After Silence

by Jonathan Carroll

  “This is no fucking cartoon, Max! I’m not fucking ‘Paper Clip’! Stop talking shit! That crazy fucking shit! I’m not your cartoon. I’m not an angel! Why don’t you say the truth! Why don’t you say the truth for once in my life!”

  I think I could have stopped his arm the next time, reached out fast and blocked it, but I didn’t. He hit me again on the cheek, on the throat, on the top of the head. I wanted to lift my arms to keep him away, keep him off, but there was no strength. He hit me again and again until I blacked out. The last thing I remember was he kept saying “Daddy” as he beat me with all his might.

  “There once was a very great magician who, having grown old, decided to work his greatest magic by turning a mouse into a beautiful woman. After he had finished his masterpiece, he felt that because she was so exquisite, he had to find her the most powerful being in the world for a husband. After much thought, he went to the sun and asked him to marry this woman. The sun was touched by the offer, but said no because ‘there is someone stronger than me—the cloud, who covers me when I shine.’ The magician thanked him for his honesty and went to the cloud with the same offer. Much to his surprise, the cloud said no too because there was someone even stronger than him—the mountain, whose ragged peaks stop the cloud’s movement across the sky. Shaking his head, the magician went next to the mountain but again heard no. ‘There’s one stronger than even me,’ he said. ‘It is the mouse, because he can burrow into my side as often as he pleases and I am powerless to stop him.’ So at last the magician went home and sadly turned the beautiful young girl back into a mouse so that she could take another mouse for a husband. All things return to their origin.”

  Finky Linky sang his crazy goodbye song and the show ended. Lincoln turned to me and squinted a disbelieving eye. “A mouse is not the greatest thing in the world. It’s not greater than the sun!”

  I could feel a great father-son moral lesson coming on here. I took a deep breath and was about to begin, but when I opened my mouth nothing came out. I could move my jaws and lips but there was no voice in me, not a peep. I cleared my throat but even that made no sound. I tried again. Nothing. Rubbing my neck, I nodded at him. He was waiting for an answer but his quizzical expression asked if I was playing a joke on him. He began to smile. I tried harder to talk but couldn’t. My silence began to scare me. I pushed him off my lap and sat up straighter. I tried again. Nothing. Again. Nothing. I began to panic.

  I woke up.

  The dream was a recurring one I had had over the years and it would have gotten worse as it invariably did if the pain hadn’t woken me. I was conscious but there was only pain. My eyes were all right. I opened them and was not surprised to see an unknown white room around me. After a time it made sense that this was a hospital room. My face felt huge and hot. When I put a tentative hand up and touched it, pain barked back at me to stay away, leave it alone or it would really get me. I said okay, okay, I’ll be careful. But I had to know how bad the damage was. I had to know what was there. This pain became a dog in my mind, growling in a corner of this big white room, ready to attack the moment I did the wrong thing. As gently as possible, I touched my face and felt a battlefield of cuts, bruises, swelling. Once sure that was all, there was no more, I slid the hand down and over as much of my body as I could reach and prayed thanks when I felt no casts or heavy bandages. He’d done my face. That must have been enough for him.

  I saw a buzzer for the nurse and shakily got hold of it. I moved my head too fast and suddenly the pain dog growled loud.

  “Well, hello, Mr. Fischer! You’re back on earth with us, huh? How’re you feeling?”

  “Happy to still be around. Can you tell me what happened? But please go slow, I’m not really here yet.”

  “Sure. The police found your car all banged up and went lookin’ for you. They found you down an embankment and you were unconscious. We thought you might have a bad concussion or a skull fracture along with those cuts, but they did a scan and didn’t find anything. You’re sounding pretty good now. What the heck happened out there?”

  I sighed to give myself time, then realized a lie wasn’t necessary because most of the truth would do for now. I told her a stranger had forced me off the road and at gunpoint made me go over the embankment with him. Once there, he started hitting me until… I couldn’t say more and she didn’t press it.

