernays had any hope of fucking any one of them tonight, or all three, Frank’s ghoulish silence at the table would have dampened the possibility of an orgasm for any of them.

  ‘Don’t you drink beer?’ asked Bettina, surprising Frank with her memory. Yes, he’d had a beer in Los Angeles. So she’d been watching him. He fought against feeling a little respect for her.

  ‘Why don’t we see what’s on tap?’ said Bernays.

  ‘Oh, that’s OK,’ said Frank, which didn’t really mean anything. It could go on like this for ever, he thought, I can stand here, and we can talk like this, about nothing, yet aware of everything, not just for another three minutes, but until time is finished, until everyone knows everything about everything. I can keep us alive for eternity if I stand here, all of us forever afloat on frustration. Death from boredom? Never.

  This is how to torture them, thought Frank, and then he wanted to say to them, ‘You see, after all, I can hate! I am capable of reflecting back all the hate that is beamed to me. I can stand here, ten feet away from you, so that you have to raise your voices just a little, which must irritate you, and I like that, I like to see the strain of forcing this geniality when the last thing you want to do is work, since being nice to me is what you’ve been paid to do. And yet you do not fully comprehend the source of this irritation. You think you are uncomfortable because the social traffic among people always hurts. You do not know that were I standing next to you, the power you have as a group would override my weak force, so I stand here, just this far away, and it gives me great pleasure. You may think that I am some pathetic loser of a brother, some kid brother to my younger brother, some kind of desperate loser – loser at work, loser at airplane lottery – but I am the king of these few seconds of your lives, the moment belongs to me, I am the master, I am in control.’