Broken Vessels

by Andre Dubus

  Next morning I did not tell the family. My wife not only is able to sleep early, but also she cannot stay up late, so at Provincetown, as at home, there were nights when I stayed out with people while she went home, and I did not want her knowing about the latch, then having to sleep alone. Probably, too, I wished to avoid the responsibility of going home early, or the guilt of staying out.

  But on Saturday night, a week after we had arrived, we went out before and after a fiction reading, then she took the sitter home, and I went up to our bedroom and shut the door, as it had been that night, not flush with the jamb, but pushed against it. I put the hook in the eye. Then I pulled the door toward me, as though wind were pushing it open. I did it slowly, gently. When the door touched the hook, it moved against the outer rim of the eye. I grasped it with finger and thumb, and tried to move it back and forth, to shake it click click clicking. It would not move. The door pulled against it kept it still, pressed against the outer side of the eye. I shoved the door against the jamb, then the hook was loose in the eye. I could move it and make the sound I had heard, had watched that night.

  I did this several times, pulling the door against the hook with varying degrees of force, trying then to move the hook, and each time I could not. So I shut the door, as well as it would shut, always with that thin crack between it and the jamb, and saw finally what I had already known but had to demonstrate to myself anyway: that the only way the wind could have opened the latch was to come through the bathroom and hall, to come like a vertical, thin blade, a wind moving through space only the size of the crack, so that, without touching the door and moving it against the hook, it would go unimpeded through that crack, with only the hook in its path. There had not been any wind, at that hour, that night, and I knew it, but wanted to consider whatever physical causes there may have been, no matter how improbable or absurd they may seem. For, though I believe in ghosts, they still seem nearly as improbable as a narrow shaft of wind crossing Provincetown from west to east, slipping between the door and the wall, and opening the latch on its way through our bedroom. And they seem nearly as improbable as a wind that could somehow shake and lift a hook jammed tightly against its eye, and then only open the door a matter of inches, rather than pushing it completely open.

  But only nearly, so I then walked through the house, into each of the rooms, starting where Cadence, our baby daughter, slept, and spoke aloud and gently to the ghost, said that I knew it was there, I believed in it and did not require a further manifestation, but that if it wished to continue, I hoped and asked it please not to disturb my wife or baby; and that if there were something it needed, or something it wished done, I would gladly do it.

  When my wife returned, I told her all of it, and she believed it but was not afraid, so I left and went to the party up the street. We were there one more week, and the ghost was quiet, and we told the story to people. Many, of course, said it was the wind.

  But there was no wind in my stateroom aboard the USS Ranger, moored at Yokosuka, Japan, in late September of 1961. I was a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, serving a year of sea duty with the Marine Detachment aboard the aircraft carrier, a large ship weighing seventy thousand tons, with a flight deck a thousand feet long. I mention this to help explain my feelings that night. In the ship’s crew were thirty-five hundred men; added to that number were the squadrons which were aboard the Ranger for its seven-month deployment. So every day, as in a town, you saw faces you had never seen before.

  I had never seen his. He appeared at four o’clock on a Monday morning. I was in the duty section on Sunday and, though I was not assigned Officer of the Deck watch that day, I had to stay aboard. I’m sure I went to Mass in the forecastle, and probably I worked on a novella I was writing then, and wrote to my wife, and read. Perhaps I watched a movie, in the afternoon, in the Marine Barracks. It was beneath the ship’s bakery, and every morning we smelled bread baking, then a Marine would come down the ladder with fresh, hot loaves. In those days I slept at will, and at ten o’clock that Sunday night I climbed into my bunk, and slept.