  “It’s so crazy, so scary these days. Sometimes I get scared just going out of the house to buy some milk. My husband told me—” She would have gone on, only a state policeman walked into the room and asked if we might be alone for a while. She took off. Sitting down on the chair next to my bed, he took out a notepad.

  I told him the same story, and with a few specific questions here and there, he appeared satisfied. He was particularly interested in what the assailant looked like. I described a man in his early thirties, nondescript, but with a surprisingly deep voice. I thought it best to add one memorable characteristic so this fantasy attacker sounded more real. No, I had never seen him before. No idea why he would want to hurt me. I said who I was, and when asked why I was in New Jersey, I said business. The cop was a nice guy, friendly and sympathetic. He shook his head often, as if he couldn’t believe what had happened. When I was finished, he asked me to sign a form and said it wouldn’t be necessary to meet again unless I had questions. As he was leaving, I touched his arm and asked how long I had been in the hospital. Checking his watch, he said ten hours. Ten hours! I could barely keep from shouting. Ten hours! What had Lincoln done in that time? All the possibilities were horrible.

  Alone again, I eased myself up to the side of the bed and picked up the telephone. It was difficult but I talked the hospital operator into placing a long-distance call to our home in Los Angeles. What time was it there? It didn’t matter. The phone rang and rang. Pick it up. Pick up the damned phone!

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Lily? Lily, it’s Max—”

  “Max, Jesus Christ, where are you? It’s Mary.”

  “Who?” I couldn’t understand. Why hadn’t Lily picked it up?

  “Mary. It’s me, Mary Poe. Max, for God’s sake, wherever you are, get home. Lincoln’s dead, Max. He hung himself. Lily came in and found him. Max, are you there? Do you hear me? Lincoln is dead.”

  My clothes were in the closet. There was a mirror on the inside of the closet door with a small lamp over it. I turned it on and looked at myself for the first time in ten hours. My face was as bad as my fingers had said, but I’d seen worse-looking people at bus stops in Los Angeles. The pain dog was bellowing as I slowly dressed. I left three hundred dollars on the table next to the bed, along with a note saying if that wasn’t enough to send the bill to me in California.

  I opened the door to the room, saw no one in the hall, and walked out. Luckily there was a door that opened onto a large garden. Outside smelled of good fresh things and made me want to cry. It was evening. I walked on cobblestones across the garden and then through some high hedges into the hospital parking lot. A taxi had dropped someone off at the front door and was just pulling away when I flagged it down and got in.

  “Hey, you’re lucky. I was almost out of here. Where to?” The driver looked in the rearview mirror and his eyes widened. “Holy cow! What happened to you?”

  “Car accident. Would you please take me to Newark Airport?”

  “You sure you’re all right? I mean, it’s okay to travel and all?”

  “Yes, please just go to the airport.”

  Hanged himself. It was absolutely the crudest, most brilliant thing he could have done. What had he said back there? “I’m no cartoon.” Did he say that? Yes, something like that. But now this and it was so hideously perfect that nothing in the world could have been more effective. I was certain he had done it somewhere in the house where Lily would have been sure to find him. Lily or Greer.

  “Greer. Oh God.”

  “You say something?”

  “No, nothing.”

  The driver look
ed at me in the mirror and shook his head. My carry-on bag was next to me on the seat in the dark. I reached into it and felt around for the sketchbook and a pencil. Flipping the cover over, I put the pencil to the paper and began to draw. Except for the streetlights and the occasional car headlights flicking over us, it was utterly dark in the back of the taxi. But I drew and drew, never looking down, only feeling the pencil scratching across paper, doing whatever my hand felt like doing. I drew until we arrived at the airport, where I left the book and pencil on the seat and got out to catch a plane home.

  There was a film on the flight. The stewardess gave me a set of earphones but I left them in my lap. It was better to watch without any sound, making up dialogue in my head, guessing the plot as it skittered silently along. Anything to fill my mind.

