Sleeping in Flame

by Jonathan Carroll

  "You know I love you anyway, Nicholas."

  There was an embarrassed silence, then, "Yeah, me too. Take care of each other. I'll see you in a few weeks."

  "Do you want me to take you to the airport? It's no trouble."

  "No, Eva will take me. She likes to drive out and play her radio. Bye-bye."

  The next morning the Sylvians arrived at the airport an hour before Nicholas's flight. It wasn't like him to be such an early bird, but he knew El Al was very slow and careful about inspecting luggage and passports before they let you on the plane. He couldn't afford to miss the flight, so he played the good boy.

  As he was checking in, an old Mercedes pulled up to one of the doors on the upper level of the airport. Several Arabs with submachine guns and hand grenades got out and ran into the building. Eyewitnesses said it was such a shock to see them there, that no one really started doing anything until after the men opened fire and threw the first grenades at the El Al counter. The same thing was happening in Rome at Fiumicino Airport.

  The bullet that tore off part of Eva Sylvian's ear was probably the same one that kept moving – straight through her husband's head. One in the head, one in the stomach. If you have ever seen that grisly picture they ran in Time of the many dead at Vienna airport, Nicholas Sylvian is the man in the dark suit splayed like a dropped doll, still clutching something in his hand. It is his passport in the leather billfold Maris and I gave him at our last meeting.

  We heard about the attack in an electronics store while out shopping for a new VCR. The first report was that the road to the airport was closed to all traffic because of an "incident." We paid no attention because the Austrians love to interrupt their radio programs with traffic reports at all times of day. But a few minutes later the first detailed news of what had happened started coming in. Maris said she noticed the whole place stopped and, as one, everybody turned toward whatever radios were on in the store. These things didn't happen in Vienna. They simply didn't. No one looked at anyone else – only the radio speakers had the answers we wanted.

  In that shock-time when the enormity of what had happened began to come clear, I was first outraged at the sheer wrongness of the act. Shoot randomly into groups of people at an airport? For what, a political cause? What about the politics of humanity? Or man's purported ability to distinguish between the enemy and a child with a doll in its arms? Or had part of the world really turned the corner en masse, really grown so mad as to think enemy and child were the same? I kept saying "Those bastards!" to myself as the news updates turned into horror stories.

  Someone grabbed my arm. Before I registered it, Maris said in a scared, shrill voice, "Nicholas is out there! He was going to Israel on El Al!"

  For an instant I hated her for saying that. We hate anyone who hands us the death sentence, the news that everything is terminal.

  We looked at each other and ran out of the store. My car was parked nearby and we jumped in without saying anything. Both of us were silent all the way to the airport, the loud radio news the only words we shared.

  A mile outside the town of Schwechat on the autobahn, police barricades blocked the road. I told the first man we came to I was afraid my brother might be one of the dead. He was sympathetic and checked with his boss, but couldn't let us through because things were still going on out there.

  After they finished shooting, the terrorists ran out of the airport building, got back in their car, and drove away down the same road we were on. They didn't get far. There was a crazy, moving-car shoot-out between them and the police that resulted in more blood and death. There is a photograph of their stopped Mercedes, its rear window blasted out, one of the terrorists dead on the road, his pants conspicuously soiled. A young policeman is looking at the body with a small smile on his face.

  I made a U-turn and drove to the next phone booth, where I called my friend Barbara Wilkinson, who worked in the news department at O.R.F. Luckily I got right through, and she knew what I wanted the moment she came on the line. Nicholas had introduced us years before.

  "Walker, Nicholas is dead. I just heard that. His wife was wounded, but that's all I know. Call me back in a couple of hours. Everything is completely crazy here. Call me later. I'm sorry. I'm crying. Call me later."

  I realize now that I began this narrative by speaking of Nicholas's and my relationship in the present tense. But that's only because whenever he comes to mind, always several times a day, I think of him as still alive: his late-night calls, the black Valentino suits and pastel shirts, the strange but unique balance of precision and hyperbole of a good man unsure of himself but totally sure of his art. I loved the landscape inside him. Next to Maris, he was the best friend I had as an adult, and perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay him is thinking he is still here. When he died it was the first time I ever had the feeling that life sometimes unfairly takes sides. Possibly the only reason for that relationship was to be happy together then, for that period of our lives. Expecting or wanting more was unwise or greedy.

  No, I don't like that. There are too many ways to rationalize the death of someone you love. Many sound good, but none are strong or convincing enough to genuinely console you. Especially when you see someone smoking "his" cigarettes, or a new film you would love to talk to him about . . . if only he were alive.

  Not long before this happened, I was reading around in a poetry anthology and came across one entitled "A Space in the Air" by Jon Silkin. The last part of the poem touched me, so that I copied it down and gave it to Maris. She liked it too and put it up on the board above her desk.

  And I shall always fear

  The death of those we love as

  The hint of your death, love.

  Why had I discovered that poem then? Why had I thought it "lovely" when all it did was tell a cold truth about life that was best ignored as long as possible? Art is beautiful until it becomes real or the truth. Keats was wrong – beauty may be truth, but the truth, once lived, is rarely beautiful.