  On the Ranger, junior officers shared a stateroom, and lieutenant-commanders and above, and my skipper, a Marine captain, had single rooms. My roommate was not only a practicing southern Baptist, but was between six feet four and six and a half feet tall, and weighed in the range of two hundred thirty to two hundred fifty pounds. He had those qualities I have so often encountered in devout southern Baptists: he did not smoke, he rarely spoke profanely, but at times he had about him the righteousness of a leader of a lynch mob. Once, though, during those seven months in the Western Pacific, he did come aboard drunk from liberty, and frightened me more than the visitor who appeared that night at Yokosuka. I was asleep in the upper bunk, whose mattress was level with his pectoral muscles; he stood at my bunk, said: I’m drunk, roomie, and with a foolish grin, he grasped my shorts in one fist, my T-shirt in the other, and lifted me, held me suspended, horizontal above my bed. That Sunday night he was ashore, and now I wish he had been in the room, in his lower bunk, so my memory of this would be comic. But perhaps he would have slept, as my wife did in Provincetown while the latch announced a visit. Surely, though, I would have waked him; and he would either have seen the ghost, or seen me pointing to it, and what would have followed would be a better story.

  But he was in Yokosuka and, late as it was, I know he was chastely and soberly in Yokosuka (some men did that, simply spent a night in a hotel, to be away from the ship), and I was asleep, the bulkhead on my left, our spacious stateroom on my right. It had two desks, adjacent and facing a bulkhead, and next to them were our two wall lockers, and then the bunks. Opposite the desks were a lavatory and mirror. Filipino stewards did motel maid service every day, and picked up our laundry outside our door, and placed it, folded and wrapped in paper, on our bunks when it was done. We each had a shelf alongside the bulkhead next to our mattresses, and reading lamps over our pillows. On my shelf I kept an ashtray, books, and a small alarm clock, whose numbers and hands glowed at me in the dark. At four o’clock Monday morning, I was suddenly awake.

  The first thing I looked at was not the clock. For I woke as you wake when someone comes into your room and stands over your bed, looking at you. I was lying on my back, and I turned my head to the right, and looked into his face. It was swaying from side to side, with the rest of his body, and on it was a grin as foolish as the one I would see months later as my roommate lifted me into the air as though I were a two-by-four. His face appeared bloated by recent heavy drinking. His hair was dry, light brown, and brushed or combed with a part on the left side. He wore a sport jacket, or perhaps the coat of a suit; I believe it was tweed. He had a button-down pale blue shirt, its collar open, and beneath that small unbuttoned V was a dark knit tie, its knot pulled down from his throat. My fright was quick, and I sat up, probably with no help from my hands or arms. Then, as suddenly, I realized that he was simply a Naval officer I had never seen before (officers were required to wear civilian clothes ashore, if they left the confines of Naval bases), he was very drunk, was in not only the wrong room but the wrong area of the ship, and I would have to get up and dress and help him to his room, keep him from injury or death on the steep ladders of our huge home. I glanced away from him, to turn on the reading lamp, and when I looked again, he was not there. So he had fallen to the deck. It did not occur to me to wonder about a fall so silent. I peered over the side of my bunk, and the deck was as empty as the space he had just filled.

  That was when I looked at the clock, then spoke to myself, in my mind, but with sentences. Usually, when I talk to myself, it is with images, and pieces of sentences. When I do actually use the language, in the form of a monologue, I address it to someone I love. Sometimes these become dialogues. But, as well as I know, I only address myself when I need encouragement: to get out of bed, or to get in it and try to sleep, or to start a workout or complete one when I feel I can’t, or to go to the desk and write. That night I said to myself: It is
four o’clock. You have been asleep for six hours. Then I pinched the flesh on my forearm. You are awake. I turned off the light and, immediately, before I could lie back and settle on the pillow, he was there.

  I turned on the light, and sat there on the bunk looking at the room, empty save for our wall lockers, our desks, our lavatory and mirror. By then, my bladder wanted relief, and I suppose now it was the ghost who caused that. But this is also the time to make clear that, save for the first time I saw him, and the first time he disappeared, and the second time I saw him, I felt no fear for the rest of the night. I am as frightened of bedroom intruders in the night as the next person, whether the intruder is mortal or not, so this was not a matter of insouciance in the face of physical danger or simply fear. I have of course thought much about that night, from time to time in the past twenty-two years, and my only answer is this: the ghost did not mean to frighten me, but meant instead to convey his own need. For when I first saw him, then quickly saw him again, swaying drunkenly, with that grin widening into his bloated cheeks, he made me want to help him find the way to his room. He looked only young and friendly and absolutely helpless.