  A very beautiful blond woman has the world in her hip pocket, money, power, a handsome boyfriend who seems to love her as much as the rest of the world does. But she grows tired of it all. One day she meets an enormously fat man who works as a cashier at a supermarket. They talk, she laughs, they talk some more. The next shot is of her waiting for him out in the parking lot after work. He comes out of the store and sees her there, a blond Venus leaning on her red sports car, obviously waiting for him. Cut to his face. His eyes roll up in his head and he faints.

  As the film got worse, I became more and more involved. I put on the earphones and turned them way up. The couple must fight the whole world to prove their love is real. Every cliché you could think of was in the film. Her rich parents are outraged, her once nifty boyfriend turns out to be a cad who does whatever he can to break the lovebirds up. They almost part, but true love wins out.

  Probably one of the sillier films I’d seen in my life, but I laughed at the lame jokes, sat forward on my seat when things looked bad for them. At the end, when they are off in an idyllic Vermont town running a general store together, I began to cry. There was no stopping it. A middle-aged woman on the other side of the aisle watched me suspiciously. What did she see? A man with a swollen, bruised face crying like a child. At that moment I would have given anything to see that movie again, but the screen went blank, then black. Unconsciously I reached into my bag for the sketchbook, but remembered I’d left it in the taxi. I looked at the staring woman but she had gone back to her magazine. There was nothing left to do but close my eyes and think about my dead boy.

  I got the car from the parking lot and drove toward town. I’d been gone a little over twenty-four hours, but the only thing left in the world that was the same for me was this road with the orange lights above and the familiar billboards for airlines, hotels, weekend package trips to Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe. When I passed the gas station where the cashier looked at you through binoculars, I thought of stopping and asking him through all his thick protective glass: Remember me? Forget how I look now; I was the one who offered you a twenty last night and made no trouble. Last night when things were only full of dangerous possibilities. Not like now with my purple split face and dead future.

  I passed the hamburger stand where the murderous gang had stood, but it was empty and only full of lonesome yellow light. A few more rights, lefts, two red traffic lights, another right turn, and I was on our street. Welcome home, Daddy. Lincoln rode his bicycle down this street. We had walked the dog together here. “Lincoln, there are some packages on the lawn. Would you give me a hand bringing them in?”

  Lily’s car was nowhere to be seen, but Mary Poe’s black Jeep was parked in our driveway. I pulled up to the curb and turned the motor off.

  “I’ll count to fifty and go in. Just give me to fifty and I’ll go.”

  The lights were on in the living room and, far away as it was, I tried to see through the window if there was anyone in there besides Mary. No movement, no forms going back and forth. I was counting to fifty in my head as I watched. At fifty I would go. Nothing moved.

  Something tapped loudly on my window. I jumped. My mind screamed it’s Lincoln, Lincoln’s back. He’s here, he’s dead but he’s here…

  The face at the window was a woman with tan skin and dark hair. Thirty-five or so, she was pretty but there were a great many lines on her face that showed both her age and her experience. I was so spooked by her tapping that I didn’t understand when she gestured with a finger for me to roll down the window. I shook my head. She was close enough so that when she spoke I heard through the glass: “Could you put your window down? Please, only a minute.”

  I rolled it down halfway. Calming down, I realized I knew her face from somewhere. Was she a neighbor? What was she doing out here at this time of night?

  “Thank you. Do you know who I am? Do you recognize me?”

  “No.”

  “I’m Little White, Mr. Fischer. Lincoln’s friend, Little White.”

  When I saw her the night before, Little White was sixteen years old with a head of spiky white hair and a face so clown-white/deathly pale you’d have thought she wore special makeup. This woman was close to my age, had short dark hair and… freckles. Yet the longer I looked, the more that familiar young face came to the surface through this one. The eyes, mouth… they were the same. I had seen her so often in the months she’d hung around with Lincoln.

  “Can we talk a minute?” She waited. I didn’t move. “How about Anwen Meier, Mr. Fischer? How about Lincoln shooting at you on the road?”