  Neither Maris nor I liked Eva Sylvian. She was a loud, self-centered woman who never stopped talking about herself. She lived in the shadow of her husband because she liked being known around town as Mrs. Nicholas Sylvian. But she was also the kind of person who fights her way out of that shadow by constantly trying to dominate any conversation with stories from her own dull life. Somewhere inside, she knew the most interesting thing about her was her husband, but that only made her more strident and desperate for attention.

  In the hospital, she was impossible to listen to. After the first visit neither of us had any desire to be there, because she went on and on about what she'd seen, how she'd felt when it happened, what the doctors were doing for her . . . but little about Nicholas. To put it horribly, she had finally gotten hold of the spotlight and wasn't about to give it up for anything.

  But because of Maris, we went to visit Eva every day. Maris believed in continuity: If this woman was Nicholas's wife, then it was our duty to help until she was ready to walk back into her life again. We didn't need to be her friends; only to continue for a while our friendship with the man who'd loved her.

  In his will he had asked to be cremated, but first they held a memorial service at his favorite building in town, the Otto Wagner-designed church on the grounds of Vienna's largest insane asylum, the Steinhof. That was in the will too, but I could never figure out whether the request was serious or another sly Nicholas joke. No matter. The Jugendstil church was filled with people. What was most heartening, the mourners came from everywhere to say good-bye to him. He would have loved to see the array.

  He'd made films about old Russians, sexy spies, a foolish tour group that got lost on its way to Venice. Some of his movies were dull, others superb. But all of them were made with the greatest love toward whomever he was picturing, and that was evident everywhere. As we were walking out of the church, an old woman with a thick Ottakringer accent and an old loden coat on said to the man next to her, "Nicholas Sylvian knew us. That's w
hy I came. He knew what was in my refrigerator, you know what I mean?"

  We drove Eva to the Zentralfriedhof where the cremation would take place. It is an enormous cemetery and you can easily get lost in it if you don't know where you're going. Eva went into the crematorium and we started walking back to the car.

  "What do you think of cremation?"

  "Not much. I read somewhere that your soul gets destroyed if you do it. That scares me a little. I want to be buried in a nice simple box."

  She stopped and looked at me. "In Vienna?"

  "I don't know. I love it here, but a small part of me thinks I should be put down in my own country. If there's any life after death, I'd be able to understand the language better."

  She put her arm around my back and we walked in silence. On reaching the car, she stopped and said she wanted to wander around the place for a while by herself, if I didn't mind. She would catch a tram home. I understood because I felt like being alone too. We made a date to meet for dinner and I drove off with a quick glance at her in the rearview mirror. I would go home, she would look at gravestones, Eva would wait while her husband slept in flames.

  The phone was ringing in my apartment when I opened the door. Dashing to catch it, I narrowly missed stepping on Orlando, who'd come to the door to say hello. I scooped him up and took him along to the phone.

  "Hello?"

  "Walker, it's Maris. You've got to come back here. You've got to see something. You have to. It's incredible!"

  "Right now? I just got in this minute. I really don't feel like driving anymore, Maris."

  "Have you ever heard of a man named Moritz Benedikt?"

  "No."

  "All right, I'll take a picture. I've got the Polaroid with me, but it's not the same. When you see this picture you're going to drive out here in the middle of the night, believe me. Can I come over after?"

  "Sure. I'll probably be asleep, so use your key."

  Real sadness either keeps me up all night or punches me to sleep. This time it was all I could do to put the receiver down and get to bed before going out as if I'd been conked on the head. I dreamed of Nicholas sitting naked on a scarlet stallion twenty hands high in the middle of a beautiful pond. He looked very happy and called out to me, "Bathing the red horse!"

  When I awoke, Orlando was asleep on my stomach and Maris was lying by my side. The room was completely dark and warm and smelled of her distant, hours-old perfume. It took some time for my mind to land back on earth. While it was circling the airfield, I gently combed her soft hair with my fingers. It had grown much longer since she'd been in Vienna.

  "How long have you been here?"

  "About an hour. I'm glad you're up. I've been dying to wake you. You've got to see what I found. Can I turn on the light?"

  "Uh huh."

  The light burst the air like a flashbulb. I closed my eyes against the white shock. When I opened them again, she was holding a Polaroid photograph in front of me. It was a picture of an ornate black marble gravestone. Across the top, thick gold letters spelled out the name "Moritz Benedikt" and the dates he lived. Below them was a small cameo photograph of Benedikt; a common practice on Austrian gravestones. I couldn't see the photo very well, but before I had a chance to think, she handed me another snapshot, this time a close-up of the cameo.

  "Holy shit!"

  It was a picture of me. Same hair, soft tired eyes, large nose. It's common to hear people say they know or have seen someone who looks a lot like you. It's different when you're faced with a mirror image of yourself, thirty years dead. It's time blown through a horn – right in your face.

  "Who was he?"

  "I don't know. I asked every groundkeeper out there I could find, but no one knew. It'd be easy enough to track him down, though, Walker. God knows, Vienna is famous for keeping records. You could probably find out how many sugars he put in his coffee, if you looked hard enough."