  I climbed down from my bunk. The room was well-lit by my reading lamp, and I stepped into the passageway, which was always darkened, and lit only by red lights placed at certain points, close enough so there was always light, but little of it. The light was red to protect pilots’ night vision. The passageway between our room and the head was L-shaped. A red light was at the first corner and, as I turned it, I saw him walking toward me. He swayed, he grinned, his face and his very posture told me he was lost, and unable to gain his wits. I stopped and waited. I do not know whether he wore a sport jacket or a suit because I could not look away from his face. I had a question for him, and it was not one I considered, thought about, but one that came to me as naturally as true questions do. I wanted to ask him: What do you want? So I stood waiting, and when he reached me he stopped, and we faced each other in the dark, and the dim red light. I looked at his face. When I opened my mouth to speak, he vanished.

  I went on to the head, whose door was closed and inside was lighted, and stood at the urinal, watching my urine, and still did not think ghost, did not think anything at all, but simply stood there in some state that was not anxiety, and certainly not peace, but excited curiosity, and wonder. I returned to the stateroom.

  What would I have done, had he come howling at four o’clock into my room, turned on the water faucets, taken my pen and written on my manuscript, sent the wall lockers flying? You know as well as I do, for it can only be imagined: my fleeing in skivvies down passageways, my crewcut turned white — But he did none of this to me, and I know that is why I slept again. Not at once, though. I climbed into my bunk, looked around the room, then lay on my back, pulled up the sheet and blanket (the ship was air-conditioned too; there are much worse ways to serve), smoked a cigarette, then turned out the light. In the dark he swayed and grinned beside me. I turned on the lamp, and he was gone. I left on the lamp, turned my back to the room, my face to the bulkhead, and slept.

  That fall and winter we tied up at Yokosuka, for a week or so of liberty, many times, more than at any other port. He did not come back. Or, if he did, he came while I was ashore, and did not waken my roommate. Or he came again while I slept, and chose not to disturb me. Perhaps by then he knew I could not help him.

  1985

  INTENSIVE CARE

  THAT FOURTH OF July night in the hospital in Montpelier, Vermont, I listened to the Red Sox playing in Fenway Park. Twilight’s brushstrokes of color were low on the horizon, and the trees and foothills were dark but still green. Then it was dusk, then night, and the Red Sox had won. Downstairs at the main desk you lied, old friend Dave Supple, and told them you were my brother.

  So you could come up to my room in intensive care and smile down at my smile under the oxygen tubes in my nostrils and, quickly as the professional bartender you are, glance at and absorb without weakening your smile or glazing your eyes the tube going into a vein in my left wrist and the twin wires rising from my bare chest to the heart monitor. It was to my right, above and between us, the screen and the lighted waves. You shook my hand, and I said: “Remember: it’s you who wants to be placed like a Cheyenne in a tree. I want my ashes buried among the poplars on my hill.”

  You blushed and said: “Aw, come on.”

  I did not tell you that my true wish was as illegal as yours. Two days later your wife and I devised a way to steal you from casket and funeral home the night before your burial, drive you out into the northern California boondocks, put you in a tree, and keep ourselves out of jail. I do not want to be cremated. In our country there is no pyre, and I would not leave my family without a ritual while they wait for the urn. I imagine them drinking at a bar, looking at their watches, knowing a good bar clock is always fast. Strange, Dave: some scorn funerals, say they are for the living. I agree, and celebrate that; yet you and I have planned and lived our funerals too. Three nights before the hospital, I turned to you at Fenway Park and said: We always Goddamnit have fun.