  I looked again at the house and got out. We stood no more than three feet apart. She was wearing a dark chic dress, a gold bracelet, high heels. I remembered what she had been wearing yesterday: dirty jeans, a T-shirt saying “Nine Inch Nails,” combat boots. Now this thirty-something woman, elegant and attractive, her perfume drifting over subtle and flowery, was saying they were one and the same.

  “You’re not really surprised, are you?” The voice. Yes, it was the girl’s voice too, only slightly deeper.

  “No.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t be. Lincoln told me what he did to you in New Jersey. He told me why too.”

  I said nothing.

  “I saw him today. Before he did that.” She pointed at our house. “He told me he was going to do it, but I couldn’t stop him. He called from the plane and asked me to pick him up. Told me to come alone and not tell Elvis. He got very upset and begged me to be there when he landed. That wasn’t like him: Lincoln never asked for anything, so I said sure, okay, I’ll come.

  “I can’t tell you how bad he looked when I saw him. In the car at first he didn’t say anything, just kept clicking his lighter open and closed till it got on my nerves. I asked him what the hell was going on and he told me. About you and your wife and how she kidnapped him. And about how you told him he was an angel.

  “After he was finished telling me his whole story, he asked if I believed him. Know what I said? I’ll believe it if you prove it. That’s the only way you can ever really know, right? He said, ‘Okay, pull over and I’ll prove it.’ I didn’t know what to expect, but I pulled into Loehmann’s parking lot and turned off the car.

  “He started telling me things about myself no one in the entire world could have known. Things I’d even forgotten, they were so deeply buried.

  “I was still shaking from it when he said, ‘That’s now, that’s who you are today. Now I’m going to show you your immediate future.’ When it was over and he brought me back, I had no doubt in the world that that was what the next few years of my life were going to be.

  “And you know what? They were total shit. First, thanks to Elvis, there were bad drugs which landed me in the hospital twice for long stays. Then a withdrawal clinic. I got out and, to spite my parents, married a painter who decided beating me up was more fun than painting. Worse, he wouldn’t let go or give me a divorce until my parents bought him off. And even after that he made trouble for me, the psycho.

  “I mean, my life was one big horror story after another. Seeing them unfold like that, I knew they’d happen, because the way I was, they made sense. Lincoln showed me every disgusting and pathet
ic thing that was going to happen to me those next eighteen years. Unbelievable. Eighteen more years of that! I’d be a living disaster area for as long as I’d already been alive till I finally got hold of myself and got it together. Great, huh? Lots to look forward to.” She had been speaking nonstop for minutes but paused now and smiled. “Your angel showed me the ghost of my Christmas Future and it was real, all right.

  “Then he brought me back and said, ‘That’s it. That’s what your life is going to be like.’ I asked what I could do to stop or change it. Nothing. But there was one thing he could do if I wanted: he could make me older. He said when I was thirty-four my whole life would change and begin to be satisfying. He could skip me up there if I wanted, over those gruesome eighteen years, but with my whole history in my head, so I’d end up the same person. It’d just be like going over a bridge, and the water down below was the bad years.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Better than ever, and it’s only been a few hours. The funny thing is, I went home and my parents didn’t see any difference.”

  I knew she wanted to talk more about it, but I couldn’t. I needed to ask other questions. “What did Lincoln say at the airport? What did he tell you?”

  “He made me promise not to tell. He also said not to tell you what I think of you and your wife.” She stopped, considered this, went on. “The only thing he asked me to do specifically was give you this.” She put her hand in her purse and pulled out a pistol. “He used it on you yesterday.”

  “What am I supposed to do with it?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he thought you’d want to use it on yourself. I have to go now. I did what he asked.” Turning away, she walked down the dark street, some of her perfume still in the air.

  “Wait! How could he save you if he was so upset? And why didn’t you stop him from killing himself?”

  “Because we were friends and wanted the other to have what they wanted. Because of what you did, Lincoln wanted to die; that was his choice. He was my friend, Mr. Fischer. He’d do anything for me, even at the end. Too bad you didn’t know him.” She turned again and left. I had no desire to call or follow her. She meant nothing to me, and if her story was true, so what? Lincoln was dead. My fault. My dead angel.