  I couldn't stop looking at the picture. The light wasn't good and some parts were a little out of focus, but the resemblance was stark and mysterious and . . . exciting in its way. You think you are the sole proprietor of your looks. Once you discover you aren't, you immediately start wondering what else there was in common between you and your double. What kind of life did he live? What were his secrets, what were his dreams? The world is a place of wonders, but the greatest of all is yourself. Finding that someone once walked the earth with your face is incentive enough to send you out searching for answers. But that was one of my greatest mistakes. Wonders don't always have answers or reasons. Or rather, even if they do, those answers are not necessarily what we want to know.

  The black stone was so polished it looked like obsidian. The gold letters cut into its face were deep and done with great care and skill. I stood a few feet away and took in the whole thing before moving closer to look at his picture on the stone. A bouquet of not-so-long-dead flowers lay at the foot of the grave. There was someone alive who knew and still cared for Moritz Benedikt. Oddly, Maris hadn't mentioned the flowers, but she'd been right about something else: After her photographs, I'd had to come to the cemetery the next day to see for myself.

  The cameo of Benedikt was large and vaguely yellow from age. He wore a dark suit and formal shirt, but no tie. Not only did we look alike, but for the first time I realized he wore an expression halfway between amusement and small exasperation that I often had on. My mother called me Mr. Long-suffering whenever she saw it. So, the last public image of Moritz Benedikt was as Mr. Long-suffering. Too bad for him. It made me smile. I wanted to smile then or just generally lighten up because the more I looked at my . . . self, the more nervous and uncomfortable I became. Besides the impossible similarity in looks, I had a gooseflesh chill going up the middle of my spine from something else as well. Some people, after shivering involuntarily, are asked what's the matter. The common answer I'd heard all my life was "Someone just walked over my grave." How's this, though – imagine coming across your grave, replete with a picture of you on it wearing one of your most recognizable expressions. Only it isn't your grave and it isn't your stone and it isn't a picture of you and the person in the ground there has been dead thirty years. That ground two feet in front of you.

  Two old women, both dressed in black, both carrying identical purses, walked by. One of them looked at me and nodded her head.

  "Guten Tag, Herr Rednaxela."

  The name stuck its finger in my ear, but I couldn't remember where I'd heard it before. I smiled at the woman as if I knew her and what she was talking about.

  "It took you a long time to get here!"

  Her friend looked angry and shook her head. "Leave him alone. He's way ahead of schedule."

  Rednaxela. The crazy man on the bicycle the first day in Vienna with Maris. He had called me Rednaxela!

  Without really seeing, I watched the two women start walking away.

  "Wait!" I ran a few steps to catch them. "What are you talking about? Who's Rednaxela?"

  Both women smiled and exchanged glances – they were in on something I didn't know anything about. One of them gave me a little coquettish shrug. "That's your job to find out. You've come this far."

  The other one came up and patted my shoulder. "Everybody's proud of you. Don't mind what I said before. I was only teasing."

  They began to leave again. I grabbed the one closest by the arm and pulled her around to face me. Her smile vanished. "Don't touch me! Stop asking questions. Fuck off!"

  I shook her arm. It was thin as a pipe cleaner through the thick wool of her coat. "What are you talking about? Who's Rednaxela? How do you know me?"

  A bunch of birds on the grass started as one and flew away.

  The woman saw a young couple nearby and started screaming in a squeaky voice, "Help! Let me go! Leave me! Help!" Her companion hit me on the back with her purse. The couple came running over and the man pulled me away from the old woman.

  "Who's Rednaxela, damn it!"

  "You'll find out, shithead!"
<
br />   "Just tell me now."

  "The fuck I will, sonny boy."

  I started back at her, but the man held me.

  "Hey, man, are you crazy? That's an old woman!" He was strong and wasn't going to let go.

  The old women scuttled away, watching me the whole time over their shoulders. At first they both looked terrified, but when they were a safe distance away, one of them laughed like a loon and made a crazy face at me: thumbs in her ears, pinkies pulling out the corners of her mouth, her tongue zipping in and out like a snake's. Her laugh was so strange and loud that the man, his wife, and I all stopped tussling to watch the two women as they turned and disappeared among the gravestones.

  "Are you crazy, man? Beating up on old ladies? What the hell for?"

  He let go of me and crossed his arms – a father expecting an explanation from his ten-year-old.

  "Forget it. It was a mistake." I was embarrassed and angry and wished like hell I knew where the "ladies" had gone.

  "You don't shake up old ladies in graveyards, man. I don't care what you do in your own country."

  I looked at him. "What are you talking about?"

  "This is Austria. I don't care how you treat people in your own country. Even if that was your grandmother. Here you do it our way."

  His wife came up and gave me a defiant look. "Where are you from? What kind of language was that? I used to work out at the United Nations, but I never heard people talking as crazy as that before."

  "What do you mean?"

  "That language. Those sounds you were using. Both you and the old women. Where are you from?"

  Her husband gave a big snort. "The ocean maybe! Maybe they're all three dolphins in drag."

  I looked at him, his wife. "What did it sound like?" I was frightened.