  You stood on my right and we talked about the ball game and young Jeff Sellers pitching and picking up the win. Father and husband and writer by day, your night work behind the bar has given you the talents of a detective, a spy, a thief: before leaving, you looked again in an instant at the tubes, the monitor. Then still smiling you strongly shook my hand and said: “Well, smoke filtereds and keep the salt off the rim.”

  We laughed, and as you walked away I called to your back at the door: “Goodnight, Brother.”

  “What?” you said, over your shoulder; and then: “Oh. Right. Goodnight, Brother.”

  In the morning the cardiologist said it was not my heart, only fatigue, and a week later I knew that you and I had received a gift. For one of us will answer a telephone then travel to a funeral; or perhaps the theft of a dead friend, and a night drive into the country. But we’ve had our deathbed farewell, and now I know that it doesn’t matter which friend is on his feet. The goodbye is the same.

  On Sunday in Montpelier, with wives and friends and my young daughter, we all laughed through a long breakfast at a restaurant counter, and I believe my heart knew then what I could not articulate for another six days: knew that in the hospital our love became was, so you drove from there to the bar and shots of tequila, and now it will never be was again. It is, and I have already with your wife placed you on boards in the tree, and you have found a way to bury me whole in my spot of the earth.

  1986

  LIGHTS OF THE LONG NIGHT

  I REMEMBER THE headlights, but I do not remember the car hitting Luis Santiago and me, and I do not remember the sounds our bodies made. Luis died, either in the ambulance, or later that night in the hospital. He was twenty-three years old. I do not remember leaving the ground my two legs stood on for the last instant in my life, then moving through the air, over the car’s hood and windshield and roof, and falling on its trunk. I remember lying on my back on that trunk and asking someone: What happened?

  I did not lose consciousness. The car did not injure my head or my neck or my spine. It broke my right hand and scraped both arms near my wrists, so my wife believes I covered my face with my arms as I fell. I lay for a while on the trunk, talking to a young man, then to a woman who is a state trooper, then I was in an ambulance, stopped on the highway, talking to a state trooper, a man, while he cut my trousers and my right western boot. That morning my wife saw the left boot on the side of the highway, while she was driving home from the hospital in Boston. The car had knocked it off my foot. The state troopers got the boot for my wife, but I did not leave the hospital with a left foot or, below the middle of my knee, a left leg.

  While the state trooper was cutting and we were talking, I saw Luis Santiago on a stretcher. People were putting him into an ambulance. Lying in the ambulance and watching Luis I knew something terrible had happened and I said to the trooper: Did that guy die? I do not remember wh
at the trooper said, but I knew then that Luis was either dead or soon would be. Then I went by ambulance to a clinic in Wilmington where Dr. Wayne Sharaf saved my life, and my wife Peggy and my son Jeb were there, then an ambulance took me to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where they operated on me for twelve hours.

  Luis Santiago said what were probably his last words on earth to me: Por favor, señor, please help, no hablo Ingles. This was around one o’clock in the morning of 23 July 1986. I was driving north on Route 93, going from Boston to my home in Haverhill, Massachusetts. The highway has four lanes and I was driving in the third. That stretch of road is straight and the visibility on 23 July was very good, so when I saw the Santiagos’ car I did not have to apply the brakes or make any other sudden motions. It was ahead of me, stopped in the third lane, its tail lights darkened. I slowed my car. To the right of the Santiagos’ car, in the breakdown lane, a car was parked and, behind it, a woman stood talking into the emergency call box. Her back was to me. I was driving a standard shift Subaru, and I shifted down to third, then second, and drove to the left, into the speed lane, so I could pass the left side of the Santiagos’ car and look into it for a driver, and see whether or not the driver was hurt. There were no cars behind me. Luz Santiago stood beside the car, at the door to the driver’s side, and her forehead was bleeding and she was crying. I drove to the left side of the road and parked near the guard rail and turned on my emergency blinker lights. Because of the guard rail, part of my car was still in the speed lane. I left the car and walked back to Luz Santiago. She was still crying and bleeding and she asked me to help her. She said: There’s a motorcycle under my car.